Comments on Setting Criteria for Experimental Writing

Abstract

In response to a call for discussion of criteria for judging ethnographic experimental writing, the author felt it necessary to address the relationship of politics and experimental writing. Given that recent experimental writing was initiated with the critique of traditional ethnographic writing in sociology and anthropology that was part of the larger criticism of the authority of Western discourse, she wanted to speculate on the future to which experimental writing points and for which it prepares ethnographers to think politically. For her, this is the primary value of experimental writing: It links ethnographers to the future of politics and to the politics of the future. It is in terms of this two-way link that experimental writing might be judged.