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A Student's Guide to Reading and Writing In A Student’s Guide to Reading and Writing in Social Anthropology Cover image from “Anthropology 1662: Anthropology of Middle Eastern Communities” taught by Zahra N. Jamal in Fall 2008. ©Copyright 2010, President and Fellows of Harvard College This guide was prepared in 2007 by Smita Lahiri, Lilith Mahmud, and James Herron, and revised in 2010 by Smita Lahiri and James Herron. A Gordon Gray Faculty Grant funded the writing and design of the original version of the guide. The Anthropology Department and the Harvard Writing Project funded the printing of this revised version, which was designed by Karen Hendrickson-Santospago. A Student’s Guide to Reading and Writing in Social Anthropology TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 Introduction 7 Reading Anthropological Literature 7 Essays 9 Ethnographies 13 Moves Anthropologists Make 13 Entering a Conversation 14 Borrowing and Extending 16 Establishing Authority 17 Countering 18 Stepping Back 21 Writing Assignments: Types and Strategies 21 Response Papers: An Informal Formality 24 The Nebulous and Open-Ended: Pitfalls of the “Short-Long” Essay 26 Taming the Term Paper Monster 31 Locating the Right Sources 33 Working with Sources 39 An Annotated Paper 51 Other Writing Support Resources Image from “Anthropology 1972: Reconceptualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border: Comparative and Global Perspectives” taught by Robert Alvarez in Fall 2009. Introduction Welcome to Social Anthropology. This world of social anthropology is endlessly varied. Its practitioners may be found in Japanese fish markets, Argentine labs, Lebanese bars, Indonesian photography studios, East St. Louis neighborhoods, Thai temples, and Brazilian favelas — to name just a small sampling of the ethnographic locales studied by Harvard faculty and students, past as well as present. Despite the conceptual and physical The writing practices distance amongst its sites of study, the coherence of social anthropology and conventions of stems from its distinctive intellectual frameworks, methods, and lively anthropologists are not internal debates conducted around shared passions and inquiries. Your courses serve as point of entry into some of these disciplinary conversa- always transparent. tions, and the mission of this guide is to offers tips and guidelines that will make it easier for you to join them. While it is often and rightly stressed that ethnographic field research lies at the heart of the discipline of social anthropology, scholarly publication is its life-blood: it is chiefly through writing that most anthropologists disseminate the results of their time in the field. Writing transforms data and personal observations into texts that inform, provoke, and inspire debate and conversations amongst anthropologists and members of allied disciplines, and at times even reach public arenas beyond the university. This guide starts from the position that the writing practices and conven- tions of anthropologists are not always transparent, and that engaging with the questions, data, and conclusions found in anthropological texts is not a self-evident task. Keeping in mind your position as a newcomer navigating an unfamiliar disciplinary culture, we have tried to demystify some of the challenges you may encounter. As you read the texts assigned for your courses and engage them in your own essays, immersing yourself vicariously in the fieldwork of other scholars, we hope you will find your own appetite for conducting — and writing up — ethnographic research being whetted. A GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 5 Image from “Anthropology 1720: Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Film” taught by Steve Caton and Ramyar Rossoukh. 6 | Section Title I. Reading Anthropological Literature If you are taking several anthropology courses at the same time, the read- ing load may appear daunting or even overwhelming. The truth is that it does not need to be so, even though it is not uncommon for upper- division undergraduate anthropology classes to assign over 200 pages to read in any given week. In this section of the guide we will examine the major forms of publication in social anthropology that you are likely to encounter in your courses and suggest some strategies for reading them more effectively. Essays Essays on a single subject are one of the primary vehicles through which scholars present their research and ideas to the academic community, add- ing to existing knowledge through innovation and debate. They are gener- ally published in journals or in edited volumes that are focused on a single topic. Most of the essays/journal articles you will read in your classes will probably fall into a handful of categories discussed below. Programmatic Essays. These essays examine one or more theoretical issues in anthropology and suggest new directions for future research. For instance, Sherry Ortner’s (1974) essay “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” argued that the universality of female subordination across all known hu- man societies should be viewed as a reflection of ideological preoccupations found in all cultures, and not as an outcome of biological determination. Programmatic essays offer an overview of key positions and arguments, fre- quently capturing ongoing shifts in how a major topic is being conceptual- ized and researched. The fact that the authors of programmatic essays tend to draw upon a wide range of literature (in addition to their own research) makes them particularly informative in this regard. Since programmatic essays by their very nature address topical issues and dilemmas, they tend to become superceded by later work. Sometimes, however, the very “datedness” of an essay becomes part of its overall significance. For instance, Ortner’s essay is still widely read and assigned, A GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 7 even though her concepts of “culture” and even “gender” have been thor- oughly challenged and revised since the time of its writing. For all its datedness, however, it still stands as a landmark essay (which is quite different from a period piece.) Research Articles. Anthropology research articles pose and address a ques- tion or problem arising from the author’s original data (generally gath- ered through fieldwork, but sometimes in the course of archival research). Such research reports are self-contained works of scholarship whose con- clusions are intended to be applicable or illuminating in the context of other ethnographic settings. The distinction between programmatic and research articles is not carved Scholarly essays range in stone. By drawing it, we hope to draw your attention the fact that scholarly essays range widely in their ambitions for producing generaliz- widely in their ambitions able knowledge: some are primarily oriented towards reporting specific for producing generalizable research findings, while others seek to chalk out a program of wide-rang- knowledge: some are ing scope and significance. You may find it illuminating to discern and analyze the author’s ambitions in this regard. Is she primarily attempting primarily oriented towards to account for a particular set of circumstances and/or events? Or is she reporting specific research seeking to develop concepts or approaches that can be applied to compa- findings, while others seek rable situations elsewhere? to chalk out a program of The two objectives are not incompatible. An example of a research article wide-ranging scope and that is simultaneously programmatic in scope is J. Lorand Matory’s (1999) significance. article entitled “The English Professors of Brazil.” Here, Matory re-examines the widely accepted notion that Brazilian Candomblé (an Afro-Latin Ameri- can religion) is based upon preserved cultural memories brought to the New World from Yoruba and other regions by enslaved Africans. Matory uses his own research on the circulation of free black travelers across the Atlantic Ocean to argue that much of what is often seen as “purely African” about Candomblé was actually formulated through inter-regional exchanges be- tween Nigeria and Brazil in the nineteenth century. The article thus speaks to scholars of other regions who are studying the circulation and agency of diasporic persons, or the ways in which local cultures can develop under influences that do not obey political and geographic boundaries. Theoretical Chapters and Articles. In some social sciences like economics or government, “theory” refers to explanatory or predictive models into which data of varying types may be fed. In contrast, anthropologists tend to think of “theory” in ways more similar to their colleagues in the humanities: as an interpretive lens to be borrowed from one context and adapted to another 8 | Reading Anthropological Literature for the purpose of illuminating it. At the same time, boundaries between anthropology and other fields of such as history, geography, gender studies, and science studies, etc. have become increasingly porous since the 1970s. As result, a great diversity of directions and topical subfields have emerged within the discipline, complementing established areas of study (like eco- logical anthropology and historical anthropology) with a whole host of “an- thropologies of ______” (fill inscience , humanitarianism, and globalization, Christianity, or any other contemporary keyword.) Not surprisingly, this eclecticism is likely to represented in the reading list of any given anthro- pology course. Since the sources of “theory” vary widely, instructors will be your best guides on what to read for and how to think with the theoretical readings assigned for their courses. (See also this guide’s section on “Work- ing With Sources”). In anthropology, theory Book Reviews and Review Articles. While book reviews are unlikely to form part of your required course readings, you should consult them tends to be used as an whenever you need help understanding or contextualizing an ethnogra- interpretive lens that can be phy or monograph. Book reviews in anthropology journals succinctly ad- borrowed from one context dress the scope and contribution of a specific work, allowing you to get a “quick fix” on its contents and how it was received by other scholars upon and adapted to another.
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