Towards a Minor Anthropological Writing: Comment on Alma Gottlieb’s “Writing about Children for a Public Forum” [Writing about Children for a Public Forum]

Anthropologists researching children’s lives have incredible stories to tell. How might we best tell them in readable ways that will appeal to “ordinary readers” beyond our colleagues and students? In this article, I explore the possibilities of “alternative” ways to write ethnography in general, and the ethnography of children in particular. Given children’s nature, I argue that creative approaches to writing children’s lives are especially appropriate and powerful. In the first section, I consider a variety of adventurous ethnographic writing on assorted topics; in the second section, I discuss some creative approaches to ethnographic writing focused, specifically, on children.