17 June, 2026

When it came time to write my bachelor’s thesis, I was assigned an advisor from a pool of social science professors; an unfortunate consequence of scholarship at a small, public, woefully underfunded university. To my profound dismay, I was introduced to a man who would become my enemy for the next four months: a political science professor, expert on the history of Canadian Liberalism, guy who felt like a less-obnoxious, more-socialist incarnation of Kendall Roy. Almost seven feet tall, a fan of basketball and hip hop, bald, white, adult son who lived in Japan. I was not the only student he was supervising—there were a handful from his own department, and even another student from mine—but I was the only one that seemed to come up against a wall with him.

My first hurdle was to convince him on the merits of my topic. He came into supervising theses because, as he’d later tell me over a beer, he liked to ensure that the next generation of social scientists could prove themselves to be capable of academic rigour. As is often the case, he was particularly devoted to ensuring that nobody affiliated in any way with his work could be seen as diminishing the already tenuous grip social scientists had on “science” and being “scientists”. When I sat down and told him I wanted to do my dissertation work on werewolves, he balked.

It took a lot of explaining, justifying, and countless frustrating revisions of a research proposal before I finally convinced him. A few months later, when I handed in my first draft, he balked again. The problem, this time, was the tone of my writing. It was too casual, too prosaic. I was spinning a yarn, telling a story—it wasn’t scientific. It wasn’t academic. By now I had become familiar enough with him that I felt capable of fighting back. He was not an expert in my field, he did not have experience in my field, and as this was meant to be an opportunity for me to show off my understanding of my chosen field, he ought to let me work. My petition was successful, but the topic continues to bob to the surface over and over.

So why exactly are anthropologists such good writers, and why is their technical writing so different to that of sociologists, archaeologists, political scientists, etc.?

One of the first pieces of ethnographic writing I was exposed to was Clifford Geertz’ Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. It is spell-binding, reading more like a Hunter S Thompson piece than a hallmark of academic scholarship. Atmosphere and setting are vividly described, actions punch across the page, broken here and there by tongue-in-cheek innuendos and jokes. It is no wonder that Geertz is held up as the pinnacle of such writing, as he co-opted and introduced the term ‘thick description’ to describe his ethnographic method. By describing not only the people you are studying, but their actions, how they occur in a physical space, and your own actions, interactions, and engagements as the ethnographer overcome one of ethnographies largest challenges: scientific study of the subjective.

Anthropology’s problem is one of interpretation, and its a problem that ethnographers have been chewing on for centuries. In the past, the necessity of ethnography to pass through a human being led to horrific racism, violence, plague, and colonial terror. These days, you are told cautionary tales about anthropologists who violated the creed of their craft and joined up with the CIA, becoming blacklisted from professional organizations, conferences, and academic positions. Because fieldwork is person-dependent—you go out to the field, you talk to people, you watch them, you take notes, you go home and write about it—a second ethnographer travelling to the same place may get different results, just by talking to different people or even having a slightly different relationship with the same people. Everything that you, the ethnographer, experience and understand passes first through your eyes, and your brain. There is no laboratory, there are no values to be plotted on a graph.

The only way to solve this problem is to put yourself in the story, too. Your conversations, your actions, your thoughts and decisions all become necessary components for a reader (professor, peer reviewer, etc.) to fully understand your work and interpretation. When studying ghost hunters in a creepy, perilously creaky old building, it is as important for me to describe how I feel sitting in the dark, listening to the shrieking of technical equipment and the hiss of radio static, as it is to describe every time my informants gasp or murmur to each other that they all suddenly got goosebumps. Our informants have selflessly agreed to share their world with us and our audience, so the least we can do is join them.

Ethnographic writing feels like a story because it is. A narrator—most often a courageous, go-getting, over-zealous, bumbling, dorky graduate student—sets off for a world quite different from the one that they are used to. Upon entering these strange frontiers, the narrator quickly learns that they knew less than they thought. They make friends with the locals, overcome any number of faux pass, partake in some thrilling adventures, and come out a better, wiser, more interesting person. By the time they return home from the field, the ethnographer is often changed. It’s a condensed, lipstick mirror of what Joseph Campbell coined The Hero’s Journey.

This idea of narrative academic writing has been on my mind lately because, with a bit of free time during a scholastic sabbatical, I’ve been working on getting my prosaic muscles back in shape. I haven’t sat down and written fiction, or even a personal essay, in months (if not years). Like going back to drawing after a long break, I find that everything I write seems flat when I read it back, even when the picture I held in my mind was lush, fleshy, something you could almost hold in your hands. After a lot of re-reading, re-writing, and contemplation, I’ve concluded that my problem is I don’t slow down. I’m the kind of person that tries to let the hard candy melt slowly on my tongue, but I always end up biting it without thinking. My active observation has gotten rusty, and it has rusted up my ability to describe the world.

So I am going back to the basics. For at least an hour every day I’ve been going outside with naught but my notebook, and writing down in great detail everything I see—the shape and movement of the clouds, the direction and taste of the wind, the birds I hear, the plants around me, how water looks as it flows over different stones. I made this website as an attempt to force myself to be more casual and open, and to share the things I am working on without the pressure of professional academia; a place I could post writing that maybe isn’t perfect, but is good enough, without feeling the desire to shamefully throw myself off a high bridge. Writing anything, even something clunky, is better than writing nothing at all, and I must overcome my neurotic fear of bearing any part of my soul to other people—especially the part transposed in everything I’ve ever written.