As part of my research, I've been delving into some papers from other disciplines. Now I am a big fan of interdisciplinarity; I'm delighted by the move in economics to borrow from other disciplines like psychology, sociology, and history and hope that it accelerates. But... Man is there a lot of crap in other disciplines. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the amount of crap churned out by economists, but still.

Take this anthro paper on the internet in Malaysia. First off, the writing is terrible:

Having visited putatively exemplary innovative spaces such as Silicon Valley, Cyberjaya planners were clearly convinced of the importance of creating an environment of interactive conduct.

This is anthropology guys, you know one of those liberal arts subjects that has no use in the "real" world. At the very least, you're supposed to be able to write! Reading this sentence makes me feel like I'm chewing on dried cow dung: too many needless polysyllabic words and irritating alliterations.

The kicker, which prompted me to write this post is the following:

If Southern California was the exemplary intelligent space on account of its ‘technical virtuosity and economic dynamism’ (Winner, 1992, p. 32), then its inhabitants--what Nigel Thrift has termed Homo Silicon Valleycus (Thrift, 2000, p. 688)--were imaginatively positioned at a global evolutionary apex in the minds of MSC planners.

Aren't anthropologists supposed to do lots of field work, where they visit physical locations rather than simply reading about them in a book? These guys don't seem to know much about basic geography: silicon valley is in Northern California. You may think this is a tad nit picky on my part, but if you're supposed to be an expert in anthropological implications of new media, this is one thing I think you should know.

I don't see why they didn't just go the traditional route and write in a manner that is so incomprehensible that the paper is impossible to critique, like Homi Bhabha:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.