I came upon a provocative text, Michael Taussig's And the Garden Is You: Essays on Fieldwork, Writingwork, and Readingwork [2024] in a Chicago University Press ad in the most recent NYRB, and the subtitle reminded me that Taussig is an anthropologist. His Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses baffled me when I got it 5 years ago ("...explores the complex and interwoven concepts of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and alterity, the opposition of Self and Other... demonstrates how the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism and the idea of alterity has become increasingly unstable..." [Amazon blurb]), but perhaps I should try again.
Anyway, I was so attracted by the subtitle (Fieldwork, Writingwork, and Readingwork) that I ordered it, with the thought that writingwork and readingwork were just what I think I'm engaged in. The Author's Note and first chapter riveted my attention, at least in part because of the puzzlement of "The Manglewort" (a word I'd never encountered) and the accompanying image:
...found on a coast far away. Or did it find me? I can't recall. Plucked out of obscurity like that, unknown, unknowable, beguiling and ever strange, it stands for the shapeless shape of a writing born long ago from my experience with Shamanism and colonialism in southwest Colombia....
...which is very similar to some peculiar specimens I harbor:
Taussig writes most provocatively about fieldwork, the sine qua non and rite of passage of professional anthropology, and along the way he draws a parallel between his Manglewort ("my magic stone") and Kafka's Odradek, from the short story The Cares of a Family Man:
...the narrator states that Odradek has a lingering presence in his home, often not seen but his presence is noticeable. It is discovered that Odradek can speak, another human capability.Throughout the story, the narrator provides an extensive analysis of Odradek, attempting to emphasize how the object has taken on a life of its own, displaying life like qualities and traits, as well as his silent relationship with the object...
Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread by Anya Meksin at The Kafka Project (includes the text of Kafka's [very] short story)
...disjunction between a lifeless physical reality and the deluded expectations humans have of that reality points to a larger context in which the figure of Odradek once again finds a central location. This time, Odradek stands for the entire physical world, not just manmade objects, but all of nature, which human beings incessantly probe for hidden, transcendent mystery, for some locked up higher truth, accessible to the human soul... There is a terrible incongruity between our yearning, grasping consciousness, and the impenetrable, eternal reality of the dead universe. In fact, the accident of our thinking, knowing minds in this barren world of objective physicality is just as improbable and shocking as Odradek's appearance in the family man's dwelling... Just like visualizing Odradek requires attempting to coalesce a number of contradictory details into one composite figure, so too interpreting the story requires attempting to coalesce a number of enigmatic sentences into one composite meaning for the story, or meaning for Odradek.
We have here a creature of the Imagination, with mysterious relationships to reality as experienced and as reported. The written products of fieldwork are just such enigmatic beings, as Taussig presents them:
...there were indeed dimples, pixels, curves and undulations, protuberances and declivities in the text I eventually composed (or did it compose me?), a work in which the content became the form, terror montaged with healing, and interracial networks of magical attribution were legion, including that between the writer and the writing. For yes! The writing is Other, too, magic songs and all. In other words, through mimetic transfer the object of study became the subject driving the work such that it was no longer about something but was that thing in its enchanted form...Why was writing never even mentioned in my graduate student days or, for that matter, in most of my academic life? In seminars we went chasing ideas, not style. Writing would look after itself. But then why did it seem most of the time a chore, even torture, when it could be the source of pleasure and the primary tool of research. Yes! That's right. Writing in itself is investigation. As you write, so the ideas and associations flow. A new world opens. Then another. Why, it's just like fieldwork! At this point I need to emphasize that mine is not a plea for "better" writing, whatever that is, but for shaggy dog alternatives to what I refer to as "agribusiness writing," meaning most of what gets published in the social sciences. That sort of writing seems to be modeled on the no-nonsense tone of a legal brief, expunging the fiber of lived experience with its complex extremes of emotions and fantasy....