Interview with Angela Garcia (Part I)
I'm going to write it the way I want to write it
We spoke with Angela Garcia, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, who is an award-winning anthropologist and author. She is known for her work on addiction, kinship, ethics, and violence, and the ways these are shaped by histories of colonialism. She is also known for her literary approach to ethnographic writing.
In her newest book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost, Garcia draws readers into the hidden world of anexos: informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness that are spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reach into the United States. For many families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, they offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them – the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.
You can read the full version of the interview (Part I) here.
HW: I think of your work as blurring the boundary between academic and non-academic writing – your first book, The Pastoral Clinic, was published by UC Press and follows academic conventions, but it’s also widely recognized as a model of beautiful, impactful writing (it won the Victor Turner Prize, and so many academics I work with cite it as a model). Your second book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost, inches over just on the other side of the divide – it’s not published by an academic press, doesn’t necessarily follow academic conventions, but it’s based on rigorous scholarship and makes conceptual interventions. I would love to hear you talk through how you think of the division between academic and non-academic writing, and then more practically, how you made the decision for your second book to move into the non-academic space, and what that enabled for you.
AG: This sounds like a bit of a cop out, but I never felt very stressed about the idea that there was a boundary between the two. [...] I just always had the sense that good writing enables the research to materialize. We are all familiar with profound scholarly books that might be rather difficult to get through because of the writing. Some of our best thinkers are not necessarily our best writers. I always want the writing to carry the thinking, both the narrative and the scholarly story.
What I read has really shaped how I approach writing. I see a lot of women in particular, feminist, queer writers, scholars of color, pushing this so-called boundary between scholarly and more narrative or personal work. That is work that I'm very drawn to, the short story as a form, novels, poetry, philosophy. So I think in the mix of all that I read, I began to develop a sensibility toward writing, and that dovetailed into my interest in anthropology and scholarly work, and so I never felt that I was pushing any boundaries until people told me that I was. Until, actually, people on my dissertation committee expressed worry that I wasn't doing something scholarly enough, and that I wouldn't get a job, or that I wouldn't get published. It turned out to not be true, obviously, but I did receive some of those messages early on when I was a graduate student, and I just chose to ignore them and continue. What I thought is – this is my project. I'm going to write it the way I want to write it. This is my community that I'm writing about, and I want people to read my writing. I'm not just writing for an academic audience. I have always wanted the people that I write for and about to see themselves in the writing. I really wanted the stories to carry the ethnography, and felt that stories were an organic space for thinking about things like argumentation and theory. Building the story itself was where that was located for me. [...] So I think that ethnography is a natural home for me. It brings together all of these different elements.
RP: What prompted you to go with a non-academic press? Was that conscious?
AG: It was really another accident, a case of good fortune. The press that I ended up going with, Farrar Straus Giroux [FSG], which has a really wonderful tradition of publishing great literature, the executive editor read The Pastoral Clinic and contacted me, and said “What are you working on?” And I thought, Oh, my God! This is amazing! I went to New York, and I pitched a book, and they were not interested in the book that I pitched, which was more exclusively narrative nonfiction without anthropology. And they asked, “Well, what else are you working on?” And I described the book that I ended up writing. And they said, “Okay, that's the book we want.” The editor saw, even before I did, the anexos that I was going to write about, and he pushed me to provide a very sensory take on these spaces.
Working with FSG was like doing an MFA in writing. It was a wonderful experience. But I was worried because my department chair at the time said “You won't be promoted if you publish with a non-academic press, so get promoted first, and then think about it.” I just was so… I kept thinking, Oh, my God! Susan Sontag, Joan Didion! All of these authors that have worked with FSG, I thought, Screw promotion. I want to take this risk. And I'm so glad I did, because I learned so much about things like narrative arc, carrying a story, developing a relationship with one or two what we might call an “interlocutor,” but publishers call a “character” who could carry the story through from beginning to end. So I learned some conventions of writing, and I fell in love with the freedom that I had, and I wanted to indulge that freedom. Even though my chair was very concerned, I simply thought: I don't care. [...] The next book is also an ethnography,, but I'm going to allow myself even more freedom to go in whatever direction. We’ll see what happens.
One of the things that my editor [at FSG] said to me early on was, “What do you, as an anthropologist, bring to this story? And for me one of the key things was sticking with a story for a very long time. The fieldwork took 10 years. It was too long, perhaps, but that long view which I think ethnography and fieldwork can enable is one of the things that we bring that's very different from, say, a journalist, or a fiction writer. We do a lot of work, a lot of really hard fieldwork, and I also wanted that to come through, to show – what is anthropology like? [...] I wanted the story of developing relationships to come forward, because I think we're in a really unique place to be able to talk about – how did we arrive? How did we become close with somebody? How did we come to know what we know? We [anthropologists] have the space to tell those stories. So my anthropological training was what the editor ultimately was hoping would emerge in the story. [The story] does grow in unexpected ways, and I just allowed myself to grow with it.
To be continued on April 16th with Part II.
Angela Garcia, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, is an anthropologist and writer. Her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and PEN Center USA’s University of California Exceptional First Book Award. Her second book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, was published by Farar, Straus and Giroux in 2024.