Beyond the footnote: Citation as disruption in creative anthropology

“I SUPPOSE you'll manage.” Chubby Sr. García, the regional military liaison with far too much dust in his cuffs, broke into a smile that marked him a persistent optimist. Still, his eyes hung a beat too long on the groaning pickup piled with plastic drums of contraband diesel, sacks of powdered milk and rice rebagged for trade, and his two hired hands—already called “the boys” without irony—set to guide us through mule tracks and mining trails to the informal encampment beyond the border crossing. Why begin here? Why this story, this tone, this trace of Bohannan's work? Because this essay is about creative citation, and about the stakes of form—what we borrow, what we honor, what we let speak through us. The passage above is not an ornament. It is not a clever Easter egg for anthropologists who happen to have read Return to Laughter. It is an opening argument, delivered in the language of literary mimicry. It performs the very citational ethics this essay advocates: citation as entanglement, not extraction; as homage, not possession; as a quiet form of transmission that speaks to influence, resonance, and kinship between texts. And yes, it is disorienting. That, too, is deliberate. Creative work often is. Unlike academic citations, which promise clarity and legibility, creative references resist that neatness. They pull at something deeper: recognition, unease, curiosity. The discomfort here is not a failure—it is an opening. A way to signal that we are about to enter a conversation not about how to cite, but why to cite differently. And what becomes possible when we do so. Return to Laughter was one of the earliest recognized attempts to smuggle the real contradictions of fieldwork—its absurdities, its ambiguities, its ethical failures—into narrative form. It turned anthropological knowledge into fiction not to fictionalize the truth, but to show how unstable, relational, and storied the truth always already was. We borrow it here not to revive a canon, but to unsettle it. To take that early experiment in form and let it resonate inside new terrain: a smuggling route, a borderland, a different kind of field. This act of adaptation becomes a kind of “unfootnoted” citation—a citation not of content, but of method. A way of saying: form matters. Mood matters. Lineage matters. What if our citational practices could hold all that, too? So, we begin here: with mimicry as a method. With a borrowed opening that neither claims nor conceals its origin, but lets it shimmer in a new context. From here, we will unfold what it might mean to reference creative work not just as evidence, but as atmosphere, rhythm, rupture. We will ask what citation might become if we allowed it to breathe. To echo. To feel. And so, we turn, slowly, toward the tangle. Because to cite is never merely to reference; it is to trace and retrace the filaments of an epistemic web, a web that binds and blinds in equal measure. Citation is architecture: scaffolding the edifice of legitimacy, holding up who gets to be seen as foundational, whose words endure, whose absence goes unnoticed. These absences are not incidental. They're structural, a consequence of how power circulates—who gets remembered, who gets misfiled, who gets called decorative, and who gets called theoretical. Citation is not only the history of ideas—it is the history of exclusion. In creative anthropology, these exclusions take on another texture entirely. Here, in the unruly zones of image, form, sound, and performance, the omissions do not simply happen. They are built in. Experimental forms—films, visual essays, embodied ethnographies—are positioned as excess, as unruly data, as too beautiful to be serious, too serious to be beautiful. Their refusal to behave like “proper” scholarship—footnoted, static, expository—is met not with curiosity but suspicion. Their refusal is read not as rigor, but as rebellion. And rebellion, as we know, is rarely rewarded. The discipline polices its borders not just through what it includes, but how it includes. Rigor becomes a cudgel. Citation becomes a gate. The illusion is that knowledge is cumulative, tidy, traceable. But creative work reminds us that knowledge is also felt, fractured, uncontainable, confusing. Which is why it so often goes uncited—not because it lacks substance, but because it threatens the structure that pretends to define what substance is. To be excluded from citation, in this context, is not just to be overlooked. It is to be overwritten. To have your work rendered illegible by the very system that claims to organize the field. Creative work makes a mess of that system—by design. And the system responds by pretending it never happened. But resistance is not enough. Merely noting these exclusions does not change their force. To cite creatively is not to add another line to an already bloated reference list. It is to rupture the list itself. In some cases, to be referred to in context, but more importantly to ask: what if citation weren't a ledger of obligation, but a map of resonance? What if it could be felt as well as read? This means we must reject tokenism—the performance of inclusion that leaves the canon intact. Because to cite a creative work as decoration, as diversity, as flair, is to gut it of its force. It is to remove its teeth. Citing creative work well—citing it with care—requires something else entirely. It asks us to approach not extractively, but relationally. Not as an illustration, but as an interlocutor. To name a creative piece is not enough. We must let it speak inside our work, shift our tone, fracture our arguments, delay our conclusions. We must let its rhythm interrupt our grammar. This is not simply about the politics of inclusion. It is about the conditions of knowledge itself. When we do this—when we cite not just who said what, but how it was said, what it felt like, what it moved in us—something shifts. The edges of the discipline fray. New epistemologies become possible. The archive begins to breathe again. And so, we do not advocate for citation guides that tidy all this up, that create a new protocol for creative work and slot it into a bureaucratic footnote. That is not the point. The discipline does not need more citation rules. It needs more citational courage. More citational experimentation. Which is why we offer two gestures. Not guidelines. Not policies. Just openings. The first is imitation. That is, to cite through echo. Through a gesture, a structure, a line of light. Through mimicry that is not theft but tribute. This is what the opening of this essay attempted: a reshaping of Bohannan's Return to Laughter not to steal her voice, but to sound it differently. Not to reproduce her narrative, but to press her form into new terrain. A citational murmur, not a shout. The second is to cite the creativity of a work—not just its data, its insight, its “takeaway,” but the mode of thinking that it makes possible. To reference not just what a work says, but what it does—how it moves, how it fractures, how it refuses. What follows will illustrate these approaches. They are imperfect. They will not suit every piece, or every reader. They are not systems; they are signs, suggestions. They point to a citational practice that is atmospheric, affective, and unfinished. That lives in gesture and texture. That trusts readers to feel their way as they go. And if all of this started with Bohannan, perhaps it is worth saying: Return to Laughter was never really about return. It was about what happens when you cannot go back. When the field changes you, and you are left trying to find a form that can hold that change. Maybe that's what we are doing here. Trying to find a form—of citation, of voice, of relation—that can carry what we now know, and how we came to know it. Creative works resist the clean lines of traditional citation; they do not fit neatly into the footnotes and bibliographies that discipline knowledge into traditionally structured, manageable forms. They demand another kind of engagement, one that recognizes their formal and affective force—not as ornamental supplements to theory, but as theoretical interlocutors in their own right. To cite a poem, a film, a performance in an academic piece is not just to name it but to acknowledge its force—to treat it as something that acts upon thought and feeling rather than merely illustrating it. In doing so, we enter a fragile but radical space, one where knowledge is not a fixed commodity but a living, shifting practice, one that changes shape with each encounter, each new presentation, each new reader, each new viewer. Before presenting the examples, it is important to be explicit about what is at stake. When we reference a creative work through imitation, we do not assume that every reader will recognize the original. Nor is recognition required. What matters is the encounter: the echo that signals a prior voice, the trace that invites curiosity. For those unfamiliar with the source, imitation should function as an opening rather than an exclusion. It should gesture toward another work, another way of knowing, and invite the reader to pursue it. In the examples that follow, the act of imitation serves not only as homage but as pedagogy—encouraging recognition where possible, and exploration where necessary. The still below is drawn from Falling, the forthcoming essay film by Eva van Roekel (Forthcoming) that explores the ethical and emotional complexities of making cinema as an ethnographer engaged with individuals implicated in crimes against humanity in Argentina—military officers that many befriended interlocutors consider “genociders.” The film wrestles not only with its subject matter, but also with the question of form—how to shape a visual language that can hold such weighty film process. Scattered throughout are brief sequences and carefully composed shots that recall, without directly replicating, the seminal ethnographic film Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a by and The is not as but as a act of The film from and where the of its and its by its of the narrative itself. than the work in in a kind of visual citation through the work, the of left the of to their the of the and its visual are the of ethnographic and where and often not through but through tone, and method. These are not just are of quiet recognition that for works that have their own of their field through a In this imitation is not in the but a act of and into the very of the film itself. of at the the of our and at the in the with the and The becomes a ethnographic citation not through name or but through tone, and emotional the voice, its affective rather than its It is a kind of imitation that as it homage that the and of To cite we is not merely to reference her in a but to her to shape our This mean our academic or echo the of the we It mean into a not our its its with the of is a of ethnographic which works through imitation of form in From her own in the and her own history of in the for that speak to of and the of an approach to the first between and in the which a for of and The politics of and the of into in here. the a it as but who is the and how does this a of the the the for of imitation a much more radical and more form of this happens through the shape two of the and the and of which directly reference the shape and form of the these as of a of and of They to do this in just the way we are with imitation as an or perhaps a and space, the into the to shape the of a her academic Just as the to between and it to the of words on the her to the of this In this as and Which of these might we also for in to cite this might doing so be on not only toward but for the that we might and our in to into a different of with and through What and and all show is that imitation in creative is not It is a form of citational ethics that it. It makes the that shape our gesture, rhythm, image, and and through the shape of as form, and force. In cases, citation is not about or It is about what us and how we with it. To cite creatively is not simply to reference but to be moved enter into a with the work, its texture to unsettle the of When we cite a film imitation, we are not merely its but its of and how it the the in the where does its When we cite a imitation, we are its rhythm to the of our own a field of where and To cite in this way is to the function of traditional citation, to the that knowledge must be or It is also to creative as for to breathe in new This kind of citation does not simply it It toward creativity by its by holding the that what might still be To cite creatively is not merely to a here or a a a and it or It is to recognize when a work begins to for you, with you, and against It is to that what the creative piece its its a kind of a kind of that does not just but makes and creative knowledge that through gesture and form as much as through The citation, becomes about and more about not who you cite, but what kind of way of thinking and enter when you we what it might mean to take creative works as theoretical We offer a of to be but how creative anthropological through their form as much as their content, the of These are works that resist works that the fracture the and the of academic here is not only to these but to what it means to let on our own to how we cite, how we and how we This is a To cite creatively is to enter into a with the work that its power to to to In doing so, we begin to trace a new citational to form, and the of creative We can this in the work of Their is often as but to read it only as a is to its radical ethnographic does not simply from narrative and to the to to work does not on the of the but from an that voice, and of In a piece on or anthropology, we might be to cite to to gesture toward But that is not enough. To cite her merely for is to the theoretical of her method. What we let her narrative our own narrative What if we let the question What does ask of What does it into the language the the very shape of the What if form is not but a to theory, but in To cite creatively is to enter into conversation with a form that that on and that knowledge through and citation is to not just to what is said, but to how it is to let that shift the of our own take another whose Because When the does not merely in it. at the of and performance, a where becomes something else affective, work does not neatly in a citation; it and it To with is to a of but of are and is not is not rendered The academic her In New for in that the of the performance in academic and and the of to a that is as as it is In a one the of or the of ethnographic might be to a as a of But that the method. does not it. is not is the is not is the in and To cite is to her work to interrupt your own to let its rhythm unsettle the of your It is to the academic and into the This becomes in her performance at the for A and the of that not simply a a not merely and Through and of resistance and to let in the performance and citation into a living, not but into one another in a of In a piece on or the of should not be as ornament. work It a citational that rupture the that and refusal to shape form as well as What if we let the interrupt our What if we allowed to as of not as to be What if we let performance our structure, our affective To cite is to cite rupture. It is to feel form shift It is to let not just through but through and It is to treat not only as a mode of but as a of and The with another a form that the of academic is as a as but as method. A of of of ethical These are not they are the They not as but as as as In doing so, asks us to what evidence, and what form its To cite is to take the as to with rather than A traditional citation might his or his of the But that that from the affective and his form what if we let the shape the of our or its in our own up the mode of the the refusal to too the ask us to consider citation as as and work is not simply to be is to be who a citational form that one that that in the that does not for but with the discomfort of To cite well is to resist the citation often It is to let the structure of the just its in our own form. To let its What does this you is your work And who is left for an us to breathe with a work, and us to us to To cite the is to in fracture and In and and of and and and to the of that structure military in the of and for the The not as an but as an implicated with a and an to the of itself. or if a the if a does not her was not with the was with in this making at In an in this The us the of a to a where is a this is not in own but from by a making a for a upon in the essay here. The that a be of dust and the is not simply is The of the are not of they are its its and its grammar. The is not only to but also to be implicated in the scaffolding of of an already first the in and it in her and practice from and this is neither nor is the of the field and how might such work be in a academic on or could and her of the of in military But to do so be to the very that her To cite well is not simply to is to to in to recognize and as theoretical It is to that are not always they are they rupture. they they ethnographic The these to cite is to into a where ethnographic into the of story, and In the does not simply a into the of and The narrative it into into kinship into epistemic does not fiction to ethnographic it to to show how be rendered the of ethnographic form. we are to cite we must for the to enter our own the of that knowledge is not only in but in and In his the becomes not merely a but an a for to the on which our anthropological claims and To work with The in academic is not simply to it for about or It is to let its form and narrative press against our own of The work invites us to with rather than to acknowledge the and that the we Citing well mean for in our arguments, that ethnographic not in but in in in the refusal of It mean the not as but as And it mean that in the of and the find a than a a they can neither nor What these voice, of field ethnographic not simply that they are It is that they the lines between form and argument, and evidence, and They us to what we mean when we something or In each the formal are not they are the very means by which is and knowledge is To borrow the form as well as the of a creative work is not only a gesture of It is a A on the that epistemologies in and can unsettle the that have long knowledge as and In as in field and are not they are where different of the real They do not simply they in the it might to on to what cannot be or neatly To let these into our own is not to It is to it different It is to shift the of what as from the scaffolding of to the of resonance, and To with fracture is to acknowledge that much of what be without also in the of these are not of They are of to a already already unfinished. This a of a canon, but a A to how we with creative works in our To cite such works well is not merely to but to their to press to to the of our own at the and To our own way of It is to let rhythm interrupt argument, to let voice, to let These are not acts of but of that take the and stakes of creative In we are not just a we are and with its To citation is to the very conditions which we are allowed to know, to to speak as It is to ask: do we our What do we carry and Citation is not merely a it is a of A of A of influence, resonance, and Creative with not only an practice, it is a It the of the where are for In such a citation becomes and knowledge a to be Creative works do not well such They ask us to To again. To be To cite creatively is to from the of and toward the of It invites It is not about but about It asks not just what do you but how you to know and who moved with you the It is not But neither is is is This kind of citational imitation, resonance, or formal a act of A in the A refusal to by the of a system that what it can To cite creatively is to are of knowing, and they We offer these openings. Not conclusions. They are and But they point toward a citational politics that is not merely but Not decorative, but Not merely about who gets but about what of knowledge are possible in the In the citation is a we about where we from and who we us that resist the of that borrow, that Return to Laughter to become not just a we but a form we Not to to but to let it to Because the of very well not on how we on we are to cite

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.