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In his essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Walter Benjamin (1968) urges us to tell stories that are charged, inexhaustibly, with mystery and possibility. How we tell our stories, and how those stories release insight, matters. As anthropologists, when we render social worlds, we often pivot between ethnographic scenes and various forms of explanation, theory, and analysis. The tools of creative writing have much to offer to anthropology, perhaps namely, a means of enacting[1] a scene or world or set of conditions, rather than simply describing them—albeit “thickly” (Geertz 1973). Creative writing can help us embed analysis within the language itself (or the syntax or the structure of the writing), rather than only extend a separate explanation. Formal choices can do analytic work, alongside the thinking through of theory, and help us render the ethics and politics of our studies. Moreover, the effect of “literary anthropology” is ethnographic writing that feels more “collaborat[ive]” with its audience (Bessire and Ralph 2025). The reader is carried along—co-experiencing the epiphany and discovery that the argument produces.
1. Can’t-Put-Down: Write propulsive books. Rather than allowing our books to be sites for quick extraction of citations and “useful” concepts, the study (and practice) of creative writing can give you the tools to write something that your reader finds engrossing, as well as theoretically rigorous in a way that invites longer engagement. Increasingly, academics are writing books with the goal of bringing the reader in to stay from one cover to the other. Many are succeeding!
2. Hone Concept Alongside and Through Craft: Anthropology’s “Writing Culture” movement led by James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) reckoned with the methods, epistemologies, and the reflexivity of the ethnographer’s position, seeking new ways of writing to challenge ethnographic realism and to gesture towards the partiality of truth. But to many of us now, that movement feels a bit stale, a turning inward that risked self-indulgence, and at the expense of other crucial lenses and forms of critique.
We can hone our representational strategies all while writing dynamic books which rigorously engage political economy, non-discursive forms of material life, and critiques which continue to decolonize the discipline. We can use literary tools and craft our voices as writers, as we interrogate our objects of analysis and scrutinize our own positions. Now, in 2026, anthropologists are publishing books that are as analytically lively as they are vivid to read, making them more resonant both within and beyond academia.
3. Image as Method and Concept: The anthropologist Lisa Stevenson (2014) asks us to pivot our gaze to images (vivid, sensory details) within our fieldwork, as mysterious, generative wells. Indeed, image can be a kind of method, which centers the body and singularity, butts up against the edge of the discursive, makes space for contradiction and partiality—as well as potentially invites entry into the conversation by a wider public (see also Feser 2025).
Moreover, by sifting through the teeming, sensory tumble we have observed as ethnographers, we can find the imagethat does bigger conceptual and metaphorical work of the book. I am talking about that opening scene in Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Biehl 2005), where Catarina holds a doll and pedals on a stationary bicycle, moving in her own way but also immobilized by the structures that impede her. I mean Chino dancing on top of the moving train, a charged enactment of the precarity and danger of his life as a smuggler, but also of his own joyful brazenness, in Jason De Leon’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (2024).
4. Build an Unfolding World through Scene: Scenes (real-world events shaped into a compelling narrative) are the cornerstone of creative writing in prose, and they can transform academic writing too. Writing scenes with a close attunement to the textures of the world you experienced in the field allows your reader to co-experience both the charged and sometimes bewildering accumulation, as well as the insights that build therein. In their recent essay in Anthropology and Humanism, “Literary Anthropology: A User’s Guide” (2025), Lucas Bessire and Laurence Ralph describe how ethnographic scenes might “convey the process of coming to know something fundamentally mysterious over time.” In this logic, scenes work over time to crystallize epiphanies and concepts which the reader might participate in, rather than coming after the concept as evidence from the singular and authoritative ethnographic interpreter.
5. Perfect the Art of Balance: Architecting an effective balance between narrative, theory, and histories on the page, without losing momentum, is a key skill to writing compelling books. To craft an effective scene, you need to learn to tinker with the ratios between key elements (such as exposition, dialogue, action, and interiority), and then thread them through with concepts and genealogies.
6. Hone Narrative—Time, Tension, Desire: Knowing where to start your narrative, how to launch it, and how to keep the structure taut to the end is a skill––one that (done right) will transform your work. Whether it’s an essay or a full manuscript, identifying the tensions that drive the questions is both an ethical question and essential for compelling writing. You will want to ask: Where does the story begin, and which arcs do I follow? How does a charged set of present (political-economic-social) circumstances unfold over time, and what kind of conceptual intervention might this narrative reveal? And ultimately, what are the questions that the reader (and writer) have that can only be answered by reading the book? Then you will communicate the urgency of the material through storytelling that lily-pads your reader across a narrative (as well as conceptual) throughline.
7. Control Narrative Distance: Narrative distance—that is, the distance between yourself as the writer and the material you are writing about––is a seemingly simple concept but one that’s harder to control effectively. Closeness to your material brings your reader into direct touch with the world you’re representing, and retrospective distance from that world can sharpen your gaze and insights. The study of creative writing can help you to learn how (and when) to modulate that distance: how to bring details, interlocutors, events, places into immediate, intimate focus and then pan out into insight and analysis. Deft movement between these two modes and positionalities shows, in writing, how we come to know, as ethnographers.
8. Enactment in Language: The study of creative writing is the study of language and what it can do. Through careful deployment of varied diction and sentence structures, you can control the pacing and rhythm of the release of epiphanies in your prose; evoke moods, climates, and phenomenological conditions; and ultimately, if you wish, enact theory. In this way, your theory isn’t something you just tell your reader; rather, it’s something they can embody and experience through the reading.
9. How to Represent your Interlocutors: Interlocutors are the most important people in our books, and we want to make sure we are representing them both accurately and ethically, as well as portraying those interactions in ways that make both the voices and concepts of the book ring out. In creative writing we lean hard on dialogue to say the unsaid, the unsayable, and hint at the unknowable. And in real life, such as we experience in our research, dialogue is full of gaps, silences, and redirection. It is charged with lived moments: a gaze away from the researcher, a reaction to a noise. By both listening more closely and representing these encounters more fully, we hone our own insights and produce a richer account.
10. Develop your Voice: Your voice is your own and should be as distinctive on the page as it is in the room. The study and practice of creative writing can help you to craft that voice––turn the dials up and down on tone, syntax, diction––to animate your argument and make your reader want to keep company with its author and their inquiry until the end. Having a unique voice can make the difference between your book being something a reader needs to read for a purpose and a piece of work that will linger with them and reconfigure their seeing.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, Walter. [1968] 2007. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Bessire, Lucas, and Laurence Ralph. 2025. “Literary Anthropology: A User’s Guide.” Anthropology and Humanism.
Bieh, Joao. 2013. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
De Leon, Jason. 2024. Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. New York: Viking.
Feser, Ali. 2025. “Uncertain Futures, Doubled Freedoms, and a Defense of Misreading Marx.” Visual Anthropology Review.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press.
Zia, Ather. 2019. “Ethnographic Poetry: A Conversation with Ather Zia.” Allegra Lab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism.
Zia, Ather. 2024. “Ethnographic Poetry as Decolonial Feminist Praxis.” In The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology. New York: Routledge.
[1] See also Ather Zia (2019, 2024) for a discussion of how she (Ather Zia), myself (Nomi Stone), and Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor developed an initial concept of “Enactment” at a Society for Humanistic Anthropology Event at the American Anthropological Association in 2014. Zia describes it as “a poetic enactment of theory in action.”