Developing an Argument Throughline for Your Cultural Anthropology Monograph

This blog post is about how to organize your arguments and develop an argument throughline in your cultural anthropology monograph.

In academic writing, scholars make arguments and work with concepts and themes.

Arguments and unique concepts form the "currency" of intellectual exchange, and so it's worth taking the time to reflect on and uncover what arguments lie in your ethnography and anthropological theorizing. It's common for arguments to be buried, not developed clearly enough, or for there to be too many, with no decision made about which to center.

With concepts, they should be explained appropriately, depending on your goals for the text and your knowledge of how familiar the reader will be with them. You can assume an academic audience will understand “cultural capital,” for example, but they are unlikely to understand field concepts like “veze” in Bosnia or “eating the oath” in Liberia without significant explanation.

All this can potentially confuse or overwhelm the reader, and a lot of my work as a developmental editor deals with finding and evaluating arguments (and to a lesser degree, evaluating the presentation of concepts) in a book manuscript or journal article.

When working on an academic book manuscript, consider carefully what arguments you want to make in each chapter, what the big argument (I call this the overarching argument*) you want to make is, and how all the arguments in your book relate to one another. This is one reason why spending time developing your book proposal is a good idea: a well-developed book proposal will include all these arguments, although it is normal and very common not to have clarity on all your arguments when you write and submit the proposal.

Unless you are deliberately breaking with norms and writing experimental ethnography, your book’s arguments will work like a tree, with a clear hierarchy between them. The overarching argument is the tree trunk, and then you have chapter- and section-level arguments that form the branches and twigs.

Finding the overarching argument in your cultural anthropology monograph

Ideally, by the end of your revisions and peer review, you will have settled on one overarching argument. This is your book’s main takeaway. This argument should strike a balance between not being too general as a to be a bland truism, while not being too specific to be of little interest to scholars in other subdisciplines or fields. If the argument can be applied to other contexts, that is great in terms of widening your potential audience, which your publisher will be happy about.

In cultural anthropology, this overarching argument could be a theoretical argument or an ethnographic argument.

Chapter-level arguments

Chapter-level arguments are like branches that link to the main argument(s). If you follow this approach, then the reader will have digested the overarching argument by the time they reach the end of the book. You can think of these arguments like Russian dolls—some of the more specific arguments will fit neatly inside the more general ones. You will also find a few arguments that do not relate in an obvious way to the others. These are potential candidates for pruning, depending on their relative importance.

If an argument is important but does not relate clearly to the others, you can sacrifice a certain amount of cohesion and include that argument; how much you prune the argument tree is up to you. Ethnography definitely has room for a little more messiness than most other disciplines because human experience (including your experience in the field) is messy, and there can be details that are important to include for ethnographic understanding but that may be tangential to your main argument.

That said, unless we’ve explicitly discussed doing some kind of unconventional or experimental ethnography, then I do insist on coming up with an argument throughline** for your book.

Developing an argument throughline

To figure out your argument throughline, you should first come up with an argument tree that details your overarching argument and main chapter-level arguments.

Then you should be on the look out for some kind of progression or pattern across the chapter-level arguments you make; something that links back to the overarching argument.

If you returning to a field site over many years, this throughline could be about the timeline, how a situation is changing over time.

For instance, a situation is steadily getting better, worse, or is a cycle.

The argument throughline could also be thematic. For instance, in a study of factory workers, you note how several sources of worker agency have been taken away by various managerial and technological developments.

Whichever approach you take, the argument throughline will involve telling some kind of progression to the arguments across the book chapters.

A note on other approaches

You may wish to take a different approach or write an experimental text, an approaching I called Editing Otherwise—I welcome these kinds of projects and enjoy working on them. But for a first monograph in particular, I often recommend playing it safe, with a simple hierarchy of arguments.

Uncovering and advising on how to organize arguments in a book is one of the key parts of my job when I do a full developmental edit of a monograph draft, and this can be done before peer review, or alongside it—because developmental editing insights focus on big-picture aspects of how the material is organized and styled, whereas peer review is focused on expert evaluation and judging of the book.

This analysis draws heavily on Scott Norton’s book Developmental Editing, and in his second edition, he also emphasizes in a new section, “A Few Notes on Cultural Assumptions,” how his approach to arguments emerged from a German tradition of creating taxonomies.

*Scott Norton calls this the master thesis.

**Laura Portwood-Stacer refers to this as a narrative arc, but following a conversation with the developmental editor Jenny Gavacs, I prefer to call this an argument throughline to avoid confusion with the idea of a narrative arc in fiction and narrative-first (rather than argument-first) nonfiction. If you are writing a trade nonfiction or crossover ethnography, your book may be narrative-first rather than argument-first, but that’s a topic for a different blog post.