Table Of ContentTHE COMPOSITION
OF ANTHROPOLOGY
How do anthropologists write their texts? What is the nature of creativity in the
discipline of anthropology? This book follows anthropologists into spaces where
words, ideas and arguments take shape and explores the steps in a creative process.
In a unique examination of how texts come to be composed, the editors bring
together a distinguished group of anthropologists who offer valuable insight into
their writing habits. These reflexive glimpses into personal creativity reveal not only
the processes by which theory and ethnography come, in particular cases, to be
represented on the page but also supply examples that students may follow or adapt.
Morten Nielsen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
Aarhus University, Denmark.
Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies in the
Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK.
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THE COMPOSITION
OF ANTHROPOLOGY
How Anthropological Texts
Are Written
Edited by Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
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ISBN: 978-1-138-20812-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-20811-7 (pbk)
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CONTENTS
List of figures vii
List of contributors viii
INTRODUCTION 1
On the genealogy of writing anthropology 3
Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport
TEXTS WITH COMMENTARIES 13
1 The life of concepts and how they speak to experience 15
Veena Das
2 Ten preludes to a preface 26
Kirin Narayan
3 Writing against conclusion 42
Nina Holm Vohnsen
4 Composing texts and the composition of uprisings: Notes on
writing the postcolonial political 56
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
5 Public ritual in Mauritius 73
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
vi Contents
6 Writing Whalsay: Reflections on how, why, and for who
anthropologists write 89
Anthony P. Cohen
7 Writing a cosmopolitan anthropology in recognition
of Anyone 104
Nigel Rapport
8 Diversifying from within: Diaspora writings in Sweden 122
Helena Wulff
9 Dialogic aesthetics: Notes and nodes in analogical
software coding 137
Morten Nielsen
10 Composing American stiob 155
Dominic Boyer
11 In the workshop: Anthropology in a collaborative
zone of inquiry 169
Anthony Stavrianakis, Paul Rabinow and Trine Mygind Korsby
EPILOGUE 193
Writing the human: Anthropological accounts
as generic fragments 195
Nigel Rapport and Morten Nielsen
Index 201
FIGURES
7.1 Stanley Spencer and Patricia Preece (centre) outside
Maidenhead Registry Office on the day of their wedding,
1937, accompanied by witnesses Dorothy Hepworth
and Jas Wood 106
9.1 N-Vivo screen showing fieldnotes and interview-excerpts
regarding the administrator’s house (the case study used
in the text-piece above) coded as a node (column to
the right). The middle column shows titles of other
ethnographic case-studies as nodes 145
9.2 N-Vivo screen showing notes for the first pages of Cheah’s
article ‘Cosmopolitanism’. The highlighted sections are
those coded as ‘the stranger’ 146
9.3 N-Vivo screen showing the node ‘the stranger’ where notes
from Cheah’s ‘Cosmopolitanism’ can be seen together with
notes for other texts coded in a similar way 146
9.4 N-Vivo screen showing the node on the production of
‘social distance’ in Mulwene 148
11.1 Uploading a first set of objects 178
11.2 Organizing and composing materials 179
CONTRIBUTORS
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at
the University of Bergen and has researched issues such as state formation, egali-
tarianism, cosmology, violence and rural–urban connections in Mozambique since
1998. Bertelsen has authored the monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation,
Sociality and Power in Mozambique (2016), and has co-edited Crisis of the State:
War and Social Upheaval (with Bruce Kapferer, 2009); Navigating Colonial Orders:
Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, ca. 1850 to 1950 (with Kirsten
Alsaker Kjerland, 2015); Violent Reverberations: Global Modalities of Trauma (with
Vigdis Broch-Due, 2016); and Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity
and Difference (with Synnøve Bendixsen, 2016).
Dominic Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and founding
director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human
Sciences (CENHS, culturesofenergy.org), promoting research on the energy/envi-
ronment nexus in the arts, humanities and social sciences. He is part of the edito-
rial collective of the journal Cultural Anthropology (2015–2018) and also edits the
Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge book series for Cornell University
Press. His most recent monograph is The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital
Era (Cornell University Press 2013). With James Faubion and George Marcus, he
has recently edited Theory Can Be More Than It Used to Be (Cornell University Press
2015) and, with Imre Szeman, has developed Energy Humanities: An Anthology for
Johns Hopkins University Press (2017). His next book, Energopolitics, is part of a col-
laborative multimedia duograph with Cymene Howe, exploring the complexities
of wind power development in Southern Mexico. With Howe, he also co-hosts the
‘Cultures of Energy’ podcast (available on iTunes, PlayerFM and Stitcher).
Contributors ix
Anthony P. Cohen was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Edinburgh from 1989 to 2003, where he was also Provost. This followed 20 years
at universities in Canada and at Manchester. He then became the founding prin-
cipal and vice-chancellor of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. He retired in
2009 and is now an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University. He specialised
in issues of personal, social and national identity, and, since retiring, his academic
activity has been spent largely in critical reflection on what he did and did not do
during his active career.
Veena Das is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct
Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. Her books include Life
and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007); Affliction: Health, Disease,
Poverty (2015); and a jointly authored book, Four Lectures in Ethics (2015). She
has also co-edited The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (2014);
and Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (2015). She is cur-
rently completing a further book: Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropological Essays,
Wittgensteinian Traces. She is also engaged in an interdisciplinary research group
(QUTUB) working with other organizations on the goal of reducing time to diag-
nosis for TB patients in two cities in India and improving treatment adherence. Das
is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy of Scientists
from Developing Countries, and is a recipient of honorary doctorates from the
University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh and Bern University.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University
of Oslo. Following his early fieldwork in Mauritius (1986, 1991–92) and Trinidad
(1989), he has published widely on the politics of identity and the cultural dynam-
ics of complex societies. He has also carried out and directed research in Norway
addressing these issues. From 2012 to 2017, he was principal investigator (PI) of the
ERC AdvGr project ‘Overheating’, which takes a comparative look at the crises of
identity, climate and economy. His latest books are Identity Destabilised (ed. with E.
Schober) and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change, both published by
Pluto in 2016.
Trine Mygind Korsby is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, where she
works on a project on transnational crime and criminal livelihoods in Romania. She
completed her PhD in anthropology at Department of Anthropology, University
of Copenhagen. Her recent publications include ‘Moments in Collaboration:
Experiments in Concept Work’, co-authored with Anthony Stavrianakis (Ethnos
2016); and ‘The Brothel Phone Number: Infrastructures of Transnational Pimping
in Eastern Romania’ (The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, forthcoming).
Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the
Australian National University and has an abiding interest in how oral and written
narrative forms relate to anthropology. She is the author of Storytellers, Saints and
