Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part V

Laura Meek: I've been inspired by my conversations with you all, and by Sienna's piece here, to start experimenting with writing ethnographic fiction. I published a short story recently, and it felt really liberating to be able to take seriously causes of illness that exceed what global health recognizes as “real” and to foreground the agency of ancestors and nonhuman actors in a way that didn't need to be heavily footnoted or explained away. … But then the limitation for me there is that the piece was not taken seriously at my previous institution. I got reactions like: “I don't think you should be writing fiction. That's not anthropology.” And, so, I would be curious to hear how your work has been received for those of you who have more experience with nonconventional forms of anthropological writing. Casey Golomski: I want more, richer description. What has saved me and made me continuously excited about anthropology is doing that rich description and acknowledging that every single encounter or phenomenon we behold in the field maybe doesn't have to be explained in an analytic register. The prevailing genre that is the journal article forces you to do that kind of explanation. It's kind of like what Sienna said. We can use forms of writing that bring you to that precipice of lived experience that we often face in the field. Those moments of, “Oh my god, I've just beheld something that cannot be explained.” Yet. And if you can represent that in writing, that does something productive for what we think medicine or care is or could be. … And yes, I've had a Dean look at my yearly review and say to me, “Why are you publishing poems?” Not saying, “Don't do it” per se, but rather, “You should be concentrating on other things.” Sadly. Sienna Craig: My first book was a creative nonfiction, ethnographic memoir. I was told not to write it by the people who were my institutional mentors. When it came out, the Dean of the Faculty was very blunt. He said, “Until you write the next book”—meaning the one that walks and talks like a “tenure” book—“this book will be a liability.” But, he continued, “Once you write that other book, it will be an asset.” I appreciated the bluntness. But I do think that loops back to the question of lineages and gatekeeping and boundaries. Abigail Neely: So how do we write differently, practice medical anthropology differently, if everything that we want to do has to be extra? Sienna Craig: Good question. I don't have a single answer, but focusing on the things I want to do makes doing the things I know I need to do feel more balanced. This is part of the process. And with journal article as form, the stakes are different—higher, even—than a book in some ways. The journal article is the cryptocurrency of academia as opposed to the IRA of a book. It's expected to have and sustain a certain kind of condensed value. And if it doesn't look the way it's supposed to look, it's really confusing for the people doing the evaluative process. That includes peer review and our annual institutional counting exercises. It's even a question on the CV: Where do you put this thing that is creative, but that has been peer-reviewed and is coming out in a journal that is part of our professional association? It's still just not quite legible. Tatiana Chudakova: But it would be really nice if you were not tenured to be still able to take risks. … Because I mean, there's other life course stuff that happens. You get older, you get tired, you have children or not. Other stuff is going on that you might not have the room for this later on, until maybe further down, to take on that kind of experimentation. And I don't think the way that things work is conducive to it. Abigail Neely: Yes, and also the fact that tenure is a disciplining process, in terms of both becoming legible to a discipline and in terms of a particular mode of work and type of production—the journal article, most notably. If we're disciplining people out of risk, then the successful people's future work is much less likely to be risky. Sienna Craig: Also, part of why one takes those risks is to resist burnout, to care for oneself, to attend to the people who have entrusted you with relationships and stories. … I think we are doing a disservice at multiple levels to make all of that be either erased, or made invisible, or squelched. Tatiana Chudakova: There's something about the journal article that is inimical, I think, to that kind of experimentation. And I'd love to think about how it can be reformed. Laura Meek: I also wonder if the form of the journal article can change. What would it look like if we could write articles where we resist causal closure? Where we don't say, “I argue.” Where we can sit with uncertainty or multiple different interpretations side by side. … I feel like I couldn't possibly publish an article today where I have a conclusion that unsettles some earlier analysis I'd made in that piece. But what if I could? That's a thing I would love to see. Casey Golomski: The metrics we have at our hands cannot contain the extraordinary, world-making stuff that we're doing in anthropology. So maybe it's about remaking the metrics, reimagining what a journal is itself, something that is not a scientific box, but a home-place where we gather-in lots of really rich ideas. We can curate these spaces within the architectonics of neoliberal academic production, but that also requires some different kind of visioning.

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