Tools to Shape Texts: What Creative Nonfiction Can Offer Ethnography

Abstract

Drawing on the storytelling techniques of fiction to write about realevents, creative nonfiction is a flourishing literary movement. This article examineshow attention to the craft of creative nonfiction is potentially useful to ethnography. Ipresent a few practical tools that may help ethnographers seeking to shape the materi-als of fieldwork: story, situation, persona, character, scene, and summary. I also ponderhow to include background material without dense expository lumps. To show thesetools in action, I offer a segment of my own ethnographic writing set in the Himalayanfoothill region of Northwest India and present short selections from the writings ofanthropologists who have reached wide interdisciplinary and popular audiences.