messy text

is a kind of experimental and innovative writing done against the key controlling conventions.

writing against the key controlling conventions that established the social scientific authority of this genre. self-conscious experiments in bringing out the experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic process at work in any ethnography. There was an aura of 'opening up,' of excess about these works, a pleasure in taking advantage of the emerging license to write into ethnography the reflexive tales of fieldwork, In the 1980s, I once termed the exemplary ethnographies that circulated influentially for their innovative or experimental qualities as messy texts (Marcus 1994). Calling them messy was an affectionate way to draw attention to their often-systematic strategies for writing against the key controlling conventions that established the social scientific authority of this genre. Such texts were self-conscious experiments in bringing out the experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic process at work in any ethnography. There was an aura of 'opening up,' of excess about these works, a pleasure in taking advantage of the emerging license to write into ethnography the reflexive tales of fieldwork, which always had an important role to play in the professional oral culture of anthropology particularly by which method as aesthetic and professional identity had been inculcated from generation to generation. (marcus 20 years after 2007)

messy text, n.All

messy text