I picked up Kirin Narayan’s Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov back in November at the Anthropology meetings in San Francisco, but I finally got around to reading it now. I was really impressed with this book and its practical advice and useful writing exercises. Narayan, who is an ethnographer as well as a novelist and memoirist, understands that the product of most social scientific research is a written document, whether it is a dissertation, a book, a book chapter or a journal article. Too often graduate training focuses solely on the methodology of doing a study. Little attention is paid to how one writes up the results. This is a beautifully written guide to writing. I highly recommend it to any aspiring (or seasoned) cultural anthropologist.
