Authorship and the writer

A now dearly departed friend of mine was a living archive of Iroquoian linguistics. The first hour I sat down with him consisted of me asking questions, him reeling references off the top of his head, and my pencil trying desperately to keep up. To one of his suggestions I responded, “I’ve seen that one, but I had a hard time reading it.” To which he replied, “Well, you should have seen it before I rewrote it for her!”

My first semester in graduate school my Linguistic Field Work professor was asked if there was a difference between an informant and a collaborator. His answer, as I remember it—an informant is someone from whom you gather data, a collaborator is someone who really should be listed as a co-author.*

If ‘author’ mapped 1:1 with ‘writer’ the word amanuensis would not exist. But in my experience anthropologists tend to be largely oblivious of that fact. Growing up in an American Indian community I was not, and I was not alone. Plenty of people had strong feelings about who exactly the authors of a few fairly well-known ethnographies of our community were.†

cats writing
An author and her amanuensis.

So from time-to-time when you look at the author line recall invisible writers like my friend who helped make an Optimality Theory analysis of a Northern Iroquoian language accessible for posterity, and think about the typesetters who helped turn a copy edited and proofread Microsoft Word document into a small work of art. And imagine a universe of possible invisible authors: the patient old men and women who have expressed the same thing a dozen different ways because they know the ethnographer doesn’t understand no matter how much s/he is convinced s/he does, and the significant others whose solicited thoughts and advice were rewarded with an evenings’ worth of sulking. Seeing the end of the anthropological publishing process asks a lot of the individuals whose names end up on the author line, but it never asks it of them alone.

Matthew Timothy Bradley


*Fiona McLaughlin and Thierno Seydou Sall’s chapter “The give and take of fieldwork” in the Linguistic fieldwork collection co-edited by my professor and Martha Ratliff is a must-read for any and all ethnographers.

†It’s kind of inside baseball, but I am talking about James Mooney and Frans Olbrechts. Mooney was fairly open with acknowledgment of the role of his collaborators. Olbrechts, not so much.

4 thoughts on “Authorship and the writer

  1. “If ‘author’ mapped 1:1 with ‘writer’ the word amanuensis would not exist.”
    If Homer as the last in a line of storytellers “wrote” the Iliad, he’s not the author, he’s the codifier.
    For once try listening to a storyteller as if he were smarter man than you are.

    Everything you’ve written on literature and language has been so absurdly naive and self-serving it seemed a waste to comment, at least here. But this was just too much.
    If you refuse to read things that you find truly foreign, it’s more than a fact of life, it’s a problem.
    Find something you’re afraid of and go there. As it is you’re defending the politics of laziness.

    Is this where we’ve come: from the shallow pomo-fadish fixation on “the other” to actively avoiding foreignness?

  2. For once try listening to a storyteller as if he were [a] smarter man than you are.

    I was socialized in an American Indian community, it’s kind of our thing, actually. Even and especially when the smarter man is a woman.

    Find something you’re afraid of and go there.

    Exposure therapy might work with arachnaphobia but I don’t see how the analogy holds for literature. Lack of fear does not equal insight or understanding. And in some cases insight and understanding leads a reasonable person to fear something.

    If you refuse to read things that you find truly foreign, it’s more than a fact of life, it’s a problem. […] As it is you’re defending the politics of laziness.

    1) I can assure you that I am as well-read as 99.9% of our planet’s population. Not hard to be, but still. 2) I realized several years ago that there is not enough time in the world to read all of the books in it even if I had no other interests whatsoever.

  3. As far as I can tell, you’re “socialized” more than anything in the academy.
    Fiction and Familiarity:
    “My impression is that many people read fiction as an escape from their day-to-day. I am not those people. I like to have enough of a non-fictional toehold on a story to be able to judge its verisimilitude. I don’t want to be the reader analog to the millions of people under the impression that the legal system is in any way similar to Law & Order or CSI.
    Given my interests and experiences, my toehold criterion seems to leave me with only so many fictional reading options to choose from.”

    Law and Order is a far better description of the legal system than anything by John Rawls, so your “toehold criterion” should limit your interests in nonfiction as well.

    Commenter Barbara
    “While many people read fiction as an escape from life, many experience it as an escape into life (and I forget who first said that or I’d cite it). That is, fiction can be a way to learn about people, places, and experiences in a way that is more tactile and engaging of emotions than much non-fiction is.”

    And your response:
    “I understand that to have been Ella Deloria’s intent with Waterlily.”

    I understand that’s the history art of and of the novel. It’s so foundational there’s no point in looking for a source.
    The best nonfiction is intellectual and tactile. That’s what it means for a book to be well written.

    You read non-fiction for content without reading for subtext, but subtext is there nonetheless. Academic culture is culture and textbooks have subtext; it’s just uninteresting, or worse. Novels are written to be read for subtext. That’s the point. They function as poemics and poetics. It’s hard to find a better more objective understanding of Victorian culture than you’ll find reading Victorian literature, because the language is a form of that culture and the authors are studying that language as they use it.
    “I understand that to have been Ella Deloria’s intent with Waterlily.”
    Anything written recently that will be read in 200 years will be read and studied as a product of this time. it will be read as text and subtext, for intentions and for elisions. That’s how people will learn about us and what and how we thought. Ideas are prescriptions; descriptions tend to last much longer.

  4. There’s a difference between fiction and nonfiction, but there’s also a difference between books and “textbooks”. Textbooks will become artifacts. The point is to read and hope to write books that will not. You write for and from the culture of textbooks.

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