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Paper short abstract

Engaging debates about 'single stories' in anthropology, this paper discusses how drama-triangle narratives cast communities as victims, states as persecutors, and anthropologists as rescuers. The author then considers anticolonial and psychoanalytic techniques to unsettle these polarizing frames.

Paper long abstract

This paper interrogates anthropology’s current enthusiasm for “theoretical storytelling,” arguing that narrative form can both enable and constrain analytic innovation. While storytelling is often framed as transformative, the author shows how it can sediment “single stories” that reproduce theoretical sameness. Responding to Nolwazi Mkhwanazi’s critique of medical anthropology in sub-Saharan Africa and Sherry Ortner’s account of US theory since the 1980s, the paper identifies a recurrent three-act plot—state failure, cultural suspicion/resistance, and local ingenuity—that, despite empirical plausibility, narrows what can be seen and said. A comparable template is traced in European ethnographic writing on Bhutan, where repeated motifs risk reactivating tropes of Himalayan otherness even in careful fieldwork.

To theorize how such plots stabilize, the author borrows from transactional analysis Eric Karpman’s concept of a “drama triangle". The paper argues that anthropological narratives frequently position communities as victims and states as persecutors, while the ethnographer’s implicit stance slips into that of rescuer—an arrangement that can echo colonial savior imaginaries and “damage-centered” portrayals. Elaborating on Acey Choy’s “winner’s triangle,” the author proposes an exit from these polarizing scripts through practices that redistribute agency: asserting needs without punishment, problem-solving without victimhood, and listening rather than rescuing.

Finally, informed by anticolonial science studies and by episodic/frame-tale traditions, the paper offers practical “unsettling” exercises: cultivating reflexive thirdness, foregrounding land relations and routes/roots, treating methodological limits as sites of interdependence, and attending to boundaries and necessary exclusions. Unsettling drama triangles, the author argues, can reorient ethnographic storytelling toward relational and political accountability.