Any anthropologists out there?

[ellen_kushner]

After 3 days of intense & furious editing of everyone else's Bordertown stories, I am now working on my own. My character is a grad student in cultural anthropology, who had the bright idea of going to B'town to do field work among the elves (or Truebloods, as they call themselves).  Ideally he'd go right into the Realm, but of course no human can

Comments

[khraesch]

Fortunately, you can rest easy. You don't have to write work *on* the topic. You merely have to write work *about* the topic.

Obviously, you know enough about the topic. But a layman reader is more interested about how the characters deal with the subject matter than the matter itself. :-)

Does that make sense? I hope so!

[ellen_kushner]

yes & no. I do need to come up with some believable-sounding questions for him to ask the Bordertown elves (which they will invariably find offensive, intrusive & ill-bred).

Am I right in thinking that he needs to have a Thesis Topic, or is it enough for him to be doing fieldwork & hoping for something he'll be able to write up?

[movingfinger]

Then go at it from the other side. What would it be offensive, intrusive, and ill-bred to ask about? Sex? Money? Death? Marriage? etc. etc.

Personally, I'd write this with the guy having the wrong end of the stick about some push-button issue (say, incest!) and the elves deciding to take the piss out of him by feeding him a long, long line of sensationalist rubbish. (Think Margaret Mead.)

[ellen_kushner]

I'm already there! The comedy will be in his endlessly trying to make it work, and constantly getting jerked around by them one way and another. He's got just a few more weeks before he has to go home, and he still hasn't got (his data? his thesis?)....

[movingfinger]

There ya go. He's been working on this for years, his superannuated and academically out-of-fashion advisor just died of a surfeit of eels or something, the new department head has taken on this fellow, the advisor's last dilatory student, and told him his funding would not be renewed, and he's got until the end of the semester to produce the written thesis to support his alluringly, sexy, rubbish idea (perhaps he inherited it from the advisor---you know how it goes---and he's a gormless dupe in that direction also)(a la The White Goddess, so beautiful and so very wrong about so very many things).

So he has his dodgy, all-wrong thesis subject, and he's convinced that he can find data to support it by actually going to Bordertown and doing Field Research. He has only read about Bordertown before.

Snigger.

Pick a subject that will not be obviously immediately wrong to the readers and it's even better ("Oh my god! I never even suspected the elves would do that!")...

(Btw, speaking of field researchers, have you guys read