http://ageofintuition.blogspot.com/2011/04/lameness-of-otherness.html

I think in the end, though, my lasting issues with reflexivitity are less about what was written in WC than the way that the collection’s subtle questions got turned by some scholars into boilerplate critiques of those who did not ask the same questions. That is, while I respect WC as an intellectual project, the arguments became rehearsals for formulaic critiques of other scholars: ‘you aren’t being sufficiently reflexive,’ ‘you aren’t considering how genre conventions are shaping what you write’…

Certainly, in my own development, as I have tracked steadily away from humanities-based approaches in my writing toward more engagement with biological and cognitive science, I grow increasingly impatient with critiques from absence, the always-available criticism ‘you don’t do something else in your work (that you never promised).’ The WC project, however positive and *self*-reflexive, also lent itself well to this dogged suspicion of each other, sometimes justifying an intellectual refusal to engage with people’s projects.

I’m intentionally being vague (well, that’s what I’m going to claim). I suppose that one thing about doing a PhD at certain sorts of august institutions is that you realise critique ain’t hard; get a few good ones down, and you pretty much can try to put anyone on the back foot, no matter what sort of paper they present or question they ask. I certainly don’t blame Marcus, Fisher et al. for this tendency, but it does sour my enthusiasm for WC.

And yet, like so many other schools of thought that we initially define ourselves against

I am willing to recognize that the contributions may have had more to offer than the ways they were caricatured; that these contributions were part of ongoing projects, student-led work, and drew different and perhaps more creative people into the discipline. Still, it seems Writing Culture marked a retreat from public relevancy. Without claiming there was a prior Golden Age of Anthropological Importance and Influence, the Writing Culture approach seems to solidify a move away from anthropological engagement.

Rather, I have an art and fiction writing background, and my first thoughts upon reading WC were “Banzai! I can experiment with writing in this medium and get away with it!” This is to say that as someone used to writing explicitly labeled as “creative”, what struck me about it was the permission it gave me (at that time, being an anthro newbie, I needed permission) to tinker with how I wrote ethnography the same way I used to tinker every aspect of my writing in the past. I didn’t have to make some sort of pretense towards journalistic feigned neutrality if I didn’t feel it… I could still… and I type this with tongue in cheek.. make art.

I actually got all of this from Taussig as well, not just from WC.

Well, Tyler retired this past spring, and I was thankfully able to tell him at his retirement party that I’d felt the same level of excitement reading his essay as I had reading all of the emergent hypertext fiction stuff in the late 90s 🙂