Paper short abstract:

Outsourced, mechanistic copyediting, especially without track changes, violates the anthropologist’s unique authority. Ghostwriters’ errors and overbearing ethnocentricism defy the fieldworker’s grounded experience. Independently authored and culturally specific texts are central to writing anthropology

Paper long abstract:

Barthes' Death of the Author critiqued presumptions that the conscious intentions of the author were primary. Multi-layered texts float independently of mono interpretations. Nonetheless, the writer's devices were free from advance, external tampering. Mutilations were confined to foreign translations; de Beauvoir's Le Deuxieme Sexe being a celebrated scandal.

Recently, mechanised computer writing has enabled copyeditors to transform textual minutiae before publication. Unless the author is vigilant, rogue hackers may operate without consultation. Previously, authors were sent paper pages with hand written suggestions. Certainly, computerised editing offers constructive track changes, to accept or reject. Recently, however, outsourced copyeditors have been working covertly, highlighting only explicit queries. Finger/trigger happy, they impose banal, de-contextualised meaning on texts, soon devoid of multi-faceted interpretations. With emerging uncertainty in academic publishing, this simplifying agenda is wrongly believed to be a marketing necessity.

Global outsourcing imposes howler errors and alien styles disconnected from grounded experiences. The anthropologist, not the hacker, has lived the ethnography. Original because unique, it cannot be second-guessed by ghostwriters. More than other social sciences, the anthropologist has multiple engagements as participant, analyst and writer. 'Out-sorcerors' even delete every 'I' or 'My'. Such classical anthropological tropes, confirming presence, are censored by disembodied strangers. Knowing only spread-sheets, they have never 'been there'.

Simultaneously, publishers peddle lucrative, celebrity autobiographies where the 'I' is predominant; even faked. No scandal, if ghost written. By contrast, independently authored, culturally specific texts are central to writing anthropology. Computer-facilitated hacking proclaims scientism while mechanically reproducing ethnocentricism. Cross-cultural discovery is destabilized.

Paper short abstract:

This paper sketches potentials for ethnographic writing, but also harsh realities of funding that tend to corrupt the anthropological mind. In defense of an engaged and global anthropology, my intervention deals with the question how to keep thinking anthropologically despite corrupting realities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sketches potentials for ethnographic writing, but also the harshly uncertain realities of projects and academic funding that tend to corrupt the anthropological mind. In defense of an engaged and truly global anthropology, perhaps my intervention more than anything else deals with the question how to keep thinking anthropologically despite unstable academic realities. Following a well-known anthropological line of thought, I see ethnography as both process and product, and to be able to capture lived moments of global coevalness, fieldwork and writing-up are intertwined processes, with research interlocutors as coauthors, not only in the phrasing of their stories, but more, in the analysis itself. This is an anthropology that brings worlds together, and to speak from a personal anthropological horizon as a Swede with fieldwork experience mainly from war-torn northern Uganda, the phenomenology of war in Uganda is just as European in character as it is African. Here is an anthropology not in search for final answers, but one that asks questions to enable further and, so we can hope, better questions. Such anthropological openness, a Malinowskian legacy really, is built on the serendipity of never-ending conversations that potentially suspends conventional restrictions of time and space. Yet anthropological serendipity with its disrespect for borders and boundaries does not really pay off with most research agencies, because it goes against the misplaced certainty as expressed by the very idea of "a project" - the idea of a distinctly defined "field" framed by a clear beginning and an even clearer end.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that there may be beneficial effects of the ‘publishing turn’ to shorter and more ‘popular’ books. It will encourage writers to pay more attention to people’s direct speech, and to handle in a more holistic and less deconstructive way people’s reflections and emotions.

Paper long abstract:

I come from a tradition that emphasizes 'structure'. In analyzing and presenting my fieldwork on economic relations among African villagers, I always stressed the structural components of my knowledge, drawing only occasionally on quotations from people's speech. However, my fieldwork focus has changed to a consideration of both the intellectual and emotional reactions to their condition of African immigrants on Malta. In this work, I have deliberately sought to remedy my earlier neglect of discourse. Focus on discourse, and the personal circumstances in which discourses emerge, has drawn me ever more deeply into a style of writing that is reflexive and seeks to intimately portray my informants as creatures of emotion and reflection as well as of calculation. I am aware that the effect, at least on academic audiences, is novelistic, even (according to one listener) 'poetic'. And yet (to my irritation), this work excites more academic response than my earlier structuralist writing. Selecting excerpts from my papers on African immigrants for reflexive analysis, I will argue that perhaps one advantage of the 'publishing turn' to shorter and more 'popular' books, is that it encourages the anthropologist to take much more seriously the methods and tropes of the novelist - more particularly, the ways in which novelists present the world of the mind and heart. And by leading the anthropologist to grapple with human beings in an holistic rather than a deconstructive way, publishers may be pushing anthropological writing closer to an old ideal - inter-cultural understanding.

Paper short abstract:

While writing is an uncertain process under uncertain circumstances, it is the reason we do fieldwork and remains the ultimate outcome. It is also the way we deal with uncertainties, both professional and intellectual, as we write our way out of the predicaments we get ourselves in.

Paper long abstract:

The position of the anthropologist is almost by default one of uncertainty. We work with the external pressures of securing funding and of publishing, the inherent complexities of fieldwork and the occasional intellectual and existential crises that come with the territory when you are your own research instrument, and we sometimes work in uncertain environments.

Participating in and observing the events of Moscow Pride 2007 is a good example. It was a highly volatile course of events in a political context where the role and intentions of the state were unclear. It was difficult to grasp what was happening and the future course of events, and it was even harder to imagine a text or the analysis.

In hindsight, it is writing, more than anything else that stands out as the central organizing principle, the core of the anthropological endeavour. It was writing that put me on the streets that day, it guided me through the mayhem, and it forced me to make sense of the events and interactions I saw.

The text was a negotiation and a balancing act between the immediacy of the ethnographic description and the distanced view of analysis. In a similar manner, different formats of presentation demand a balance between the narrative that captures the reader and the analysis that prompts reflection, occasionally undoing familiar assumptions in the process. That is, creating uncertainty.

While writing is an uncertain process under uncertain circumstances, it remains a cornerstone of the profession, and one of its greatest assets.

Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at the role of depression in my research on diabetes in a Wisconsin Ojibwe community by reconstructing how depression seeped into my fieldwork and how my Ojibwe research partners and I finally came unstuck by engaging in techniques of contemplative communication: Praying and writing.

Paper long abstract:

Diabetes is one of the most common serious diseases of certain groups in the United States, including many American Indian peoples. Over the past 50 years, the incidence of diabetes in some Native communities has grown to epidemic proportions. In Wisconsin, American Indians have the highest diabetes rates of all population groups, including African Americans and Hispanics. Medically speaking, diabetes mellitus is a chronic disorder characterized by abnormalities in the metabolism of all body fuels. Nutristionists and other medical professionalists recommend that diabetes patients live an active life, engage in sports and diversify their nutrition. One of the most prevalent side effects of the disease, however, is depression which in many cases goes unnoticed by medical providers and even the patients themselves. Modern indigenous health providers are currently beginning to address the problem, seeking culturally appropriate ways to stop the looping effects of diabetes and depression. This paper looks at the issue from an anthropological point of view. It deals with the role of depression in my ethnographic research project on diabetes in a Wisconsin Ojibwe community. It explores the various aspects of depression I encountered during my research by reconstructing how depression seeped into my field work and eventually almost brought it to a halt. The main focus of the paper, however, is on how my Ojibwe research partners and I finally came unstuck by engaging in different yet similar techniques of contemplative communication: Praying and writing.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the dilemmas embedded within the ethnographical encounter and the politics of representations of Roma children and parenthood in Italy. Because of strong stigmatization, families showed a pronounced mistrust versus everything that would be written about them. The act of representation entails serious political and ethical dilemmas because of the infiltration of illegal factions into many urban Roma communities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the political, ethical and epistemological dilemmas embedded within the ethnographical encounter and the politics of representations of "mined fieldwork", taking as example my PhD thesis about public policies, parental strategies and the subjective experience of Roma children in Italy.

Because of strong condemnation of Roma child-rearing practices, conducting research about Roma childhood and parenthood was not an easy task. As a member of the majority population, families expected me to implicitly accuse them of being "bad children" and "bad parents" and showed a pronounced mistrust versus everything that would be written about them. Representing Roma families entails serious political and ethical dilemmas because of the infiltration of illegal and criminal factions into many urban Roma communities. To disclose much of their lives might have very negative political consequences on the ensemble of these minorities, already strongly stigmatized. The urgency to cope with these dilemmas are strengthened by my civic responsibilities as an anthropologist "at home" and by the claims of the NGO funding the research (Doctors of the world), that is in immediate need of acquiring practical tools and to have some practical responses to their own dilemmas as humanitarian actors.

This communication aims at discussing the moral, political and epistemological consequences of researching in a "mined fieldwork". Ethnographical discomfort will be used as an heuristic tool to analyze the act of researching as an historical scene that inform us on the possibility to produce an anthropological knowledge. I will carry on simultaneously a reflexive and political analysis of the activities of observing and writing.

Paper short abstract:

In the drive to popularize anthropology, cultural journalism is one way to reach a wider audience. Disseminating research is a university request, yet cultural journalism is not rewarded on ranking lists even though it contributes to the reputation of the discipline and the anthropologist.

Paper long abstract:

Cultural journalism is a feature of outreach activities at many universities. In the framework of Swedish university life, activities of communicating and collaborating with groups and audiences outside the university are summed up by the term "tredje uppgiften", the third task, the other two being research and teaching. Not least by anthropologists, disseminating research results to a wider audience is regarded as a question of democracy, even an ethical one, also according to the argument that "scholars live on tax payers´ money". The Swedish Research Council requests a popular article as a part of the final reporting of funded projects. In this paper, I discuss the anthropologist as cultural journalist in terms of the contradiction between the call to disseminate research to a wider audience, and the fact that such activities do not count in academic ranking and citation indices. Yet, cultural journalism contributes to the reputation of the discipline, not only to that of the anthropologist who writes in newspapers and speaks on television. As to the actual writing, this is a tale of two translations (from data to academic text, 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 native language of the anthropologist such as Swedish, Norwegian, or German, while academic publications primarily are in English. Cultural journalism is thus on the whole unnoticed by colleagues in other countries.