Let’s be honest. Anthropology is plagued by dull, pretentious, and sometimes even meaningless prose: language that is at best imprecise and at worst incomprehensible. Now and then, examples of clear and evocative writing emerge from the literature like flowers from the weeds. Yet many anthropologists will privately acknowledge that the general state of the discipline’s prose is poor. Some say it openly, though often only toward the end of their careers, perhaps because by then, the conventions for what can and cannot be said in public have worn thin. Daniel Goldstein, emeritus professor at Rutgers University, describes anthropologists as the kind of people who “can make the most interesting subjects sound boring.” Despite studying the burning issues of our time, anthropologists often produce writing that is “astonishingly dull”. Some of it is weighed down by jargon “simply to show off or to cover the fact that the writer does not really know what he or she is talking about” (Goldstein 2016: 10).
It took me years before I learned that many of my colleagues share this view. Perhaps my naivety was because I had not grown up in an academic family. Early in my studies, I struggled to understand academic books and seminars. I thought that I was not smart enough, while everyone else comprehended without much effort. In my first months at the university, I made a personal dictionary to decipher the tribal language others around me seemed to master (I still have it, tucked away in a drawer in my office). With practice I became more like the insiders. I learned to use passive verb forms and odd nouns instead of ordinary sentences. I wrote about how “phenomena” were “constituted” and peppered my prose with words like “temporality” and “reification.” By changing how I spoke and wrote, I imagined that I belonged.
But there was something fake about the academic community I was becoming part of. As I began working as a professional academic, the extent of fakery became clearer. At prestigious seminars, visiting scholars would talk about “layered temporalities,” “inter-scalar” concepts, and increasingly in recent years, “entanglements” and “assemblages.” Attendees would nod importantly but afterward, over a beer, some of us juniors would admit we had not understood much of what had been said. Occasionally, even the seniors betrayed a similar sentiment. Once, a visiting anthropologist gave a seminar at my department. In the hallway afterward I overheard a conversation between two older professors on their way to lunch. “Did you understand anything she said,” said one to the other. Her colleague shook her head as they entered the elevator.
Not all anthropological writing is opaque, and some of it is excellent, living up to the discipline’s lofty ideals as a bottom-up mode of inquiry that transports readers to other worlds and challenges their assumptions. The real question, however, is not whether anthropology occasionally lives up to its promise, but why it so regularly betrays it, allowing insincere and sometimes impenetrable prose to flourish.
Colleagues have regularly sounded the alarm about anthropology’s tendency to turn the intensity of fieldwork experiences into dull and introverted rumination (Eriksen 2005; Shah 2023). But judging from a recent study, the academic habits of obscure writing are only getting worse. In 2024, journalists at The Economist analyzed 350,000 PhD abstracts from 1812 to the present using a well-established readability test. They found that academic writing has become increasingly difficult to read over the last 50 years, with the social sciences and humanities experiencing the most significant declines (The Economist 2024).
What accounts for these habits of bad writing? And what can be done to counter them? The beginning of an answer to both questions lies in the conditions under which academics work. Young researchers, in particular, face immense pressure to “publish or perish”, but rarely with any actual training in writing. Crafting a 30-page article, or a 300-page PhD, is daunting – as one colleague puts it, the equivalent to “entering a marathon with no distance training” (Starn 2022: 190). Our education rarely includes training in writing beyond the cursory seminars and fleeting advice offered by time-pressed seniors whose convoluted prose is often part of the very problem. Having completed my PhD only a few years ago, I am not surprised to learn that doctoral students in the U.S. suffer from mental health disorders at six times the national average (Evans et al. 2018, quoted in Starn 2022: 190). Between mastering the jargon, keeping up with the latest hip theorists, working to pay tuition, and trying to sound smart in seminars, it is unsurprising that few find time to do more than mimic the style of senior scholars, let alone produce exceptional prose. Minorities, students of color and academics from working-class backgrounds will often feel like impostors in this environment built and run by the white upper classes. And so, we learn to imitate, much as I did with the help of my dictionary of fancy words. Indeed, psychologist Michael Billig has suggested that such imitation is a recipe for success in the social sciences. Those who write badly have not had too little education, says Billig (2013: 11), “on the contrary, you have to study long and thoroughly to write so poorly.”
Billig’s observation resonates with my experience from co-organizing a course in science journalism and creative writing in recent years. The BA-level version of the writing course was a success, as undergraduates excelled at developing more accessible writing skills. But the same course for doctoral students proved a failure. Many PhD students were eager to learn the craft, but lacked the time to properly attend class, or incentive to take the extra course work seriously. The minority who completed the writing exercises tended to submit half-baked work, too preoccupied with other academic publishing demands to focus on improving their prose. The graduate-version of the course was shut down after only one semester.
Clearly, the difference between undergraduates and PhDs is not just that the latter group was pressed for time and had adopted the writing habits of their seniors. Another factor is the legitimate demands placed on doctoral students, as scholars, to do high-quality research. Unlike writers addressing a broader, non-academic audience, who are freer to craft evocative prose, the creed of the academic researcher is to produce solid knowledge, not necessarily to inspire as many readers as possible. Specialists must rely on some degree of technical language to ensure precision and progress in their research. Our work is also assessed by anonymous peers who check for rigor when we present our results, and honesty when discussing the work of others. At best, these norms and procedures make academic texts more reliable, promoting quality but not always readability. The problem is only that this enables some of our worst writing habits.
In some corners of the social sciences, it is an open secret that part of the peer review process is about saying the right words and quoting fashionable theorists, at the expense of writing anything important or clear. Trendy discussions are then validated by colleagues writing in the same style, who cite, acknowledge, and promote one another’s work. Adhering to standards of academic “rigor” can be code for promoting unnecessary jargon and fluff. This would likely not be a problem of such a magnitude if the audience we addressed were not either too structurally implicated, or too disempowered, to criticize our taken-for-granted habits of writing. Scholarly enclosure creates this familiar weak spot: Graduate students will often lack the time and intellectual self-confidence to question what they are reading, interpreting poor or even nonsensical writing as profound insight (what Dan Sperber, 2010, has called “the Guru effect”), while senior scholars are often too polite or too deeply involved to do anything about the problem.
Freeing academic writing from pomposity and humbug is therefore difficult. It requires broad reforms to higher education and research, prioritizing quality over quantity in publishing, improved support for public scholarship, and measures to alleviate the precarity of young academics. But even in the absence of such reforms, departments and journals can take immediate steps to nurture better writing. First, writing should be treated as a core component of anthropological education. Instead of leaving students to mimic the habits of dense academic prose, departments should teach the craft of writing for both scholarly and general audiences. We may aspire to influence the public sphere, but it is likely anthropology itself that will gain most from such efforts, because public-facing communication can help root out obscurity and fluff.
As anyone who has tried to engage an uninitiated audience will know, there is no bluffing with those who are neither paid to care (colleagues) nor forced to read (students). A second set of measures should target established publishing practices. Recent years have seen calls to decolonize scholarly syllabi and practice. A similar effort is needed to de-privilege and democratize the academy. Departments should encourage scholars to use or develop outlets that prioritize clarity, accessibility, and originality over jargon-filled conformity.
None of this is easy, but it is worth remembering that anthropology is well-positioned to produce vivid and clear prose that can “ignite scholarly relevance beyond academia” (Shah 2022: 570). After all, the heart of the discipline is ethnographic fieldwork among people who would either laugh or shake their heads at the articles we write about them. Much as writing for a non-academic audience can serve as an antidote to fluff, the reality we encounter through fieldwork can help strip away the pretension that often pervades academic texts. By stepping out of seminar rooms and engaging with the public, anthropologists gain better access to what matters to actual people. Many return from the field with a sense that something important is at stake in our research. In an institutional environment that teaches, incentivizes, and values writing not for its ability to impress or reinforce class membership but for its capacity to convey meaning, anthropologists can develop ways of expressing themselves that captivate audiences, reach beyond academic circles, and even honor the time and effort others have given to our research.
Bibliography:
Billig, M. (2013). Learn to write badly: How to succeed in the social sciences. Cambridge University Press. UK: Cambridge.
Eriksen, T. H. (2005). Engaging anthropology: The case for a public presence. Routledge.
Evans, T. M., Bira, L., Gastelum, J. B., Weiss, L. T., & Vanderford, N. L. (2018). Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education. Nature biotechnology, 36(3), 282-284.
Goldstein, D. (2016). Owners of the sidewalk: Security and survival in the informal city. Duke University Press.
The Economist. (2024, December 18). “Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all”. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/18/academic-writing-is-getting-harder-to-read-the-humanities-most-of-all
Shah, A. (2022). “Why I write? In a climate against intellectual dissidence”. Current Anthropology, 63(5), 570-600.
Sperber, D. (2010). “The Guru Effect”. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 1.4: 583-592.
Starn, O. (2022). “Anthropology and the misery of writing”. American Anthropologist, 124(1), 187-197.