We are living in affective times. At least according to the many journal themes, conference panel titles and other measures of anthropology’s current interests, affect is in the air. This feels relevant for thinking about writing. Feeling seems central to the reasons we write, even if we rarely say that out loud. Feeling in the mood to write, feeling ready to say something, feeling safe to say it, feeling passionately about it, feeling proud of it once we’ve said it, these all undergird the conditions for writing. These feelings contrast with the objectivity of a social science based in data and facts, and we have a now decades-long critique in the discipline about the fundamentally political and subjective nature of knowledge production. But these are also largely positive feelings.

I want to suggest that one of the motivations to write is also irritation. This may seem contrary and cranky. I don’t mean for it to. For me it is empowering. I increasingly find that the nudge that takes me from mental idea to written word is much more than a deadline. It is a feeling that might be impolite. I find I am most in the mood to write when I am agitated.

My research is about gender, style and politics in contemporary Indonesia. These may seem superficial, but in the US Indonesia is far too little known a place, and my predominantly Muslim friends and informants in Indonesia are far too pious to be recognizable to most Americans. The zeitgeists in which my friends in both places currently live frame them as radically other to each other. While they would disagree with each other on many things, I also know they would recognize fundamental familiarities. Most of my friends, in both places, are disappointed with their current political choices. They question their place in an imbalanced class system. They worry about getting ahead. They worry about looking good. They are stressed. They are bored. They worry about their parents, their partners, and their kids. In short, they have lots of feelings and those feelings are often very similar. They often turn to similar sociality to soothe these worries, like cooking, celebrating holidays with family or going shopping.

Affect theory has emphasized that affect is about public feelings, not just personal emotions. Yet it is precisely the public feelings that frame these personal feelings as mutually unintelligible. Public representations of Islam in the US position it as singular and sinister. Indeed, in these depictions Islam is threatening in large part because its adherents are imagined to be incapable of keeping their religious beliefs to themselves. Representations of the US are similarly alien in Indonesia, frequently depicting a place where atheists have great wealth, few kin and empty lives.

If ethnography is the antidote to misrepresentation, then stories about similar families, worries and pastimes can say something humane in a sea of fear mongering. But we also know that anthropology has also relied on categories of difference for its role in translation. Our own stories shape how we see that humanity. I am often asked a simple question: Why did I choose to study Indonesia? Indonesians, Americans, students, family members ask this innocent, reasonable question. It isn’t easy to answer. As I suspect is true for most anthropologists, the answer is a mix of choice and luck. I was lucky to be born to parents who raised me in Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore). While I probably would have become an anthropologist, I likely would not have focused on the countries in which I was raised because they were too familiar. As a college student in California, I had little interest in studying the places I already knew. I wanted to study a place that was just unfamiliar enough to still be a bit exotic. My university had an excellent program in Indonesian studies, so that is the place I chose. If I had gone to a different college, I might have chosen another place. Selecting Indonesia was both choice and luck.

Sharing a background story of that sort is vulnerable because it appears to threaten the emotional foundation anthropologists are supposed to have with their research communities. We are supposed to fall in love with a place, a people, and have sentimental explanations for our choices. Yet in spite of my own journey, I only feel more connected to my Indonesian friends’ feelings in the intervening decades. Here or there, when a friend gets married, has a child, gets divorced, loses a parent, these all cause me joy or pain. If I am truly lucky, I am able to be present for some of these events. Small things connect me, too, like being able to wander through a market arm in arm with a dear friend, bargaining and chatting with vendors. Gossiping about cousins and colleagues while sitting in interminable traffic.

These small delights could be enough. The little joys of feeling close to people who, like me, are sorting out life as it comes to them, making sense of the contours as they emerge. But they aren’t enough. It should be sufficient to simply want to relate those recognizable insecurities we all share, but that is rarely enough. Instead, I find that the nothing sends me to the keyboard faster than reading regrettably common and acceptable descriptions of Muslims in general and Indonesians in particular as provincial and anachronistic. No writing block can endure the irritation born of my reaction to radical difference. Being offended and agitated truly is empowering. And if writing is any way a small solution to continued circulation of conventional wisdoms that reproduce exclusions, then maybe getting cranky is good because it produces more writing. I would really like to live in a world where writing about the small things was enough. I would like to find myself in a world where I wasn’t provoked, but until that day comes, here’s to turning to the keyboard. Here’s to feeling.

Anthropologists are storytellers. We tell stories: other’s stories, our own stories, stories about other’s stories. But when I think about anthropology and storytelling, I think also of something else, of anthropology as theoretical storytelling.

What is anthropology as theoretical storytelling? Several things. A discipline engaged in explaining, understanding, and interpreting cultural worlds as well as in developing theoretical paradigms large and small for making and making sense of cultural worlds. This is not something new to anthropology. Looking across generations of anthropological scholarship, theoretical storytelling appears repeatedly. From Zora Neale Hurston’s tales and lies to Muchona the Hornet to the Balinese cockfight to Rashīd and Mabrūka and Fayga in Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments and on and on. Stories stay with us. People stay with us. Esperanza. Adamu Jenitongo. Uma Adang. Gloria. Miss Tiny. Charles and Morley and Nick Thompson. Angela Sidney. Valck. Mr. Otis. Bernadette and Eugenia. Tashi Dhondup. And so many more. Anthropology as theoretical storytelling may be a method of narration by both ethnographer and subject, a means of organizing writing, a way of arguing certain ethnographic points, and an ethnographically-grounded way of approaching theory. This is not then a singular approach or description, but a term that captures a range of anthropological sensibilities and strategies.

As with many before me, in the field I found myself to be a recipient of stories. Yet not all was narrative. Some moments in the field were more staccato or fragmented, confusing or obscure; some were just talk about this or that, about the minutiae of everyday life or about nothing at all (and those are deeply cultural moments indeed). But many days included storytelling, official and not, and almost always told over shared food and drink. Some of these I asked to hear in the context of my research, and others people told me for other reasons known and unknown. Turning these stories into a written ethnography or a spoken one in the classroom involves analytical and narrative labor. This process is about both ideas and story.

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It was a dark and stormy night. People were gathered in Lhasa’s Twentieth Park (nyi shu’i gling ga) to celebrate ‘dzam gling spyi bsangs, the Universal Smoke Offering Day. Throughout the day, people picnicked and gambled in tents set up throughout the park. The weather was bad but the atmosphere was festive; people eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves; it was a party after all. Beer maids roamed from tent to tent singing, flirting, and refilling chang (beer) bowls. Much of Lhasa’s high society was there. The flaps of their tents were down, perhaps as much as to prevent prying eyes as to provide shelter from the weather. Inside one tent, dimly lit by oil lamps and candles, a group of important men played mahjong and drank chang. As they played, a thunder and lightning storm developed. Outside the tent, two men huddled, nervously preparing for their own festival activities. Then, as one or another of the men inside the tent contemplated his next play, there was a ferocious roar of thunder, followed by a flash of lightning. The lightning illuminated the tent, and through chang-glazed eyes, the men inside saw that one of their mates had fallen over. Outside the tent, the two other men were already gone, swiftly making their escape through the back alleys of Lhasa. The man who had fallen was dead, murdered with just one shot fired precisely at the time of the thunder, so as not to be heard and thus giving the assassins enough time to make their get away. This was 1921 and the murdered man was Pangda Nyigyal, the head of the newly powerful Pangdatsang family, an eastern Tibetan (Khampa) trader settled in Lhasa and a favorite of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.

It was a dark and stormy night.

For real. This is not an entry in the annual Edward Bulwer-Lytton “dark and stormy night” sentence contest, but the way numerous people told this story to me. Dramatically. Voices lowered. Voice and tone matching what a dark and stormy night feels like. Narrators who’ve never heard of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but who instead narrated the story as it was told to them. Narrators who reproduced oral framings as much as cultural and political ones. Anthropologists who then re-tell in English these stories originally told in Tibetan.

When I sat down to write my dissertation and faced the question of where to start, my advisor Ann Laura Stoler gave me a piece of advice I now share with my graduate students: start with a story you know must be in there, one that can’t be left out. What stories can’t be left out? As I wrote those stories and beyond, and as I continued to write and teach, the place of storytelling as theoretical strategy in anthropology became clearer to me. We tell stories to make theoretical arguments. We use narrative to convey both story and theory. Renato Rosaldo makes these points beautifully in Culture and Truth: narrative is key to social analysis.[1] As Kirin Narayan writes of this book and of what she learned in Rosaldo’s “Stories and Culture” graduate seminar, “stories are inherently analytic, and … in the sequence of reasoning, analysis has narrative form.”[2] Years of reading good, well-written ethnographies in which the argument is built in part through narrative structure demonstrates these points. And yet, narrative drives much of our theoretical work in underappreciated ways.

Anthropologists specialize in thick description. When Clifford Geertz, for example, suggests that it’s turtles all the way down, this is commentary on the simultaneously bounded and limitless aspects of ethnographic interpretation. To say our descriptions are thick is to say they are concerned with meaning and not only description. We don’t just work to describe turtles, but to get at why turtles matter, why it’s turtles rather than elephants, and why the fact that it’s turtles all the way down does not close down our interpretations, but rather provides a foundation for them. Describing turtles, including why turtles are culturally meaningful, is a key component of theoretical storytelling. Description itself may be a non-narrative form of prose, but thick description is narrative. It involves characters, a plot, a storyline, a form, a goal. In thinking about the place of interpretation within anthropology today, it has in some ways been folded almost seamlessly into ethnography. Interpretation is now unmarked, assumed, expected, and is often narrative in form. This has become so true that experimental ethnography is now that which is non-narrative; the pendulum has swung back in the other direction. As a vehicle for theoretical argument, narrative provides both form and content. As Hayden White might say, theoretical storytelling is content and it is form; it is both.

Storytelling’s theoretical powers are not neutral. They are important conceptually and cognitively, and always need to be situated in specific contexts—historical, ideological, political, cultural. And, as Hayden White does say, “narrative is an expression in discourse of a distinct mode of experiencing and thinking about the world, its structures, and its processes.”[3] In that sentence, one could replace narrative with ethnography in order to see how contemporary ethnographic writing in anthropology relies on storytelling. When we write and when we teach, we do not just share information, but we tell stories to bring material, data, beliefs, theories to life. Walter Benjamin differentiates between information and stories by claiming: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”[4]

In this current moment, our Zora-inspired “spy glasses of Anthropology” are focused on stories more than on information. In temporally shifting away from a focus on the ethnographic present, we have also shifted away from information in this Benjaminian sense. Instead, what we are in search of and what comes to us are stories. Stories that do not expend themselves, but which take new shape in our retelling of them.

Our telling of stories told to us is itself a theoretical exercise. Narrative helps us “translate knowing into telling,” that is, narrative provides us with a means for “fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culturally specific.”[5] Death, for example, is generally human. All humans eventually die. All societies have some sort of funerary rites. And yet not all people encounter tragic deaths. Not all deaths come as thunder roars.

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The dramatic story of the murder of Pangda Nyigyal is still told today by Tibetans in exile. Eyes wide, voices lowered, narrators almost one hundred years distant from the event drape their narration in suspense and conspiracy enabled first, by the fact that the murder was never solved, and second, by the controversial place of the Pangdatsang family in modern Tibetan society and history. Who shot Pangda Nyigyal? We don’t know. Or do we? Some people know. Some names are whispered into ears of anthropologists. Some names are kept secret, tucked away for other times, and other stories. Kirin Narayan writes that “Storytelling, after all, does nothing except shuffle words, and yet through the words’ arrangement, new worlds are built and filled with an imaginative wealth.”[6] The worlds built through stories create truths, they do not just hold or represent them. Stories give frameworks to hopes, to morals, to politics, to ethnographies. And yet.

Anthropology as theoretical storytelling needs to dwell more in the connection between the documentative and the generative. Michael Taussig claims that “Anthropology is blind to how much its practice relies on the art of telling other people’s stories—badly. What happens is that those stories are elaborated as scientific observations gleaned not from storytellers but from “informants.””[7] What is defective is how we miss the power of stories and storytellers even as we tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our points. We miss that the stories are the point. They are the getting, and they are the there. Julie Cruikshank and many others have demonstrated poignantly how people live storied lives. Anthropology is a storied discipline. This is one of our truths.

[1] Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Beacon Press, 1989.

[2] Kirin Narayan, Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov, University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 8.

[3] Hayden White, “Storytelling: Historical and Ideological,” in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, edited by Robert Newman, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 59.

[4] Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1968[1955]), p. 90.

[5] Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7(1), 1980, p. 5.

[6] Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teachings, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

[7] Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 62.

In a recent contribution to this writers’ series, Michael Lambek offered some reflections on the virtues of “slow reading.” In an era of rapid-fire online communication, when images increasingly substitute for text, Lambek argues we would be well served to revel in the quiet interiority and reflective subjectivity made possible by long-form reading.

In this post I would like to think more carefully about this claim and to consider whether we might want to make a similar argument regarding the shifting pace of academic writing. If, as Lambek and others suggest, the temporality of reading has been altered by the digital age, can the same be said for research and writing? How have new digital tools, platforms, and shifts in technological access transformed the temporality of ethnographic writing, and is this something we necessarily wish to slow down?

I recently had occasion to experiment with sped-up academic pacing when offered the opportunity to contribute a piece to American Ethnologist about the protests surrounding the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In brainstorming our article, my co-author Jonathan Rosa and I asked ourselves hard questions about what we could contribute to the unfolding discussion about Ferguson. Both of us had produced academic “slow writing”— the product of years of careful research, analysis, drafting and editing. We had also engaged in some forms of “fast writing.” For example, I had published journalistic pieces on social movements in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. But these pieces focused on events not being covered in the mainstream media and for which informed journalism was necessary. The same could not be said of Ferguson. Despite an initial lag in journalistic coverage, by the time we were drafting our article, Ferguson had reached a point of media saturation, indeed it had become a challenge to keep apace with the numerous thought pieces and editorial columns emerging at a feverish pace during this time.

Image from the Ferguson newsletter

In plotting our article we thus asked ourselves: how can we contribute to this fast moving conversation while still producing a piece that might hold up over time? That is, how could we produce something fast but not ephemeral?

The result was an exercise in mid-tempo research and writing. It was not the product of long-sustained fieldwork, and was very much written “in the heat of the moment,” but it nonetheless tried to anticipate how anthropologists might look back on Ferguson over time—how they might use this event to teach and write about broader issues of racialization, longer histories of race-based violence, the racial politics of social media, and the shifting terrain of contemporary activism.

This process forced us to think about the challenges of being not just fast writers but fast ethnographers. How can we speak to fast moving stories while still retaining the contextualization, historical perspective, and attention to individual experiences characteristic of a fieldworker? Also, how can we engage with emerging digital platforms like Twitter with the comparative and ethnographic perspective characteristic of our discipline?

The latter requires us to take seriously the narrative genres and political possibilities afforded by new forms of digital communication without assuming that their speed robs them of their social complexity. For example, while some might see the prevalence of “memes” and the seeming dominance of image over text on the internet as an inherently negative development, as anthropologists we are well poised to recognize that shifts in communicative practices are neither inherently virtuous nor corrosive. Rather, they speak to, and are themselves generative of, a new set of social and political possibilities.

Photograph from the Ferguson newsletter

In the case of Ferguson, the fast-moving pace and ease-of-access afforded by Twitter helped activists and supporters bring heightened awareness to what would have otherwise been an under-reported story. Moreover, it allowed many individual users for whom slow writing is not a possibility or a desired practice, to engage in forms of creative expression and reflective activity that could challenge, contest, and contextualize mainstream print narratives in which they rarely see themselves adequately represented. The tweets, images, memes, and hashtags that circulated during this time (and which continue to circulate) should thus not be seen as cheap and fast substitutes for artisanally crafted modes of personal reflection. Instead, they need to be understood as complex texts, worthy of the same kind of close-reading and critical analysis scholars usually devote to long-form prose.

Ethnography in the digital age requires us to avoid conflating the fast with the ephemeral or the vacuous. The aggregative and cumulative dimensions of social media, as well as their far-reaching scope, force us to re-think what constitutes an enduring or transformative social action. Moreover, attention to these practices also requires us to think more carefully about how we, as academic writers, can contribute to fast moving conversations without giving short shrift to the historical and analytical contextualization that is often absent in quick moving public debate. These challenges require us to move quickly when we feel something is worth attending to while still rallying in those quick moments the kind of critical perspectives that can only be honed slowly, accumulatively, over time.

Instructors on the frontlines report that undergraduate grades are falling into a bimodal distribution rather than the comfortable old bell curve. The majority do poorly, it is said, because they do not know how to write. I suggest the source of the problem lies one step behind writing, in reading.

Writing presupposes reading. To write one has to know how to read and to write well one has to read well. Whether or not we write in order to be read, as Mary Murrell asked in her posting, at the minimum we are our own first readers. We read in order to own our writing, to confirm and assert it is ours, that it is what we want to say and the best way we know how to say it. Even before the copy edit and the proofing, we read what we write; reading is part of the very technique of writing. I am reading these lines as I write them.

The relation of this function of reading internal to the practice of writing has changed over time. Word processors enable us to revise with ease. We read and reread our work in progress, write and rewrite, cut and paste with abandon. Writing with a word processor has become a different skill than it was with a typewriter or a ballpoint pen. And before those inventions, the writer with ink and pen or brush had to know exactly what she wanted to say and how to say it before she put it to paper or parchment. Space too was limited—the end of a page imposing the same tyranny as the boxes with fixed character limits on recommendation forms.

As the allusion to calligraphy suggests, writing is an art. Anyone trying to write—a letter, novel, dissertation, poem, or ethnography—knows that it is a skill to be cultivated, and learned through the sheer doing. In part, this cultivation occurs by means of reading and it is thereby not fully deliberate or self-conscious. The fact of intertextuality, that texts connect and respond to one another in multiple ways, implies that writing is, to a degree, mimetic. It is mimetic not only explicitly of what we are trying to represent, but also tacitly of what we have read. Hence the reproduction of style and genre from text to text. Literary critics have had much to say on all this.

As for anthropology, we teach by having students read exemplary works. In the MA seminar called Critical Issues in Ethnography I have sometimes taught, I expose students to a wide range of ethnographic style. I do not reserve my admiration exclusively for the kind of first person writing that Ruth Behar advocates in her entry (which uncannily pre-empted my decision to approach writing through reading). Yet I like to start my course with a text that raises the writing stakes or challenges the conventions of genre, a book like Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place or W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. It is a striking fact to discover then that, just like Kincaid, Malinowski begins Argonauts in the second person. When I set out on a new writing project I try to cleanse my palate by reading a piece of really good fiction. (It may not have the desired effect, but there is always a horizon to aim for.)

I am afraid that reading is becoming a lost art or one limited to that privileged small percent at the top end of the bimodal distribution. Marilynne Robinson, surely one of the best American writers, whose novels range from the surreal (Housekeeping) to the simple sublime (Gilead), gave a book of her essays the pointed—and quite wonderful—title When I Was a Child I Read Books. How many of our students can now say that of themselves?

We all know what the issues are. First, the shift in the venues and means for imaginative experience, from private reading to electronic gaming and various forms of rapid fire and simultaneous on-line communication. Second, the shortening of texts. This is as true for so-called ‘high culture’ as it is in the popular sphere, as novels slim down from the hefty tomes of Dickens or Tolstoy. Ethnography too has shrunk. Evans-Pritchard’s supreme Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande is taught in abridged form. The original doesn’t sell because instructors don’t assign it; instructors don’t assign it because students won’t read it. Students won’t read it for “lack of time” and for want of sufficient attention span. There is a risk that the works that do sell pander to these students.

Third, there is the substitution of images for text and even of text received as image. “Good teaching” is now supposed to be produced through orchestrating sound and image bites, in which PowerPoint summaries can be captured on cellphones. What get lost are the slow reception, translation, and absorption of ideas over the course of a lecture, the disappearing classroom arts of listening and note-taking. In effect, what professors are now expected to provide for students are not lectures themselves, in all their depth, idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, and provocation, but the professors’ own notes—as if the instructors were the ones receiving instead of giving the lecture. Listening, reading and writing on the part of students are effectively short-circuited and the professors get high marks both on student evaluations and from the institution’s teaching and learning centre for their innovative use of technology. A further approach, cheerfully called “experiential learning” at Toronto, does afford some real benefits, but it too avoids silent reading and writing or a situation in which a student might actually be forced to be alone with his or her thoughts.

The subjectivity cultivated in silent reading or in letter writing and journal keeping is once again restricted to a small proportion of the population. Such reflective subjectivity was a significant component of the modern self or subject, the self that is displayed and reflects on itself in 19^th and 20th Century fiction, philosophy, and social theory, the self that is presupposed, exemplified, and enacted by most authors we value, even by those poststructuralists who claim to deny or subvert it. (Poststructuralists read too.)

Our profession and our own writing have been based (among other things) on the art of quiet reading (perhaps: the quiet art of reading), of reading to ourselves and for ourselves, and communing with ourselves by means of the text. The question is, what kind of writing can we expect when we no longer read this way?

We have not yet reached a fully post-literate society. Certainly, technology enables lively new genres of writing, shorter and less formal, like this blog itself, with the request for 800 to 1000 words that I am now over (I write, therefore I count). The art of reference letters flourishes—and is beautifully sent off in Julie Schumacher’s epistolary novel Dear Committee Members that should be on every (aging) academic’s bookshelf. A forward thinking editor at the University of Toronto Press, Anne Brackenberry is keen to commission graphic ethnography. And less is sometimes more. We read and admire Geertz and Sahlins more for their essays than their monographs and we should give as much attention to the crafting of articles as we do to books.[1]

As the number of texts increases it is only right that most of them should be shorter, enabling a more equal reception among a limited audience. But we need to resist the reduction of books and lectures to the compilation of information or the status of executive summaries. Just as the Slow Food movement promotes good eating (and irrespective of any elitism), we need to advocate Slow Reading. Good writing will follow, as surely as food lovers become cooks.

[1] For a lovely example, see Donna Young, “’The Empty Tomb’ as Metaphor,” published in the special section on Pilgrimage to the Holy Lands that she edited with Jackie Feldman in Religion and Society (Volume 5, Number 1, 2014, pp. 106-127).

First I ask myself: what do I want (or need) to write? This helps determine the best format for my research results. In some cases the format was predetermined for me – when I was a doctoral student I had to produce a dissertation of a certain minimum length. When I write for a journal, they enforce specific word counts. These days, I have a bit more freedom, but I still struggle to determine if I have a book length argument or if my research is best presented as a series of articles.

Before I write the first sentence, I try to visualize the contours of my project. I once typed up outlines, but now I imagine less formal ways to physically manifest a project. At the outset, I spend hours examining my research, beginning to define the distinct sections or chapters. I need a concrete guide that will help me tackle the writing tasks necessary to get from the first to the last word of the project.

This initial visualization of a project helps me find the right medium for the research. Do I have one or two key points to make? If so, can I substantiate them with a few well-chosen ethnographic examples or will these points require lengthy contextualization and multiple examples? Ethnographic articles must be succinct and therefore suit arguments that can be stated, contextualized, and substantiated within about 10,000 words. If I need more space, I either break up the argument into smaller arguments and write two or more articles, or consider expanding them into a book.

When I wrote my dissertation, I kept a large, three-ring binder that would eventually contain my final thesis. I created divider tabs for each of the imagined chapters, and inserted the relevant materials and fieldnotes into the binder where I thought they belonged. Sometimes, I included blank pages as stand-ins for unwritten sections. As I reorganized my writing, the physical process of moving pages from one section to another helped me think through the final contours of the thesis. I reproduced this method when transforming the dissertation into The Red Riviera.

When writing Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe, I was on sabbatical and had accepted a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. I had an empty office with bare bookshelves. I divided this blank shelf space into imaginary chapters, taping the name of each chapter under each space, and created piles of paper associated with each chapter, moving things from pile to pile as needed. When I sat down to write a particular chapter, I would pull down the pile of documents and have everything I needed beside me on my desk. “Piling” proved more efficient than “filing.”

I wrote the first full draft of The Left Side of History on a summer fellowship in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I wanted the book to have a greater number of shorter chapters so I wrote all of the chapter subjects on index cards and stuck them to the wall over my desk with sticky blue tack. I could move the pieces of the book around with ease. When I cut chapters, I removed their index cards, and rearranged the remaining cards on the wall. At the end of the day, I poured a glass of wine and meditated on the cards, wondering how best to assemble the chapters into a coherent whole.

The dividers in the three-ring binder, the chapter shelves, and the index cards all correlated with individual document files on my computer. For each imagined chapter, I create a new document file and keep these together in a folder. In the electronic folder, I can move the individual files around in different orders (by starting each document file name with a number, for instance) until I find the ideal flow for the narrative.

While I worked in Cambridge my colleague, the cultural anthropologist Doug Rogers, was finishing up his fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Doug arrived in Cambridge with his research and fieldwork already done, and used the software program Scrivener to produce the first draft of his new book manuscript. He said that the Microsoft Word interface was too familiar, and he found himself tempted to start self-editing when he used it to generate new prose.

According to Doug, Scrivener allows you to organize your writing into chapters and subsections within one file. All of this can be easily moved around and rearranged on a side menu without all of the scrolling up and down and cutting and pasting required in a long Microsoft Word document. Scrivener also has a window where you can see the footnotes linked to your text off to the side of your document. You can upload research materials, and attach them directly to the relevant chapter or subsection. Then you can work in a split screen mode where your text is open on top and the research article you need is open on the bottom.

Doug also transferred the organizational structure provided by Scrivener onto the walls of his office. He used Post-It memo notes to physically map out his chapters, surrounding himself with the outline of his book as he wrote it. If he ended up moving sections of text around in the manuscript, he could rearrange the Post-its on his walls to reflect the new ordering. When I walked into Doug’s office, it felt like I was walking into Doug’s book.

I am convinced that visualizing techniques like these provide enhanced mental clarity when dealing with a large body of research to be organized into a coherent narrative. They also give you an incentive to start writing.

For the Songhay people of Niger and Mali life is a series of paths that end and then fork off in two new directions. At these forks in the road the traveler must choose her or his direction, destination, and fate. My choices, many of which were shaped by forces beyond my control, miraculously led me to two mentors: the late Jean Rouch, French filmmaker extraordinaire, and the late Adamu Jenitongo, a profoundly wise sorcerer-philosopher among the Songhay people. Both of these men loved to tell stories, the life source of their science and their art. They never told me how to tell a story; rather, they asked me to sit with them, walk with them, and laugh with them. In this way, they said, I would find my own way in the world and my own way to tell stories. They both believed that the story, in whatever form it might take, is a powerful way to transmit complex knowledge from one generation to the next. Like Milan Kundera in his magisterial The Art of the Novel, they believed that the evocative force of narrative could capture truths far beyond the scope of any philosophical discourse.

And yet, like most anthropologists, I was trained to tell—not to show, to denote the social through analysis—not to evoke it through narrative. Following the path marked by my mentors, though, I have often tried to resist that disciplinary maxim. In most of my writing I’ve attempted to use narrative to connect with readers through what Jerome Bruner called the narrative construction of reality. There are many elements to Bruner’s approach. One central element—at least for me–is that narratives can underscore our human vulnerabilities. In my experience, they can bring to the surface deep fears about how we confront misfortune, illness and death. A second important element of narrative is that it evokes the human dimension of our inextricably intertwined professional and personal lives.

Here’s the rub. It is one thing to talk about the important elements of narrative and yet another to know how to express these important themes in our works. It is clear –at least for me—that writing anthropology or anything else is an activity that requires an open-minded and playful approach to exposition, an approach that has no rules or easy steps to follow. To find their way, writers, like filmmakers or apprentice sorcerers, need guidance from mentors as well as a measure of existential fortitude. It is not easy to pursue the truth of our stories, but a playful openness to possibility can sometimes show us the way.

When I’m writing or thinking about writing, which is much of the time, things pop into my consciousness that lead me in felicitous directions. When I sit down to write ethnography, memoir, fiction, or a blog, I move into a different space. When you write, strange things sometimes occur. In the summer of 2013 I read through files trying to find a topic to for a talk at a conference on Anthropology and the Paranormal. After several hours of fruitless perusal, a copy of a Le Monde interview, which I hadn’t looked at for seven years, fell to the floor. That inexplicable event created a perfect storm, or what Arthur Koestler called a library angel, that not only showed me the way to that presentation but also inspired a new book project. During a dog walk, a character from a work in progress “talks” to me, telling me that the tone of such and such a passage is wrong, or that a particular dialogue is off the mark. Staring at the computer screen a distant relative or a long lost friend “visits” reminding me of a turn of phrase that clears a path through the textual thicket.

If we are open-minded and playful, these elements sometimes materialize and can be woven into narratives that powerfully evoke complex social realities. When I sat with Adamu Jenitongo, he told stories to convey the most important lessons of his being-in-the-world. When I slowly read him the manuscript of what was to become my first book, In Sorcery’s Shadow, he told me I needed more stories in the text. I asked him if I should recount his story in more detail. He said that would be fine, but “if you want to tell my story, you have to tell your story as well.” His personal challenge has shaped all of my professional writing in which ethnographic narrative has been foregrounded, in which an attempt has been made to evoke the texture of inter-subjectivity, in which an effort has been made to describe sensuously the nature of place, space, and character. In this way, I have attempted to use narrative to evoke the themes of love and loss, fidelity and betrayal, and courage and fear—central elements of the human condition. Remembering Adamu Jenitongo’s example, narratives can sometimes transcend the here and now, which means that they can be fashioned into works that remain open to the world. For me, that is the scholar’s greatest challenge and most important obligation.