Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The Power of the BetweenAn Anthropological Odyssey$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey

Paul Stoller

Print publication date: 2008

Print ISBN-13: 9780226775340

Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226775364.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use.date: 30 June 2022

Memoir

Memoir

Chapter:
(p.160) 22 Memoir
Source:
The Power of the Between
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226775364.003.0023

This chapter presents the author's thoughts about memoirs. Writing a memoir is something that many anthropologists may want to pursue at some point in their careers. Memoir is important because as a genre, it can extend substantially the readership for things ethnographic. However, the memoir is also a very tricky enterprise. In far too many cases, the author is so focused on recounting, sometimes in excruciating detail, the intricacies of her or his life that the text can become a tedious exercise in solipsism. Illness narratives are among the most popular memoirs. Many of these works have merit, for they connect the experience of the author to thousands of people in relatively similar circumstances. The greatest strength of these memoirs is their penchant for storytelling. Their great weakness is a paucity of insight.

Keywords:   writing, memoirs, anthropologists, illness narratives, storytelling

Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.