Title: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Date: 2015
Form: Academic monograph
Keywords: Anthropology, Ethnography, Capitalism, Environment
At the beginning of Part III of The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing starts a kind of micro-chapter (it’s a page and a half long) in a familiar way: The first paragraph is an anecdote describing a conversation with an interlocutor, who tells her something unexpected but provocative (in this case, that conserving a forest might require encouraging—rather than trying to prevent—human disturbance). The provocation is a way for Tsing to introduce an intervention: she’s arguing for a change in how we imagine the interaction between humans and non-humans. What’s noteworthy here, though, is the sentence that comes after this anecdotal first paragraph:
“Working with forest managers in Japan changed how I thought about the role of disturbance in forests.” (151)
This sentence does at least three things. First, it recaps the subject matter of the previous paragraph: “Working with forest managers in Japan.” It also establishes the scope of the section, the bigger-picture topic at hand: “the role of disturbance in forests.” Between those two phrases, though, it introduces an argument about that topic, or at least signals that there’s a claim being made. The signal is the phrase “changed how I thought about.” These words indicate an argumentative claim—because one way to describe what an argument does is to say that it changes someone’s thinking about something. University of Chicago writing program director Larry McEnerney makes pretty much this exact point in this lecture on effective writing.
But what I find noteworthy here is that that change of thinking takes place via a first-person pronoun: “changed how I thought about.” It’s a way of disguising an argumentative claim as a personal narrative, and it’s also a nicely open and generous way of communicating one’s argument: it admits that the author didn’t always think this way, and invites the reader to come along on this journey from one way of thinking to another. From a purely functional point of view, it’s not far off useful but clunky statements of intention like “I am going to argue that…” But it’s personalized, and more gracefully embedded within the flow and tone of this anecdotal opening.
The lesson, then, might be something like this: in learning about the topic you’re writing about, your thoughts changed in some important way. If they didn’t—if your research just reconfirmed your priors—you likely wouldn’t be writing about it. Recalling your starting position, your initial naïveté, can be a useful way to reach out to where your readers might well be at at the outset of reading your work. And narrating the surprise you encountered in your research, and the effect it had on you, can be a useful way to bring your readers with you and change their thinking as your own thinking changed.
This is a post from Editorial Letter, by Philip Sayers. Editorial Letter is a newsletter about writing better arguments; you can read more about it here. Email me by replying to this newsletter or at pcgsayers@gmail.com.