le rocher éclaboussé. ‘it rolls too much’. retrieved from Wikimedia, original art by : François Delage – tableau de Jean Delage,
Letters generally open with a declaration of place and time to situate the author. This act initiates a self-conscious examination, which, as Margaret Mead affirms, inevitably prompts reflection on the feeling of being ‘observed back’ (1977). While Mead was referring to being ‘observed back’ by one’s readership, letters may also provide a moment to reflect on the feeling of being ‘observed back’ by one’s interlocutors and company in the field. The form of the letter also invites close detailed descriptions of one’s settings, impressions. Often, this entails engaging multiple senses to suspend the reader temporarily in the place of the writer. The impulse to write a letter arises in part from the desire to affirm one’s place and presence and maintain a kind of intellectual and emotional proximity to the reader(s); they therefore often include highly descriptive accounts, the relevance and analytical significance of which may not be necessarily or immediately clear. This affirmation, projection, and proximity and are nonetheless significant, however, particularly for developing dexterous and skillful writing. Each of these dimensions to letters draw on compositional techniques that are important for writing ethnographic accounts, writing letters thereby incidentally strengthen overall writing prose.
The succinct form of letters, sometimes explicitly imposed by the setting in which they are written—as is the case for Mead here, “It’s no use, dear friends, I just can’t write you a nice long descriptive letter on this ship, it rolls too much. To summarize:…” (1977, 65)—constrain content. Consequently, they require concise writing and leave the reader wondering what was left out (Scheld 2009). This incites distinct forms of both reading and writing—that which is speculative, open-ended, and partial. Usually postcards also include a photo, drawing, map, or graphic which symbolically captures some fact about the whereabouts or context of the writer (Danyi, Suchman, Watts 2021). In this sense, postcards require pause, they capture disparate sites, punctuate work, represent spans of time and space, and offer a backdrop to political cultural contexts (ibid.). This feature also opens a kind of ‘third meaning’ (Barthes, from Taussig 2011) from the interplay between the content, form, and visual element; this dynamic inevitably inspires different composition; either the writer has to explain the visual or else they know that it’s there and that their composition will be interpreted, on some level, ‘beside’ it.
Postcards are also unique in that they are addressed in the second person. This prose requires the author to consider and account for their audience’s reception, and invites the reader to take part in the interpretive process. This form of writing departs from the conventions of the objective third person that characterizes most academic work, as well as the intensely reflexive sometimes confined nature of first person found in autoethnographic accounts, to instead open more of a dialectic of interpretation and speculation. By implicating the readers in both the writing and interpretation, postcards prove to be a dynamic register. As Allan Bass points out in the introductory glossary of Derrida’s ‘The Post Card’, ‘poste’ has etymological resonances in ‘position’ ‘postilion’ ‘relay’ and ‘imposter’; while the root ‘post’ evokes a ‘halt’ it also implies an immediate sending or conveying; notably, Derrida plays with—or “exploits”—these multiple meanings (1987, xxvi). This semantic variability illustrate the dialogic, speculative, paradoxical, and playful nature of letter-writing.
Because letters consist of descriptions, settings, and impressions intended for a mixed audience–that is both intimate and public–they require a kind of meta-perspective and flexibility that proves to be a valuable compositional and conceptual device. Calling on a range of prose promises to improve the flexibility of the writer. And while they might be direct, they are often directionless, suspending anticipatory schemas or preemptive understandings and instead demanding active and responsive ‘good’ reading (Derrida 1987).
Works Cited
- Bass, Alan. (1987). Translator’s Introduction: L before K. Glossary. from The Post Card. University of Chicago Press.
- Dányi, Endre, Suchman, Lucy, & Watts, Laura. (2021). Relocating Innovation: Postcards from Three Edges. In A. Ballestero & B. R. Winthereik (Eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (p. 0). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013211-008
- Derrida, Jaques. (1987). The Post Card. University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, Margaret. (1977). Letters from the Field 1925-1975. Harper & Row, New York.
- Scheld, Suzanne. (2009). Letter Writing and Learning in Anthropology. The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009, 59-69.
- Taussig, Michael. (2011). I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.