The Tyranny of the Abstract

Abstract

Submitting an invited text for the Anthropology and Humanism festschrift “Hundreds for Katie,” I experienced cognitive dissonance between the objectives of ethnographic writing championed by Kathleen Stewart and the journal's submission requirements. The insistence that every submission must contain keywords and an abstract signifies deeper issues with academic writing. Specific forms of writing enforce the disciplinary norms of Thomas Kuhn's “normal science.” To “write difference”, we may need to write differently. The paper draws inter alia on works by Kathleen Stewart, Lauren Berlant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, Walter Benjamin, James Clifford, Georges Bataille, and members of the Mass–Observation group.