Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer

Across and Within Genres

Bibliographic Data

ID20049944
AuthorsH Wulff (0000-0002-8200-7980, corresponding author)
Year2022
Pages1-18
Publication date2022-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueThe anthropologist as writer (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1515/9781785330193-003
OpenAlexW2486403403
ISBN9781785330193
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited23

There you are: facing the computer screen.Your "fi eld," whatever that was, is some distance away, at least for now.You have worked through the materials you collected there, and think you have them in a promising order.Time for the next step: to write.You may not get away from the screen any time soon-not really get away.Then at some later point, you are there again in front of the screen, checking your emails.Has that publisher or editor you had in mind been in touch yet, responding to your proposal, or even to that entire manuscript you sent?If so, expect-at best-a period in front of the screen again, reviewing, rewriting, perhaps reorganizing.Anthropologists have mostly celebrated the fi eld experience in all its variety.Yet in fact, they are likely to spend as much time sitting in front of the computer screen.Once it has begun, writing is in one way a very solitary activity, but in another way, it is not: you may be in interaction with an imagined audience of colleagues, students, as well as people in your fi eld, perhaps general readers, and, increasingly, the representatives of academic audit culture.For some time now, anthropologists have understood that they are also writers, and have engaged in scrutinizing the implications of this fact.Clifford Geertz, in his infl uential book The Interpretation of Cul tures (1973: 19), famously asked (in the idiom of the time): "What does the ethnographer do?-He writes."Taking existing conversations on writing in anthropology as a point of departure, the mission of this volume is twofold: fi rst, to identify different writing genres anthropologists actually engage with; and second, to argue for the usefulness and necessity for anthropologists of taking

Art · Literature · Sociology · Anthropology · Cross-Cultural and Social Analysis · Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies · History

Tools

Open DOILibgen