Paul Durrenberger. American Fieldnotes: Collected Essays of an Existentialist Anthropologist. West Branch, IA: Draco Hill Press, 2014.

At several points throughout this text, Paul Durrenberger reflects upon the possibility of one day being found out as something other than an academic, as the son of a working man that he is, and that he has been locked out of his office. It is hard to imagine a better attitude for the 2014 recipient of the Society for Applied Anthropology’s BronislawMalinowski Award. The Malinowski Award recognizes an outstanding scholar whose career has made significant contributions toward applying social science to solving human problems. American Fieldnotes: Collected Essays of an Existential Anthropologist (Durrenberger 2014) serves as a fine, yet untraditional example as to why he should receive such an accolade. American Fieldnotes is a collection of previously unpublished extended field entries, radio transcripts that were aired and those that were not, a number of Society for Applied Anthropology news articles, as well as previously published manuscripts from a wide range of anthropological journals. The text is thematically divided, addressing: war and peace, corporations, politics, food, economics, religion, communication, education, the everyday, anthropology/anthropologists, and existentialism. Durrenberger’s extensive fieldwork in the United States, Southeast Asia, and Iceland is present in nearly each thematic section providing an interesting, if not slightly disjointed holism. Self-reflections upon personal relationships, professional posts, and academic politics also percolate throughout. Given each of these threads, however, issues of class and labor radiate from every page, and they are repeatedly punctuated by a call for contemporary anthropologists to apply their skills for global betterment. Durrenberger consistently frames the everyday, its habits and assumptions, within a global context that has everything to do with how class and power control laboring bodies near and far. He goes further in many cases to show how anthropological theory and fieldwork can intervene and disrupt such systems. He often uses his work with unionized labor as examples. How professional associations and institutions (like universities) can and should participate in supporting this applied anthropology and activism is also often addressed. On more than one occasion, what appears to be heading toward an anthropologically informed rant resolves itself with insightful, well-cited cultural critique with theoretical significance. To escape some of the disappointing brevity, the reader will satisfied with the number of Durrenberger’s other publications that tackle the topics in greater depth. Durrenberger’s existentialist claims and explanations stand as concise, deeply personal bookends within the text. This thematic, however, is somewhat lost throughout the heart of it. Anarchism, though, is another theme introduced early on and serves Durrenberger well in the absence of anything necessarily existential. He does, after all, argue that anarchism, existentialism, and anthropology all mutually imply one another in the first few pages. It is in the final section where Durrenberger’s existentialist claims become clear. He argues that Icelandic saga heroes may not have been romantic, but they were certainly heroic as well as “natural existentialists” in an absurd world with no alternative philosophies. Given Durrenberger’s admiration for anthropologists’ ability to see complexity and accept absurdity, it’s not hard to figure why he’d consider these farmers and fishermen turned warriors as heroic.