1
Introducing the Anthropologist
as Writer
Across and Within Genres
Helena Wulff
ላሌ
There you are: facing the computer screen. Your “ﬁeld,” 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 ﬁeld 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 ﬁeld, 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 inﬂuential book The Interpretation of Cultures (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: ﬁrst, to identify
different writing genres anthropologists actually engage with; and second,
to argue for the usefulness and necessity for anthropologists of taking
2 Helena Wulff
writing as a craft seriously and of writing across and within genres in new
ways. This introduction will contextualize writing in anthropology historically
and theoretically, move on to my own experience of writing dance journalism
as one instance of broadening anthropological writing, and conclude
by offering an overview of ways of writing anthropology as discussed in the
following chapters.
What writing genres are anthropologists expected, in various contexts, to
master in the twenty-ﬁrst century? Anthropological writing is a timely topic
as it shapes the intellectual content of the discipline, as well as careers and institutional
proﬁles. Academic scholarly writing is obviously the primary genre
for anthropologists, and the recent debate has had its center of gravity here.
Yet anthropologists also do much writing in many styles and genres other
than academic scholarly writing. Writing for various administrative contexts,
which includes not one but a number of changing genres, is—because of their
control over academic values—regarded as an expanding problem by many,
if not most, anthropologists with intellectual drives. Sooner or later most anthropologists
ﬁnd themselves writing academic administrative texts, ﬁlling in
extensive forms, and ﬁling reports (Brenneis 2009). With increasing demand,
many anthropologists also develop a capacity to write reports commissioned
by development agencies, municipalities, and business corporations. But
there is also signiﬁcant cultural, social, and political critique communicated
through anthropological writings (Gusterson and Besteman 2010). There are
anthropologists who write memoirs (Narayan 2007; Stoller 2008; Collins and
Gallinat 2010), and ﬁction, as commented on by Ruth Behar in the book
chapter “Believing in Anthropology as Literature” (2009). Anthropologists
have taken an interest in writing novels (Stoller 1999), poetry (Tedlock 2002),
and even crime novels (White 2007) inspired by ethnography. The fact that
anthropologists also are engaged readers of detective stories has been examined
by Regina Bendix (2012). Ulf Hannerz (2013) has written about a
legendary Swedish detective story writer, Stieg Trenter (whose idiosyncratic
spelling of his ﬁrst name most likely inﬂuenced Stieg Larsson of the globally
best-selling “Millennium Trilogy” when he changed his name from Stig to
Stieg), pointing out similarities between anthropologists and detective story
writers. Travel writing, especially that describing dark sides such as violence
and security issues, is examined by Skinner (2012).
CONTEXTUALIZING WRITING IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Writing and writers have attracted anthropological attention for quite some
time. Clifford Geertz (1988) analyzed the anthropologist as author (particu-
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 3
larly Malinowski, Benedict, Evans-Pritchard, and Lévi-Strauss), and in the
1990s, Eduardo Archetti edited the volume Exploring the Written (1994a),
which applies an anthropological perspective to texts ranging from ﬁction
and songs to letters and newspapers. As Archetti (1994b: 13) argued, “a literary
product is not only a substantive part of the real world but also a key
element in the conﬁguration of the world itself.” And the volume Anthropology
off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing (2000), edited by Alisse Waterston
and Maria D. Vesperi, elaborates on anthropological writing for a general
audience, especially on questions of racism, sexism, and ethics. An anthropological
inquiry into writing is not limited to the anthropology of writing,
text (Barber 2007), reading (Boyarin 1993; Reed 2011), and cultural literacy
(Street 1997), but includes ideas from literature that have been a frequent
source for anthropologists. Writing as a way of life is one of Michael
Jackson’s recurrent themes as in The Other Shore (2012). Kristen Ghodsee
presents an original experimental ethnographic writing form when she includes
some ethnographic ﬁction chapters in the third person among other
ethnographic chapters in the ﬁrst person in Lost in Transition: Ethnographies
of Everyday Life after Communism (2011), her monograph about the collapse of
communism in Bulgaria.
One of the enduring impacts of the “writing culture” debate during the
1980s is that it made anthropologists sharpen their writing tools. There was
the critique of what was conceptualized as narcissism, with focus on the ﬁeldworker
at the expense of the people of the study, which was mostly articulated
in British anthropology by, for example, Dawson, Hockey, and James (1997),
while the volumes by Barton and Papen (2010) and Zenker and Kumoll
(2010) testify to the inﬂuence of the debate on “writing culture” two decades
after it ﬁrst came about. So does the issue of Cultural Anthropology (Orin 2012)
celebrating the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of the publication of Writing Culture
(1989) edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. In that anniversary
issue of Cultural Anthropology there is an interview entitled “Anthropology and
Fiction” where Damien Stankiewics (2012: 536–537) talks to Amitav Ghosh,
the Indian writer who has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from University of
Oxford and is quoted by a number of contributors here. When asked about
his writing anthropology versus writing ﬁction, and his novel In an Antique
Land (1992), Ghosh replies by ﬁrst praising his anthropological training:
But after I ﬁnished my dissertation I was left with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction:
I felt that everything that was important about my time in Egypt had been
left unsaid. To describe this as a “nagging sense of dissatisfaction” is perhaps inadequate.
Like many who’ve spent a long time alone in a foreign circumstance,
I was haunted by my experiences. This was one of the reasons why it became so
important to write the book. While living in Egypt, I did two kinds of writing. I
4 Helena Wulff
kept ﬁeld notes and I also wrote a set of diaries. In my mind the ﬁeld notes were
the “anthropological” part of my work; the diaries were more literary. My dissertation
was based almost entirely on my ﬁeld notes; similarly the ﬁrst-person
narrative in Antique Land is based on my diaries.
A sense of being constrained by the academic form of dissertation writing
has thus produced ﬁction from the ﬁeld, but also, in line with the argument
of this volume, kept developing experimental ethnographic writing and new
genres.
In fact, the afﬁliation between anthropology and literature goes a long
way back. With his literary interest, Victor Turner (1976: 77–78) regarded
African ritual and Western literature as “mutually elucidating.” Richard
Handler and Daniel Segal (1990) looked at Jane Austen as an ethnographer
of marriage and kinship in her time and class in England, which showed
contrasting social realities. And when Nigel Rapport (1994) did ﬁeldwork in
the village Wanet in England, he made the writer E.M. Forster his companion
ethnographer by considering Forster’s literary writings parallel to his
own ﬁndings in the village. Among the volumes juxtaposing anthropology
and literature are Dennis and Aycock (1989), Benson (1993), Daniel and
Peck (1996), and De Angelis (2002). In Novel Approaches to Anthropology (2013),
Marilyn Cohen and her contributors discuss the role of historical as well
as contemporary novels in anthropology. Writing about the relationship
between ﬁction and anthropology, Archetti (1994b: 16) distinguished three
categories of ﬁction: “The realistic historical novel that attempts to ‘reconstruct’
a given period in a given society; the totally imagined story set in a
historical period; and the essays devoted to an interpretation of a nation,
its characteristics and creed.” As Archetti (1994: 16–17) pointed out, “some
kind of historical and sociological knowledge is important in ﬁction,” which
is where the process of writing ﬁction is similar to that of writing anthropology.
But when Archetti says that he does not believe that novelists are really
aware that they make use of cultural topics, he seems to be thinking more of
novelists who situate their work in their own culture rather than in foreign
places. For Archetti, as for many literary anthropologists, ﬁction around cultural
topics is “ethnographic raw material, not ... authoritative statements
about, or interpretations of, a particular society.”
A TALE OF TWO TRANSLATIONS
“So you’re a writer—why don’t you write about us in the paper?” one dancer
after another kept asking me when I was doing ﬁeldwork in the transna-
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 5
tional ballet world in Stockholm, London, New York, and Frankfurt am
Main (e.g., Wulff 1998, 2008a).1
The people I was studying seemed to suggest
that I make myself useful by writing about them in the newspaper, and
also, they told me, in dance magazines, international and national. In order
to give something back to the people that had allowed me access to the
closed world of ballet, I thus set out on my ﬁrst piece of cultural journalism
(Wulff 1994) for Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish newspaper that features daily
essays on topics of culture, history, and politics by academics, freelance writers,
and journalists.
Cultural journalism is a feature of outreach activities at many universities.
In the framework of Swedish university life, the activities of communicating
and collaborating with groups and audiences outside the university
is summed up by the term tredje uppgiften, the third task, the other two being
teaching and research. Not least among anthropologists, disseminating research
results to a wider audience is regarded as a question of democracy,
even a matter of ethics; this is also supported by the argument that “scholars
live on taxpayers’ money.” It is also the case that the Swedish Research
Council requires a popular article as a part of the ﬁnal reporting of funded
projects. It is remarkable, and somewhat contradictory, that the call to disseminate
research to a wider audience is not reﬂected in academic ranking
and citation indices. Nonetheless, cultural journalism contributes to the reputation
of the discipline, and not only to that of the individual anthropologist
who writes in newspapers and speaks on radio or television. As to the
actual writing this is a tale of two translations: from data to academic text,
and from academic text to popular text. One crucial point in relation to reputation
and ranking is that cultural journalism by anthropologists tends to
be performed in the national language of the anthropologist, such as Swedish,
Norwegian, German, or French, even though international academic
publications are primarily in English. Cultural journalism is thus on the
whole unnoticed by colleagues in other countries.
The translation I had to perform when I did my ﬁrst journalistic essay
entailed a different type of translation than the academic one I was trained
for. As anthropologists we can be said to translate our ﬁelds into academic
conceptualizations. Doing journalism, I had to make my anthropological
ﬁndings not only accessible, but also attractive to a wider readership familiar
with culture and the arts, but not necessarily with anthropology. Writing
my essay for Svenska Dagbladet, I was aware that dancers and other people in
the ballet world I was still studying, and thus depended on for my continued
research, would also read it. They were more likely to read this relatively
short essay rather than my forthcoming academic book (Wulff 1998) (which
eventually turned out to be the case) as most dancers are not voracious read-
6 Helena Wulff
ers. But it was not difﬁcult to keep their trust. They knew I was not a critic,
and that is why they had allowed me back stage for so long, even into intimate
situations. I could have been critical in my essay about certain conditions
in the ballet world, such as the lack of long-term contracts in some
companies, the use of drugs to enhance dancing capacity, the prevalence of
anorexia, or wealthy fathers giving large sums of money to ballet companies
in exchange for their daughters getting leading roles at the expense of better
dancers. But this was not the place for that. Writing my essay, I also had to
organize the text differently than I normally did when I wrote academically.
The standard academic format provides more space, which allows for an introduction,
perhaps in the form of an ethnographic vignette; an articulated
aim, followed by ethnographic evidence related to a theoretical discussion;
and a conclusion, which shows how this ethnography has contributed to
theoretical development. Writing my newspaper essay, I had to stick to no
more than 1,800 words, much shorter than academic articles in journals and
volumes tend to be. I also had to start with the essence of the essay, rather
than building up an argument toward it as in academic texts. And just like
on stage in the theater, entrance is essential. In order to capture the general
reader of a newspaper—remember, I was writing about ballet, which most
people think of as elitist, old-fashioned, and artiﬁcial—the entrance of an
essay has to be striking. Slightly provocative or seemingly contradictory beginnings
often work—something that gets the attention of even the reluctant
reader. Next I had to make my sentences short and clear. There is no time
for complicated arguments or efforts to impress colleagues with theoretical
ideas. In journalism, captivating ethnographic cases are useful as a way
to indicate a wider circumstance. This is the same technique as in poetry
where a few lines can crystallize a long life or a country’s contested history.
And just like in the theater, again, exits are important for how and whether
a piece is remembered afterward, They should also be carefully crafted.
In contrast with academic writing, in journalism it is important to stop in
time—otherwise the editor will do it, which often means cutting from the
end, raising the risk that concluding points disappear. With newspapers you
cannot negotiate about word count. Essays can in fact end on the climax, or
with a question. It is common that they end by connecting to the opening,
thereby forming a circle. The end can also be used as a contrast, turning
everything that has been said previously around without warning, which can
be one way of making an argument. In my experience, more often than not,
endings appear during the writing process; they do not always end up they
way I have planned.
When I posted my ﬁrst essay in a yellow mailbox one sunny late summer
day in southern Sweden, which you did in 1994 (this was before email),
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 7
I knew that if the essay was accepted, the editor would do the headline.
This is common practice in journalism, and I would not have any inﬂuence
over it. He would also write a short introduction summarizing the essay. It
was thus not until the very morning the essay appeared in the newspaper
that I learned that the title of it was “Ballet—a language everyone can understand.”
Had I been allowed to do my title, I would never have come up
with a title that general, but it was ﬁne. The editor obviously knew what he
was doing, and I was still learning to relate to a wider readership not only
outside academia but also outside the ballet world. The essay was a success.
I was suddenly surﬁng on fame—as long as it lasted, which was for about a
week. After all there is a new essay every day in this newspaper. But friends
and family, of course, and also colleagues, acquaintances, and people I did
not know—such as a ballet fan who wrote a fan letter to me(!)—praised my
essay. I even heard from my primary school teacher, whom I had not seen
in about thirty years. I got a sense that “everyone” had read my essay, also
from the knowledge that this newspaper is printed in hundreds of thousands
of copies. This quick major impact is quite different from what happens in
the academic world, where publications not only take much longer to write,
but also reach a considerably smaller readership. Academic publications
may also last much longer, though, while newspaper essays are in most cases
forgotten after a while. Even in this era of Internet publication, books and
journals are still cherished and kept in collections. Newspapers are thrown
away or used for packing things.
What I had not expected with my ﬁrst essay was that it would become
a part of my ﬁeldwork in two ways. First, the dancers did read it, and to
my great relief they liked it. And I realized that part of the reason that they
liked it was that I had managed to verbalize what mattered the most to them
about their dancing life. Contrary to many media reports of the ballet world,
my essay was a positive portrait. Dancers are vulnerable; they often feel misrepresented
in the media, and see themselves as different from other people.
They are trained to express themselves through their dance, not through
words. Second, as I mentioned above, by using materials in the form of ﬁeld
notes, for a general readership, I discovered new data, circumstances, and
connections in my materials that later would enrich my academic writing.
Since then I have continued to write cultural journalism once a year or
so. I keep meeting colleagues who have an interest in writing in this genre,
but do not know how to get a piece into a newspaper. There seems to be an
assumption that academics can also write popularly without any coaching.
To write anthropological journalism requires training. This has to be taken
seriously, and it should be provided for students and young scholars. Certain
anthropologists who would like to write journalism now and then make
8 Helena Wulff
the mistake of not adhering to the rules and conditions of journalism. This
is surprising in light of the fact that seeing the “native’s point of view” is
supposedly our expertise. We have to learn to switch into a less academic,
meaning more straightforward, tone, and of course to adjust to the very
compressed time and space frames, at least with newspapers. This, again, is
different from what we are used to in academia.
Since my ﬁrst journalistic essay, my cultural journalism has consisted
of essays on my ongoing research, review articles on books relating to my
research, and feature articles on choreographers and composers. I occasionally
write for the Swedish daily, the Swedish dance magazine, and British or
European dance magazines. Like any writer, I have had rejections, but after
one or more attempts found another publication for rejected articles. With
time, I have learned that cultural journalism, not least dance journalism,
has to be hinged on current events. Timing is central.
I have had commissions for dance journalism. One was for a German
art magazine Parallax, for which I was asked to write about the fact that
dancers have two careers, as they stop dancing early and then move on to a
second career. I wrote in English and the essay was translated into German,
which meant that I could read it but with effort (Wulff 1997–98). Another
commission was for a Swedish magazine, Axess, which publishes popular
scholarship. I wrote about a dance photographer and his work. Even though
I had submitted images, the editor added more images and made the essay
into what he referred to as a “photo essay”; it was like a gallery illustrating
my text (Wulff 2003). Unsurprisingly, my early essays were more edited by
the editors than the more recent ones. I also get higher fees now than I
did in the beginning. This is not only because fees are higher for all freelance
writers, but because I am now known in some circles as a scholar
who sometimes does cultural journalism. With time and articles published,
you acquire a reputation in your ﬁeld of journalism. All this also applies to
fellow anthropologists such as Andre Gingrich in Vienna, Thomas Hylland
Eriksen in Oslo, and Dan Rabinowitz in Tel Aviv, who write anthropological
journalism now and then.
Going back now to the issue of translation: already Evans-Pritchard
(1965) identiﬁed anthropology as cultural translation, a notion that has been
inﬂuential in the discipline, as well as debated. For what is it exactly that is
translated? Cultural conceptualization can obviously get lost in translation,
or be misunderstood. There is a risk that we look for cultural units that
are actually incomparable. What does a dance anthropologist, for example,
study in a culture where there is no word for dance? Anthropologists are
acutely aware of this problem. Yet things may also be found in translation:
call it understanding, interest in a different way of life. The classical in-
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 9
sight in anthropology is, of course, that learning about difference is a way
to learn about yourself. The debate on cultural translation in anthropology
has generated insights into the relationships between interpretation, understanding,
and authenticity. As Hannerz (1993: 45) suggests, there are “two
main ideas of the translator’s role, when we think of translation in its ordinary
sense”: the ﬁrst type of translator is expected to convey the meaning
of a language in an exact, literal way, “impartial,” ofﬁcial, while the second
type is allowed more creativity as this translation is “to be responded to
in aesthetic and intellectual terms both as a reﬂection of the original work
and as a work in its own right.” It is obviously the latter type of translation
that anthropologists are aiming for. And it can be taken further to a second
translation, from academic ﬁndings into cultural journalism, as an instance
of one anthropological genre.
WAYS OF WRITING ANTHROPOLOGY
Cultural journalism is thus one way of writing anthropology. The following
chapters offer a variety of ways of writing anthropology: in relation to the
making of an anthropological career, ethnographic writing, journalistic and
popular writing, and writing across genres.
Dominic Boyer argues most convincingly in the opening chapter for the
necessity of being a writer in anthropology today. Despite the fact that the
discipline depends on engaging teaching for its survival and reproduction,
and that teaching can be said to be the discipline’s oxygen, it is as Boyer
points out nevertheless “the knot of writing, peer review and publishing”
that deﬁnes an academic career. In a neoliberal perspective of academic
audit, ranking, and impact factors, teaching is losing its prestige. Instead,
a central concern is writing and publishing in relation to careers and academic
organization. This is an elusive area as criteria keep changing: what
one cohort of anthropologists was trained for is bound to be different once
they begin being exposed to assessment. To what extent is the quality of
academic writing tailored to research assessments and evaluation formats,
and what are the intellectual consequences of this? Don Brenneis has done
extensive ethnographic work on scholarly publication, research funding,
assessment exercises, and the construction of scholarly knowledge. As he
reports on its limitations, he is not convinced about the efﬁcacy of peer review.
In his chapter he investigates “writing to be ranked” as well as different
types of “reading for ranking.” With his scholarly approach, Brenneis sheds
new light on the idea of managerial accountability in the academic world.
Research applications for funding form a special genre, one genre within
10 Helena Wulff
the genre of writing to be ranked. Sverker Finnström’s chapter details the
clash between academic values and administrative values in research funding.
In order to write a successful research application, Finnström learned
to streamline his text, which lead to what he experienced as intellectual corruption.
Applying Maurice Bloch’s (1977) idea of “the long conversation” for
a long-term relationship to the ﬁeld, Finnström also discovered, did not ﬁt
with the rhythms and realities of European academic life. Eventually, he was
awarded a major research grant and landed a lectureship. Now that he ﬁnds
himself on the other side, so to speak, with requests to evaluate research applications,
Finnström has developed the dual capacity of performing assessment
work in accordance with administrative requirements while keeping
his intellectual integrity alive.
In that part of the global scholarly landscape where English is the natural
choice of language, alternatives are hardly ever explicitly discussed. In
Máiréad Nic Craith’s chapter, the dominance of the English language in academic
publishing and ranking is problematized. Writing in English means
a larger readership, at least potentially, but the size of the readership might
depend on the publisher’s reach. As Nic Craith says, the focus on English
excludes many scholars and institutions, but there is an expanding drive to
learn to operate academically in English as a second language. Translation,
both literal and cultural, is a dilemma here, including the fact that things get
lost in translation. Despite efforts to acknowledge other world languages as
well as small languages, Nic Craith is not very hopeful that this will change
the position of the English language in the academic world. Still, as she
concludes, in light of the nature of anthropology as a discipline for human
diversity, it makes sense, not only academically but also ethically, to sometimes
publish in other languages than English.
The acclaimed Irish writer Roddy Doyle had his breakthrough with
the novel The Commitments (1987), which describes a group of unemployed
young people in working class Dublin who form a soul band. It has also been
made into a ﬁlm. Interviewing Doyle for my study of the social world of Irish
writers (Wulff 2008b, 2012a, 2012b, 2013), I asked him about his writing routine.
He then talked about self-discipline, and how he writes Monday to Friday
between 8:30 in the morning until about 6 in the evening, divided into
two-hour sessions. He spends one of his daily breaks, he spends “looking at
the BBC football page.” As to the actual writing, Doyle prefers ﬁlling pages
rather than worrying over the quality of the ﬁrst draft. This is why editing is
key. “When I edit, I’m a bit obsessed!” Only editing can make him work into
the night or on a Saturday morning.
In his chapter in this volume, Brian Moeran considers the craft of editing
anthropological texts. This is clearly an underestimated craft, despite the
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 11
fact that it is key also for writing academic texts. Editing requires training,
and it is possibly useful with a bit of talent to start with. Admittedly, some
people seem to have a natural ﬂair for editing (and some for proofreading,
as they spot errors more easily than others). Moeran identiﬁes self-editing
as a process of making choices. It has to do, basically, with what to include
and exclude, how to pitch the texts theoretically, the role of the ethnography,
and—following Van Maanen (1988)—what style to chose: realistic, confessional,
or impressionistic. Moeran applies Howard Becker’s (1982: 198)
notion of “editorial moments” to these situations in which choices are made,
both in editing one’s own texts and those of colleagues. This is where editing
from the perspective of the publisher’s editor, as well as from that of the desk
editor, comes in. Moeran does not want editing to be conﬂated with writing.
They are different activities: writing means striving to get into a ﬂow, while
editing means stopping the ﬂow in order to think about structure.
Alma Gottlieb, Paul Stoller, and Kirin Narayan have long offered authoritative
approaches to ethnographic writing. For Alma Gottlieb writing
an engaged anthropology for a wider readership and teaching ethnographic
writing to students are paramount. Having already been a ﬁne writer in high
school, Gottlieb joins Amitav Ghosh in his frustration over the constraints
of the academic writing format. Gottlieb confesses in her chapter that while
adhering to the expected academic writing style and publication outlets ﬁrst
as a Ph.D. student, and later when she was on her tenure track, she began
clandestine writing. Together with Philip Graham, the ﬁction writer, Gottlieb
wrote what was going to be published as Parallel Worlds (1993), a popular
account in which the anthropologist and the writer each commented on
their shared experiences of Côte d’Ivoire. As there was a risk that this book
might jeopardize Gottlieb’s application for tenure, she kept it separate from
the university world. This worked until the book was awarded the Victor
Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. Since then it has been used extensively
in teaching. Paul Stoller likewise found the academic format limiting
as a young anthropologist. In his chapter he spins the story of how he (together
with Cheryl Olkes) wrote the experimental ethnography In Sorcery’s
Shadow (1987), which, despite a number of early institutional setbacks, became
a classic in anthropology. The book builds on Stoller’s time as an apprentice
sorcerer. It was his teacher, the sorcerer Adamu Jenitongo, who put
him on the path to experimental writing that eventually would release his
writing powers. The sorcerer urged Stoller to write a story that would be remembered,
a story from which younger generations could learn about “the
truth of being.” As Stoller rightly says, good stories are not only effective for
making points, they also tend to remain. Therefore, anthropologists should
write for the future. For Narmala Halstead, the process was the reverse. She
12 Helena Wulff
had written novels, plays, poems, and short stories in the past, but her Ph.D.
work put an end to that kind of writing, she explains in her chapter. As a
committed Ph.D. student, she did not ﬁnd time for writing ﬁction. She also
notes that she had to accommodate her writing style to an academic one.
Still, her experience as a ﬁction writer, as well as a journalist later on, did
contribute to the way she conceptualizes anthropology. Halstead shows how
a life history of writing in different genres fuses into a notion of life-writing
that is a conduit for both personal and professional writing experiences.
In Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012),
Kirin Narayan merges her experience of ethnographic writing with that
of Anton Chekhov, playwright and short story writer, as he reported on
Sakhalin Island, the Russian penal colony. And it is around Chekhov, as her
ethnographic muse, that Narayan’s chapter revolves. She considers letters
about Chekhov’s journey to Sakhalin, his own reﬂections on his research,
and the actual act of writing about this, which resulted in his most substantial
nonﬁction work. It enticed Narayan to rethink her engagement with
ethnography in terms of “a golden thread of continuity” as she gathered different
topics and texts into her book. She also learned how an ethnographic
sensibility structures not only Chekov’s ethnographic work, but much of his
literary oeuvre.
To the problem of negotiating between scientiﬁc study and engaging
storytelling belongs the desire to share one’s work with as broad an audience
as possible. In the spirit of Amitav Ghosh, Anette Nyqvist wrote a popular
account parallel to writing her doctoral dissertation. She explains in her
chapter that she did not feel held back by the academic form, but with her
background in journalism she found that writing a popular version of her
dissertation was most beneﬁcial for her academic writing. Interestingly, she
introduces the notion of cross-writing as a way to improve a text in one genre
by imports from another one and to keep the ﬂow going. Oscar Hemer
identiﬁes himself as a writer, a literary writer but also a journalist. His doctoral
research in anthropology was on ﬁction and truth in the transition processes
in South Africa and Argentina (Hemer 2012). In his chapter Hemer
mentions the “like-sided triangle” (Hemer 2005) covering the three writing
practices—academic, journalistic, and literary—that are distinguished by different
traditions and genre conventions. Hemer’s preferred writing style is a
discursive text that makes room for literature and journalism, as well as aspects
of reportage, essay, and memoir. His literary case is Jorge Luis Borges’s
(1974) short story “The Ethnographer” about a doctoral student who eloped
from the ﬁeld.
Again, usually when you sit there in front of your computer screen, you
are alone at your keyboard. At their keyboards, pianists sometimes sit next
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 13
to one another, making music together. Something like that may now occur
increasingly often in anthropology as well.
The recent upsurge in different forms of collaboration shape writing
styles, intellectual contents, and careers. This is evident in the multi-authored
chapter written by anthropologist Eva-Maria Hardtmann, activist-scholarlawyer
Vincent Manoharan, feminist Urmila Devi, Jussi Eskola with an
M.A. in religion, and activist-drummer Swarna Sabrina Francis. It describes
how the writing process emanated from a workshop of the Global Justice
Movement in Kathmandu attended by scholars and activists. In order to
include their various personal styles in the same text, they agreed to write
in a dialogical form. This went very well, as everyone felt their voice came
through. But when they tried to write a collaborative text with a single voice,
their different writing styles and political and intellectual approaches made
it a conﬂictual endeavor.
As to writing across genres, in his chapter Nigel Rapport draws inspiration
from the novelist E.M. Forster when he declares his belief in the individual
rather than in “the people.” Rapport’s twinning of anthropology and
literature has the form of a Kantian cosmopolitan vision of anthropology
that entails “a bringing together in a dialectical tension two poles of human
existence”: all of humanity and the individual. Rapport outlines his notion
of ﬁction and anthropological understanding around “ﬁction as local practice,”
and makes clear that what he refers to as anthropology’s ﬁctional truth
goes back to the discipline’s humanistic origin. Mattias Viktorin’s chapter
is framed by a literary case from a novella by Andrei Volos (2005) about a
woman who at times struggles to convey her thoughts into words, to “wrap
them into words.” To her, ideas seem to change in the process, and what
comes out is not her sparkling thoughts but ﬂat statements that fall apart.
With Hanna Arendt’s notion of emergence, Viktorin goes on to show how
anthropologists are able to address processes of rending visible the “not yet,”
also using examples from the painter Paul Klee.
A notable current development relevant to the volume, which urges for
writing across genres, is the growth of new media forms, in large part connected
to the Internet. Blogs, social media, and open access now also have
their part in the shaping of anthropological writing, raising urgent questions
about how technology impacts on writing skills, collaboration, and communication
(Kelty et al. 2008; Balakian 2011; SavageMinds.org). Drawing on
her experiences of writing the monograph Digital Drama: Teaching and Learning
Art and Media in Tanzania (2012), Paula Uimonen discusses the three formats
it took: a printed book, a website (http://www.innovativeethnographies
.net/digitaldrama), and a hyperlinked e-book, as well as the relationships
between them. For one thing, the website had to tell its own tale, through
14 Helena Wulff
many visuals and videos with some short texts. In designing the website,
Uimonen’s intention was not only to make it into a colorful illustration of
the book for readers who wanted to learn more; even more importantly, the
idea was to present the website as a trailer for the book for those who had
not yet read it.
In contrast with many writers of ﬁction, scholars tend to develop a writing
style that follows a set structure, and then stick to that style. While aware
of both intellectual challenge and academic audit requirements, Ulf Hannerz,
in the ﬁnal chapter of this volume, suggests two possibilities to further
writing styles, as well as careers, in anthropology. The ﬁrst possibility is
to continue to do ﬁeld research, which might entail different types of ﬁeld
studies than the traditional one year away. The second possibility, which is
his main concern in this chapter, is “a plea for experimenting with greater
diversity in styles of writing, more ways of using anthropological ideas and
materials, perhaps developing new genres.” Rather than pursuing the widespread
“me and my ﬁeldwork” approach when writing, Hannerz suggests
an openness to “writing otherwise.” Among other things, this would entail
making more use of ethnography that colleagues have collected and analyzed,
especially in terms of comparison and synthesis.
Before concluding, let me note that the development of creative writing
in university programs and workshops, and the process of teaching writing,
is beginning to be analyzed anthropologically (Wulff 2012a). A sibling genre
to creative writing, which has come forth especially among anthropologists
in the United States, is creative nonﬁction (Cheney 2001). Going back to
New Journalism in the late 1960s, this literary genre features real events
in a ﬁctional form (Narayan 2007). Connected to this is a growing concern
in anthropology with having its reporting and its social and cultural understandings
reach a wider public (Eriksen 2006). The particular task of
anthropological writing naturally has much to do with the emphasis on understanding
social and cultural diversity, in local and national society but
not least globally. Some of the deliberations over the forms and techniques
of writing relate to parallels and contrasts with journalism and other reportage
as shown by Boyer and Hannerz (2006).
Preﬁguring chapters on different ways of writing anthropology, I have
made the case for the advantage of writing across and within genres in new
ways. This is especially captured by Anette Nyqvist’s concept of cross-writing
and Ulf Hannerz’s call to writing otherwise. Geertz’s (1980) notion of blurred
genres might seem like an obvious backdrop here, but my aim has been to
show the importance for anthropologists of constantly developing their writing
skills in distinct genres. One advantage of writing across genres is the
possibility of taking inspiration from another genre, in style and structure as
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 15
well as content. Rather than blurring genres, this is actually an efﬁcient way
to keep developing the character of one genre.
It is clear that anthropologists have a lot to gain from honing the capacity
to operate in different genres ranging from academic writing to journalistic
writing, even ﬁction. By cultivating ﬂexible writing, new possibilities
for expression and conveyance spring up. This is beneﬁcial for anthropological
knowledge production, not least as such writing might reveal different
aspects of social and cultural life than traditional anthropological writing
can do.
Helena Wulff is Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.
Her research is in the anthropology of communication and aesthetics based
on a wide range of studies of the social worlds of literary production, dance,
and visual culture, and recently on writing and contemporary literature in
Ireland. Among her publications are the monographs Ballet across Borders:
Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (1998) and Dancing at the Crossroads:
Memory and Mobility in Ireland (2007), as well as the edited volumes The Emotions
(2007), and Ethnographic Practice in the Present (with Marit Melhuus and
Jon P. Mitchell, 2010).
NOTES
1. Some paragraphs in this section ﬁrst appeared in Helena Wulff. 2011. “Cultural
Journalism and Anthropology: A Tale of Two Translations.” Archivio Antropologico
Mediterraneo online 12/13, 13, no. 1: 27–33.
REFERENCES
Archetti, Eduardo P., ed. 1994a. Exploring the Written: Anthropology and the Multiplicity
of Writing. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
———. 1994b. “Introduction.” In Exploring the Written: Anthropology and the Multiplicity of
Writing. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
Balakian, Sophia. 2011. “Mapping a Lost Friend: Technology and Tracing a Transnational
Life.” Paper presented in session on “Writing Ethnography: Experimenting
on Paper, Experimenting Online” at the American Anthropological
Association, Montreal, 16–20 November, 2011.
Barber, Karin. 2007. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture
in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barton, David, and Uta Papen, eds. 2010. The Anthropology of Writing: Understanding
Textually-Mediated Worlds. London: Continuum.
16 Helena Wulff
Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Becker, Howard S. 1998. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research while
Doing It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Behar, Ruth. 2009. “Believing in Anthropology as Literature.” In Anthropology off
the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, ed. Alisse Waterston and Maria D. Vesperi.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bendix, Regina. 2012. “‘Tatorte’—or: Why Do Anthropologists Love Mysteries?”
Paper for the Symposium for Andre Gingrich’s 60th
Birthday, University of
Vienna.
Benson, Paul, ed. 1993. Anthropology and Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Bloch, Maurice. 1977. “The Past and the Present in the Present.” Man 12, no. 2:
278–292.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1998. “The Ethnographer.” In Collected Fictions. London: Penguin.
Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. 1993. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Boyer, Dominic, and Ulf Hannerz. 2006. “Introduction: Worlds of Journalism.” Ethnography
7, no. 1: 5–17.
Brenneis, Don. 2009. “Anthropology in and of the Academy: Globalization, Assessment
and our Field’s Future.” Social Anthropology 17, no. 3: 261–275.
Cheney, Theodore A. Rees. 2001. Writing Creative Nonﬁction: Fiction Techniques for Crafting
Great Nonﬁction. Berkeley: Ten Speed.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cohen, Marilyn, ed. 2013. Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology.
New York: Lexington Books.
Collins, Peter, and Anselma Gallinat, eds. 2010. The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing,
Memory and Experience into Ethnography. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Daniel, Valentine, and Jeffrey M. Peck, eds. 1996. Culture/Contexture: Anthropology and
Literary Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dawson, Andrew, Jenny Hockey, and Allison James, eds. 1997. After Writing Culture:
Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. London: Routledge.
De Angelis, Rose, ed. 2002. Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse.
London: Routledge.
Dennis, Philip A., and Wendell Aycock, eds. 1989. Literature and Anthropology. Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press.
Doyle, Roddy. 1987. The Commitments. London: Vintage.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence.
Oxford: Berg.
Evans-Pritchard, EE. 1965. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
———. 1980. “Blurred Genres: The Reﬁguration of Social Thought.” American Scholar
49, no. 2: 165–179.
———. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres 17
Ghodsee, Kristen. 2011. Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage.
Gottlieb, Alma, and Philip Graham. 1993. Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a
Writer Encounter Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gusterson, Hugh, and Catherine Besteman, eds. 2010. The Insecure American: How We
Got Here and What We Should Do about It. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Handler, Richard, and Daniel Segal. 1990. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Hannerz Ulf. 1993. “Mediations in the Global Ecumene.” In Beyond Boundaries, ed.
Gísli Pálsson. Berg: Oxford.
———. 2013. “A Detective Story Writer: Exploring Stockholm as It Once Was.” City
and Society 26, no. 2: 260–270.
Hemer, Oscar. 2005. “Writing the World.” In Media and Global Change, ed. Oscar
Hemer and Thomas Tufte. Göteborg: Nordicom.
———. 2012. Fiction and Truth in Transition: Writing the Present Past in South Africa and
Argentina. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Jackson, Michael. 2012. The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Kelty, Christopher M., et al. 2008. “Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of
Open Access and Scholarly Societies.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3: 559–558.
Marcus, George E., and Michael MJ Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, Daniel., ed. 2009. Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Approach.
Oxford: Berg.
Narayan, Kirin. 2007. My Family and Other Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 2012. Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Orin, Starn, ed. 2012. Current Anthropology 27, no. 3, special issue on 25th anniversary
of Writing Culture.
Rapport, Nigel. 1994. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing
of E. M. Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
———. 1997. Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London:
Routledge.
Reed, Adam. 2011. Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: A Study of Henry
Williamson Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press & University of
Toronto.
Routledge Innovative Ethnographies Series InnovativeEthnographies.net/digital
drama.
Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology SavageMinds.org.
Skinner, Jonathan, ed. 2012. Writing the Dark Side of Travel. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Stankiewicz, Damien. 2012. “Anthropology and Fiction: An Interview with Amitav
Ghosh.” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 3: 535–541.
18 Helena Wulff
Stoller, Paul. 1999. Jaguar: A Story of Africans in America. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 2008. The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship
among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Street, Brian V. 1997. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Tedlock, Dennis. 2002. Electronic Center Poetry. Buffalo, NY. epc.buffalo.edu/
authors/tedlock/.
Turner, Victor. 1976. “African Ritual and Western Literature: Is a Comparative Symbology
Possible?” In The Literature of Fact, ed. Angus Fletcher. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Uimonen, Paula. 2012. Digital Drama: Teaching and Learning Art and Media in Tanzania.
London: Routledge.
Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Volos, Andrei. 2005. “Ivachev’s arv.” In Hurramabad. Uppsala: Ruin.
Waterston, Alisse, and Maria D. Vesperi, eds. 2009. Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists
on Writing. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
White, Jenny. 2007. The Sultan’s Seal. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Wulff, Helena. 1994. “Balett – ett språk som alla kan förstå.” Svenska Dagladet. 5
September.
———. 1997–98. “Das Leben nach dem Tanz: Der Wechsel zur zweiten Karriere.”
Parallax December/January 5: 8–15.
———. 1998. Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers. London:
Berg/Bloomsbury.
———. 2003. “Frusna rörelser.” Axess 5, no. 2: 36–40.
———. 2008a. “Ethereal Expression: Paradoxes of Ballet as a Global Physical Culture.”
Ethnography 9, no. 4: 519–536.
———. 2008b. “Literary Readings as Performance: On the Career of Contemporary
Writers in the New Ireland.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 17:
98–113.
———. 2012a.”An Anthropological Perspective on Literary Arts in Ireland.” In Blackwell
Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, ed. Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic
Craith, and Jonas Frykman. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2012b. “Instances of Inspiration: Interviewing Dancers and Writers.” In
The Interview: An Ethnographic Approach, ed. Jonathan Skinner. London: Berg/
Bloomsbury.
———. 2013. “Ethnograﬁction and Reality in Contemporary Irish Literature.” In
Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology, ed. Marilyn
Cohen. New York City: Lexington Books.
Zenker, Olaf, and Karsten Kumoll, eds. 2010. Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections
of Epistemologies and Representational Practices. Oxford: Berghahn Books.