At some point in graduate school, I realized that our reading goals were untenable. We were inundated with reading, and yet ended up reading far less than we ought have.
In the economy of grad school, professors are likely to thrust their own sense of cannon upon the students, with the result that there's too much to read. They often justify the load by saying that "filtration" and "learning to read quickly" are important skills for the academy. All well and fine, but a more reasonable goal awaits.
Suppose, instead of burying anthropology grad students under mountains of reading, we asked them to thoroughly read one article per week for the entire duration of their studies. During the course of, say, 8 years, this would 416 articles. Well, this doesn't address the important books that need to be read, but... I submit that most anthro grads don't carefully read 400 articles during their studies. To do so would have good results, I should think.
More to the point: I would like to set a GOAL of reading at least one peer-reviewed journal article per week. To get off to a fresh start, I began with the following: Michael Taussig, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Patient," Social Science and Medicine 14: 3-13. It was an excellent way to begin.
Taussig gives us a superior two paragraph summary of Lukacs' Reification and Class Consciousness, and goes on to discuss the mechanisms by which doctors reify disease, science, medicine, symptoms, and more. It's a fascinating indictment of Western medicine, but also a brilliant application of reification theory.
Taussig's essay is a step taken in the direction of a challenging manuscript/project I call "The Gift/Commodity," in which I reinvestigate 'the gift' in an age of commodities.
I hope to read more than one article a week, but the goal for the time being is one per week.
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