Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405189207 ISBN 13: 9781405189200

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Synopsis

In Anthropology off the Shelf, leading anthropologists reflect on the craft of writing and the passions that fuel their desire to write books.

• First of its kind volume in anthropology in which prominent anthropologists and 3 respected professionals outside the discipline follow the tradition of the “writers on writing” genre to reflect on all aspects of the writing process
• Contributors are high-profile in anthropology and many have a strong presence outside the field, in popular culture
• Unique in its format: short essays, revealing and straightforward in content and writing style

About this title

About the Author

Alisse Waterston is Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Author of Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence (1999), she is currently working on two intimate ethnographies: Out of the Shadows of History and Memory: Writing My Father's Life and Narrating Poland.

Maria D. Vesperi is Professor of Anthropology at New College of Florida and a trustee of the Poynter Institute. Author of City of Green Benches: Growing Old in a New Downtown (1986), she is currently completing a book on the relationship between ethnographic narrative and narrative journalism and developing a 150-year social history of a utopian community turned company town.

From the Back Cover

In Anthropology off the Shelf, leading anthropologists consider the craft of writing and the deeply-rooted passions that fuel their desire to write books. In eighteen original essays, the contributors reveal their inspirations and worries, their narrative strategies and imagined audiences, their habits and how they get people to read what they write. The authors reflect on the very personal decisions required to take a work of anthropology from its initial conception to its creation, and beyond that to its reception by actual readers.

This path-breaking anthology offers rich detail on how writers steer through difficult issues of racism, sexism, real and imagined critics, and ethical quandaries. In captivating first-person accounts, the reader gets sharp insight into the creative process and the challenges of bringing new ideas into the public conversation.

This path-breaking anthology offers rich detail on how writers steer through difficult issues of racism, sexism, real and imagined critics, and ethical quandaries. In captivating first-person accounts, the reader gets sharp insight into the creative process and the challenges of bringing new ideas into the public conversation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Anthropology off the Shelf

Anthropologists on WritingBy Alisse Waterston

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Alisse Waterston
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-8920-0

Chapter One

Introduction: The Writer in the Anthropologist

Maria D. Vesperi and Alisse Waterston

Off the shelf and into the hands of well-informed general readers. That's the where.

The who are increasing ranks of anthropologist-writers, folks whose words could burn right through the covers of the prestigious journals where they might consign them if their eyes weren't fixed on that where: the bookstore window, the policy library, the bedside table.

The what are texts these anthropologists-writers produce, mostly ethnographies but also history, critical analysis and works of creative non-fiction.

The why is the weight of this work, too imminent to contain, too heavy to be borne by those who would publish simply not to perish. These are stories that must be told, sometimes at the risk of personal rejection or professional failure. "We have taken upon our shoulders an enormous responsibility that is beyond any allegiance we might owe to the academy or any desire for tenure," writes Irma McClaurin in her contribution to this volume. "We hold in our words, real people's lives."

The when is right now, before the policy is made, the hope crushed, the genocide completed.

It's not that anthropologist-writers believe their work can change the world, although some admit freely to outsized assumptions about the potential impact of a book or article. It's just that they won't give up on the job of sharing anthropological knowledge in straightforward, powerful ways.

"I think it is enough to be able to document carefully and clearly what is happening," suggests Paul Farmer. "That is my idea of speaking truth to power with books."

Encouragement in that direction comes from Andrew Barnes, a journalism leader and Pulitzer Committee veteran. "Too much of our public discussion is superficial," he observes. "We need more ideas grounded in fieldwork and rigorous thought. It's worth your effort to take anthropology to the broadest possible audience."

Increasing numbers of anthropologists agree. But for many who would take it public, the how is the rub.

Ruth Behar opens her contribution to Anthropology off the Shelf with comments from an editor who sought to remove "cultural anthropology" from the blurb touting her newest book, An Island Called Home (2007). The editor explained that "since we're marketing the book as a trade book, we need to reach the general reader, and any reference to an academic discipline is a turn-off. They say it's toxic. They've done studies."

"They" say a lot of things but Behar resisted, as any discipline-based writer might. After all, many scholarly books are reviewed in the mainstream press, featured in bookstores, selected for prizes that signal to readers: "Pick this one! A must read!" Well-crafted books about language, ideology, history, politics, war, race, poverty, health, gender - and so much more - routinely find their way onto "must read" lists and win non-fiction awards, in part because their orienting premises and narrative structures are accessible to diverse audiences. Few anthropology books meet this criterion and even fewer enjoy such notice, even when they treat the same topics.

At the core of Anthropology off the Shelf is a critical analysis of whether the models anthropologists use for framing, illustrating and contextualizing information and ideas facilitate or hinder engagement with the well-informed general reader of non-fiction. The project began as a way to approach this problem by tracing specific books from their intellectual origins to publication and beyond. In a series of four panels presented between 1999 and 2005 at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings, some 20 writers and editors offered straight talk about the desire to reach intended readers and how this goal became wedded to the writing process - for better and for worse. They revisited difficult, sometimes painful choices about conceptualization, crafting and marketing. They discussed, in retrospect, which strategies were effective and which ones fell flat. They revealed specific decisions about theoretical framing, unit of analysis, contextualization and narrative structure in representing ethnographic material. Bravely, they probed further to expose the rich but rarely tapped lode where commitment, inspiration and motivation are pressed hard by racism, sexism, real and imagined critics, ethical quandaries and ingrained writing habits, productive or otherwise.

Sometimes the result is a diamond. From the start, "Anthropology off the Shelf" sessions drew large audiences brimming with questions. People were hungry for frank conversation about the passions that prompt a researcher to enter the public conversation through scholarly literature, and where acting on such passions might lead. Talk remained sharply focused on the process of writing: what anthropologists really do in their everyday writing lives and how they get folks to read what they write.

Our decision to follow in the tradition of the "writers on writing" genre promoted engagement across a broad range of research topics and anthropological allegiances. Despite the purported intellectual and praxis divide in anthropology, the opportunity to talk about writing itself revealed more overlap, more fluidity than the much-discussed boundaries between such camps seem to suggest. Participants could agree to disagree as they shared fresh insights about how theory, epistemology, methodology, ethics, politics and potential applications shape the structure and texture of a book.

It's no secret that conference-to-book projects can lack collective spark. Sometimes readers are left to wonder what unites a collection of essays beyond that ephemeral moment when their authors shared a skirted table under hotel ballroom lights. Surely, there was excitement in the room. The audience was engaged. So much seemed possible. Too bad it didn't survive the telling.

In the case of Anthropology off the Shelf, however, the four panels generated dialogue and reflection that continued to develop and mature. All but one of the contributors to this volume participated in the original four panels. And as they persisted in grappling with the issues - and equally important, persisted in living their lives as writers - many were moved to radically revise their essays. Some are altogether new. As a result, the collection reveals important new patterns in the ongoing, often frustrating, rarely celebrated process of taking books or articles from their initial conception to their fruition, and beyond to their reception by targeted readers.

Anthropologist-writers reveal a clear pattern when they discuss the power of imagining the audience for a particular work. In many cases, the Oz-like images of teachers who drove graduate school writing in certain directions gave way first to equally constraining fantasies of scowling colleagues at peer-reviewed journals. "Every time I sit down to write, I knock a host of academic critics off my shoulder who tell me I can't, shouldn't, wouldn't write what I believe in; that I must follow their guidelines for 'truth,' academic style," reports Carolyn Nordstrom.

"When I think of my own progression as a writer," reflects Ruth Behar, "I believe I have gone from trying to write for my teachers to trying now, in the most recent phase of my work, to write for my mother so I could write for the world."

There is general agreement that dialogue with institutional phantoms must be abandoned before an anthropologist-writer can hope to be understood beyond the academy. "The key, of course, is to present things in such a way that they can be heard and taken in," notes Catherine Kingfisher, "a goal anthropologists also pursue in the classroom when teaching about topics such as racism, colonialism and gender inequality."

"The norms and conventions of citation determine so much of how you tell your story, and these conventions become ingrained, to the point where the writer often thinks everyone can read that dialect," Andrew Barnes observes. "A lot of us can't, and won't."

Dialect is a polite word for jargon and the tortuous sentence structures required to support its weight. It's a bumpy read. Would-be social scientists become inured to the ill effects of this writing style through a slow but effective inoculation process that begins in college. They might protest at first, but by graduate school most are fully accommodated to this dense code and more or less eager to reproduce it. Colleagues and students for whom the going remains hard are left to stammer along as best they can. Some drift away from academia for this reason; they aren't motivated to sustain the code-switching required to hold forth in academic high jargon.

In contrast, general readers out grazing for knowledge are free to taste, reject, leave the "lardballs," as Karen Brodkin aptly names them, half-chewed. Through conversation or bad reviews, they warn others off their feed as well. Like any shoppers, folks who invest in books gauge the quality of the medium before they spoon up the message. If it's lardy, they leave it on the shelf. If it's tougher to open than a shrink-wrapped compact disc, well advised, they move on.

The title of Marie Cardinal's The Words to Say It is a haunting mantra, a compelling summary of the longing associated with novelists but experienced by anthropologist-writers as well. Anthropology off the Shelf reveals the persistent question behind this desire: the words to say what to whom? Who can be counted among the readership by those who would aim beyond the captive audience of tenure and promotion committees? How wide is the potential audience for an anthropologist's work?

"I think that progressive anthropologists can reach large popular audiences, as I hope to do with my New Haven book, with skillfully written, accessible, historical ethnographic narratives that eschew biting the public cultural hand that feeds them," writes Micaela di Leonardo, reflecting on a work-in-progress.

Lee Baker structures his historical writing to help students "think differently and critically," beyond the familiar dualities. "I always write for my undergraduate students, and I often have a specific class in mind when I begin to tackle a research project," he explains.

Karen Brodkin writes for "two different but connected audiences," undergraduate students and "a community of kindred political intellectuals, both activist and academic." Over the years her audiences have changed, but each has been clearly envisioned. Caring by the Hour (1988), for example, "used as jargon-free a style as I knew how." The book remains in circulation two decades later, Brodkin is pleased to note, and "my greatest joy has been the fact that, so I've been told, at least two unions engaged in hospital organizing in the South and on the East Coast have used it as an organizing manual and in organizer training."

Some frame particular writing projects by imagining direct, point-counterpoint engagement with readers. In her work for the editorial and op-ed pages of the St. Petersburg Times, Maria Vesperi learned that the efficacy of opinion writing springs from accurate, balanced data collection and clear delivery to closely targeted readers. Some editorials have a "readership of one" - the governor, say - while others, the ones that are toughest to write, speak to broad but vividly imagined communities.

Signithia Fordham employs the term "counternarrative" to describe her engagement with the public through popular media. "The determination to claim a space in American public discourse for a viewpoint that comes from my position as Black and female is an integral part of my quest for justice," she explains. "In an effort to practice writing as a form of social activism, I submit op-ed pieces for publication by well-known newspapers and magazines."

Similarly, "I wanted to talk back to those mothers of my daughter's classmates who believe it when the tabloid press, some popular politicians and social scientists depict other women as undeserving and disreputable," recalls Alisse Waterston in describing her imagined audience for Love, Sorrow and Rage. And, at the same time, "I wrote in dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor, my colleagues in anthropology, especially those with a critical, political-economy perspective and those interested in urban poverty issues in North America, including the US."

Academic writing comes with disciplinary qualifiers: there is anthropological literature, historical literature, area scholarship. Prompting that general reader to reach for one's book obliges the writer to move beyond academic caveats, to aim for "something we call literature," as Ruth Behar puts it. Behar titles her essay "Believing in Anthropology as Literature," and belief - faith in one's skills - is required if a book is to fly off the shelf and into a canvas tote on the shoulder of that well-informed general reader.

Among the contributors to this book are scholars who peruse Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture (1986) as a guide to form, in the same way they might pick up an edition of Strunk, White and Angell's The Elements of Style. They are not deterred from Clifford Geertz's call to craft in Works and Lives by his ironic caution that tradition trusts "plain texts" as credible ethnographic work, discounting attention to writing as odd, "suggestive even of sharp practice" (1988: 2). They aren't hampered by canons or schools or even disciplines, because the readers they seek don't respond well to the narrative conventions required.

Moving beyond the foundational qualifier "anthropology" is a difficult step, however, and not one the contributors to this volume seem eager to make. Instead, they demonstrate eagerness to work seriously with form in ways that enlarge anthropology's potential to provide accessible, in-depth information and analysis about things that are amiss in the world.

As a result, however, they must take risks with their writing, pushing the safety zone of disciplinary protocol in ways that are rarely welcomed by colleagues. There is perhaps no greater example than the career of Zora Neale Hurston, who shines posthumously as an enduring beacon for those who would risk mislabeling and misunderstanding to position themselves between the reflexive tasks of a scholarly life and progressive engagement with the world.

Discussing the privilege and inspiration of "Walking in Zora's Shoes," Irma McClaurin foregrounds how Hurston "linked ethnographic observations and anthropological analysis with literature" in powerful and compelling ways. McClaurin explains why it is "important to write in ways that move our communication beyond the scholarly constraints that have shaped most academic writing, and truly get at what Zora called 'de inside meanin' of words.'"

The late Octavia Butler created fictional worlds that reached deep for the inside meaning of real ones. Her work inspired anthropologists and also journalists such as Sharon Ball, the former cultural desk editor at National Public Radio. Ball confided to Butler herself a special dream that "I, too, always intended to write. At that point, [Octavia] looked up and said, not unkindly, 'Well, you'd better get to it!' and she smiled right at me."

Butler understood the need, the sine qua non, for a writer to grasp that elusive how. "There was that voice, soft and strong, telling funny stories and offering straightforward advice about the key elements of a writing life: Research; Realism; Description; Details; Family stories; Serendipity; Persistence; Go on Learning; Walk the Ground You Want To Write About; Write Your Passion," Ball remembers gratefully. "As you see, I took notes."

"More and more, I dare to think I can call myself a writer, plain and simple," ventures Ruth Behar. "But I can't forget that I took up the pen for the same reason all anthropologists do: because we care passionately about the worlds that others inhabit and not just about our own small worlds." Of course, she notes, many fiction writers share the same concerns. Yet, "Our imaginations are in service to real communities we know firsthand and to real journeys we've taken across land and sea. And this isn't a bad thing at all, so long as we know how to spin a tale about all that we've witnessed."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Anthropology off the Shelfby Alisse Waterston Copyright © 2009 by Alisse Waterston. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405189207
• ISBN 13: 9781405189200
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232
• Editor: Waterston Alisse, Vesperi Maria D.