Professor of Anthropology Elizabeth Traube specializes in cultural and media studies, ethnographic writing, the anthropology of ritual, and the cultural politics of nationalism. She conducted her dissertation fieldwork in East Timor; most recently, however, her interests have turned to television studies. This is reflected in one of the classes she is currently teaching called “Television Storytelling: The Domestic Medium,” as well as a class she will teach in the spring, called “Television Storytelling: The Conditions of Narrative Complexity.” The Argus sat down with Traube to talk about her many bookshelves, her DVD collection, and her current queue of television shows.

The Argus: What is currently on your bookshelf?

Elizabeth Traube: What I’ve been reading lately is things for courses. Let me explain to you the system here…Most of the middle is anthropology, American and British, arranged alphabetically. Then below it—for some reason or other, I decided to keep the French stuff separately—so it’s French anthropology, sociology, and social theory in those shelves there. The top [used to be] Southeast Asia, which is my region [of study]. Then to the very top, I moved all my structural linguistics and sociolinguistics books, so the top is structuralism and post-structuralism, sociolinguistics, stuff like that, and undergraduate theses.
So that was the original bookshelf, and we quickly outgrew that and moved over to this one. I started doing more work in media studies, and so this side of it is about half of my film [collection]—much of that is actually at home. It’s film and cultural studies over there and then the top is classics, classical mythology, Greek mythology, folklore. I was originally a folklore major when I was an undergraduate, so that is left over from college days.

Those are journals mixed in between classics, film theory, [and] film media cultural studies. The far side is a mix of youth culture stuff for courses I do, and psychoanalysis. Things are from different periods, you know, and in general the higher up means the less I’m using it at the moment.

Meanwhile here, these shelves got built a couple years ago, and most of it is television studies, which I work a lot in now. Half of it is television and a little bit of it is from a cultures course that [Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology] Sarah Croucher and I do. Down towards the bottom is stuff on East Timor, which is my immediate research area, and some spillover anthropology for courses that I’m doing currently. And of course all the DVDs, which are proliferating.

A: So what’s on this table then?

ET: Basically things that I’m either using in class or that in the beginning of the semester I thought I might use. Everything on the table is course-related, either in that I was considering using it for the course or I’m actually using it; the stuff on the floor is the same.

One of my courses in local and global youth culture is a new course, and as I told students in the beginning, that course really was new, so a lot of the material I’ve been reading for the first time. So if you ask what I’ve been reading that’s new this year, it’s really a bunch of things on the globalization of youth cultures.

A: How’d you become interested in teaching this class?

ET: Well, I’ve been teaching a 200-level course on youth culture that’s pretty much exclusively U.S.-based. The field kind of started out focusing on the U.S. and the U.K., and there’s been more and more work done on the way in which both Western cultures’ products have been exploited, taken up, and transformed in a variety of different places across the world and the way non-Western foreign [products] have been exploited back in the U.S. It’s a related but different literature, and I just got the idea that it’d be a nice idea to do a smaller seminar that would be more for the anthro majors that would look at some of that literature. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

A: Do you think there’s one bookshelf you use the most?

ET: That one now, which filled up rather rapidly. [Points toward the third bookshelf, containing film studies, immediate research, and material for a culture course.] For instance, the anthropology that I’m currently or recently reading [is] there, TV studies are there, and my East Timor stuff is all there: I tend to rearrange a little bit each year, get rid of some things. Things that I’m using tend to be on one of these two shelves.

A: Is it hard to throw things out?

ET: Yeah, I’m very bad about that. With both books and clothes. I start out saying, “Okay, I’m really going to clear out some space here.” I need to start doing more of that because it’s crazy. There are so many things I’m not going to read anymore.

A: What kind of books do you have at home?

ET: More of the film theory and film studies is at home. A little bit of the TV—there’s one TV shelf at home. And then a lot of earlier cultural studies and American studies stuff is at home. Things that I kind of read when I first was getting into those fields. A lot of fem theory is at home, more psychoanalysis, [and] novels—all the novels are at home.

A: What kinds of novels do you have at home?

ET: I don’t really read very much, to be honest, because I watch a lot of television. So I’m either watching TV for work or for pleasure, and those lines are very blurred. I just discovered Amitav Ghosh a few years back. When I start reading novels, I love it, and I’ll read everything an author’s written. I loved Ghosh. I read all of his work. I tend to like nineteenth-century novels. I’ve read Dickens and Austen, classics and things. You know, unless someone recommends something, I’ll go into a bookstore and say, “Can you recommend anything?” I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I would like to.

A: What have you been watching lately?

ET: Well, first of all, whatever we’re doing for the class, and that’s the class [that] this year is a kind of TV history course, so a lot of sitcoms for that. In terms of the current season, I’m very behind, but let’s see…I keep up with “Elementary,” “Person of Interest,” [and] started watching “The Blacklist,” but have to get caught up. So sort of the episodic serials as they call them. So that’s one genre.

I watch “Nashville,” which is the only one of the ABC melodramas that I watch. I keep meaning to watch “Scandal,” but I’m just so behind I can’t cope. I watch “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Mindy Project,” “New Girl,” all of the so-called smart comedies on NBC. And “Parks and Recreation.” But, well, actually, the new ones aren’t so good. I watch “The Good Wife” like all of your parents, and I’m way behind on “Boardwalk Empire,” so I’ve had to leave that behind for Christmas or something.
That’s the problem with serial dramas. Once you’re behind, you just have to binge-watch it, or marathon view, as we say now. Oh, I just discovered Joss Whedon’s new show [“Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”]…so I’ll have to catch up on that.

A: Do you have anything else on your list that you’d like to get to around Christmas?

ET: I need to really watch all of “Girls”—that’s another thing I’m behind on—and probably finish “House of Cards,” which I started watching last year, but didn’t really like. All my students loved it, but I didn’t, really. And then things like “Castle.” I love “Castle.” I’ve been recording it all year and haven’t watched any of that. So much TV, so little time, as they say.