Daniel Tubb – Page 12

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 12 Special – Stories from Cuba / Échos de Cuba / Historias de Cuba.

There are many ways of doing anthropology.

A little auto-ethnography. Writing this, I look east over the white crested waves of the Saint John River through the girders of a bridge, once a railway now a footpath, and on towards the hillside campus of the University of New Brunswick Fredericton. Amongst the ubiquitous brick, there is a lone wooden building, also red. Once, rumour has it, the building housed prisoners during the Second World War. Now, it houses the Department of Anthropology and my office. All of this is a far cry from the bustling city of Santiago de Cuba and the annual meetings of the Canadian Anthropology Society in May 2018. Not least because the Saint John River was colder than the Caribbean, but also because there are far fewer anthropologists. And yet, I’m convinced my department is a microcosm for the part of a CASCA meeting I enjoy the most.

Our department is small and three-field: archeologists, biological anthropologists, and sociocultural anthropologists. I am probably one of a handful of faculty in New Brunswick who identifies as a sociocultural anthropologist. In my department, we each do anthropology, but we do it in different ways.

In Cuba, there was a concentration of anthropologists—faculty and students and practitioners—from across Canada, Cuba, and the Americas. Many doing anthropology differently, in their own ways. On the campus of the Universidad del Oriente, I regularly felt myself a humble eavesdropper on conversations new to me. Conversations about what anthropology is in Cuba, about what anthropology is in Latin America, and about what different anthropologists are doing for their research. The conversations were in Spanish and English and French.

I once thought such a large national conference was a place where everyone was participating in the same conversation. Conferences bring people together, after all. In our case, people with a commitment to this thing we call anthropology, and a peculiar way of understanding, thinking, researching, and writing about the world as anthropologists. While I suspect many of us have a shared commitment—fraught and conflicted as it may be—to this thing we call Anthropology, we do not share one vision of what anthropology is. And yet, still, we talk of ourselves in the singular: anthropology. A case can be made that it should be anthropologies.

What is anthropology, anyway? We debate it, we critique it, we deconstruct it, and sometimes we try to redefine it. Sometimes, we police our disciplinary boundaries of interlopers, or we lay claim to central concepts or methodological approaches. “They’re not really doing anthropology properly, all they do is ask questions?” I think to myself. In my department, we tell students that Anthropology is a holistic study of humanity across time and place. Yet, how we teach that, the questions we ask, and the answers and methods we accept as truth are different. I think this plurality is a good thing.

Even the way I self-identify as a sociocultural anthropologist is a plurality. The name has resonance in Canada, influenced both by British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. In Quebec, where I trained as an undergrad briefly, the influences were the French school. In Colombia, where I do fieldwork, the influences are wider still. Indeed, Colombian anthropology has its own thriving history. All of this, of course, was a brought up by the debates around World Anthropologies. Yet, going to CASCA in Cuba, reminded me that there are many anthropologies, even within the settler state some call Canada. Cuba was humbling and exciting precisely because there were many good ideas to think with and about.

As I contemplate how to teach a theory course next semester, I’m struck at how difficult the task is. It can’t be enough to dwell on Western anthropology from elite US and British schools, too often white men from prestigious places have dominated those conversations over the last hundred years. That anthropology is tied up with colonial histories. That it is complicated and exacerbated by a tradition of writing about marginalized communities in non-Western (and now Western) contexts, is of course true. Conversations about anthropology as a handmaiden of colonialism and a discipline in need of decolonizing are vital conversation to keep having. In Santiago de Cuba, I was struck by the many other vibrant and urgent conversations already going on. This is the plurality that I found exciting.

There were challenges, of course. One is the academic class system, which was entirely on display—a cup of coffee at the conference hotel was almost a month’s wages for a Cuban worker. The lingua franca was, too often, English. None of this is unique to an anthropology conference, Canadian or otherwise, as attendees and organizers of all conferences face these challenges. I congratulate the organizers of CASCA in Santiago de Cuba for shifting the locales of conversation and opening up new spaces for discussion, even as money and language and prestige were elephants in the room.

There is a politics to who gets to define anthropology, of course. A jockeying for position. The attempt to define a discipline, can be a good move. “Anthropology should be this.” “It should be that.” Being in Santiago de Cuba reminded me there are so many conversations already going on in many places, and that such that is exciting. In broad left organizing, there are arguments about a “diversity of tactics.” While I do not condone all tactics employed at political demonstrations, I support the right of people to choose which tactics to adopt. I may not find all conversations in anthropology to be equally compelling, but a cacophony is more critical than attempts to discipline the discipline.

Annual conferences like CASCA serve many purposes, not least bringing people together. For me, from a small province and a small city where I am one of a small community, the conference was a much needed chance to recharge, to remind myself what I am doing and why I am doing it by connecting (and reconnecting) with colleagues, by learning to listen to what other people are doing and saying, and by dipping into many conversations. I met people whose work I appreciate, I thought about how to teach better, how to write better, and how to be a better mentor. While I’ve always been most attracted to evocative ethnographic writing and making ideas accessible by doing my best at being readable, this is just how I approach my discipline. There are other approaches. We need more spaces for more voices and for more conversations, as messy and imperfect and as human as these spaces may be. In support of this, we can embrace anthropologies as they are, a plurality in all of its messy glory.

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2016. “Getting on the Tenure Track.” Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 10.2. https://cascacultureblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/17/its-anthropologies-not-anthropology/

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 11.1

Anthropologist, ethnographer, writer? What am I? I spent seven years as a grad student (two in coursework, two and a half in both fieldwork and writing) and two as a postdoc. Only lately have I begun to identify as a writer. When did this happen? In the morning, I think.

The sun began to peek above the sea. I felt the air caress my face, inhaled the salty twang, listened to the waves rumble on the beach, and let my fingers patter on the keyboard. I had left my hotel room to sit on the beach after a conference in the Caribbean. My mood was meditative as an elderly woman stretched in a yoga pose, and I practiced my morning writing calisthenics on my keyboard: a holdover from fieldwork. In the mornings, I wrote questions to follow up on, first drafts, reflections on process, and notes for myself. I used to think the words were most important, now I’m not so sure. Julia Cameron (The Miracle of Morning Pages, 2013) calls what I was doing morning pages: a practice of both ethnographer and self-help guru. Do I write that last part with a cringe of cynicism? Perhaps, but, might the writing be as important as the words written?

Should we think of ourselves as writers? Yes. Prosaically, because our careers depend on it: finishing the PhD; getting the tenure track or alt-academic job; keeping that job; and advancing our careers. At each step, publish or perish. Aspirationally, because writing is a craft which requires both skill and practice. Learning to write is a kind of enskillment.

My cynical self asks why academics write so much that nobody reads? Anthropologists are as guilty as anyone. Michael Taussig (The Corn Wolf, 2015) laments this ‘agribusiness writing.’ Might one explanation be our training is, in fact, in agribusiness writing? I trained as an anthropologist, academic, scholar, and researcher, but not as a writer. Graduate school involved gleaning big ideas from convoluted, sometimes serpentine and labyrinthine and even tortuous scholarly prose. I read far more about my field site and ethnographic theories and methods than I ever did about writing. I was trained to think, but never in something so prosaic as how to write. The only university course I took on composition was in Spanish. If we read accessible and readable ethnography, it was on the side. We read the high priests of writing culture, but rarely the Stephen Kings of writing culture.

I mean it. Despite this clumsy transition, we never read any Stephen King. This might be a shame, because the career of a fiction writer seems more the model for many an anthropology graduate student: underemployed precarious obscurity for most, with a good income for a few. I found Stephen King’s memoir (On Writing, 2002), with its descriptions of receiving hundreds of rejection slips while writing in a laundromat, comforting as my then failed job search grew into its third year. King’s daily writing inspired my own. His golden rule—keep reading—kept me, well, reading.

Is there one way to become a writer? Sure. To paraphrase Antony Johnston, a prolific graphic-novelist and writer: Write. How to write? Tautologically, do what works for you. How do you know what works for you? Try various techniques. I read the self-help for academic writers’ literature. Although my grad school self would have rolled his too-soon jaded eyes, here’s some of what I read.

For me, the Writing on Writing series started it all. Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron reflect on the call and response rhythms of writing before dawn. Tsing references Dorothea Brande’s (Becoming a Writer, 1934) advice on developing a habit: “Write every day, first thing.” No time to write? Paul J. Silvia (How to Write a Lot, 2007) deconstructs every such excuse. Heavens, I logged my writing for a year. After all, Anthony Trollope famously woke, wrote for three hours, and then ran the British Postal service—he was nothing if not prolific. Wendy Belcher (Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, 2009) breaks down the Herculean task of preparing an article for publication: her workbook taught me how to revise. Deirdre McCloskey, the prolific, conservative economist, recommends William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (The Elements of Style, 1999); Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (The Reader Over Your Shoulder, 1979), who have delightfully quirky insights; Joseph M. Williams (Style (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/900697.Style), 2002), who advises writing with characters and actions, putting subjects and actions at the beginning of the sentences, and cutting down on nominalizations; and Richard A. Lanham (Revising Prose, 1987), who describes how to edit out long prepositional phrases. We all have our tick-words, which Bruce Ross-Larson (Edit Yourself, 1996) lists alongside alternatives. Roy Peter Clark (How to Write Short, 2014) casts brevity as positive; then shows how it is done.

On writing books, William Germano’s (From Dissertation to Book, 2013) meta-commentary on turning a dissertation into a book shows why a dissertation is your last piece as a student, how a book has a thread pulling everything forward, and how a dissertation is written defensively with an audience of five: your committee. A book has a wider audience. Eleanor Harman, Ian Montanges, Siobhan McMenemy, and Chris Bucci (The Thesis and the Book, 2008) edit a volume on the difference between the two genres. William Germano (Getting It Published, 2008) and Anthony Haynes (Writing Successful Academic Books, 2010) describe how to write a book, select a publisher, decide between a university and a commercial press, craft a prospectus, and write the damn thing.

Ethnography is not journalism, but Kirin Narayan (Alive in the Writing, 2012) gives practical ethnographic exercises drawn from creative non-fiction—her bibliography is a gold mine. In a workshop I attended on turning a dissertation into a book, the facilitator recommended Jack Hart’s (Storycraft (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10140746-storycraft), 2012), whose advice on structure, story, character, point of view, scenic writing, analysis, and digression gave me a new vocabulary; Ursula K. Le Guin’s (Steering the Craft, 2015) advice on rhythm and sound applies as much to fiction as ethnography; and Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir, 2015) opens memoir as another body of literature to learn from. Ethnographers don’t write fiction, but Renni Browne and Dave King (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, 2004) are invaluable on editing, dialogue, and techniques to show, not tell.

Feeling anxious? You’re not alone. Writers writing on writing might help: Virgina Woolf (A Writer’s Diary, 1973); Lafcadio Hearn (“On Composition,” Life and Literature, 1920, p. 53), who describes re-reading notes and a technique of composition I mirrored, accidentally; and Rosa Luxembourg (The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 2013), whose early letters are on writing. I’ve found video inspiring too: Alan MacFarlane has many, but his videos on academic creativity and on writing come to mind.

Reading about writing as a craft has been inspirational. Maybe my morning notes won’t lead me to craft the next Great Ethnography. However, in my own way I have been implementing Ray Bradbury’s advice (http://thewritepractice.com/ray-bradbury/), “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2017. “Self Help for Writers.” Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 11.1, 11.1.