Nicholas Dirks: The Enormous Differences of Human Experience

I always read more than one book at a time. I just finished reading Apollo’s Arrow by Nicholas Christakis, an excellent book on the pandemic, as well as Sontag by Benjamin Moser, a biography of Susan Sontag, who was a formative intellectual influence for me. I am now reading A Promised Land by Barack Obama and Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (the latter soon to be followed by Martin Amis’ Inside Story).

Kim by Rudyard Kipling. I read it when I spent a year in India at the age of 12, a time that opened up a life-long fascination with India.

First I wanted to be a farmer like my uncle and then thought I’d be a preacher or a politician.

History and Anthropology together allow me to teach just about anything – they cover the world in time and place! Both disciplines allow one to explore the enormous differences of human experience, and to tell terrific stories from the archive and from ethnography.

Hind Swaraj by Mohandas Gandhi; The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz; Orientalism by Edward Said; Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Gandhi wrote about the need for India to assert its nationhood as he was returning from South Africa to confront the British empire in India; Geertz showed that anthropology drew its insights equally from ethnography and philosophy; Said showed that there were political stakes in the “area studies” programs in which I studied and taught, and Foucault showed how the history of modern institutions is not always (or only) about progress.

Two Men and Music by Janaki Bakhle (she’s my wife)! It is a great book on the history of Indian classical music.

I’d suggest starting with The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani but would also recommend two of my own books, Castes of Mind and The Scandal of Empire.

I read a great deal of fiction, but if I had to choose, I would have to choose non-fiction. That being said, my life would be immeasurably poorer without the fiction of Melville, Eliot, Bellow, Ford, DeLillo, Pamuk, Rushdie, Toibin, Ondaatji, and Morrison, among many others!

I read two terrific books on twentieth-century philosophy that were, well, bookends: At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell; and Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger. Both books set some of the major intellectual figures and movements of the twentieth century in the historical currents of their times; both are also immensely readable.

It is a great honor to preside over a learned Academy that was founded in 1817 and hosted talks over the centuries by Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Margaret Mead, and most recently Anthony Fauci. Since this is a time when science has been under attack, the work of the Academy – is hosting lectures and conferences, organizing work on science-based policy, awarding prizes for young scientists, delivering innovative educational programs for young people around the world – is especially important.

It varies. My first book, The Hollow Crown, emerged out of my dissertation. When I wrote Castes of Mind, I fashioned the book out of essays and papers I had written over the course of a decade, though I revised each one. When I wrote The Scandal of Empire, I started with an outline and wrote chapter by chapter in sequence and from scratch.

I have one pile of books on science on my desk that I am beginning to read in connection with my work in the Academy: The Scientific Method by Henry Cowles; Knowledge Resistance by Mikael Klintman; Science under Fire by Andrew Jewett; and The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens. These books provide histories of the development of ideas in and about science, and also discuss popular reactions to and sometimes rejections of science. I have another pile of books that are memoirs (of different kinds): A Political Education by Andre Schiffrin; What You Did Not Tell by Mark Mazower; A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson; Educated by Tara Westover; Borges and Me by Jay Parini; Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford; Working by Robert Caro; Love and Science by Jan Vilcek; and Avid Reader, a Life by Robert Gottlieb.

As it happens, I’m writing one right now; for the moment it is called “The University: a memoir.”