Writing Up Cutting Up

"What new possibilities for thinking and living might result from extending the notion of creativity beyond the human realm?" This edited collection is the fruit of a day-long writing workshop, invited by the practice and prompts of Stuart McLean. In his anthropological pursuits, McLean often delves into the transformative potential of storytelling and fabulating. His approach celebrates narratives not as mere reflections of the world but as generative entities that shape and re-shape realities. The method is not about anthropomorphizing nature but rather engaging with it on its own terms, understanding its inherent rhythms, and unraveling its mysteries through language. The short pieces of this collection were composed in two steps: first with the reactivation of McLean's fieldwork fragments, as a collective bout of "writing up"; and then again with the practice of slashing the prose into free verse to feel the liveliness of written words, as a "Cutting Up." Whether it's through poetic engagement, the radical open access publishing process, or fieldwork that blurs the lines between observer, the second order observer and the observed, a new frontier in anthropological writing is showing at the edge of the human. With an introduction by the editor and a foreword composed in verse by Stuart McLean, and contributions by Yoonha Kim, Theodore Stanley, Sandro Simon, Geoffrey Garrison, Wendy Chua, Stuart McLean & Maxime Le Calvé.