Storytelling is crucial to anthropology. In the field, we collect people’s stories. In the classroom, we illustrate concepts and theories by telling stories to our students. In our texts, we re-tell others’ stories, and we produce our own. However, if there has long been an anthropology of storytelling, we have paid less attention to anthropology as storytelling. If, as some scholars argue, people live storied lives, then how have we responded to this reality? Since the narrative turn in the 1980s, social-cultural anthropologists have rethought how we write, think, and theorize. Now in the 21stcentury, we have reached the limits of some of this thinking. New politics and possibilities require our attention and consideration, theoretical storytelling among them. In this moment of rethinking anthropology and decolonizing academia, what might the practice of theoretical storytelling have to offer? 

Carole McGranahan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, USA, and a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the Himalayas. She is author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020). She is currently co-editing The Tibet Reader, a volume on Ethics and Ethnography, and finishing a book about theoretical storytelling, ethnography, and refusal.