Comments on: Anthropology and the Long Essay

By: Ilana Gershon

Ilana Gershon — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:29:31 +0000

Thanks for the compliment on the title!
I guess I did intend to write a short book, since I was turning to Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning or Bauman’s Let My Words Be Few as models. But really, my goal was to write a teachable book, one that the undergraduates I interviewed could read. I don’t think Malaby had the same project.

And I have to say that I encountered some interesting resistance and encouragement along the way towards writing accessibly. I kept having very long conversations with my editors about how to cite, for example — including references to other people’s work turned out to be a sticking point around accessibility. Keeping the book short was one of the ways to give it a fighting chance of being assigned in a class (market forces indeed!) and as we know, there is a very long tradition of that in anthropology.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:00:07 +0000

Amazon recently announced that they will begin publishing pamphlet/long-essay length works:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/kindle-singles-will-bring-novellas-chapbooks-and-pamphlets-to-e-readers/

By: Rex

Rex — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 22:35:50 +0000

Particularistic concern drives interest in long works. People write them and read them because they care about the topic. Unless you are writing about something that is really central to the lives of a lot of people — and a lot of American _are_ obsessed with founding fathers — long works of the ‘documentation’ variety will have niche audiences.

I suppose this is a way of saying the long essay is a form that is the right size for readers and writers who are interested in problem, not topics — but want a good dose of particularity mixed in with their topic.

Tbh I was a bit disappointed with Making Virtual Worlds — if you get a chance track down Tom Boellstorff’s review of it, it’s pretty devastating… and hence makes for a good read!

By: anthrodiva

anthrodiva — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:00:01 +0000

How was “Making of Virtual Worlds?” I put it on my wishlist. Any reason you are reading it now?

By: Gregory Starrett

Gregory Starrett — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:16:51 +0000

This approach to thinking about ideal lengths for different sorts of documentation and analysis fits nicely into the anthropological preference for thinking about cultural practices–in this case, writing as a form of prestige-gathering or community-building or self-fashioning–as “making sense.” I’m not convinced that we can begin a paragraph on this topic with “Although market forces are at work. . .” Once we accept the “although,” we’re back into arguing about natural forms, and quite close to stereotypical culture of poverty thinking (they write that way because anthropology is a soft option and they can’t provide evidence for their assertions).

This post is a useful provocation, though. I’ll match your long essays (Myth in Primitive Psychology, American Kinship), and raise you Coral Gardens and their Magic (2 volumes!!), Death Without Weeping, and Peasants into Frenchmen (yeah, yeah, so it’s not by an anthropologist). Way-longer-than-usual-form ethnography also “pops up in several key places in anthropology’s history.” And while market forces might not have exactly encouraged the publication of such mammoth works, neither did those forces preclude it.

One of the questions we can return to is why anthropology doesn’t seem to be able to sustain the mass-market potential for the kinds of great fat books–e.g. recent biographies of John Adams or Franklin Roosevelt–that one so often sees gracing the shelves at Barnes & Noble. If we take advantage of the problem-centered short monograph/long essay form, will this have any influence on how the public sees anthropology’s relevance to their lives?

By: MTBradley

MTBradley — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:21:28 +0000

The biggest thing holding people back from documentation, in my opinion, is that a lot of contemporary anthropologists just don’t care for it much

I would definitely read a long essay attempting to square that fact with cultural anthropologists’ receptiveness to assemblage theory.

If you look for it, the long essay pops up in several key places in anthropology’s history: just think of pieces like The Balinese Cockfight, Totemism (of Lévi-Strauss), Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities, Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture. I think there is something about this length of work that lends itself to anthropological ethnography and data.

I can think of the Sahlins as historical ethnography but the Lévi-Strauss is ethnology, the Sapir is a methods paper, and the Geertz isn’t really all that long an essay (is it?). I do agree that there are some great works at that length, but no true ethnographies come immediately to mind.