ABSTRACT
For the purposes of this essay, I take as my definition of ‘popular anthropology’ whatever has been written with a view to a large market. That implies that it is aimed (by definition) at a general readership beyond professional academia, though the target may often include school and university teaching courses. A ‘popular’ text may not necessarily get the large sales hoped for, of course, and there is always the odd counter-phenomenon of a professional text doing well commercially. Among those ‘popular’ texts aimed at the sales charts, we could distinguish three genres of writing: the personal tale of anthropological travel; the classroom teaching text (much more common in English than in French-language anthropology); and the grand new theory of human or social origins. One appealing quality of these three kinds of popular anthropology is a good strong story-line, as would also be true for popular history, or astronomy, or medicine. Is there an eye-catching start, a seductive unfolding of plot, a satisfying denouement? When Professor (later Sir Edward) Evans-Pritchard was once encouraging me to turn my thesis into a book, he tried to reassure me by saying it was just like writing a novel: all you needed was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Maybe a number of primary ethnographies could be compared to novels, though very few books of either category achieve the readability and memorable quality he was urging on me. While the analogy may be a reasonable one for a doctoral thesis or its immediate offspring, surely we can find a better one for the popular book. The novel is too logocentric and parochial a form to find much response from a wide audience. The model offered by the playscript surely works better.
