Writing anthropology
Writing an thropo logy
by Sofia Lesur Kastelein
Often, when reading for a seminar, I will spend fifteen minutes staring at the same sentence. I’ll rearrange sections of it in my head, in the hope that they might make more sense, or open a new tab to check whether a word means something other than what I think it means. Sometimes, this goes on for paragraphs. Sometimes it is the whole article. (I never get close to the point of whole books.) This usually happens when there is a lot of technical language, or a dense use of complicated words, or references to Deleuze. Conversations with friends reassure me I’m not alone in this. It then becomes easy to wonder, how many people are there who understand the reading in question? If a class-full of MSc students, most with an undergraduate degree in the social sciences, are stumped, do you need a PhD to get it? And, if the number of people who can understand a text is so small, why write? Starting with my frustrations about understanding some anthropological writing, I was curious to hear from anthropologists about how they write, who they write for, and why they write. I approached some people in the department asking to chat about how they think about these kinds of issues. The following is a little of what I learnt from these informal conversations. •
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