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.