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CALL FOR PAPERS
 
Anthropology Matters Journal
www.anthropologymatters.com
 
Themed issue: WRITING UP AND FEELING DOWN . . .
 
It is not uncommon for PhD students - and others - to feel somewhat dejected while writing up (aka – 'How is the PhD going?' – 'I hate it!'). Yet it is often surprisingly difficult to untangle the various pressures and anxieties, illusions and disillusions, realizations or 'lightbulb' moments, expectations, obligations, inspirations and hopes that create this situation. In this journal issue we wish to draw out some of these.
 
Possible themes include:
 
* The strong tension between the very 'lively' experiences of fieldwork and the 'deadening' process of writing them down afterwards. As Jean-Paul Dumont (1978:6) reports one apocryphal PhD student to have replied: 'How is the writing going?' – 'Oh it should move along quite well, once I get through beating the life out of my material...'
 
* The resulting tone and style of many monographs and theses. As Mary Louise Pratt notes, 'For the lay person, such as myself, the main evidence of a problem is the simple fact that ethnographic writing tends to be surprisingly boring. How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books? What did they have to do to themselves?' (in Clifford & Marcus 1986:33).
 
* The pleasant surprise when this is not the case. What makes for really good anthropological writing? Is it, as Clifford Geertz (1988:5) has argued, the ability to convey to the reader that 'I was there'? If so how is this done? What is it that makes some anthropological writing truly inspire us (so much that we decide to start doing PhDs)?
 
* The pressures that come to bear on the writing when those we are writing about will read what we have written. As David Mosse (forthcoming in JRAI 2006) has put it, 'field' and 'desk' are no longer clearly separate spheres in social anthropology – as opposed to in Malinowski's day – and this has implications for a range of issues, from how to maintain relations with our 'informants' today, to scholarly integrity and revision of ethics guidelines.
 
* The different set of expectations and pressures that suddenly and without warning make themselves known if you are one of those anthropologists trying to write for a non-academic (or even just non-anthropological) audience. What role can writing play as part of the engagement with anthropology's 'publics'? And what does this do to the anthropology?
 
* The process of being disciplined into what and how to write and not to write for it to be 'anthropological'. There are strong disciplinary expectations in the field of social anthropology, communicated through post-fieldwork seminars, supervisions, vivas, anonymous peer reviews, and editorial decisions – which become especially pressing if the writing is not deemed anthropological 'enough', or the author has unwittingly come to touch on an anthropological 'taboo'.
 
* We always have so much more material than we can write about. As one anthropology lecturer advised me, 'Keep an open mind about your material – until you have written your analysis. Then close it down.' We grapple with our fieldnotes until we hit on one clear line of argument - but how exactly does this process of selection and analysis take place, and what happens to all the other possible lines of argument that are then silenced?
 
* Anthropology departments try to prepare their PhD students for the intensity of fieldwork, but they come nowhere close to preparing the students for the intense emotions that writing triggers – such as anxiety, loss of self-confidence, and anger, to name but a few – or how to deal with these. How is this part of the research process handled (or not) in anthropology departments?
 
* Alternatively you might be one of the lucky 1% – you love writing up, you gain a new sense of meaning from it, and you can imagine doing nothing else for the rest of your life. Tell us how you do it.
 
We especially encourage submissions by PhD students and early-career anthropologists. Please see some of our previous journal issues (at www.anthropologymatters.com) to get a feel for the level of critical reflection, innovative perspectives, and provocative questioning of established anthropological boundaries that we wish to promote.
 
300-word abstracts should be sent to the editor, Ingie Hovland ([log in to unmask]), by 30th September 2006.

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