Lists can be tyrannical. They tell us what we are supposed to do and what we have failed to do. They purport to keep us on task. They lead us to derive pleasure from crossing things out. Done! Eliminated! Lists enlist us to worry about rank and order, to aspire to the top-ten, top-twenty, top-one-hundred. Lists compel us to click and consume. If you like that, you might also like this. Click through to learn about 13 Animals Who Are Way More Gangster Than You.

These characterizations and their assumption of shared experience speak to cultural patterns of a particular time and place. Lists reveal systems of thought and organization, as Foucault notes in the preface to The Order of Things, which opens with his reading of Borges quoting a “certain Chinese encyclopedia.” The specious tome’s categorical division of animals into an alphabetical series—…(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera…—strikes the French philosopher as hilariously distant. He writes, “In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”[1]

Lists, recorded by the ethnographer, related to the ethnographer, can serve as a form of cultural communication, with the order, logic, and habitus of one way of being weighed against another. Lists demonstrate shared sensibilities. Lists also divulge idiosyncrasies, of personal association, of deviation from the norm, of heterogeneous juxtaposition. They can distill a life in a few short lines. Here is an abbreviated list, one of many, I found amid my father’s jumbled papers after his death:

Read Fuster and write regarding hypotheses

Call Sasha

Clean tripod

Get milk

Thinking about lists as a form of ethnographic rumination—list as cultural artifact or writing prompt—led me to think about lists as literary form, about the relation between form and content, and about what formal restriction gives rise to. Vietnam vet Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” required reading for the generation of U.S. youth that followed his, rose to the top of my mental list. His evocation of the vulnerability, brutality, fear, loss, and longing humped through the fields of war by American GIs unfolds through list after list: of what they carried in common; of the distinctions between what they carried; of what they discarded; of what they dreaded; of what they dreamed; of what they joked their way into denying. Lists of standard-issue equipment are shot through with lists of individual particularity. After “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of waters” comes this: “Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet.”[2] O’Brien’s lists pile up and push against the silent rows of white tombstones and names carved in black stone. They communicate to those not there the burden carried by those who were.

I arrived at lists in my own writing through a prolific, long-distance correspondence I maintained during my dissertation fieldwork. I was an ethnographer living in the burgeoning megacity of Beijing; my correspondent was a creative non-fiction writer living in the small town of Matías Romero. Wendy Call and I first met in 1999 when we were tossed together as roommates at a writers’ conference. In 2000, when our email began bouncing between China and Mexico, we hadn’t seen each other since and had spoken by phone only once. When a call from the wonderfully eclectic, genre-bending, now sadly defunct journal Chain came our way, we began crafting our messages into a submission for issue 9 devoted to “dialogue.” In what became “Living Elsewhere in 16 Steps,” we experimented with the alphabetical series as a means of organization and dialogic juxtaposition. We started with A. Address and ended with P. P.P.S., with entries along the way like H. History Museum and I. Indigenous Means. Of our method, we wrote, “As ‘non-fiction’ writers, we find ourselves thinking a lot about what constitutes ‘truth,’ how to honor the voices of the people with whom we speak, and also about the uncanny, contradictory, parallel, and paradoxical elements of our experiences on opposite sides of the world.”[3]

Little of that writing experiment made its into my dissertation, but during the slow process of revising it into a book, I snuck in a line form A. Address. Slightly altered to account for the passage of time, it now reads:

I made lists, like this one, of what I passed in the daily transit from my apartment to the nearest subway station, of what was there but would likely be displaced, in the wake of demolition, in months or years to come: husband and wife shops selling yogurt, melon seeds, liquor, cigarettes, shampoo, and toilet paper; three competing salons with hairdressers who had repeatedly dyed their hair, waiting behind plate glass for customers and watching TV; the pigeon cage, noisy with flapping wings, on the roof of an enthusiast’s apartment; a government family planning clinic; the south entrance to the hospital where victims of the falun gong self-immolation in Tiananmen Square were treated a week before their fanaticism showed up on the fruit seller’s television set; a couple of dimly lit stores selling bed-side toilets, canes, neck braces, and prosthetic limbs resting motionless under glass; at least four stalls, open night and day, selling funeral clothing and paper money to burn for an afterlife of prosperity; several fresh fruit and flower stands; a Muslim restaurant blaring Uyghur music with barbecue mutton for one yuan a stick sold out of the kitchen window; three street-side bicycle repairmen with basins of water for finding the leak in a tire; a mishmash of clothing shops crowded with students in baggy pants, leg warmers, and disco t-shirts, trinkets dangling from their cell phones; the gaunt old man staring blankly at them while clipping his fingernails; a string of CD/VCD/DVD stores, with overflowing cardboard boxes of jumbled cellophane-wrapped pirated goods; a hot pot restaurant with showy tanks of doomed fish breathing heavily; a 24-hour Taiwanese-style noodle, dumpling, and soy milk cafeteria; two Adam and Eve branch sex shops (nos. 5 and 8), with sales people in white lab coats and advertisements of blond, big breasted blow-up dolls in the window; a store selling light bulbs of all hues and wattage; a trophy store; a roasted chestnut stand; the mandatory dumpling stall; a few old moon-gate entrances to residential alleys; and the homeless woman dragging along the uneven pavement in Cultural Revolution braids and green soldier’s uniform.

Fifteen years later, this excessive sentence conjures the sensory, emotional, experiential time and place of my fieldwork, and the sense of my daily path through a city undergoing massive physical and social transformation as one among more than twelve million.

I wouldn’t know it until I came “home,” but as cranes and construction sites riddled the city of Beijing, cancer tumors did the same to my sister’s body. As I wrote or didn’t write through the years that she was living and dying, I learned from her another list-like form of correspondence, a shared practice of counting, meditation, and making do. Kara had discovered haiku. Its three-line form required only short moments of focus, and the puzzle-like 5-7-5 syllable count was perfect for a boggle-scrabble-sudoku master like my sister. While taking a medication with the side effect of sleeplessness, she sometimes stayed up all night writing haiku after haiku. In the morning, I would find dozens of new poems—tiny blasts of wisdom, anger, insight, and love—in my inbox. I struggled to keep up, sending back mine in exchange for hers. We traded litanies of pharmaceutical peril, televised escape, childhood joy, and brightly colored games of skill and chance.

drugs yuck I hate them

sutent, temodar, keppra

dexamethasone

but wait there are more

kytril, zofran, marinol

and VP-16

no more morphine no

hate the nightmare dreams it brings

no percocet either

oprah oh oprah

ellen ricki dr. phil

regis and kelly

so who wants to be

our next top reality

star search survivor

you’re my monk my house

my crime scene cold case closer

and law and order

spring days carefree sun

shortcuts through neighbors’ yards long

for our kid days past

etch-a-sketch lite-brite

chutes and ladders candyland

monopoly life

These simple, ordered lines helped us communicate what had become almost unspeakable. They cut to the quick, the living and dying heart of things. They provided respite along the way toward an uncertain end.

As much as lists rule my life, as they accumulate on my computer, on sticky notes, on crumpled, pocketed slips of paper, I have also learned to listen to lists, to find meaning, poetry, and reprieve in them. They have a rhythm of their own that can sometimes only be heard when read aloud. On a night not long ago, as I read E. B. White’s Stuart Little to my six-year-old and we neared the end of the anthropomorphic mouse’s journey from city to country in search of his missing friend Margalo the bird, I savored the sound of this sentence as it unexpectedly wrapped us in a verdant world of wonder: “In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”[4]

[1] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xv.

[2] Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 4-5.

[3] Wendy Call and Sasha Su-Ling Welland, “Living Elsewhere in 16 Steps,” Chain 9 (2002), 69.

[4] E. B. White, Stuart Little: Special Read-Aloud Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 100.

One year ago, we launched the Writers’ Workshop series here on Savage Minds to provide a new space for reflecting on writing. We’ve now had two successful seasons with twenty-one anthropologists contributing:

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

This spring we have a new group of contributors who will be sharing their writing each week, eleven anthropologists writing about craft, process, voice, publishing, wherever the muse takes them. We also have the pleasure of following two fantastic guest bloggers on Savage Minds—Irma McClaurin’s posts on Zora Neale Hurston, one of the original (if not the original) ethnographic writing geniuses, and Kristen Ghodsee’s posts on ethnographic writing. Thank you to everyone who is participating and reading this time around. Without further ado, this season’s contributors are:

February 2—Ruth Behar, “Read More, Write Less”

February 9—Chelsi West, “Finding My Muse While Mourning”

February 16—Annie Claus, “How a Professional Writer Improved My Academic Writing”

February 23—Alan Kaiser, “Why the Peer Review Process Works Even When It Doesn’t”

March 2—Anand Pandian, “The Ecology of What We Write”

March 9—Michael Lambek, “Slow Reading”

March 16—Jane Baxter, “Writing Archaeology “Alone,” or Eulogy for a Co-Director”

March 23—Sarah Besky, “Can’t Get There From Here? Writing Place and Moving Narratives”

March 30—Yarimar Bonilla, “Fast Writing: Ethnography in the Digital Age”

April 6—Donna Goldstein, “The Nuclear Option: For Anthropologists Who Have Considered Humor When the Drive to Modernity is Not Enough”

April 13—Jess Falcone, “Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction”

May your writing be fruitful, productive, satisfying, and good. May your writing be.

While I’m brainstorming ideas for this writers’ workshop series, my pre-school daughter is sitting next to me. Even though she can’t read or write yet, she’s fascinated by letters. As I type along on my laptop, she jots down her own invented script in a little notebook. It reminds me of my own journey of discovery of “the written word.” I had barely mastered the technicalities of handwriting when I started scribbling in personal diaries. As a teenager, I complemented these self-absorbed writings with more social formats as I exchanged snail mail letters with pen pals from across the globe. My first love relationships added poetry to the list and I became an avid journalist for my school’s newspaper (named “Boomerang,” hinting at the importance of reader reception). I continued some of that work at university, where I took a specialized course in journalism and experimented with a range of academic writing styles and formats. I also became a “critical writing fellow,” helping undergraduates to translate thoughts into words. When I moved abroad (which happened multiple times), I mailed weekly electronic “letters from [destination X]” to relatives and friends. I kept this tradition during my doctoral fieldwork, in addition to launching an ethnographic blog. So it’s no exaggeration to state that I like writing.

I became aware of the importance of writing for anthropologists from the moment I enrolled in an anthro program. Now that I teach, I realize that the majority of our course assessments are based on paper assignments. Even though we offer MA students the alternative to produce an ethnographic film (instead of the traditional thesis), we still require a supplementary explanatory document. Fieldwork remains an important hallmark of our training, but in the end we value most the latter part of the word “ethno-graphy”: writing. The less you have written, the less you realize how much time and energy goes into the process that leads to a product worth reading―be it a monograph, a peer-reviewed article, a research proposal, or something else. Unless you’re a prodigy, creating a quality text requires sustained effort (and patience). I involve my graduate students in reading and commenting upon the various drafts of my own manuscripts in order to give them a sense of the writing labor.

Let’s be honest, not everything written is worth publishing. It takes courage to abandon a writing project that, for some reason or the other, does not seem to pan out. Unfortunately, the increasing pressure in many academic cultures across the globe to publish more (or perish instead) has led to a noticeable decrease in quality of academic output. Anthropology is a notoriously “slow science” and does not really fit the dominant mold of “quick and dirty” scholarship. It takes time to prepare our research, collect our data, and analyze them properly. We should certainly not try to compromise by reducing the write-up time. In my experience, there’s something mysterious about the writing process. When or how it happens is impossible to predict, but the moment a new insight dawns and the various parts of the (often complicated) puzzle start coming together, the Aha-Erlebnis or Eureka effect, is kind of magical. This is what I’m trying to achieve in my own work, but is also what I’m looking for when reading other texts.

While there are many excellent resources available concerning how anthropologists should write, less attention is given to our intended audience(s). Apart from some exceptions (e.g. ,writing as therapy), we write expecting that someone will read us. For whom do we write and for whom should we be writing? This is not a trivial question because our answer partly determines our writing style. While internal dialogue and exchange are important for the discipline to grow intellectually, far too many precious anthropological insights are lost because the readership does not reach beyond the boundaries of academic anthropology. The blame does not necessarily lie with the author. There is something terribly wrong with academic publishing models that limit free access to scholarly writings, particularly when the underlying research is supported by public funding.

Apart from accessibility, there is the issue of readability. Is it not contradictory that academics in countries such as France have a long history as public intellectuals, participating actively in societal debates, but that most of their scholarly writings are so arcane? I am pleased to see an increased global presence of anthropologists in newspaper and magazine op-eds and postings on blogs and websites. This is relevant work and we should continue to do it because it broadens our readership. I see this as complementary to our other scholarly work, not as a replacement for it. Many of the most popular anthropologists are gifted writers. Grounded ethnographic fieldwork and experience lies at the basis of their narratives. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” However, to wit, captivating storytelling is only one part of the story. Good ethnographers are also capable of translating complex anthropological analyses into a language that is understood by broad audiences.

In sum, as anthropologists we have a whole array of tools at our disposal to upgrade our writing skills and to increase the impact of our work. With the constructive help of mentors and peers, we need to find our own way of mastering the art of writing. We should not get lost in the plethora of formats and fora available but focus on those types of writing that suit anthropology best and that matter. Only sustained practice (which includes occasional failure) can make us excel. This involves not only working on our own texts but also learning by reading what others have written. After all, a good anthropologist is not only an excellent writer but also a seasoned reader. So I look forward to reading your comments on my ideas. Meanwhile, I return back to my writing desk… and the fantasy world of my daughter.

The idea of having your own writing style is an illusion. In fact, we learn to write by digesting the writers we love. We obsess over the elegant turns of phrase they appear to deliver effortlessly, and pore over our own drafts hoping to wrench beauty from passages that have been pummeled by angst and uncertainty. If we manage to enjoy success in writing (or really, in editing), it is generally because we have been well trained. At some point, someone made it her mission to instill in us a sense of conviction about the words we wield. We learned to appreciate the magic of authorship. But, it is easier to trace the blessed path to writerly righteousness in retrospect. Learning to write (which means learning to think and plan more carefully) can be a curious kind of training, in part because we don’t always know when it is happening. In reflecting upon my own training, I decided to dedicate this column to the person who initiated me into the anthropological guild, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

In what is perhaps my most acute memory from the first year of my PhD program in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, I was walking up the stairs toward the Haskell Hall Mezzanine, as Andrew Apter and Michel-Rolph Trouillot were on their way down. “Hey,” Andy exclaimed, “Michael Ralph—Michel Rolph: you guys have the same name.” Rolph was not amused. I can’t even put his expression into words, but it was something like, “There is little, if anything, similar between this young man and myself, at this juncture.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Rolph was mean, just that he had a very particular idea about mastery. He expected his students to adopt rigor as a crucial element of their intellectual formation. Faculty routinely speak about treating their students as friends. Rolph instead believed that training implied a clear hierarchy and series of protocols through which a student would ultimately become an expert—and ideally, one day, a master. As early as my prospective students’ weekend, someone destined to be part of my cohort had asked if Chicago faculty treated their students as equals. Rolph fielded the question and flatly told the student, “If there was no difference between you and I, there would be no reason for me to be here.” Thus, while I feel indebted to Rolph for endowing me with the conceptual framework that animates my work, I have to confess that the process of acquiring knowledge and securing feedback was part of the challenge that training entailed. As Malcolm X once said of his mentor, “I feared him…like you fear the power of the sun.” But then, Rolph’s “Introduction to Social and Cultural Analysis” (aka “Systems”) syllabus began with the fifteenth century political theorist Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. And my initiation involved a lot more fear than love—or so I thought at the time.

Rolph treated the students he mentored like Knights of the Round Table. He expected us to swing swords that we initially were barely strong enough to lift as a way to cultivate our intellectual fortitude. He assigned so much reading and placed such a high demand on our writing, and insisted so much that we clarify our arguments, that his training forced us to spend countless hours devoted to the task of becoming a better scholar. In the process, we were not simply forever changed as thinkers and writers—Rolph’s method of initiation changed our physical constitutions. Rolph’s approach to knowledge was, in this sense, monastic. His grueling work regime left me feeling like a friar in the darkened basement of a medieval castle, poring over texts. But for all the rigor he promoted and embodied, he was also the most imaginative thinker I have ever come across. In that sense, being trained by Rolph was like going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that so many of the allusions that come to mind when thinking about Rolph’s intellectual legacy emerge from the medieval period. For, he instilled in us an appreciation for both the breadth and the continuity that defines historical inquiry. After all anthropology was, for Rolph, a historical enterprise. For some anthropologists, ethnography is the only method that matters. Rolph’s approach, instead, combined history, anthropology, and critical social theory. These distinctions are, in fact, often more misleading than they are beneficial. For Rolph, what an ethnographer does is quite similar to what a historian does: scholars in both fields make use of cultural artifacts (whether as discrete objects, built structures, or texts), they conduct interviews when possible, they develop arguments concerned with the way that people navigate and negotiate social transformation. The crucial difference between an ethnographer and a historian thus becomes the question of periodization: the historian might explore transformations over several centuries, a half-century…a decade, while ethnographers strives to make sense of the way that people understand the world around them in the course of a year, or a few years.  For this reason, the context of an inquiry is always crucial to tease out.

In this regard it is telling that when Rolph assigned work from someone like Immanuel Kant, he veered away from the Critique of Moral Judgment, focusing instead on his 1798 publication, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. I imagine Rolph was trying to teach us that, in addition to the specific disciplinary trajectory of a field that we call, “Anthropology,” there is a social theory tradition available to us that has likewise been concerned with the norms, protocols, and ritual procedures through which people authorize trade compacts, establish control of territories, arrive at some sense of what they find sacred, and learn to adjudicate social difference. For Rolph, this debate about the stakes of social belonging had a long arc.

In recalling the conversations we had in class and office hours—and my favorite passages from his many books, articles, and essays—I am reminded that Rolph routinely looked to the fifteenth, rather than the nineteenth, century for his understanding of what it meant to be modern. His critique of colonialism was not merely about the transformation from slavery into colonialism and the formal acquisition of territories, but about the way that Renaissance-era notions of difference had structured European (or, what he preferred to call, “North Atlantic”) perspectives of people and polities in what is now Africa, Asia, as well as the Caribbean and Latin America. In fact, in his critique of prevailing scholarship on the origins of capital, industry, and governance, Rolph insisted the Atlantic world was where modernity had been worked out and that African people, products, and technologies had been central, rather than auxiliary, to these developments. Like his mentor Sidney Mintz, he saw in the conjuncture of finance capital—as well as in labor regimes and land allotments fitted to actuarial projections of future profit, and the vexed process through which any given polity secured diplomatic standing amongst its peers and rivals—the making of a political and economic system that would shape global trade and diplomacy for centuries to come.

If Rolph was a Renaissance man, it is because he viewed knowledge as as much sacred as it was purportedly secular. It is also because he sought to cultivate insights from an intellectual tradition that stretched back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing Thomas More and Machiavelli into conversation with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, Baron de Montesquieu, and others, as a matter of course. This was not simply Rolph’s method, but his pedagogy.

On the flip side, Rolph was a Renaissance man in the classic sense. Rolph was a historian, anthropologist, novelist, and folklorist, among other things. And, even in his creative projects, we see many of the key insights and historical themes that would animate his scholarship. And, as writing is as much about re-thinking as re-deploying, I like to think that creativity is ultimately the most urgent mandate Rolph persuaded me to abide by.

Like fiction, archaeology allows us to visit other worlds and to come back home again. So, it can be a useful exercise to juxtapose archaeological texts with historical novels, poems and other forms of writing. Just as a novelist does, a writer of archaeology has to attend carefully to the conventions that shape the stories we tell. The written past demands some kind of narrative coherence, a consistency in our compositional form, and in the internal logic of the world we bring into being. Like poets, we have to choose our words carefully. In this comparison we can identify the shared techniques used to evoke other worlds and to draw in the reader. We can also consider the narrative possibilities that are excluded from our archaeological writing, and ask what opportunities might be opened up by allowing different forms of voice and language.

Going further than comparison, how might experimenting with different forms help us find new ways to conjure stories from the material traces of the past? There is an intimacy to archaeological excavation that is rarely captured in our narratives. The rasp of a trowel over granular soil; the vegetative odor of damp roots stripped green and white by a spade thrust; or the cold, polished feel of porcelain, smooth beneath the fingers. Much is gained in the translation from earth to text, but what is lost? How might we find narrative space to include some acknowledgement of affect and emotion, as well as the texture and grain of encounters with the stuff of the past?

We’ve been working through these questions in my Writing Archaeology class this semester, exploring how archaeological evidence evokes a particular response, and how novels and poems work to do the same thing. What enlivening techniques might we learn from fictional accounts, and how might they encourage us to think more critically about the role of the reader in bringing a text to life? It’s clear that the practice of archaeology is as much about writing as it is about fieldwork. The texts we compose are fundamental to translating artifacts and sediments into stories about the past, and yet we pay relatively little attention to the craft of writing, preferring to train students in techniques of excavation and field survey. This is not to say that archaeologists have not thought critically about writing. We began the class by reading some of the many experimental texts in archaeology. These include Rosemary Joyce and colleagues’ dynamic Languages of Archaeology, Janet Spector’s pioneering What this Awl Means and Carmel Schrire’s unflinching and evocative Digging Through Darkness. There are a surprising number of archaeological texts that play with form, positioning and language. Many of those who experiment with fiction also take an autobiographical approach, working to situate their experiments within the context of their own frustrations with the limits of conventional archaeological texts. Poetry is rare however. A beautiful new contribution, Stonework, has recently been published by Mark Edmonds working with the artist Rose Ferraby. Given the doubt that lies at the heart of archaeological endeavor – that moment when one must leap from the material signs that lie within our experience to the projected past that we read from and in them – how is archaeological writing approached? Do we attempt to hide or minimize this doubt, to embrace it, or to elaborate upon it? What is noticeable in many texts is the need for a framing device. Archaeologists rarely let a fictionalized or poetic piece stand on its own terms. In order to think about this more closely we’re also reading novelists who write about the past or material traces, such as Raymond Williams and Orhan Pamuk. We’re reading poets too. Seamus Heaney, of course, but also Peter Riley’s Excavations, and Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets.* Riley and Schwerner both play with the boundaries of fact and fiction in ways that are normally forbidden to us archaeologists.

The Writing Archaeology class is designed for students who are working on substantial writing projects – whether a senior thesis or a doctoral dissertation. It’s a small seminar, with ten participants this year. As part of the class the students undertake weekly writing assignments that work to better understand an author’s aims, his or her successes and failures. So, for example, in reading and discussing Janet Spector’s classic text What this Awl Means, I asked the students to write a similar narrative about their own research. Spector’s text has at its heart an imagined relationship between a bone awl and the adolescent girl who made and owned it. This was one of the first attempts to write an archaeological history as a story, as a biographical account centered on a named and historically documented person. I asked the students to write about their own projects in semi-fictionalized form, using a voice that was as close as possible to the one that Spector deployed.

This is an exercise designed to prompt students to think about language with precision. I asked them to consider the language choices that Spector made. For example, what verb tenses does she use, and how do they shift at different moments in the story? I also asked them to think about how Spector’s word choices affected their response to her story as readers. What kind of narrative mood is evoked by the text, and how is this accomplished? What kind of adjectives and verbs are used? Do they give the effect of a story quickly told, words piled up higgledy-piggledy, or does the narrative seem stretched out, slow and languorous? Or perhaps something else is achieved? Finally, what do they each bring to the text as readers – does the account resonate with other stories they’ve heard, and if so, how?

We workshop everyone’s writing in the second half of each class. I ask students to identify one thing they like or are proud of in the piece they’ve submitted, and one thing that didn’t quite work, or that they struggled with. We discuss our responses, make suggestions and note other points that we enjoyed, or that we think perhaps might need a bit more thought. What has been revelatory for me in this exercise, is the very different tone and topics of discussion that this approach elicits. By starting to take sentences apart, word by word, we’ve been finding out more about our own reading and writing practices. The writing exercise also gives students some insight into the terrain that the author was negotiating. Why did she make particular choices, and how might different styles of writing change how they read the text? To write a short piece that attempts to inhabit someone else’s authorial voice encourages close reading, attention to the exact words chosen and to the difficulties of experimental writing. What comes out of this class on writing is a more generous reading experience.

Let me offer some of the responses that the students gave me when I asked them about their thoughts on the class as I was writing this blog.

Michael suggests that the exercise works as “an excavatory tool” into the texts we read. In emulating a writer’s style, he points out that one has to figure out the boundaries between homage, pastiche and parody. As Courtney puts it, in writing such a response to the text you “have to sit with the author” and face the difficulties and challenges that the author faced. Valerie notes that it is an awkward process to force yourself “out of your narrative comfort zone” and into other voices. When imitating an author’s voice the students must make similar decisions about how to characterize the past people that they inhabit in the text. Courtney and the others noted how uncomfortably transgressive this can feel, enhancing their awareness of the ethical issues around representation and the control over narrative. This was felt especially strongly by those students working on the recent past, or who are telling a story about another nation or people’s histories and cultures. To acknowledge this is to recognize that these writing exercises are steps along a pathway. Not an end in themselves, they are meant to make visible the assumptions that we bring to our writing, as well as to open up new ways of thinking about our archaeological evidence, and to hopefully prompt insights that we might not otherwise have had. What’s important here is to create a safe workshop space to engage with each other’s work, and to acknowledge that failure is always possible, but that it is allowable and productive. To channel Seamus Heaney (with apologies):

Beneath my fingers and my thumbs

The keyboard waits.

I’ll dig with it.

Contributions by

Lindsey Bishop

Valerie Bondura

Charles Garceau

Emma Gilheany

Michael Merriam

Maud Reavill

Maura Schlagel

Dianne Scullin

Courtney Singleton

*With thanks to Severin Fowles for bringing Armand Schwerner’s poetry to my attention.

I am happy to share the syllabus with anyone who would like a copy. My email is: zc2149 [at] columbia [dot] edu

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”   Proverbs 4:23

Like many others, the blank page can terrify me. Simply starting a new blog post, an essay, or a book chapter can have me tumbling into hours, days, or shame-filled weeks of procrastination. These are the times that resistance and fear triumph, and I feel myself falling into a moody mixture of anger, frustration, sadness, and general feelings of incompetence. Oh, and sometimes there is crying. However, once I find successful methods for dragging the words that are in my head onto the page,[1] I then attempt to organize them in a way that makes sense, creates “new” knowledge, and contributes to multiple fields, ever aware that in some near future a committee will attempt to quantify my publication impact and decide whether they should grant me tenure. Surprisingly, for the past three weeks Writing and I have engaged in a truce—or I should say, she has decided to get off my back, give me some room to breathe, and allow the words that infiltrate my dreams and my meditation sessions to flow a bit easier onto the page. What is interesting is that this period of writing peace has resulted in a new issue: I keep getting my best writing ideas while I’m in the shower.

You may be thinking: “How is this a problem? At least writing ideas are coming to you!” Yes, I agree. This shouldn’t be a big issue, but have you ever tried to carefully record thoughts on your phone while you’re covered in soap, trying not to get your phone wet, slip in the tub, or get water all over the bathroom floor? After a few days of repeatedly performing this balancing act, I began to reflect on what the connections between the shower and my writing might possibly be. What I learned were important lessons about vulnerability, purpose, and faith, and how they influence my writing.

Vulnerability

It has become clear to me that the shower is one of the few places in my life where I feel I can exercise vulnerability safely. Most of the time I am the only person in the shower, and unlike the rest of my hectic day, this occasion permits me a brief period to enjoy my body and consider my own thoughts. There are no mirrors, peer reviewers, blank screens, or cameras (that I know of) to judge me or remind me of the surveillance I am consistently under. I am naked, remarkably carefree, while prepping myself for the outside world. In the shower I can try arguments on for size, deciding whether that particular wording or theoretical concept will work, feeling free from critique (particularly my own, which can be the most vicious when it comes to my writing). For someone who is sometimes accused of overanalyzing, it is one of the few times in my day when I can just be.[2] My heart is open. Standing under the rushing water from the showerhead calms me, as I wash off the condemnation, disappointment, and procrastination of yesterday to start anew. I press a reset button. I let go. And I talk to God.

Purpose

The way I see it, I was called to anthropology and to teaching because these are tools that allow me to learn truths about human experiences as people view them, experience them, and express them. This is anthropology’s purpose. As I participate in research and teaching, anthropological approaches help me to learn about others, while providing insight into myself. As a Black feminist cultural anthropologist, I constantly hear the call to engage in what my colleague Micah Gilmer describes as “heartwork”—a form of “real teaching” that demands honesty, direct communication, vulnerability, and emotional investment.[3] He argues that this labor is required to build communities and places that support those passionate about transforming the world. In Gilmer’s research, heartwork is embodied in Black male football coaches and teachers who lovingly invest in their student athletes despite their hearts being broken by the strain of this emotional labor; the lack of resources available to be successful in this work; and the various ways educational institutions do not value or recognize the impact their commitment makes in students’ lives or the community. Part of my difficulty with writing was that I did not feel comfortable being truly transparent about the connections between my heartwork and my writing. In fact, being honest and open about this connection can attract enormous pushback in academic circles, particularly in publication peer reviews or promotion committee meetings. And because of the still very active role racism plays within educational spaces, scholars of color may experience particular backlash against an explicit commitment to anti-racist heartwork. But as I grow more comfortable with myself, my purpose, and my writing voice, I realize that trying to keep these passionate works—heartwork and writing—separate, in order to be validated or accepted by those in the academy, is simply killing my soul.

Faith

The anthropological truth Sienna Craig wrote about in her post last week is a knowing that many times goes beyond words. As you share your hypotheses, your analyses, your participant observed ah-ha moments with interviewees, a confidant, a colleague, or a student, there are moments when the knowing is deep down in your soul. And sometimes it can feel as if words are not enough. You may have this shared moment of knowing, but the best you can do to acknowledge it is a look, an embrace, even a collective sigh. Even though it can feel limiting, in our writing we try our best to describe these soul-knowing truths; we attempt to describe, tell, teach, and explain. It takes vulnerability to attain this knowledge; and for me, it takes faith and Faith to write it.

From my perspective, writing is about purpose and faith. In my soul, I have a deep desire to show the full humanity of Black women to ourselves and the world. I recognize that our liberation is connected to the liberation of everyone; therefore it is important to me to show how Black women pursue joy, happiness, love, and intimacy during our beautifully fierce struggles for equity and freedom. This is my purpose. Engaging this mission and writing about it requires faith. Faith that God has given me the skills, tools, and abilities to write the truths that I learn. Faith that He will protect me and guide me along this journey. Faith in myself to begin and complete this work. Faith that I can be disciplined enough to focus and not get distracted by things that can lead me to unbelief in myself, my mission, or Him. Faith that there is space to be a Christian academic who speaks and writes about her Faith. Through my spiritual teachings,[4] I have been taught that everything we do requires belief—and one can choose to aim their believing energies in the direction of fear or faith. Furthermore, as the scripture above states, I understand that belief is not something you necessarily carry in your mind, but it is something you hold in your heart.

Words are powerful. The words we hear, transcribe, and create do things in the world and act on our hearts. It is possible that the difference in my writing over the past few weeks has been that my time in the shower—relaxing, thinking, praying, and just being—has helped me begin to truly believe that there is something in my writing worth telling. During these times, I have opened myself up to being vulnerable while decreasing the judgmental energy; reconnected with my purpose; and grown more faithful that I have the ability to successfully complete the writing required to do the heartwork.

The idea of a decision is a decision.

We build arguments around impermanence

But are not the sort of people to admit

To inconstancies.

—Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, from In the Absent Everyday

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of the “unreliable narrator” these days, and what it might mean for us ethnographers, careful raconteurs of others’ stories, intertwined as they are with our own. The idea of the unreliable narrator emerges in literature, theatre, and film as a tool of craft that plays with senses of credibility or believability, sometimes to trick the reader or the audience, other times to push the boundaries of a genre or challenge the cognitive strategies a reader might employ to make sense of the story she is being told. Although unreliable narrators may materialize through a third person frame, they are most commonly first person renderings. In the most facile sense, an unreliable narrator is biased, makes mistakes, lacks self-awareness, tells lies not of substance but of form. The device can also be used in a revelatory vein: to twist an expected ending, to demand that readers reconsider a point of view, to leave an audience wondering. Like our anthropological propensity to classify, literary theorists have done the same for the interlocutors of our imaginations. Types of unreliable narrators include the Madman, the Clown, and the Naif, to name a few. Others posit that the unreliable narrator as a device is best understood to fall along a spectrum of fallibility, beginning with the contours of trust and ending with specters of capriciousness (Olson 2003). This is the shape of a character as she defies the expectations of a reader, who then may well pass judgment on this scripted self.

In medicine, the figure of the unreliable narrator emerges – perhaps too often – as the patient: that suffering middle-aged woman whose pain seems to be located at once nowhere and everywhere; the veteran who describes his sense of displacement upon return from battle in ways that fail to align with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s latest definition of PTSD, but simply must be that. Equally possible though sometimes more difficult to capture is the physician as unreliable narrator: the resident, credentialed as culturally competent, who presumes an immigrant family is “clueless” as they take in the diagnosis of a rare genetic disorder as it presents in their toddler; the oncologist whose strives for optimism in the face of the latest clinical evidence, suggesting aggressive, experimental chemotherapy against the evidence that his patient is preparing for death. Each presents a distinct form of unreliability that has to do with the vulnerable spaces that arise in narrating suffering.

***

I have known Karchung (a pseudonym) for twenty years. Still, her quick wit arrests me. Over spiced tea and biscuits, we chat about the past and future of her high Himalayan home. In speaking of migrations and the transformation of local lives as many decamp to the global village that is New York, she remarks, “I remember visiting a cousin in Brooklyn about ten years ago. She was fresh from the village and couldn’t read in any language. In giving me directions to her apartment in Brooklyn, she told me to go in the direction of the tap je, the frying pan! She meant the ‘Q’ train.” We laugh, seeing a cast iron skillet emerge from the contours of a foreign alphabet, handle and all. I marvel at the brilliant absurdity of this human skill to not just read signs but to read into signs and, in the process, to make sense of an unfamiliar landscape. In other words, far from being an unreliable narrator, she is providing a reliable interpretation of an unreliable world.

My phone rings. The number signals Nepal. It is another friend who happens to be from the same village as Karchung and who I have also known for many years. He and his wife live comfortably between Kathmandu and his rural village. All five of their children now reside in the United States. He knows that Karchung and I are about to gather with other people originally from their Himalayan homeland, a place that is culturally and geographically contiguous with Tibet but home to Nepali citizens. Although he would not frame it as such, he has called me now, knowing that Karchung and I are together, to assert his own reliability as a narrator of social change in the face of Karchung’s assessments of cultural disorientation, emptying villages, plays of power and influence between Nepal and New York. “There is no place like our place in the whole world,” he says, passionate. This is the tail of a speech whose body is the need to support a local nunnery not just by renovating its structure, but also by supporting the nuns. Once we are off the phone, Karchung quips that he is disingenuous: “His own daughter was a nun, and he helped her escape those obligations to come to America.” True enough, I note. But does this space between lived reality and ideals undercut his reliability, his narrative and affective claims?

The following morning I gather with a group of Himalayan friends now living in New York, in part to share data from a recent stint of fieldwork in Nepal – an effort at my own reliable narration, this looping back. The conversation moves from feelings of identity confusion to claims to citizenship. Some people from this region essentially pretend to be Tibetan exiles, either those born in Nepal or born in Tibet, as a strategy for seeking political asylum in the US. Even though there is truth to their figurations of Tibetanness – they speak a Tibetan dialect, practice Tibetan Buddhism – and to forms of oppression this can produce in present-day Nepal, they sometimes risk becoming unreliable narrators as they spin stories of exile. This move can make them more believable in the eyes of state authorities familiar with this particular plot line of political suffering. But when a person finally claims a paragon of US citizenship – that blue passport – things come full circle. Where once there was a Nepali citizen with land to his name and a country to call home, the reliable unreliability of an exile story becomes indelibly marked on official papers. Place of birth: People’s Republic of China. In his efforts to claim a new land, America, he who once lived between this river and that mountain, who belonged to a village and to a nation-state, has become a new kind of refugee, narrating a history that has been split open and pieced together again. Yet we might also ask different questions about narrative unreliability here. Do a small number of falsified political asylum claims come to generate a larger collective truth through being told and retold? Do assertions that asylum applicants “lie” come to circulate freely as truth even when they might just as easily be gossip? Here, too, we find unreliable narrators of a different sort.

***

As the child of a contentious divorce, I came to see my parents as unreliable narrators. Perspectives that felt too fraught, too invested, troubled me. And yet, I was also asked to believe such perspectives as evidence of allegiance, if not expressions of love. Speaking of vulnerability, I think this childhood work has shaped how I have come to cultivate an anthropologist’s sense of truth as deeply felt, emotionally charged terrain that is as real as it is unreliable. Those visceral question of who to believe and what to rely on has framed many of the deeper senses of self that, when cloaked in my academic costume, fashions me as an ethnographer. Beyond the mantle of my profession, though, I acknowledge that residual ache of personal history – the desire to be a generous listener, to resist taking sides – which has coaxed me toward the use of dialogue, irony, and shifts between first, second, and third person as strategies for trustworthy storytelling. But does this make me an unreliable narrator more than the cultivation of critical distance might?

To be clear: being an unreliable narrator is not about being unbelievable. Nor is it about faith, or a loss of faith, in the most catholic (small c) sense of this term. Rather this notion of unreliability raises questions about what we can count on. Whether a reader or a patient, a key informant or a collaborator, a new immigrant or those at the other ends of place and kin – or even each of us as we perform the work of writing culture from one day to the next – we want to know we are supported. By “count on” I don’t just mean a predictable show of support but rather a more exposed investment in the possibility of someone’s truth, however shape-shifting that truth may be. Perhaps this is what Veena Das (2007) means when she talks about the work of acknowledgement against the pretense of understanding. What can we come back to? Where do we hold on?

References

Das, Veena, 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Olson, Greta. 2003. Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators. In: Narrative. 11: 93–109.

And she gave us this gem: “Decades ago, I realized that I am not a linear writer, but more of a quilt maker. I am content when I produce chunks. I have also learned to not berate myself if I can’t come up with anything. There are works by certain poets and art books near my desk (or in the moveable studio bag), which I need and reach for when words are not whirling out of my head as I face the screen.  As long as I am present in the space and in conversation with artists or even in silence, I now consider myself writing.” 

Thank you, Gina.

Everyone has a different writing process, a different style, a different voice. And we each might have different processes, styles, and voices across our own varied writing projects. Recognize these, come to know them, learn when to work with and when to push against where you are. This is Week 2 of 10, a good time to take stock of where you are as a writer in addition to taking stock of your writing for this week. Take some time to reflect on it now and then revisit the same questions again at the end of our ten weeks; work toward generating both writing and a fresh sense of your own writing strengths and limits..

For now, let’s all check-in in the comments section below with how our writing went in Week 2. I’m looking forward to hearing about your weeks, and be sure to tune in on Monday for the insights, the generosity, and the guidance of our next guest author, the fabulous cultural anthropologist and multi-genre author Kirin Narayan.