Using the influential and field-changing Writing Culture as a point of departure, the thirteen essays in Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology address anthropology's past, present, and future. The contributors, all leading figures in anthropology today, reflect back on the "writing culture" movement of the 1980s, consider its influences on ethnographic research and writing, and debate what counts as ethnography in a post-Writing Culture era. They address questions of ethnographic method, new forms the presentation of research might take, and the anthropologist's role. Exploring themes such as late industrialism, precarity, violence, science and technology, globalization, and the non-human world, this book is essential reading for those looking to understand the current state of anthropology and its possibilities going forward. Contributors. Anne Allison, James Clifford, Michael M.J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Richard Handler, John L. Jackson, Jr., George E. Marcus, Charles Piot, Hugh Raffles, Danilyn Rutherford, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Kamala Visweswaran

"Humanists and social scientists alike will profit from reflection on the efforts of the contributors to reimagine anthropology in terms, not only of methodology, but also of politics, ethics, and historical relevance. Every discipline in the human and social sciences could use such a book."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory

In Writing Anthropology, fifty-two anthropologists reflect on scholarly writing as both craft and commitment. These short essays cover a wide range of territory, from ethnography, genre, and the politics of writing to affect, storytelling, authorship, and scholarly responsibility. Anthropological writing is more than just communicating findings: anthropologists write to tell stories that matter, to be accountable to the communities in which they do their research, and to share new insights about the world in ways that might change it for the better. The contributors offer insights into the beauty and the function of language and the joys and pains of writing while giving encouragement to stay at it—to keep writing as the most important way to not only improve one’s writing but to also honor the stories and lessons learned through research. Throughout, they share new thoughts, prompts, and agitations for writing that will stimulate conversations that cut across the humanities. Contributors. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Jane Eva Baxter, Ruth Behar, Adia Benton, Lauren Berlant, Robin M. Bernstein, Sarah Besky, Catherine Besteman, Yarimar Bonilla, Kevin Carrico, C. Anne Claus, Sienna R. Craig, Zoë Crossland, Lara Deeb, K. Drybread, Jessica Marie Falcone, Kim Fortun, Kristen R. Ghodsee, Daniel M. Goldstein, Donna M. Goldstein, Sara L. Gonzalez, Ghassan Hage, Carla Jones, Ieva Jusionyte, Alan Kaiser, Barak Kalir, Michael Lambek, Carole McGranahan, Stuart McLean, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Mary Murrell, Kirin Narayan, Chelsi West Ohueri, Anand Pandian, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Noel B. Salazar, Bhrigupati Singh, Matt Sponheimer, Kathleen Stewart, Ann Laura Stoler, Paul Stoller, Nomi Stone, Paul Tapsell, Katerina Teaiwa, Marnie Jane Thomson, Gina Athena Ulysse, Roxanne Varzi, Sita Venkateswar, Maria D. Vesperi, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Bianca C. Williams, Jessica Winegar

This seminal collection of essays critiquing ethnography as literature is augmented with a new foreword by Kim Fortun, exploring the ways in which Writing Culture has changed the face of ethnography over the last 25 years.

The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories—this is magic, that is technology—has long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption—time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.

In Anthropology off the Shelf, leading anthropologists reflect on the craft of writing and the passions that fuel their desire to write books. First of its kind volume in anthropology in which prominent anthropologists and 3 respected professionals outside the discipline follow the tradition of the “writers on writing” genre to reflect on all aspects of the writing process Contributors are high-profile in anthropology and many have a strong presence outside the field, in popular culture Unique in its format: short essays, revealing and straightforward in content and writing style