Comments on: What is good anthropological writing?

By: Amelia G

Amelia G — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:32:32 +0000

I started a comment here but it was too long so I turned it into a blog post. The short version of that post is this: At 12 years old I read John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, a collection of Doonesbury comics, and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. During my Senior year of high school I read William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming", Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot, Franz Kafka's short story, "In the Penal Colony." and David Quammen's The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature. Then, during my Freshman year of university, I read Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates.

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » 2006 Highlights

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:19:26 +0000

[...] Anthropology of the Spirit: “everybody’s got a body, and it is surprising and interesting to learn about how the taken-for-grantedness of that body is historically/socially/culturally constructed. But not everybody has a spirit.” What is good anthropological writing?: “Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why? Any answer to this question has to be biographical.” The Invention of the World: Islam in the West: “the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated” Found Mag meets Savage Minds: “Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship.” World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World: “In my last post, I described my ‘anti-teaching’ philosophy that led me to experiment with different ways of teaching cultural anthropology in very large introductory classes. So far, the most radical and intensive experiment I have tried is the ‘World Simulation.’” Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives: “Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” Reading circle: let’s do Friction: This page archives all of our posts from this summer’s discussion of Tsing’s popular experimental ethnography, Friction. The American Anthropological Association’s lobbying against open acess is so, so misguided: “In other words, in order for publishers to argue that it will become unprofitable for them to run a journal because of competition from open access repositories, they must argue that they provide very little value to a journal as a product.” 30 Days of Cinétrance: “Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences.” In the Flesh in the Museum: “From the first European contact with the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere onward, Indians had been exhibited in royal courts, traveling shows, circuses, and world fairs and expositions.” Junking the Nature/Culture Divide: “Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being.” Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday: “Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place.” Conspiracy Theory and Social Theory: “in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory” Is motherhood natural?: “Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is.” Book Review: The Politics of the Governed, Part 1: “’Political society’ is the politics of subjects who wish to have the same rights as citizens, but are excluded (by dint of their very marginalization) from civil society.” You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0: “an article about the US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia.” [...]

By: Entertaining Research » Blog Archive » Anthropological reading and writing!

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:51:01 +0000

[...] I love three authors — all of whom were trained as anthropologists, and at least one of them was a practising anthropologist: MN Srinivas (Remembered village), Ram Guha (Anthropologist among marxists) and Amitav Ghosh (Dancing in Cambodia, and In an Antique land). So, based on this statistics I came to the conclusion that anthropologists are great prose writers (till somebody disabused me of that notion). That reminds me of a story from Ram Guha about an economist whose generalisations were made on much smaller statistics Anyway, what do anthropolgists think about their writing. Here is an essay from Savage Minds on good anthropological writing. [...]

By: Moma

Moma — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:14:23 +0000

Not being a true anthropologist, but working with understanding what drives people in their everyday life, I would say that my greatest reading experiences are much more of a lighter form. There is nothing particular ore special about the books I love, most of them are bestsellers. I remember John Fowles ‘The Magus’ and John Irvings ‘A prayer for Owen Meany’ and I mostly remember them for creating interesting and fascinating stories on peoples life. The very interesting part for me, which has a great influence on my work today, is to discover how very much alike the things that we long for ore want are the same. Happiness, safety, freedom, a higher meaning with what we do, to be important to somebody else and so on, seems to be the fundamental driving forces for all people no matter how different their life seams to be. And by the way I do not understand why Thomas tells his students that they should not worry about their writing in their dissertations, for me (I am writing it up right now) it is surely a goal to do good research but also to make it so interesting that maybe more than the 4 people how has to read it, wants to read it.

By: lorenz

lorenz — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 23:49:39 +0000

Many questions, much too answer…

Well, before I went to university I hardly read fiction and mostly read about dinosaurs, pyramids (typical isn’t it?), weather (I dreamt of becoming a meteorologist!), and I had tons of books about animals around the globe. Later I spent much time with travel- and adventure books.

The book that has changed my life in this regard is “The Red Room” by the Swedish writer August Strindberg (it was on the reading list in the introduction course in Scandinavian Studies). This book showed me the power of language. Take his opening, the description of early spring in Stockholm! From then on, I stopped writing “It is spring in Stockholm, light wind, the sun is shining” and tried to be more creative (at least for a while…). After Strindberg, the articles I’ve written for the local newspaper have never been the same. And I’ve started reading fiction!

Most of my favorite writers are Russian. Mainly because of their phantasy and their style: unexpected and funny mataphers, irony, surreal events. The short stories of one of my earliest favorites Anton Chekhov actually resemble good ethnographies: By telling about small details of a some peoples’ lives, he tells us much about what it is to be human.

Good non-fiction and good fiction have much in common. (I could mention Emile Zola’s “Germinal” here as well, about the early industralisation in France. Very ethnographic, from the native’s point of view, but 10000 x better written!)

My favoritie ethnographies (among others “In Search for Respect. Selling Crack in El Barrio” by Philippe Bourgois and many Norwegian ethnographies by Unni Wikan, Arild Hovland, Vigdis Stordahl etc) have much in common. They make you feel that you’re there too, there in the field. They let people speak, tell stories: many dialogues, quotations etc. And the anthropologists have something new to say. They avoid jargon, they dare to resist trends and established truths in anthropology.

Being also a journalist, I have – to some extend- to agree in “if your auntie can’t read it, it is probably not any good”. On the other hand, it does no harm to challenge your readers a bit. I’ve mostly used journalistic style in my university papers, even in my thesis. I received both positive and negative feedback (“not scientific enough”). I wanted my papers to be readable by non-experts – including my “research objects” (f.ex. hiphop-artists when researching hiphop). During the writing process I always had my proofreaders in mind: my non-academic flatmates (musicians).

I totally disagree with orange who says “Anyway I believe the matter with ‘engaged anthropology’ is not one of ‘how do I write’ but mainly one of ‘what do I write about.” Good ethnographies actually make you read books you would have otherwise never ever read.

By: orange.

orange. — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 11:45:48 +0000

While actually, according to my unrepresentative experience, many explicit fakers in the forums I used to participate for a while were male.
‘Fakers’ in the sense of ‘clones’ (a term, resp. a practice Heike Greschke had presented at Alexander Knorr’s last cyberanthropology workshop), which are temporary parallel identities some people cultivate in online communities. In german we say ‘zweitnick’ for the registration under a second (or third or nd) nickname within a forum you already maintain an established identity under your “real” name aka first name aka main name.
['Clones in cyberspace' are a superinteresting phenomen to observe. Greschke immediately was asked if she also would run several IDs in the forums she researches, which she denied. The interesting thing here is not so much about gender in the first instance, but what the different ID s talk about, as for examole often they re used to express criticism or cause flame wars that target someone personally, etc. ]

By: orange.

orange. — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 09:55:58 +0000

“..recent research on Internet usage shows the manipulation of identities to be much less widespread than one might expect after reading Sherry Turkle.”

Absolutely.
Anyway on the net someone with a name not clearly indicating the gender usually is considered as male, according to my four years experience of hanging around in i-net forums.

By: Bill Benzon

Bill Benzon — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:41:52 +0000

FWIW, I’ve seen, but cannot cite (NY Times book review?), a serious argument that Stephen King is worthy of comparison to Dickens. I’m a literary critic by training and I’ve read quite a bit of Dickens, no Stephen King. But I’m not inclined to reject the comparison out of hand. King’s kind of popularity is worth something. The one or three articles I’ve read about him, and perhaps an interview here or there, have made it clear that he’s a serious craftsman.

On this matter I suspect that I’m something of a heretic in lit crit circles. So be it.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:43:47 +0000

Sorry about that, Ozma and other er, female-bodied folks, don’t know how I got the impression that this forum was male dominated. Reminds me of how, in the old days, when the first year of social anthropology in Norway was concluded with a home exam followed by an oral, we used to guess at the gender of students before the oral exam. All exam papers were typed. We, or at least I, tended to get the candidate’s gender wrong most of the time. Of course, on the Net, nobody can see that you’re a dog, but recent research on Internet usage shows the manipulation of identities to be much less widespread than one might expect after reading Sherry Turkle.

By: orange.

orange. — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:44:03 +0000

*gg Want to know, what I thought in answer to “les cymbles de soleil”? -> He definetely was overreacting.

By: orange.

orange. — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:33:47 +0000

[hm. I must admit, I actually have read L'Étranger at the age of sweet sixteen at school, within my french classes.]

By: orange.

orange. — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:47:33 +0000

"Now back to the serious discussion ... ok. [*one* last association: "what's in a name?"--especially in cyberspace ?]

By: Nancy

Nancy — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:35:06 +0000

I like the idea of One*man* being a *wo*man. It boggles the mind in a way that is delightful to the genderqueers among us.

Now back to the *serious* discussion . . . this is not the space for me to go on about my preference for the term “female-bodied”.

By: orange.

orange. — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:32:28 +0000

*g. *scnr.

By: oneman

oneman — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:31:22 +0000

I’m a woman! Nancy’s a woman! Orange (I think) is a woman! Hear us roar!

And ain’t I a woman?!

Er… oh.