Anthropology Editing and Proofreading Services

You spent fourteen months in a place. You know things you cannot cite, you were told things because of who people took you to be, and the analysis you are writing rests on a relationship that shaped what you were able to see. Anthropological writing has to carry all of that without becoming a memoir, and the two failures are equally common: pretending the researcher was not there, and writing about the researcher instead of the place.

We edit what anthropologists write — ethnographic monographs and chapters, journal articles and their descriptive sections, positionality and reflexivity passages, fieldnote material worked into analysis, thick descriptive passages and their framing, interview and conversation material and its attribution, methods and fieldwork sections, ethics and consent documentation for fieldwork, grant applications and fieldwork reports, and material written for the communities studied. Our editors work on the passage where description becomes argument.

Thick description and the positionality that makes it readable are the discipline's central instrument, and the failure is description without an argument or an argument without the description that earns it. A page of vivid detail that could be moved to another chapter is not doing analytical work. We work through these so each descriptive passage is doing something the argument needs, since the test is whether the analysis survives if the passage is removed — if it does, the passage is colour; so the researcher's presence is accounted for at the points where it shaped what happened, because a scene in which everybody behaves as though no one were watching is a scene that has been edited; so positionality is written as specific consequences rather than as a list of identities, given that "as a white European woman" is a category and "the men's discussions I was excluded from are reconstructed from what three women told me afterwards" is a limitation a reader can weigh; so interlocutors' words are attributed with what is quotation, what is reconstruction from notes and what is paraphrase, as this distinction is invisible in most ethnography and matters enormously; so the interpretation is separated from the description in a way the reader can see, so that people's own accounts of themselves are not silently merged with the analysis; so pseudonyms and any composite are declared; and so the description is specific enough that somebody who has been there would recognise it. Passages written this way carry the argument.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including fieldnotes, unpublished manuscripts and material concerning identifiable people. We are editors rather than anthropologists or ethics advisers, and we offer no view on your analysis, your fieldwork or your interpretations. What we can do is make each descriptive passage earn its place.