Writing is a responsibility in the academy. Through our writings we enter into dialogues with one another. From undergraduate thesis to dissertation, scholarly articles and monographs, our writing marks the trajectory of our careers. It forms the basis on which our peers and colleagues evaluate the contributions we make to discipline. But writing is more than a job responsibility of an academic. In writing anthropology, and in my case archaeology, there is an added responsibility to scrutinize how the histories we produce are connected to the lives and futures of the communities we study.

The formation of anthropology as a discipline in North America occurred at the same time as European and American governments dispossessed indigenous nations of their homelands. Coinciding with the closing of the Indian Wars in the late 19^th century, the Bureau of Ethnology, later renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology, sponsored ethnographic and linguistic research on Native American communities. These “salvage ethnographies” documented the cultural traditions and lifeways of Native American tribes under the presumption that the combination of assimilationist policies and exposure to American lifeways would cause them to vanish entirely. Archaeologists followed suit, recording ancestral sites and collecting artifacts, as well as human remains in their attempt to document the cultural history of tribes. The objects and ancestors uncovered by archaeologists and others—often through dubious means—became specimens of national history; representations of a past that ceased to exist following the arrival of Europeans and their colonization of the continent. Given this colonial history, how can the work of these disciplines be used to disrupt colonial relations in the present?

As an archaeologist who works with tribal nations in California and Oregon to develop culturally sensitive methods for studying, managing, and representing tribal heritage, remembering this legacy of settler colonialism is an important step in confronting injustices today. Approaching archaeology as a tool for restorative justice, Chip Colwell-Chanthanponh (2007:25, 34) asserts the value of using archaeology to reveal the material truths of colonialism and its impact upon indigenous communities. While the process of remembering and retelling history is an important element of healing, justice also comes through asking and interrogating how the legacies of colonialism continue to unfold through the ways in which we investigate the past. Connecting archaeology to issues of social justice is a bold prescription for our discipline, one that asks us to understand how the pasts we produce are connected to the present lives and futures of the communities we study.

In the case of my work with the Kashia Band of Pomo,¹ restoring justice to the act of researching and writing the history of the Kashaya starts with the recognition of the fundamental human and cultural rights of the community to tell its own history. From this starting point, the Kashia partnered with the California Department of Parks and Recreation and archaeologists from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington on the development of the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail at Fort Ross State Historic Park. The goal of this public interpretive trail is to introduce visitors of Fort Ross to Metini, the ancestral homeland of the Kashia.

According to Reno Franklin, the first Kashia THPO and the now current Chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, (personal communication, 2004), the purpose of the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail is to show the public “how Kashaya have learned to walk in two worlds.” This message is a direct confrontation of colonial narratives that envisioned tribes as relics of the past, fully acculturated. So strong was this latter perspective that archaeological studies of Native Societies during the historic period measured the degree of “Indianness” of a community through a ratio of discovered Native versus European-manufactured artifacts (Quimby and Spoehr 1951). Counteracting this narrative, KPITP integrates Kashaya voices, perspectives, and tribal history into the interpretive content of the trail so that the public may witness the deep connection of the tribe to its homeland, from time immemorial to the present.

Achieving these goals also involves restoring justice to the process of history making. Interpretations created for the cultural heritage trail are the final product of a community-based research protocol that frames research as a process that should, ultimately, be of benefit to both researchers and communities. In practicing community-based research with the Kashia, project members moved away from generating knowledge about the Kashia to creating knowledge with each other (Tamisari 2006:24). Producing knowledge with a community is distinguished by the formation of personal, reciprocal relationships between researcher and community and in which both researcher and community acknowledge the individual contributions and shared knowledge of collaborators. This approach stands in contrast to extractive models of research that position researchers as the sole authorities and arbiters of knowledge. In approaching the research partnership from a place of mutual respect, honesty, integrity, and trust, KPITP fostered an openness of communication so that tribal elders, scholars, and community members could remember and, importantly, share histories of Fort Ross and Metini.

Public representations of Native American history typically rely upon data generated through archaeology, ethnography, and historical documents. While each of these sources adds dimension to our understanding of the history of Metini and Fort Ross, alone they offer incomplete glimpses. Representations of Native history and heritage in archaeology often focus solely upon the context or function of artifacts and sites. Represented in this way we lose the social and cultural contexts that made these places, and the archaeological remains we recover, meaningful for the people who used them. For example, archaeologists classify CA-SON-1889—a stop on the interpretive trail—as a thousand-year old shell midden and low-density lithic scatter (see Figure 3 above). We have meaningful archaeological data for this site— over 6,000 years of human settlement on the coastal terraces of Metini that documents the changing relationship between people and their natural landscapes. Yet, places such as this are as marked by the activities that we can see materially as they are by those we only know through traces of memory and history.

Kashaya stories about how shellfish were gathered, or the stories you tell children when you visit rock outcrops of the kind found at CA-SON-1889, or about the kinds of plants you would use to ward off a cold, for example, are used with empirical evidence related to material practices and the local environment to add to the depth of interpretation of Kashaya history and heritage. Viewed in these terms, the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail transforms the picturesque vista of the terrace into a community space. It is a schoolhouse where you brought children to learn, a place that reminds the contemporary community of its past and future, and part of a living heritage and landscape.

On December 10, 2015 the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians closed acquisition of the Kashia Coastal Reserve, which gives the tribe access to their coastal homelands after they were removed over 150 years ago (video: Here and Now: Kashia Coastal Reserve). This event is a watershed moment and reminder of both the things the Kashia have lost and gained since the Russian American Company came to Metini. There is the potential through the kind of collaborative work represented by KPITP that archaeology can leave positive, lasting legacies so that in the future we can see the practices and communities such as the Kashaya in our contemporary imagination.

In writing the past, we also write the future. This carries with it a deep responsibility to do justice to these stories and, importantly, the people connected to them in the present.

Notes

[1] The Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of Stewart’s Point Rancheria is the official, political name of the federally recognized tribal government. Tribal members and anthropologists also commonly use the alternate spelling “Kashaya” to refer to the tribal community. For the purposes of this paper, I use Kashia to refer to the tribal government and Kashaya or Kashaya Pomo to refer to the tribal community.

References

Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip (2007) History, Justice, and Reconciliation. In Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement, edited by Barbara J. Little and Paul A. Shackel, pp. 23-46. AltaMira Press, Landham, MD.

Quimby, George I. and Alexander Spoehr (1951) Acculturation and Material Culture. Fieldana. Anthropology 36(6): 107-47. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25060#page/4/mode/1up

Tamisari, Franca (2006) “Personal Acquaintance”: Essential Individuality and the Possibilities of Encounters. In Provoking Ideas: Critical Indigenous Studies, edited By T. Lea, E. Kowal And G. Cowlishaw, pp.17-36. Darwin University Press, Darwin.

What if anthropology were to suspend its claims to be a social science, whether of a geisteswissenschaftliche or a positivist variety? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other-than-humans? I am prompted to reflect on these questions by an encounter from my recent fieldwork.

In February 2013, I participated in Frogtopia. At once no place and multiple places, Frogtopia is the creation of Frog King, who in turn is the creation, or the costumed alter ego of Kwok Mang-ho. Born in Guangdong province in 1947 and educated in Hong Kong, where he now lives, Kwok is recognized today as one of the pioneers of multimedia and performance art in China. His output consists of a proliferation of works in a variety of media: video, photography, ink on paper, costumed performance and found materials such as plastic bags. His approach, typically, is to fill his canvases and exhibition and performance spaces with his characteristic motifs, including calligraphy, inflated plastic bags suspended from strings and the frog image that has played an increasingly conspicuous part in his work. Kwok has stated in interviews that he was drawn to the figure of the frog because of its metamorphic life cycle and its capacity to move between land and water. At the same time the image is meant to evoke a range of other associations, its bulging eyes embodying watchfulness and suggesting too a bridge for exchange and communication between Chinese and Western artistic influences and a sail boat for journeying to new places. The title Frog King alludes to a parable attributed to the 4^th century BCE Taoist philosopher Zhuang-zi, which tells of a frog living at the bottom of an abandoned well, who considers himself the king of his narrow domain until a passing turtle draws his attention to a world extending far beyond its confines. Unlike his namesake, however, Frog King is well traveled, having toured mainland China, Korea, the United States and Europe and represented Hong Kong in the appropriately amphibious setting of the Venice Biennale. Wherever he goes, he carries with him the characteristic trappings of Frogtopia, incorporating found objects along with photographs and photocopies of previous projects to produce new works, many of which are distributed free to audience members, who are in turn invited to participate in the creative process through calligraphy, drawing, painting, paper folding, or dressing up in improvised costumes, including his signature “Froggy Glasses,” transforming an exhibition or performance space into a version of Frogtopia, where, in his own words, the principle “Art is Life, Life is Art” holds sway.

Frog King’s densely packed canvases and installations have sometimes been interpreted as evoking the crowded living environment of contemporary Hong Kong, where humans, consumer goods, automobiles and garbage jostle for space. I met him however in a very different setting – that of Papa Westray (or “Papay” as it is known locally), population around 70, the second smallest and second most northerly of the Orkney islands, lying approximately thirty miles north of the northernmost tip of Scotland. The occasion for Frog King’s visit was Papay Gyro Nights, a weeklong contemporary art festival held annually in mid February. Organized by Sergei Ivanov and Tzs Zima Chan, two artists who moved to Papay from London, the festival is now in its sixth year and has become increasingly international in its range of participants, who have included musicians, storytellers, painters, film-makers and artists working with ambient sound, digital media and performance. The 2013 line-up also included a “Philosopher in Residence” (Rick Dolphijn of the University of Utrecht, a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy) and an “Anthropologist in Residence” (me). The festival takes its name from the figure of “Gyro” (aka “Grýla”) – a giantess who features in a number of North Atlantic performance and storytelling traditions and who is identified as a hybrid figure, combining animal and human, marine and terrestrial, male and female attributes. Participating artists are invited to create site-specific works that respond to the singular materiality of the island environment by drawing inspiration from the composite figure of Gyro. The festival begins each year with a torchlight parade, culminating in a bonfire celebration. This time, costumes were supplied by Frog King, including an assortment of conventionally male and female clothing, colored wigs, hats and, of course, froggy sunglasses. Thus attired, a procession of islanders of all ages, artists and visitors (plus a philosopher and an anthropologist), led by Frog King, made its way toward the Old Pier on the eastern shore of the island, where the bonfire was to be lit. A strong wind blowing from offshore sent showers of sparks flying from the flaming torches as we left behind the island’s six street lamps and advanced into the surrounding darkness. Arriving at the pier, Frog King put his torch to the bonfire. As the flames climbed, swept upward and outward by the wind, he shouted: “Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival 2013! Heat it up! Fire action! We are making energy! Hot Beauty!” and was joined by a chorus of “Gyro! Gyro! Gyro!”

…            For the remainder of the festival, Frog King established himself in a vacant room in the island’s school, which he bedecked with a variety of frog regalia, covering every inch of the walls, turning it into a Frogtopia cum workspace. Here he held an open studio throughout the week and, on the final Saturday afternoon, hosted a gathering of artists, audience members, parents and children, who talked, dressed up, played and made art, while Frog King distributed a selection of previously produced works to everyone present. Reactions to the afternoon were varied. One visitor, a retiree from London, now living in Stromness on Orkney Mainland, was sceptiical about taking part in what he took to be children’s entertainment. Others, including the island’s oldest resident, a sprightly octogenarian, were appreciative of the fact that, for several hours, children and adults, islanders and outsiders, had played together and in doing so produced an assortment of artworks in a range of media. But what sort of play was it that we were engaged in? If Frog King’s performances seem intended to draw audiences into a participatory practice of collaborative making, many of the materials used – discarded clothing, scaps of paper, plastc bags – serve as a reminder too that such play is, inevitably, an engagement with a world that, even when it is composed of humanly manufactured objects, nonetheless exists autonomously of us and the meanings we acribe to it. Take the assertion “Art is Life, Life is Art.” This can be read as affirming, simultaneously, a generalized human creativity (as evoked by Frog King’s frequently and unabashedly universalizing rhetoric) and the ‘artistry’ (in Nietzsche’s sense) of an other than human life, an aesthetic drive – at once creative and destructive – immanant to the very substance of the material universe and as such, finally, indifferent to humans, who are, by comparison, like Zhuang-zi’s frog, ensconced in his well with his kingly delusions, an insignificant speck amid the vastness of a universe of which he knows nothing. To experience a Frog King performance in Papay was to be made aware continuously of the unstoppable encroachment of this other-than-human world – not only through the assembled materials of Frogtopia, but also through the cries of sea birds, the wind that blew continuously throughout the week and sometimes made walking out of doors difficult, the waves beating upon the island’s rocky shores and, less conspicuously but no less tellingly, the marine erosion to which the islands of Orkney and its northerly neighbor, Shetland have been subject since their formation between 400 and 600 million years ago and that will eventually cause both island chains to disappear beneath the waters from which they first emerged. By that time, of course, it is entirely possible that Orkney’s 8 millenia long human presence will have disappeared too.

If anthropology too is an art, what kind of art is it? An amphibious and metamorphic one to be sure, an art that plays – with great absurdity and seriousness – at the interface between differentiated human worlds and at the theshold of their making and undoing. Far from being the holistically conceived study of humanity – as some would continue to have it – anthropology as a creative practice is marked by a constitutive inhumanity. Like Frog King’s art, anthropology’s encounters with other humans and other than humans remind us that what we may refer to as “our” experience is never exclusively and unequvocally ours but is always also the medium of a desubjectification and disposession at once individual and collective. I propose then that anthropology is nothing more or less than the performative enactment – through writing or other media – of this simultaneous grounding and ungrounding of human worlds in the elusive commonality of their non-coincidence both with themsleves and with one another, a commonality that is one of participation in difference rather than identity. Every document of an anthropological encounter is also, therefore, wittingly or unwittingly, the transcript of a becoming inhuman, of the unraveling of observer and observed into the untotalizable whole of what came before and will come after.

As Saturday afternoon drew to a close, Rick, the festival’s Philosopher in Residence, asked Frog King whether he still subscribed to the view that Art is Life, Life is Art? Frog King – or was it Kwok Mang-ho, or both? – answered that he had once considered that to be the case – “But now I realize, Art is Frog.” Art is Frog. I can currently think of no better answer to the question: what is anthropology?

I will only know what I precisely want to say in this piece once I finish writing it.

This enigmatic sentence is not meant as an alluring opening statement, nor is it a sign for an experimental literary method that I will be employing in this blog. For what it’s worth, this sentence captures my principal insight into the process of writing. It is an insight that I gained after years of experiencing much frustration with writing, after producing endless drafts of the same text, after nights and days spent on trying ‘to get it right’, after struggling not to lose my focus, not to get lost in the texts I tried so hard to write.

Luckily, I do not feel like that any more. But it has been a long ride.

Initially, facing my frustration with writing – when I was struggling with chapters in my doctoral dissertation, or with my first attempt at publishing an article in a peer-review journal – I was inclined, and even determined, to attribute my pains to the fact that the ideas in my head were not sharp enough at the point of writing. I repeatedly told myself as a beaten mantra: ‘You need to be very clear about what you want to say, before you sit down and start writing’. I felt angrily vindicated after every article or book that I read, thinking it was so obvious that the authors knew exactly what they wanted to argue and illustrate.

I started to draw my arguments on a blank sheet in preparation for writing. I made tentative tables of content before I had written even one chapter. I sketched road maps for the order of sections in an article, I decided on the data to be included, and on the theories to be used. Notwithstanding my best efforts at having clarity in my head and being well prepared for the writing phase, it always ended up pretty much the same. Once the words began to accumulate on the screen in front of me, the text seemed to take on its own direction, leaving me halfway, confused about my main argument, about the debates in which I intervene, about the subtleties I try to get across. Why can I not control my text? Why does it take on a different form from the one I had in mind? After all the preparation I invested in having a clear focus, why can I not stick to it?

Sharing my writing frustrations with peers at the department and in meetings with colleagues at conferences, I quickly discovered that my predicament was nothing special. It seemed everyone was suffering from the excruciating process of writing. I must admit it made me feel better. It was a relief to realize that it wasn’t only my shortcomings as a writer that turned this endeavor into a permanent struggle. There appeared to be something about the essence of writing that challenged anyone who attempted it.

My breakthrough came one day while talking with the late Gerd Baumann, a wonderful anthropologist and a gifted writer. For many years, Gerd Baumann thought me various ‘tricks of the trade’ for good writing. Helpful as these tricks were, they never really succeeded to elevate, not even to decently mitigate, my writing struggles. One day, complaining to him for the nth time about my latest struggle with an unyielding text, Gerd grinned at me and emitted a rhetorical question that would change my idea about writing forever: ‘When will you realize that writing is a second cognitive process?’

I’m sure that for many people this sentence is an obvious one; perhaps even banal or cliché. For me, however, it served as a crucial eye opener. Not because I could never before think or feel that this was the case about writing, but because there are things that you need to hear from someone in order for their full meaning to dawn on you.

Writing is not about putting in words the mental ideas you have in your head. Writing is a process in which you digest, make sense and form your mental ideas, in ways that are inevitably different from toying with ideas in your head, or talking them over with colleagues, or presenting them in a conference. There is something about the externalization of ideas in a textual form that activates and brings with it a particular cognitive process. This is why writing is by definition a puzzling and creative process. It is not about transforming thoughts into words; it is about transforming thoughts. Period.

It is after we have written about something that we should do our best to make sure that the text we produce captures the thoughts that evolved out of the very writing process.

I hope I managed that much in this short piece. If not, I will give it another writing. And then produce some more text. Some text that brings to light thoughts I didn’t know I had.

Some of our co-bloggers in this forum rightly suggest that reading precedes and accompanies writing. But then they say that young people today, in this era of attention deficits, are losing the art of reading. When I was young, hope I still am, I usually responded quite stubbornly to this kind of admonishing “wisdom”. Maybe our teachers need to be more inspiring. In writing, we may need to rediscover a richer variety of forms. There was a time, for instance, when scholars primarily wrote not in essays, but in a more difficult and older art of texting, namely, aphorisms.

Let’s not underestimate the new forms of attentiveness that are emerging. On Instagram for instance, which to the surprise of discerning readers creates the possibility of stranger sociality based only on a fellowship of images.

Some forms of sociality turn one into a misanthrope. Like the sickening, saccharine self-promotion enabled by a medium like Facebook.

Another suggestion from a senior colleague is that before writing he picks up a good book to read, even for a few minutes. That’s fine, but there is a crucial qualification. Just because food is necessary for life, we don’t run around stuffing our faces with the first thing we find. The crucial question is one of diet. What is our food for thought? For two years or so my diet consisted solely of Nietzsche and as you can see, for good and for ill, it had an effect. Even now, I am careful about what texts I come near to.

For a moment, here, I am free of the necessity of citations. And yet I am quoting. When are we not quoting? Often I read books that are merely echoes. Are you an actor or a mere representative?

It is not that in this era of academic articles and books we don’t have other forms lurking within us. Sometimes a potent fragment is tucked away under other sentences. I once managed to reach such a line. I quote:

As our bus neared the village of Mamoni, my destination for now, I was startled by a luminous orb hovering close by, atop a low hill. I had seen it before. Nonetheless, this was the first time the moon chose to reveal itself to me, so blatantly round and brilliant and near. No wonder dogs howl and tides stir. Ours are water bodies too.

Ours are water bodies too. This sentence was given to me not by the gods but by the landscape, and was the fruit of many days and nights and years of labor.

Some friends of mine tell me that I wrote a very “affirmative” book. But these friends either don’t know me well enough or they don’t know how to read between the lines. Cheerfulness often conceals great loathing. So that is my advice for today, for any unlikely seeker who happens to land on these words: learn to hate well.

What do I hate? So much even in my own neck of the woods that I have to conceal it out of civility and self-preservation. A brief list: bleeding hearts and their moral tartuffery; but also scamster Marxists and pseudo-militants who have nothing left but a way of “talking” about the world that works mostly only to their own social advantage; Saidians whose anger expresses only their desire to be “recognized”, who don’t realize the rivers they are damming under the guise of so-called “orientalism”; picking up anthropology journals and reading tepid analyses of current events with a smattering of Foucault thrown in; the self-congratulation and self-flagellation of Writing Culture, as if they discovered the self; almost all invocations of “neoliberalism”; I continue at my own risk. In any case, as Deleuze says: nothing is ever gained by books against something. “If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it”.

What do I hate? In writing about India, which I marginally inhabit, I hate almost all contemporary non-fiction and fiction writing. Here is what I say in public, about this. I am referring in these lines to a genre and to a book which was awarded the Booker Prize:

Most contemporary Indian fiction and nonfiction is about call centers and cities and young men trying to get rich in the new India. These “new” India books have a very impoverished idea, if any, of what the “old” was, and of what newness may be. Consider an award-winning “new” India book, better left unnamed. A supposedly demonic businessman narrates his story of capitalist greed and divides the world into Dark and Light, in the process giving us insufferable chicken-coop metaphors about the horrors of poverty in India. Such an author knows nothing about demons or about poverty.

But why target Johnny-come-latelys? These problems persist even in the upper ranks. For instance, I hate Naipaul. He is Caliban cursing entertainingly. And he is Prospero, magisterially confirming the European tourist-traveler’s eye: “Ah, it was not only we who felt like this!” But we can also learn from what we hate. From Naipaul we can learn to write sentences of commanding precision, organized like phalanxes. Consider this, from one of his more egregious texts, An Area of Darkness:

Feature by feature, the East one had read about. On the train to Cairo the man across the aisle hawked twice, with an expert tongue rolled the phlegm into a ball, plucked the ball out of his mouth with thumb and forefinger, considered it, and then rubbed it away between his palms.

Hateful, but what a wonderfully, rhythmically composed sentence! And then, in a very classic Naipaul technique, in the next sentence he zooms out further:

Cairo revealed the meaning of the bazaar: narrow streets encrusted with filth, stinking even on this winter’s day; tiny shops full of shoddy goods; crowds; the din, already barely supportable, made worse by the steady blaring of motor-car horns; medieval buildings partly collapsed, others rising on old rubble, with here and there sections of tiles, turquoise and royal blue, hinting at a past of order and beauty, crystal fountains and amorous adventures, as perhaps in the no less disordered past they always had done.

It’s evocative, yes, but even when we try to convey a feel for a place, anthropologists do not write like this, with good reason: out of love for this world. It is our discipline, our devotion, to go beyond such beautifully painted “writerly” impressions of the world.

So, in sum, in this era of WhatsApp, we might learn again to be attentive to the sentence.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, numerous libraries and an unknown quantity of books disintegrated with it. Amid a rising Christianity hostile to traces of paganism, the texts of many authors admired in Roman antiquity were turned to dust and the memory of their existence dissolved. Pieces of writing by noted figures such as Cicero or Virgil certainly survived, but the majority of what these men wrote has been lost. This was an epochal moment in the history of writing: an imperial collapse so profound that it physically disintegrated vast amounts of texts, erasing them from human memory.

Some books from ancient Rome were saved from this massive vanishing of written words only because a few copies survived for over a thousand years in the libraries of European monasteries. This survival was often the outcome of pure chance: that is, a set of conjunctural factors somehow allowed those books, and not others, to overcome the wear and tear and ruination of paper and ink by the physical pressures and cuts inflicted on them by the weather and by the living forms attracted to them, primarily insects, mice, and humans. In these monasteries, many ancient books and their words disintegrated after a few centuries, gone forever. But others lingered and were eventually copied by hand again on new and more robust paper, which could withstand atmospheric and bodily pressures for the next two to three centuries. Three hundred years or so later, another monk would grab a manuscript about to disintegrate and copy those words again. Who knows how many amazing books were eaten away by bugs simply because no monk chose to save them from their ruination? One of the books that miraculously survived in a monastery over a millennia of chance encounters with the void was Lucretius’ extraordinary philosophical treatise De rerum natura, The Nature of Things.

What got me thinking about the ruination of written words is Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating (if uneven) book The Swerve, which narrates how in 1417 a book-hunter discovered Lucretius’ The Nature of Things in a remote monastery. In my book Rubble, I examined how different forms of ruination, from the Spanish conquest to the soy boom, have created constellations of nodes of rubble in northern Argentina, many of which are perceived by locals to be haunted (Gordillo 2014). I therefore read The Swerve with an eye sensitive to the destruction of places and matter and the affective materiality of their debris. The richness conveyed by Greenblatt’s story of the vanishing of Roman books reveals that the physical disintegration and afterlives of rubble also involve the written word, which in the modern world is often presented as an emblem of human endurance.

The striking thing about The Nature of Things’ close encounter with its ruination is how closely it resonates with Lucretius’ ideas about matter, contingency, decay, and the void. Lucretius conceptualized and celebrated in poetic verse the immanent materiality of the world through the lens of Epicurus’ atomism: the thesis —first articulated in Greece centuries earlier— according to which everything is made out of atoms and void. Written around 40 BC and admired as well as controversial in its days, The Nature of Things argued that atoms are always moving in the void, clashing with each other because of their clinamen, or tendency to “swerve.” Amid whirlwinds of random collisions, atoms create the energy of the universe and all motion, life, and destruction. Hostile to religious transcendence, Lucretius celebrated chance and the sensuous, fleeting becoming of life. The Catholic Church condemned Lucretius as a pagan writer and by the early middle-ages De rerum natura had been largely forgotten, except by a few scholars who saw it cited in ancient texts. Yet in a remote monastery those ideas lingered in the fragile materiality of those written words penned by a man who had long been dead. Those markings on paper were not just signs with meaning and poetic symbolism: they were traces, left by a human hand, that had the power to affect.

Once discovered and disseminated more widely as a book in 1471, Lucretius’ text subsequently affected some of the most prominent physicists of early modernity such as Gassendi and Galileo. As Greenblatt shows, when in 1633 the Inquisition condemned Galileo for claiming that the Earth moved around the sun, one of the charges was that he was under the influence of atomism and its pagan physics of motion, which contradicted Aristotle’s ontology of spatial fixity and stasis. As Michel Serres has argued in The Birth of Physics, Lucretius is often misread as an imaginative poet rather than a rigorous philosopher of physics. But the quantum revolution in physics in the 1900s demonstrated that Lucretius had brilliantly anticipated, if in rudimentary form, that the material makeup of the universe comprises, indeed, a ghostly dance of subatomic patterns in the void. Further, Lucretius deduced the existence of atoms through the observation of the decay and decomposition of objects such as books, which in disintegrating into smaller and smaller fragments reveal that the seeming solidity of matter hides its constitutive void.

The story of the greatest philosophy book that survived from the times of the Roman Empire may seem distant from the experience of writing in our high-tech, hyper-digitized twenty-first century. Writing has become so deterritorialized, so agile in its capacity to connect humans across continents through screens, cables, and fiber optics that it is easy to forget that writing has not ceased to be, and cannot but be, a material practice that produces a physical object, the written word. Today, as it was in the days of Lucretius, writing is a form of thinking that mobilizes a geometry between the hands (or other bodily organs) and tools for leaving material traces on an object. On a computer, these traces may be digitized but bits of energy are material nonetheless. This materiality makes of written words, either printed or digitized, objects always-already subject to ruination. As in medieval monasteries, to prevent written words from vanishing, human beings have to copy them over and over again as hardcopies or data files. Writing undoubtedly creates transcendence, and what Lucretius wrote indeed survived his times and still affects us today. But written words are immanent traces that, like all objects, as Lucretius wrote, eventually decompose into atoms moving in the void.

References

Gordillo, Gastón. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2011. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton.

Lucretius. 2007. The Nature of Things. New York: Penguin.

Serres, Michel. 2000. The Birth of Physics. Manchester: Clinamen Press.

This morning, as I am sitting down to write this blog entry in my rental apartment in Nogales, I peer through the window: The sun has illuminated the dark brown border wall that coils over the hilly landscape and reminds me of the spiked back of a stegosaurus. Six months ago I arrived in Southern Arizona to begin fieldwork with firefighters and paramedics for a new ethnographic project about emergency responders on both sides of the line, as the international boundary which abruptly separates Mexico and the United States is locally called. Though ethnographic fieldwork takes many forms – I am conducting interviews, participating in the daily activities at the firehouse, volunteering at a first aid station for migrants, teaching prehospital emergency care at a local fire district, and engaging with the first responder communities in Arizona and Sonora in multiple other ways – my primary activity continues to be writing.

I have always been a morning writer. When I was working on the manuscript of my first book, Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (University of California Press 2015), I would shut the doors of my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house in the forested suburbs of Vilnius, Lithuania, where I was fortunate to spend my research leave, and would sit at my large desk, facing the barren trees outside, until noontime. I did it every day of the week for several months during a long and cold winter. The manuscript was complete and sent off to my editor on the eve of spring.

But during fieldwork keeping a regular writing routine has been difficult. The topic of our research inevitably shapes how, where and what we write, and my study of fire and rescue services under heightened border security is no exception. Often I spend the entire day on shift with the crew at the fire station, riding along with them to the scenes of emergencies. Other days there is training, community events, long drives to do interviews at more remote fire districts. Having a background in both journalism and in anthropology affects how I go about conducting research. Instead of dividing my time into chunks for doing fieldwork and writing up fieldnotes, I tend to pursue the story as far as it takes me before I finally sit down to reflect on the new material. I think of it as combining the in-depth view of an anthropologist with the fervor of an investigative journalist. It can be exhausting.

Because of this, I write anywhere and everywhere, whenever I have a minute to jot down my thoughts and observations. I scribble names, places and dates in my pocket notebook, in a handwriting that has become illegible, especially when the entries are made while riding in the back of a fire engine or on a 4×4 truck plowing through the dirt roads to where the fence between the U.S. and Mexico is nothing more than a Normandy barrier and four-strand barbed wire. I type abbreviated notes on my cell phone during stops at gas stations along the I-19 connecting Tucson with Nogales, and whenever pulling out my phone to quickly enter some text seems more polite – and less intrusive – than opening my notebook. When I am driving and I can’t pull over to jot down a thought that I want to keep, I record voice memos; I have done so passing through Border Patrol checkpoints on Arivaca Road and on Sasabe Highway, back when I used to count the times I was stopped and to document what the agents were saying.

I also take pictures. Many pictures. On my cell phone or using one of the two DSLR cameras that I carry around. I take pictures of dumpster fires and vehicle accidents, of picturesque sunsets over the Tumacácori and the Baboquivori Peaks, of hazardous materials equipment and of tacos al pastor being prepared for dinner at the firehouse. In fact, photography has been a particularly important ethnographic tool. I am frequently asked to take pictures of official community events, bi-national meetings, and training exercises, and to later share them with the participating agencies and the media. As a designated photographer, however, I may not have time to take notes, so the pictures later become cues for the activities that took place and help me write about what happened. Writing from photographs changes the way we convert experiences and events into prose, suggested Casey N. Cep in an article for the New Yorker. They serve as powerful tools to enhance memories about the encounter that begin to twist immediately after it is over. When I finally open my laptop and begin writing, I draw on all of these cues – notes on my cell phone, handwritten memos, voice messages, photos. They neatly fall into places and begin to form a story. I may not have a well-structured writing routine, but this haphazard creation of fieldnotes has been surprisingly productive.

Fieldwork also precipitates other genres of writing such as writing for the public. There used to be a delay, a pause between ethnographic research often conducted in remote locations, and anthropological publications carefully crafted at academic institutions and perfected through cycles of rigorous revision. It could take years of going back and forth to the fieldsite before scholars would decide to share their findings with the public. Still today many monographs and research articles do not see the light of day until long after the events they depict have transpired. But this has been changing. Ethnographic fieldwork and public writing now happen simultaneously. Federal funding agencies that use taxpayer money are pressured to demonstrate the relevance of the research that they support to the society at large. Meanwhile, technological innovation and easy access to the internet allows us to share photos and news about our fieldwork instantaneously via e-mail, blogging or social media. These developments, among others, have led anthropologists to more openly talk about our work-in-progress. More of us now report preliminary findings from the frontlines of ethnographic research.

While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Sonora and Southern Arizona over the last half a year, I have written across different genres of public writing. I created a public website, http://www.borderrescueproject.com/, which I update with news, excerpts from my fieldnotes and interviews, reflections written by my research assistants, and numerous photographs. The website is also linked to the project’s Twitter account and displays a feed of the most recent events linked to my work. At the request of my contacts in the fire service and emergency management, who invite me to participate in their trainings and meetings, on a couple of occasions I wrote brief news pieces and sent photographs to the local newspaper in Nogales, Arizona. I have also given interviews to several Mexican news outlets in Sonora. As a former journalist, I am familiar with the practice of deploying information to promote activities in the community and I eagerly engage with the media in ways that benefit the people with whom I work. News media provides a powerful and readily available channel to communicate the significance of the research project to the broader public. With that in mind, I wrote an op-ed for the Guardian that was a critical commentary on existing federal policies that blend emergency healthcare with immigration policing, and thus the riskiest form of public writing I have done. This article likely had more readers than any of my scholarly publications ever will. It was shared instantaneously via social networks and thus was immediately available to the firefighters and paramedics who have been participating in my research project. I had reasons to fear their reaction. Politics are generally seen as a threat to camaraderie, and thus are a taboo topic in the firehouse where people of different political leanings have to rely on each other in life and death situations. Had they found my op-ed to be politically aggressive or provocative, my fieldwork relationships could have ended there and then and the future of my research would be uncertain. To my relief, they liked it.

Messages to the media are different than other narrative genre more familiar to anthropologists. In “Why Ethnography Matters: On Anthropology and Its Publics”, Didier Fassin writes about the challenges that scholars face when their research goes public. The shift from the academic realm to the world of news journalism, which substitutes nuanced accounts of complex social reality with flashy, explicit headlines, is often frustrating to those who invest years to understand a multifaceted problem with no easy solutions, such as the political, legal and economic conundrum on the U.S.-Mexico border. Talking to the press and writing for the public before the research is over can be even more problematic. Preliminary findings can be inconclusive or contradictory. What if, once you are back at your desk, going through your fieldnotes with analytical focus, you regret what you said or wrote while your experiences were still fresh like wet paint? It seems safer to create a distance between the messy stage of ethnographic research – the fieldwork – and the structured phase of reflection and scholarly production that comes afterwards. It may be wise to wait before you reach out to the public. But such caution has its cost: the lost opportunity to build and maintain bridges between the scientific community and the multiple publics who we want and need to address.

Writing in the field and writing from the field are forms of ethnographic writing that, because of their unpretentious character and temporary relevance, are overshadowed by academia’s focus on full-length monographs and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Fieldnotes posted on the blog may be unpolished and haphazardly put together, news articles too narrow and shallow, editorials and commentaries for the press – candid and biased (“wrinkles” which anthropologists as authors soften out after long hours spent on drafting and then revising our CV-worthy manuscripts), but they also come with the immediate reward of sharing knowledge in the making.

Writing is not the aftermath of fieldwork. Fieldwork is writing.

Acquiring Spanish as a second language led me to poetry, and becoming a better poet helped me become a better bilingual. I had been a good high school and college student of Spanish and had studied abroad in Spain and Mexico. After college, I wanted a way to give kindness back to the many Spanish speakers who tolerated and nurtured my emerging bilingualism. As a Spanish major with coursework in theatre and creative writing, it made sense to become an elementary school teacher. I was quickly overwhelmed. I struggled to teach third grade math, science, and California history in my new classroom in South Central Los Angeles.

This was 1992. Rodney King. Race riots.

Each school window had iron grating on the outside. On the inside, we decorated with window paint and crepe paper, a beautiful carpet displaying the map of the world. My students were all considered “LEP,” limited English proficient.. The institutional structure gave me, their inexperienced “bilingual teacher,” a few short months to teach Spanish literacy with the explicit caveat that English monolingualism was the true goal. To be successful in public K-12 education, my students had to forego Spanish proficiency. Meanwhile, I was learning more and more Spanish than ever before. The same bilingualism which was so privileged and nurtured in my college education was shut down for young, immigrant youth,; this didn’t seem right. As a hard-working teacher, I felt I had no time or energy left to contemplate this irony. I turned to poetry, and, then, to graduate school.

My first graduate school teachers were anthropologists of education at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Greta Gibson and Dr. Cindy Pease-Alvarez taught me how to take field notes, to understand sociocultural theories of learning, to immerse myself in classroom life and interview bilingual parents and children. I was engaged by what I learned in educational research, but I yearned for methods and texts that were less planned and more playful, evocative of surprise and feeling. I read poets on the side: Martín Espada, Dorianne Laux, Chitra Divakaruni, Wislawa Symborska, June Jordan. I was moved by the ways in which these poets wrote about human experience across race, social class, language and culture. I wanted educational anthropology to stir as their words did, to reconsider bilingual policies and practices that seemed cruel and ineffective.

During one of my many summer indulgences in poetry, away from dry social science prose, I attended the Squaw Valley Writers conference. As I searched for my nametag, I saw Renato Rosaldo’s name a few rows away on the table. The “Renato Rosaldo,” author of Culture and Truth (1989)? Could it be that a prominent anthropologist was also an emergent poet? Indeed it was. Renato encouraged me to read other “antropoetas” as he referred to them: Ruth Behar, Dell Hymes, Kirin Narayan, and others. There was a small tribe of poetic anthropologists and they convened in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. The word “humanism” became a new “homeroom,” a place to put my bookbag down and represent poetic evocations of ethnographic learning.

I had a quest, to place myself among a community of artful social scientists and socially evocative artists. I learned to use ethnographic strategies to understand forms of bilingual education and I could sift theory with fieldnotes and interview data and find the images, the music, the performance of bilingualism in everyday life. If I gave myself permission and I studied craft in both poetry and anthropology, then I might contribute to the creative and humanistic renderings that have continued to inspire my teaching and learning. I have written a great many terrible poems. I have also written many bland academic words in prose. I feel lucky that part of my job has the goal to improve the quality of my writing so that it might evoke greater understanding and action.

Recently, I’ve begun to shift my gaze. I spent 9 months in Oaxaca Mexico to study American adult Spanish language learners. Who are we, those of us who continue to seek fluency in one of our Mexico neighbor’s tongues? While no longer a Spanish language beginner, I easily identified with my study participants and rekindled the familiar feelings of strangeness, making “home” for the first time in another language and world view. While so many of us invest great resources to acquire Spanish as a second language, we continue to live in a society that rarely supports efforts for bilingual children to maintain and develop their bilingual abilities. It has been my goal to draw connections between Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages [TESOL] and teaching high quality World Language Education (WLE) to English Speakers  Sometimes, the most heartfelt way I’ve found to analyze ethnographic interviews, field work experiences and theory, is through the act of writing (sometimes terrible) poems.

The better results of this ethnographic poetry will be published in a forthcoming book, Imperfect Tense (In Press). In closing, I share one of these poems where the concluding reference to the “upside down question marks” in Spanish punctuation, resonated as an apt metaphor for the artful ethnographic work in second language education I pursue.

I am still seeking community. Inspired by the work of “antropoetas” such as Kusserow (2002; 2013), Stone (2008), Rosaldo (2013), and Faizullah (2014), I am on a never-ending quest for socially informed art and artfully informed social science. May we continue to stir one another with resonant knowing, to welcome the unexpected and lyric as we seek cross-cultural understanding:

WHEN YOU’RE A RETIRED AMERICAN STUDYING SPANISH IN MEXICO AND AFTER 
          SIX MONTHS CAN BARELY ORDER SOMETHING OFF A MENU

Chances are you’ve said I’m pregnant when you meant 

    I’m embarrassed, 
                    fuck a bus 

    when you wanted         to catch it, 

or vaginas 

    instead of “páginas”        to describe an art book’s pages. 

Odds are you’ve boozed these errors, 

    loosened        the alveolar ridge, 

    that ineffable          tongue flap 

that probably made all the difference 

when you lacked that packed poncho, 

    exact pesos 

            or translations for the dose,   the punch line, 

the bus route,  the landlord,       the speedy 

vowels garbled into the phone you answered  and fat 

    chance you sent         the right words back, 

    misreading ingredients, 

hunting for ATMs.       Filthy footed, fed 

up with it all, you tangled in a carnival of outlets, 

    sickened from taco      cilantro, 

    broke       human likenesses 

with a stick.               You risked          time

reduced to      mere        numerals, 

    a few verbs         that evaporated 

    like desert water.              Raw 

as the bed- frame wood that men 

    back-holstered up missing cobblestones, 

you startled like       patron saint firecrackers 

    outside         a sleepy weeknight 

    wooden door.        But when you creaked, 

wide-awake, to blue mornings,   you exposed 

    like a rare     book’s  ink sensitive pages, as if damage 

    mattered    less to you than a small,  braided  fist of cheese. 

Whey spilt,     you inevitably unraveled,       turned question marks 

    upside down until tart tamarind         tasted sweet.

References:

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press 2016). Imperfect Tense. Whitepoint Press.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & Souto-Manning, M.. (2010). Teachers Act Up! Creating multicultural community through theatre. NYC: Teachers College Press.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. & Siegesmund, R. (2008). Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice. London: Routledge.

Rosaldo, R. (1989) Culture and truth: the remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.

Rosaldo, Renato (2013) The day of Shelly’s Death: The poetry and ethnography of grief. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.

usserow (2013) Refuge. Rochester, NY: Boa Editions

usserow (2002) Hunting Down the Monk. Rochester, NY: Boa Editions.

Faizullah, Tarfia (2014). Seam. Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois University Press.

Stone, Nomi (2008) Strangers Notebook. Evanston, Il: Triquarterly Press.

They say to write well you should read well: “read more and write better” proclaims the Writing Forward blog. And in her Savage Minds essay Ruth Behar states: “It comes down to this: you can only write as well as what you read.”

While I have to write regularly as an academic, I’m currently struggling to identify good reading practices in my weekly or even monthly routine. How do we define good practices? Is what influences us as academics primarily the “high quality” sources — the peer reviewed articles and books, the classical texts or novels, the rich ethnographic texts, fieldwork or other reliable data — that we expect to find cited in our colleagues’ work, and that we regularly assign to our students?

My colleagues often chat about the latest award winning literature they’ve read and when I read their work and reflect on their word choices and sentence structure I can see clearly that regularly consuming good literature, non-fiction, or scholarly writing has helped shape their excellent choice of prose. Ideas are conveyed with just that right balance of substance, insight and scholarly flourish. My elder sister, who is also an academic, a poet, and definitely a wordsmith, does this very well.

As I write this, I look across to the small library on my husband’s bedside table displaying titles such as The Corporeal Image, Material Ecocriticism, The Island of the Colorblind, Musicophilia and others by Pramoedya Toer, Ursula Le Guin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ray Bradbury and Michael Pollan. His mother was an editor for Penguin and their country home, before it was tragically destroyed in the Black Saturday Victoria bushfires of 2009, held the most wonderful library of classics and more for readers of all ages. He didn’t go to university for any kind of study until the age of thirty- two but was, and still is, a voracious and selective reader. Both he and my elder sister read dictionaries as children. Read dictionaries, like they were storybooks.

My side of the bed is a different story. Instead of serious literature and classics, there are two novels by Johanna Lyndsey (Tender Rebel and Heart of Thunder), something by Nora Roberts, 25 Ways to Awaken your Birth Power, What to Expect When you’re Expecting, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and that trio of magazines I cannot pass at the checkout stand– Woman’s Day, New Idea and Who. I know a fair bit about what Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are purported to be up to though I skip anything on Princess Kate, the Bachelor, and the Bachelorette. The best literature on my side of the bed is by Stephen King and while Tender Rebel is now in the rubbish bin I am still reading every other line of Heart of Thunder featuring a male protagonist who is grossly just enough “savage” and just enough “civilized” to hold the attention of the feisty, red-haired female lead.

How did I, a decolonizing, wannabe decarbonizing, armchair activist, university teacher, ethnographer, interdisciplinary Pacific Studies scholar, and, recently, actual book author, get to this place? Rather than automatically blaming the regular periods of burnout or the hormones flowing through my body in the third trimester of what I’m calling a “mechanically challenging pregnancy”, I’d like to try to answer that question by looking back at my life as the product of an intensely cross-cultural Banaban-I-Kiribati-American household.

I grew up in the Fiji Islands in Savusavu, Levuka, Lautoka and finally Suva, where we lived outside town in a new development called Tacirua Heights, inland, in a home with floor to ceiling books, magazines, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. The majority of our relatives lived on Rabi Island in the far north, a community displaced by phosphate mining on Banaba in Kiribati, but at the time it was rather difficult to get to on any regular basis. Unlike my husband’s secular environment, our house also featured an abundance of religious, Catholic objects, literature and biblical texts. Our family of mum and dad, three girls, two dogs and a short-lived cat occupied a modest, three bedroom house on a street with no name, no telephone or television service (well to be fair the whole of Fiji had no TV at the time), few neighbors, a 180 degree view of the Suva coast, and no garbage collection. This last detail I mention because one of my clearest memories is of my father suffering from the effects of a small explosion that happened during the routine household waste burn. It singed off all the hair from his legs and left many scars.

Around the fire pit we had an abundant and beautiful tropical flower and food garden producing bananas, coconuts, papaya, soursop, passion fruit, lemons, cassava, taro, bele, yams, chili peppers, curry leaf, vanilla, and star fruit among other seasonal fruits and vegetables. Inside the house was a veritable library, and an old Betamax system and video screen on which we watched, on repeat, Hello Dolly, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Fiddler on the Roof, Star Wars, the Faerie Tale Theatre series and ballet tapes sent over from the US, particularly Coppelia, the Nutcracker, Swan Lake and occasionally Dance Theatre of Harlem.

These were complemented by cheap video rentals of taped, American and Australian television shows such as the Cosby Show, Facts of Life and Young Talent Time. When the video was off, and my younger sister and I weren’t holding our parents hostage as audience for our over choreographed musical extravaganzas, there were my father’s amazing stories of growing up on Tabiteuea in Kiribati, and on Rabi, of paying his way through primary and secondary school by working for Catholic priests, and of his many encounters with Fijian, Banaban and I-Kiribati ghosts and spirits. We would join in Banaban community events, learn cultural dances, attend mass held variously in the Kiribati, Fijian and English languages while speaking just English at home. To add to the diversity, my younger sister and I attended a Chinese primary school in Suva and like the rest of the students spent eight years doing rote style reading and writing in Mandarin taught with the bopomofo notation system. To say we were raised in Fiji with an eclectic mix of cultural content and influences would be putting it mildly.

My personal bookshelves were stacked with comics and books I had carefully collected and traded through my primary and secondary school years. They featured entire collections of Enid Blyton “classics”, the Famous Five and Secret Seven series, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, dodgy Mills and Boon, Silhouette, and Harlequin romance novels, Sweet Valley High books, and Archie, Asterix, the fairly racist Phantom and Tin Tin, and other comics from the Marvel and DC publishers. My collections were formidable, and I would bury myself in these stories for hours at a time. This was not the norm for a young Pacific Islander. While a few of my friends were into reading, we were privileged in terms of our access to books and other educational materials. This was a choice of my middle class parents to spend their income in a certain way. A visible mark of status in Fiji is a new and large family car, preferably a four-wheel drive, and we always had the humblest car in town–a light blue 1976 Honda civic, then a banana colored boat of a 1982 Hyundai Stellar, and at the end of high school a white 1984 Toyota Corolla station wagon (manual drive) that my mum still owns. Having an African American mother from a military family who was raised by a librarian and US Colonel to value literature, dance, art and music over all other material things certainly made a difference.

While I wasn’t always reading “the classics,” and Enid Blyton has to be the worst-most-popular-British-author-of-all-time, all this was enough to foster an intense imagination and sense of creativity which has served me well in life and in academia. I became conscious of the ways in which different kinds of conspicuous consumption shaped and marked sociality and status in Fiji from a young age. I was perpetually embarrassed by our lack of visible affluence but less aware of the other forms of privilege we clearly had until I reached my PhD studies without ever taking a break from school and then began to reflect on how I got there. My sisters and I just constantly gulped down knowledge and all three of us kept studying until two reached PhD and the other MD.

One day in the early 1990s while I was far from Fiji studying at Santa Clara University, my mother threw out or donated every last one of my hundreds of books, magazines and comics. She’d actually secretly disapproved of my reading choices and only kept the Asterix and Tin Tin collections which I maintain to this day. Aside from these and the large number of scholarly books I now keep in my office at work, I no longer have any books which I particularly love or care for. I spend far more time on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, and, when I can, consume a variety of television programs including The 100, Game of Thrones, Master Chef, The Biggest Loser, and America’s Next Top Model. I still teach, write, research, present at conferences, and publish academic articles and book chapters, but these are now very clearly separate and discernible from the rest of my “literary” and popular cultural consumption. Other than my students’ writing, everything I read regularly is disposable or accessible from a mobile device, and I gaze ambivalently at my excellent office collection believing I am an academic imposter.

So many life influences shape us as academics, as anthropologists who study others, or in my case, our own Pacific communities. Our approaches, methods and words are shaped by a variety of factors beyond the scholarly genealogies and lines of thought in which we visibly situate ourselves. Our scholarly writing often reflects just a fragment of our life histories or daily practices when we write in an effort to be more objective, more scientific, more authoritative, more scholarly in our work. I don’t know why I cannot bring myself to read good books but I am always reading in that sense of looking at something carefully in order to make meaning.

I’ve been reading lots of popular culture in this way, and, to repeat my own advice citing the late Epeli Hau’ofa in Consuming Ocean Island, reading landscapes and seascapes in a multi-scalar fashion for decades. My husband reminded me of this during a phone call from the top of a mountain at Wee Jasper in the Yass Valley just ninety minutes from where we now live in Canberra, two hours from the east Australian coastline. Our rather cluttered home is near another mountain, Mount Majura, which I see everyday from our bedroom window. My little family regularly walks its trails discussing ants, drop bears, kangaroo poo and all the misspelling in the hastily produced nature signs that the housing developers of “The Fair”, at the mountain’s base, were required to erect. Canberra, which in the Ngambri language is said to mean “cleavage”, and for the Ngunawal people, “meeting place”, is, in all material ways, nothing like Suva. Nevertheless, of all the places I’ve lived both these homes, one near, and one far from the sea, have provided security, nurturing and the most inspiring grounds from which to read the world.

The greatest challenge of being an anthropologist is being me. From one decade to the next I have been a cross-cultural island of self-consciousness, framed by the cross generational memories of wider kin. Wisdom comes in many forms, but as I tell my students, at least those who turn up to class, it cannot be found on the Internet. Somewhere between my father’s Maori generation of desperately trying to be English and my children’s reality of being overtly Maori you find… me.

Raised in the tribally alienated rural heartlands of Waikato naivety (built on 19^th century confiscations at gunpoint), my view of the world was one of barefoot summers by the ocean, while the rest of the year was underpinned by frosts, fog, rugby and ducking for cover in a rurally serviced school surrounded by affluent dairy farms and horse studs. Right from the start teachers placed me neither at the front or the back of the classroom. Kids in the front were mostly fourth generation descendants of English settlers, while at the back were the ever sniffling Maori who had no shoes and walked five miles to school across farmlands, one steaming cow pat to the next. And there I was, from age five, placed right in the middle, on the boundary between a white-is-right future and an uncivilised dark skinned past.

Weekends provided respite, often spent with my grandmother while dad mowed an acre of lawn on our tribal property back in Rotorua. She used taonga (ancestral treasures) to instil in me a deeper understanding of the proud history to which Maori belonged, decades before these stories found their way into mainstream classrooms. Taonga either at her museum or off the mantelpiece made history all the more real to me, especially when performed during death rituals on my ancestral marae (community villages) of Maketu and Ohinemutu.

Life in the 1960s-70s seemed so simple, so straightforward. You were either Maori (dark like dad) or English (lily white like mum). If you were Maori, society deemed you dirty, lazy and only good for fixing roads or driving buses. Whereas if you chose to be English, no matter your skin colour, you could participate in a national ideology of being “one people”, but only so long as you played by the rules. I did not play by the rules. My very left wing Irish grandmother filled my head with a whole different way of seeing the world. For her, colonial New Zealand was extremely unjust and Maori had been royally screwed by the English. She kept the home fires alight, becoming the most feared” Maori” in our village. In 1915 her husband and twenty-five other kinsmen had fought for God and Empire on foreign soil, killing indigenous people of another land in the name of an English King, but for what? To return home as second rate citizens, shot to pieces, and dig ditches on lands now owned by wealthy farmers? No, her world was now here.

Given this background my gravitation toward anthropology and later specialisation in museum ethnography (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University) was always going to happen. I grew up as a member of a tribe famous for producing, protecting and prestating taonga across tens of generations, many of which are now found in museums throughout the world. My earliest formal memories were genealogically layered narratives (whakapapa) from elders who animated surrounding landscapes with great deeds of my ancestors. I was raised to be proud of my whakapapa. But when my grandmother died my world was tipped upside down. My parents shifted us away from perceived negative influences of tribalism to let the cities shape their children into more urbane citizens of modern integrated New Zealand. By the age of eighteen, I had dropped out of education and fled to Australia on a one-way ticket. Like so many other Maori, I wanted to be anywhere but here, anywhere but living in 1970s white conservative, backwater colonial New Zealand.

Over the next decade I found solace through professional sport and writing, providing me a useful vehicle by which to travel the world and experience a multitude of cultures as an outsider looking in. The more I engaged with others, the more I began to reflect on my own cultural self and childhood experiences of being Maori in a still racially divided nation. And then overnight England joined the EU (then known as EEC) and New Zealand was forced to radically reinvent itself to survive economically. Leveraging Maori identity became a horizon of new opportunity – a point of difference on which the government sought to market national uniqueness. Its flagship was an international touring exhibition of taonga, named Te Maori (1984-87), representing a new Aotearoa New Zealand: an island nation which dared to imagine a bicultural future built on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. In the wake of Te Maori was born the Museum of New Zealand Project better known today as Te Papa: two cultures, one nation.

Beneath today’s flagging bicultural ideology still exists the unaddressed premise of being Maori: kin-accountability to source marae communities. It represents tribally ordered rights and responsibilities according to ancestral context. But where does such a philosophy of knowledge fit in a bicultural nation based on urban Maori ethnic identity beyond the horizon of New Zealand’s 766 tribal marae? The Treaty promised protection of such communities, but it now stands for the delivery of globalised tribal (Iwi) organisations based on laws of exclusive ownership at the expense of kin-belonging and inclusion. It was the genesis of these fascinating bicultural tensions that drew me back to university and into anthropology.

While my academic training was initially underpinned by post structuralism with a healthy injection of ethnicity, it was when I stepped outside the western paradigm of grid-ordered Cartesian epistemology that my engagement with the “field at home” became real. Some might refer to my approach as reflexive ethnography, bordering on neo-traditionalism. But closer inspection of my writings might also reveal a reorientation of knowledge according to a genealogical accountability to source, beyond any currently practiced Indigenous Methodology. Lets call it being “pre-indigenous”: a counterpoint to current globalised Maori organisations or “iwification”… I remain my late grandmother’s work in progress, continuing to challenge the status quo as I explore cross-generational consciousness through museums and taonga.

My ongoing challenge is to find effective ways to communicate to the field what it really means to be the Other when described from the position of my Anthropological Self. Two decades on and boundaries of misunderstanding in wider New Zealand are growing even wider. Who is doing useful anthropology of our cultural crisis when needed most? Maori urban dysfunctionality and tribal depopulation dominate our headlines. I threw myself into this fray a decade ago and today it has evolved into Maori Maps, a digitally born cross-generational reconnection gateway…

So with last thoughts of elders, grandmother and mentors, Sir Hugh Kawharu and Greg Dening: here I am again, at the boundary of difference negotiating being me with the rest of the universe.

Like many writers who have to sustain themselves with a paying job – in my case, and probably yours too, an academic job – I spend a lot of my time fretting about not having enough time to write. Many of my friends in the profession are the same way. We have to teach, we complain, which requires time to prepare, deliver, and grade our lessons, while managing students and their many needs. We serve on committees, attend faculty meetings, and hold office hours. We devote countless hours to reviewing the work of our peers – others who seem to find the time to write, which we must review at the cost of our own writing time.

As a result, I think, many of us don’t feel like writers. I know I don’t. Not a real writer, anyway. A real writer, in my mind, is someone whose principal vocation is writing. I picture someone like Honoré de Balzac, writing through the wee hours of the morning, fueled by endless cups of coffee; Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 50 novels and countless other works of fiction and non-fiction; or Maya Angelou, who kept a small hotel room as a writing space, which she called “lonely, and…marvelous.”[1] These to me are real writers.

Meanwhile, I struggle along through my own daily routine, frustrated at not having enough time to write. I don’t feel like a real writer.

On further reflection, however, I am forced to reconsider this self-evaluation. If a writer, by definition, is someone who writes, then I – again, like many others in the academic profession – am a writer through and through. I write constantly, though I fail to appreciate what I do as real writing.

Curiously, much of my writing is joined to those very activities that appear to distract me from writing. Writing a lecture, for example, may not seem like writing – no one, after all, will ever read it. Plus, a lecture is typically written in outline form, on note cards, or even – shudder – as a PowerPoint slideshow. But an anthropology lecture delivered to a roomful of undergraduates is a particularly challenging form of writing. It has to convey facts and theories without oversimplifying while also engaging the mind and imagination of a drowsy, possibly hung-over adolescent. My technique for accomplishing this is humor: I try to write lectures that amuse and startle and even offend my students (McDonald’s hamburgers, Silly Putty, and penis sheaths all feature in my Day One lecture in Intro), to grab their attention and reel them in to the concepts. And yes, I use PowerPoint – it requires all my creativity as a writer to condense my message into brief and pithy takeaways that fit the 80-minute timeframe of the class session.

Peer reviewing also demands its own unique forms of writing. If done correctly, a review of a manuscript or grant proposal can contribute to both the advancement of anthropological knowledge and the career of a fellow academic. Done poorly, of course, reviewing can be destructive and devastating to those same things. Writing a peer review requires us to be critical without being nasty, to offer productive suggestions for how to improve a piece of work without being offended when our own work is not cited. Again, this calls on the writer to deploy all of her talents to advance the scholarship without eviscerating the scholar. Not easy work, but vitally important, and another form of writing that we don’t recognize as writing.

Even in my personal life, I am constantly writing. I have two sons, one a sophomore in college, the other a 16-year-old high school junior, neither of whom seems capable of verbal communication. But, remarkably, they are both quite willing to correspond with me via text. This is especially useful with Ben, who is away at college. We text several times a week – about his work, his friends, and our shared love of New England sports teams. Eli still lives at home, but only emerges from his cave for meals and disappears just as quickly afterward. But he, too, communicates by text. I may be downstairs and he upstairs, but we write back and forth to each other, sometimes about important topics (global climate change is very much on his mind). Though it typically occurs in short bursts and can be dictated rather than typed, texting is writing. Like the other forms of writing I’ve mentioned, texts can inspire, provoke, and deflate. They can forge relationships or destroy them with a word.

There are many other kinds of writing that form part of our daily lives as academics, anthropologists, and modern humans. With my graduate assistant and immigrant research collaborators, I recently wrote (and performed) a play (as shown in the above photo). I’ve written op-eds and letters to the editor. Many of us write like this. We tweet, we comment, and we blurb. We write fieldnotes and syllabi and blog entries and Writer’s Workshop contributions. We provide feedback on student papers and craft emails to colleagues and collaborators. Each of these is its own genre, with its own particular rules and styles. We have to master all of them.

While no one would equate a text message with an ethnographic text, recognizing both as real writing helps me feel better about things, as I go through my daily routine. Writers, they say, write; the best way to improve your writing is through a regular writing practice. Instead of feeling frustrated that I don’t have time to write, I now choose to regard all my work as writing, a daily practice alongside, or in advance of, writing other, deeper pieces. I still dream of writing a novel, and perhaps one day I will. But in the mean time I live the writing life, doing the work of a real writer, one text at a time.

[1] Currey, Mason. 2013. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. New York: Knopf. See also http://masoncurrey.com/.

Sometimes, to do fieldwork is to write. This was the way first fieldwork went for me, in the years in the early 1990s when I was working in Bhopal India, at the site of the “world’s worst industrial disaster,” resulting from a massive release of toxic chemicals over a sleeping city. The devastation was horrific, but debatable from the outset. Dead people and animals were strewn across the city, rows of the dead covered in white sheets paved hospital courtyards. The sounds of coughing and grief were overwhelming, and unforgettable.  Disaster was blatant and flagrant, yet it was still was a struggle to account for in words and politics.

It was years later I was told and read about the sounds and sights of Bhopal in the days just after December 3, 1984. Journalists, activists, academics, poets, and many who were tangles of all these helped with the accounting. Stories about the plight of gas victims were also, always, stories about cover-up and denial. Even the basics – the numbers of dead, the number exposed, the number injured – were (and remain) in dispute.   At the 30^th anniversary of the gas leak in 2014, activists were still mobilizing to revise the death record.

I was in Bhopal six years after the gas leak, when the legal case was before the Indian Supreme Court.  It was a politically fraught, discursively dense time. The Indian state was neoliberalizing, Hindu nationalism was on the rise, left activists were mobilized against an increasingly ominous state-multinational complex, working to connect an array of people’s movements, linking farmers, fisherpeople, tribals, and those working again big hydroelectric projects in the Himalayas and Narmada Valley. Early use of computers at and on behalf of the grassroots animated and increased the sheer volume of writerly output.

I spent my time writing legal documents, press releases and pamphlets for students and journalists on behalf of gas leak survivor organizations. I also helped a former plant worker, T.R. Chouhan, write his account of what went wrong in the factory; he wanted his story in English so to be widely read around the world.  Bhopal had already been extensively written about. The challenge was to figure out what more needed to be said, in what forms, and with what timing. Writing more required thinking about the discursive terrain we were operating within, and how different forms of argument, evidence, and symbolism was likely to work, or go awry. Writing was a way to really work with my research “subjects” (emically), and a way to work together to understand the political and discursive conditions within which we worked – collaboratively producing “etic” perspective.

But I have written about this before. Indeed, writing was both subject and challenge of Advocacy After Bhopal, and of the PhD dissertation that came before – a dissertation painfully shaped, chapter by chapter, around the different genres in which advocacy in Bhopal was carried out. I wanted to convey how form mattered, encoding how fiction works differently than the legal affidavit or field reporting in the style of human rights activists. The harshly memorable stories of Mahasweta Devi, which Spivak had taught me to read, were an important catalyst.

What more needs to be said and written now, about writing as fieldwork, and writing as/in disaster?

I think it can be said that writing is an especially important way to participate in and observe the conditions of our times, times I have written about as “late industrial,” characterized by by discursive density and risk, expertise of remarkably high order, oiliness, and slow as well as fast disaster. Neoliberalism and fundamentalism now saturate the discursive terrain rather than work in oppositional terms. Computation enables both surveillance and slick-to-the-point-of-oily PR while also providing fundamentally new ways of accounting for and connecting people and problems. Big data, informatics and new visualization capabilities both feed the monster of commercialism, and provide ways to see and address problems previously discounted or disavowed. The granularity of insight enabled by new modes of producing and working with data poses special challenges for ethnographers. We must learn to read the formative influences of data and informatics, and learn to use data and informatics in/as we have learned to use ethnographic writing – tactically, reaching across scale, working against dominant systems of representation, working Otherwise.

It is thus a time of writing against, and of writing futures underdetermined by the present.

We write against the elisions of public relations machinery that (still, decades later) tells us that toxic sludge is good for you, that industrial chemistry is essential2life, and that high levels of ground level ozone are good for business. And we know what we write against more acutely in the very crafting of sentences and claims, through which we understand how deeply commercialism and what I think of as “industrial logic” has saturated available concepts, terms, and the very way we think about and practice language.

The 1995 book Toxic Sludge is Good for You describes how the waste management industry sponsored a contest to come up with the name “biosolids,” then “went about moving the name into the dictionary and insuring that the dictionary definition of the name would not include the word sludge.” The name stuck. As PR Watch reported in 2013, the U.S. Composting Council (USCC) a sewage sludge industry trade association now sponsors “International Compost Awareness Week, calling for “gardeners to celebrate by joining the USCC’s Million Tomato Compost Campaign, which connects community gardens, compost producers, chefs and food banks to grow healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy communities.” The “aggressive perkiness” of industry’s PR face continues to be formative today; greenwashers set the stage for many ethnographic projects.

Writing forward without overdetermination is even harder, depending on mixes of forms, deeply experimental sensibilities and practices, and technical as well as rhetorical creativity – creativity that literally creates, putting different issues, scales, data, and types of analysis together in new ways. Creativity that puts people – across geography, discipline and social standing – in new formations, leveraging different kinds of code (social as well technical), literally re-ordering things.

Philosopher Dan Price’s work is exemplary. Author of Without a Woman to Read   and Touching Difficulty, Price is an amazing reader of reading, writing, and formations of the ethical.  He’s also helped write the maps at the center of the Houston Clean Air Network. Houston has long had difficulty with its air, but it has taken high-end technology to make it visible and accountable.  And the difficulties are far from over. The State of Texas is leading an effort today to discredit the science supporting stricter ozone standards that would again put Houston (as well as many other cities) out of compliance. Price is not simply pushing information about levels and health impacts of ozone out to the public, merely correcting an information deficit. His goal in mapping Houston, with plans to draw in new data sets in coming years, is to refresh and re-order the semiotic field, and the ways people relate to both knowledge and each other – rebooting possibilities for sense making. The ends are thus underdetermined and inconclusive with purpose. It is arche-writing, with political purchase.

This, I think, is what it will take to write out a world that isn’t overdetermined by what has come before. It will take new kinds of work and writing, and an expansive sense of what writing can be and do. Old oppositions – between the theoretical and the practical, the literary and calculative, the hermeneutic and definitive – must shift and reformulate.

As I write here, for example, my student Pedro de la Torre also writes, in keeping with the work of Hanford Challenge and other organizations working to shape cleanup and a long range stewardship of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the United States produced most of the plutonium used in its nuclear arsenal, including the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Today, Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the most contaminated nuclear facility in the United States, and the nation’s largest environmental cleanup effort. Like Bhopal, Hanford can and should be connected to an array of issues and movements – against nuclear weapons and power, for and against linkage between nuclear weapons and power, for recognition of the rights of indigenous nations, downwinders, downstreamers and exposed workers, and for what the U.S. Department of Energy calls Long Term Stewardship, and Legacy Management. Just imagine (or just imagine how hard it is to imagine) what needs to be written for this – for stewardship of forever toxic sites over the very longue durée– on the order of thousands (or tens of thousands or millions) of years. There is a large plume of Iodine-129 in Hanford’s groundwater, and I-129 will take millions of years to decay; its 1/2 life alone is 15.7 million years.

de la Torre has blogged for Hanford Challenge, helped develop materials for educational campaigns and given presentations about future land use maps and the challenge of visualizing Hanford, past, present and future. Like Bhopal, Hanford has been extensively photographed, mapped, filmed, drawn and painted, and written about. And much of the effort has been recognized as cultural work – aimed at changing the way people think about the problems at hand, at possibilities for collaborative action, and about how the future can and should be configured. Much of Hanford Challenge’s work, for example, fosters collaborations that strengthen capacity in various publics to understand and engage in the cleanup, raise questions, and help conceptualize long term stewardship. But there are enduring clashes of interest and interpretation. Together with one of Hanford’s unions, for example, Hanford Challenge recently announced a legal action against the Department of Energy that calls for DOE to finally deal with workers’ exposures to toxic chemical vapors from Hanford’s aging high-level nuclear waste tanks — after decades of reports, discussion, and disavowals. Hanford Challenge is thus writing against, while writing forward; de la Torre maps the dynamics by helping write the maps.

Many of Hanford’s injuries aren’t blatant and flagrant; the violences are slow and insidious, and make non-sense in usual terms. de la Torre, as an ethnographic fieldworker, will need to write in many ways to make sense of this, in process mapping and helping refigure discursive terrain. Such is what is called for by the many slow disasters of our times. Ethnographers need to be in the mix, not only writing about but also alongside, building code, big data, and play with visualization into ethnographic practice, as a way to better understand, write against and write past the formative conditions of our times.

September 14—Kim Fortun, “To Fieldwork, To Write”

September 21—Daniel Goldstein, “Real Writing”

September 28—Sasha Su-Ling Welland, “List as Form: Literary, Ethnographic, Long, Short, Heavy, Light”

October 12—Paul Tapsell, “The Anthropology of Being (Me)”

October 19—Carole McGranahan, “Anthropology as Theoretical Storytelling”

October 26—Carla Jones, “A Case for Agitation: On Affect and Writing”

November 2—Katerina Teaiwa, “Unscholarly Confessions on Reading”

November 9—Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, “Ethnographic Poetry and the Leaping Bilingual Mind”

November 16—Ieva Jusionyte, “Writing in and from the Field”

November 23—Gastón Gordillo, “The Ruination of Written Words”

November 30—Bhrigupati Singh, “Writing with Love and Hate”

December 7—Barak Kalir, “Writing as Cognition”

December 14—Stuart McLean, “Frogtopia Revisited, or Anthropology is Art is Frog”

December 23–Sara Gonzalez, “Writing with Community”

The Savage Minds Writers’ Workshop series launched in January 2014. We’ve had three successful seasons with thirty-two contributors writing across topics, genres, subdisciplines, and concerns of all sorts. All of these essays are available here for reading (or re-reading as the case may be):

Spring 2014—Gina Athena Ulysse, Kirin Narayan, Sienna Craig, Bianca Williams, Kristen Ghodsee, Zoë Crossland, Robin Bernstein, Michael Ralph, Matt Sponheimer, and myself

Fall 2014—Paul Stoller, Noel B. Salazar, Marnie Thomson, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Mary Murrell, Roxanne Varzi, Adia Benton, Ghassan Hage, Siva Venkateswar, Catherine Besteman, and Kevin Carrico

Spring 2015—Ruth Behar, Chelsi West, Anne Claus, Alan Kaiser, Anand Pandian, Jane Eva Baxter, Michael Lambek, Sarah Besky, Yarimar Bonilla, Donna Goldstein, and Jess Falcone

We already know that all anthropologists write. This series is designed to get beyond the instrumental aspects of writing, and to think of the craft of writing, to think of anthropologists as writers regardless of the genre in which they write. We are in good company in this effort, and yet there is more work to be done, more questions to be asked about prose and style, about non-formulaic writing for journals, about writing in different languages, about finding the time to write, and more.

Second only to the tip to have a consistent writing practice and to write every day, is the suggestion to find community in one’s writing. Many academics, and probably most cultural anthropologists, have solitary writing practices. We write alone and yet we need feedback, encouragement, and conversation about our writing. Some are lucky to have regular in-person writing groups with whom they can share their writings, and others find such community online. If you are looking for online community, here are some to try: Shut Up and Write Tuesdays: A virtual writing workshop for academic folks, #GetYourManuscriptOut on Twitter, Alan Klima’s Academic Muse website, and for the entire month of November: AcWriMo or Academic Writing Month.

If what you want and need doesn’t exist, create it. Find the kindred spirits who inspire you, or perhaps those not-so-kindred ones who generate a different kind of writing energy for you. Either way, may the essays in this series be a good resource for thinking your writing anew.

Welcome all, and thank you in advance to our authors.

One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits is a game show parody called “What’s the Best Way?” The premise is simple: a group of New Englanders jockey to give fast, accurate driving directions. Phil Hartman plays an old man with an airy Downeast Maine drawl; Adam Sandler an electrical contractor from Boston; and Glenn Close an upper-class Connecticut resident. The host, played by Kevin Nealon, asks questions about how to get from one place to another within New England. For example “Who’s got directions from Quincy, Maass to the Jahdan Mahsh department store in Bedford, New Hampshire?” Contestants buzz in, quiz show style, with their directions—directions which are loaded with quirky geographical references, including a “wicked huge Radio Shack” and a fahm that offers a chance to pick fresh Maine blueberries (“but only in the summah”).

I love this skit because it satirizes my own predilection as a native New Englander for giving overly detailed directions that orient the asker to the contours of the road, the colors and shapes of houses, and places that “yous-tah be there” (instead of supposedly conventional things like the number of traffic lights or street names).

But I also find this rather esoteric parody instructive for thinking about how to write place ethnographically. For many anthropologists, navigating fieldsites that are out-of-the way or otherwise marginalized, Phil Hartman’s character’s resigned answer to one directional challenge might ring a little true: Yah caahn’t get theyah from heeyah. Beyond writing about place, how can we use our writing to recall visual, material memories of getting from one place to another (or failing to do so)?

Doing fieldwork involves moving through and experiencing space in ways particular to our projects and the places we work. In my research on Darjeeling tea plantations, I climbed up and down steep Himalayan foothills, pulling myself through the tightly planted, gnarled tea bushes that gripped the slopes. But a trip down to the plantations each morning first required a consideration of the eating schedules of the families of macaque monkeys, who would descend from the temple, where they spent their evenings, to the road below to munch on offerings left by morning walkers and whatever else they could mug off of passersby. If I could not find an old Tibetan woman on her circumambulation of the temple complex to cling to for protection as we weaved through the gauntlet of hungry monkeys, I made elaborate detours. When I write, I recall these everyday movements. As ethnographic writers, these remembered images and descriptions from our fieldnotes are “data,” as important as material from interviews or other punctuated events.

Why should we care about how (or whether) one can “get there from here”? Perhaps because, as Kirin Narayan reminds us, “Reading transports us.” She frames the project of writing place with a question: “How do ethnographers enhance this journey so that readers glean facts about a place and something of the feel of being there?”

The “arrival trope” is, of course, the most common of ethnographic devices. I have one. You probably do, too. But the arrival trope has been rightly criticized for fetishizing the state of finally being somewhere (else), ready to begin anthropological fieldwork. We probably all recall Malinowski’s directive to “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.”

This impulse to recount arrivals speaks to the fact that ethnographic narratives are at heart concerned with movement—from place to place.

The primary means by which I move from place to place, both in the field and closer to home, is walking. When I work in Kolkata, the act of winding my way through pedestrian congestion, in and out of markets, and through that city’s metro, is a constant sensorial overload. When I write about Kolkata or Darjeeling, I use the local equivalents of the “wicked huge Radio Shack” to draw readers into these movements—and importantly the sensations of these movements. As Alex Nading has argued, “trailing” the movements of people and other creatures can be a way of carrying place seamlessly from fieldwork into narrative.

When I write about place, then, I close my eyes and re-imagine walking. This is less visualization exercise and more constructive daydreaming. What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do I get there from here? How many Dunkin Donuts (or their Himalayan or Kolkatan analogues) do I pass on the way? I find that on my first couple of drafts, these descriptions are way overwritten, but with more editing, place starts to tighten, and even serve to bolster historical and theoretical elements of books and articles as well.

When I read an ethnography, I want to know where I am in the world. When I write, I want to communicate not just stories about people, but also stories about landscapes.

Most anthropological monographs begin with a fieldsite chapter as the first substantive section after the introduction. (I would add that many proposals and articles allow for a fieldsite/background section after the introduction as well.) Sometimes these chapters can be a total slog to write (and read). Perhaps we tell ourselves that we need to get a lot of historical and contextual material across so that the (more fun to write) subsequent ethnographic material makes sense.

We should bring our creative ethnographic writing skills to these chapters, but we should also work to pepper the remainder of our narratives with more place descriptions. Such descriptions can serve as a medium to convey forward what might otherwise be an episodic tale. Amitav Ghosh beautifully accomplishes this kind of conveyance, both in his intimate fluvial story about life, work, and uncertainty in the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide, and in his epic account of Mandalay, Calcutta, and the spaces in between, The Glass Palace. An unfolding landscape—of plants, animals, infrastructures, and histories of change and perturbation—can be as much a “character” in an ethnographic narrative as a human interlocutor, as encapsulated in ethnographies by Laura Ogden, Hugh Raffles, and Paige West.

While I was writing my dissertation, Kirin Narayan, who was my dissertation advisor, reminded me on multiple occasions that “all quotations need context.” We all know that quotations don’t just happen, yet they often seem to magically appear in the narratives we craft. We need to ask ourselves: Where was I? What was going on during this conversation? Was I plucking tea? Was I making tea? Was I drinking tea? Was I holding a baby while someone else performed similar labors? Or were we walking?

Without a grounding in place, narratives don’t flow. They caahn’t get theyah from heeyah. Voices appear out of nowhere. Ethnographic narratives, then, are like New Englanders giving directions. Where to turn? Certainly, “two lefts and a right” will get you there, but what about that kid on the corner selling fireworks? At the place you can get a good peach cobbler—but not on Sundays, lest you be overrun by the after-church crowd? This kind of context-building—the folksy chatter that can seem so superfluous to the weighty, critical questions we’re asking—provides an excellent opportunity for giving stories a physical medium in which to live.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been suffering from the condition we affectionately know as “writer’s block.” This has not been a generic or widespread condition as much of my writing is progressing as swiftly and smoothly as my job structure allows. This particular writer’s block has been confined to the writing associated with several years of archaeological work I conducted on the island of San Salvador in The Bahamas. The reason for this particular condition is easy to identify: my project co-director simply decided to stop writing.

My co-director and I began planning our research in 2002, and from 2004-2012 we conducted archaeological and historical work investigating transitions in the daily life of the island’s residents. During this time, we co-authored conference papers, site reports, proceedings volume papers, and articles for the Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society. We often co-authored work with our students. We developed curricular materials for the local school, co-authored a popular guide to the historic sites on the island for residents, tourists, and student groups, and created archaeology posters for a small, local museum.

And then, my project co-director stopped writing. At first, this decision to stop writing manifested itself as a waning interest in what had become a rather routinized and comfortable process of co-authorship. Writing plans were disregarded. Deadlines were missed without renegotiation. Discussions about writing ceased. Eventually, he announced he no longer had an interest in publishing scholarly articles, and told me to just go ahead and write everything up on my own. For many, being freed from the bonds of co-authorship might seem liberating, but to me it has been rather paralyzing. It also has given me cause to reflect on the production of archaeological knowledge, and left me to wonder exactly what it means to write without him.

A few quick, general thoughts about fieldwork and writing

Archaeological research is always a collaborative endeavor. Regardless of the size of the project, an archaeologist never goes into the field alone. Collaboration in archaeology is not a choice or a particular research stance; it is a necessary requirement to get the work done. The relationship between a field project comprised of many individuals, and the writing process, generally undertaken by at most a few, is a complicated one.

A multiplicity of ideas and voices exist in the field as different project participants have their own engagements with the archaeological record. This diversity of experience moves through a variety of social (gendered, status-based) and organizational (personnel hierarchies) mechanisms and generally becomes distilled into a singular narrative (the book, the site report, the article) authored by the project director(s) (e.g., Berggen and Hodder 2003, Gero 1996, Roveland 2006). Alternative ideas, different perspectives, and contrasting opinions that existed during fieldwork are rarely part of a final narrative (but see some publications of the Colorado Coalfield War Project written as the “Ludlow Collective” where the contents of the writing are attributed to the entire project team). The archaeological voice is almost always a singular one, even when the research comes from the collective efforts of many.

Some specific reflections on losing my co-director and writing

Losing my co-director as a writing partner made me acutely aware of this particular dynamic in archaeological work, and of a certain kind of responsibility that exists in archaeological writing. How is one person writing alone supposed to become the voice for over a decade of collaborative thinking?

On the positive side, I realized my own writing crisis stems from a healthy, open working dynamic cultivated over so many years. It was this positive dynamic of sharing and negotiating knowledge freely that has made it so difficult for me disentangle my voice from my co-director’s. I have repeatedly revisited the countless hours deliberately spent in thought together around issues of project design, logistical planning, student evaluation, and archaeological interpretation. Through these interactions we jointly had made every critical decision about how our field project was to be run, and how we wanted to approach every aspect of our analysis, teaching, and writing.

More poignant in my reflections were recollections of the casual conversations that peppered our days both in and out of the field. Many of these interactions were fleeting: a few minutes of banter in the truck to or from the site, a moment on an airplane, a scribbled note at a conference, or a quick IM during the course of a workday. Other interactions were much more involved- like the times a “non-work” dinner became hijacked completely by wonderings about one analysis or another, or the evenings when lab work went on hours longer than necessary because ideas were flying back and forth. I don’t remember the specific outcomes of any of these interactions, but I am certain that these were the moments when my ideas and my voice became inextricably entwined with his. I also have become acutely aware of similar interactions I had over the years with project staff and my students, and the many ways their thoughts and voices have become a part of my own.

At the end of the day, it has become my responsibility as the last project director standing to “write it all up” and disseminate the work of this collaborative project as widely and appropriately as possible. Writing in archaeology is always about taking responsibility for the different voices in our narratives. Historical Archaeologists have long characterized their work as bringing lost or forgotten voices from the past into contemporary dialogs. Archaeologists are increasingly attentive to the diverse voices of community members who are stakeholders in the places where archaeological work takes place, and who often play collaborative roles in archaeological projects. I think, as a generalization, archaeologists are less aware of the voices of those participating in projects as day-to-day co-workers, or maybe we just aren’t as sure what to do about them all. It has taken the departure of a co-director for me to recognize the challenges and responsibilities of writing archaeology “alone” and I’m thinking about new ways to write about archaeological fieldwork in the future. For now, these articles need to be written. These stories need to be told. And, while my name may be the only one on the marquee, I know I won’t be alone on stage.

Acknowledgements

A quick thank you to my colleagues Rachel Scott and Morag Kersel who helped me with these ideas over a nice cup of tea.

References

Berggen, Asa and Ian Hodder. 2003. Social Practice Methods and Some Problems for Field Archaeology. American Antiquity 68(3): 421-434

Gero, Joan. 1996. Archaeological Practice and Gendered Encounters with Field Data. In R. Wright (ed.). Gender in Archaeology. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. pp. 251-280.

Roveland, Blythe. 2006. Reflecting upon Archaeological Practice: Multiple Visions of a Late Paleolithic Site in Germany. In M. Edgeworth (ed.). Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations. Alta Mira Press, Landham, MD. pp. 56-67.

One day last summer, a caterpillar dropped from the rim of my desktop monitor. A peculiar little creature—no more than an inch long, clothed in a jacket of wispy white, a jaunty pair of lashes suspended well behind a tiny black head.

The visitation was unexpected. It’s not as though I work in a natural wonderland. The walls of this office are made of painted cinderblock. The window is fixed firmly in place, completely sealed from the outside. Peculiar odors sometimes drift from the vent above my desk, possibly from the labs upstairs.

The caterpillar seemed unhappy with the windowsill, where I placed it for a closer look. So I scooped up the errant traveler and stepped outside the building, wondering, for a moment, whether there was anything more palatable in the turfgrass. Then I went back to writing, back to whatever I could forage for my monitor that day.

We tend to think of writing as a lonely task. “The life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation,” Annie Dillard writes. “Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

There is, no doubt, a limpid truth to so much of her prose. But this, though, how could it be? Whether Dillard’s Venetian blinds slatted against the vista of a graveled rooftop, or some other more porous and inviting space, writing always happens in a sensible world of sounds and textures, an atmosphere of tangible things and diaphanous beings.

How does it matter, this company we keep?

Anthropology is a field science, staked on the value of having been there, somewhere, in the pulsing midst of something. Later, there is the hope of a work that nurtures the same feeling in the mind of a reader, that sense of really having been there too. Do we know enough about what happens between these two moments of palpable and often quite arresting experience? Does the act of description involve turning away from the world, as Tim Ingold worries, or, instead, turning more attentively toward an unseen face of its reality? What might the circumstances of our writing, in other words, share with the environments we write about?

Writing, like walking, can be a way of passing through the thick of things, as Writing Culture’s famous photograph of Steven Tyler might remind us. We write on the fly onto countless surfaces of the world at hand: notepads, napkins, scraps and screens of many kinds. This sentence, for example—this one right here—came together as I was staring through a sheet of laminated glass, taking in a railway landscape of scraggly limbs, murky water, vinyl siding, and the occasional flock of specks in a winter sky. It came together with the tap of thumbs onto the glassy face of an iPhone, as my thoughts and sentences often seem to do these days. As such screens, frames, and windows proliferate—where, for example, do you see these words?—so does the sense of a yawning gulf between ourselves and the actual world.

“Traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel,” Walter Benjamin once wrote. These words were an elegy for an artisanal unity of life and craft, shattered by our technological modernity. Benjamin’s melancholy notwithstanding, what anthropologist can afford to forsake the integral promise of such craft? How else to make sense of that peculiar collusion between fieldwork and writing, their conspiracy to transmit together the force of an experience?

Possession, dream, hypnosis, trance—writing is often likened to such altered states of perception because what happens here is a matter of channeling. Passages are literally passages, openings to a world beyond this one and yet present already within its span. Scattered sheaves of image and paper, the routines of the head and hand, tides of association and digression set into motion by whatever we see and hear, imagine and recall—writing takes shape through the expansive play of such relays.

Over the last few years, I’ve been writing a book on the making of cinema in India. I’ve tried to stay true, in the writing, to the sensory depth and richness of the medium, and certain wierd things have happened as a result. I sat in an opthalmologist’s lobby with my laptop and a film, trying to convey the pure sensation of its colors through dilated and unfocused eyes. I’ve tested the patience of my colleagues next door, looping a song hundreds of times over to put something of its rhythm into words. I wrote beside a plate glass window in Los Angeles, eyes darting between the careening of a car chase sequence and the glint of passing automobiles outside. That chapter, on speed, took form rather quickly, as a staccato series of 86 terse cuts.

How well these techniques have worked, I can’t say. But these small ventures in the experience of writing share their spirit with the process of creation I’ve been writing about. Whether a cameraman reacting to the aesthetic potential of light and shadow, a choreographer discerning possible moves in a current of sound, an editor wrestling with his body’s reaction to a discomfiting scene, or a team of screenwriters slipping into a dreamlike space of unruly associations, what I saw, again and again, were diverse ways of acknowledging the creative force of the world at hand. Their openness toward a broader ecology of creative emergence crept into what I do. I’ve come to believe that something like this happens in our own environments of thinking and writing.

There is a world that writes itself through what we do. Writing is an activity that partakes of the expressive movement of life, borrowing its form and force from the circumstances that make it possible. We write with a multitude of beings, things, and relations, with the complex sensations and unforeseen ideas they put into motion. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, “we finish a sentence because we have begun it.”

That creature, by the way, took me to Caterpillars of Eastern North America. Perhaps a Spotted Apetelodes. I haven’t seen another one since.