Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

Anthropologists are often insecure about using dialogue in ethnographic vignettes and revert to familiar academic formats, such as block quotations. This is partly for good reason: They don’t want to misrepresent an actual conversation that occurred. This is not something fiction writers worry about. And there is a tension in anthropology between writing notes or a report, which might be dry but has the veneer of truth about it, and narrative. A well-told story might be much