My time is up. My fortnight as a guest blogger is ended. Its been a great experience. First, feeling connected to a critical, engaged and international anthropological community. Second, for me at any rate, experimenting with a different kind of writing within and about anthropology. This is only just starting. I wonder whether we will see a new kind of hybrid anthropological arguing emerging which combines the blog process of iterative thinking in response to critical commentary and academic styling. I hope that new collaborative authorships will emerge as a result of connections made in the blogosphere. For this to happen more of us have to make the shift from reading to writing in this kind of space, and hence to a different kind of more immediate relationship between reading and writing than we are used to in anthropology at present.

When we consider the culture of anthropological presentations and knowledge dissemination through writing these don’t seem to have changed much since the birth of the discipline, at least here in the UK. Take seminars for example, the weekly fora which anthropology departments have for the sharing and presentation of knowledge and which typically involve one person reading aloud for an hour a paper which they have produced for production in an academic journal. The audience interacts after the reading, via commentaries and questions which may or may not be taken up later by the author.

The aim is to confront the author’s interpretation: discussion never really moves off the points made in the paper. So if the seminar is a springboard to knowledge its focused on the presenter’s paper, not on taking forward issues which might arise more generally. Of course this happens for individuals who have heard the paper, listening as a proxy experience of reading, but if this occurs it occurs inside their heads. Are we back to the social production of the individualism which I suggested characterised contemporary social anthropology? To what extent would changing our institutions and practices change our knowledge? How can we explain this conservatism of forms?