(originally posted on my other blog, hybrid tumbleweed, 03-19-2006)
I just finished reading Marwan M. Kraidy's Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. It took a while to get through, not because it is a difficult read, but because I find so little time after work when I'm not too tired to read.
As indicated in the introduction to this weblog, I have been interested in hybridity for quite some time. Only recently have I been able to get back to serious reading. I needed to get back to something intellectually stimulating--my current job does nothing for the intellect. I decided, therefore, to begin researching hybridity. My strategy is to alternately read works of fiction and non-fiction. The fictional work with which I began my research was Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. I followed that up with Kraidy's book.
I decided also to do something that I was rarely able to do at university, namely to read thoroughly, to read a book from cover to cover. Most research projects at university left no time to read sources, particularly non-fiction ones, thoroughly. Research usually entailed looking through tables of contents and indices to locate sections from which to extract information relevant to a particular topic of interest. Novels I always read thoroughly, although I certainly knew people who did not. I even heard professors remark with a chuckle when asked if they had read a particular novel: "no, I haven't even taught it".
I always felt very uncomfortable with such research. It is all too easy to read things out of context, to misunderstand, to misquote, even fail to follow an argument to its conclusion, when reading only sections of sources. Indeed, I wonder how many academic papers are guilty of taking things out of context and therefore misquoting sources. Now that I am not rushed, now that I have no deadline, no one breathing down my neck, I have decided that I will read my sources from cover to cover. It really makes me feel more secure in my understanding of the authors' arguments. And it makes me feel more intellectually honest.
I regret that the university, an institution charged with passing on proper research skills, often neglects to give students the time to be thorough.
