With Thick, she deftly weaves together anthropology, sociology, and personal anecdote, and the result is a collection that speaks to her own experience while demonstrating broader truths about race in America.įor instance, in “Girl 6,” Dr. Cottom explores the structural barriers that make the bootstrap model unavailable to all but a privileged few. That is, at least, the American ethos that many of us have invested in, though in these essays, Dr. We tend to understand our individual histories as unique to us, or as not being subject to societal limitations and pressures - if one wants to be successful, they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as the saying goes. It’s hard to write about the personal through an anthropological lens. I was missing the sociocultural lens she had asked us to apply I had failed to see the patterns in the patrons behavior, how they served (and didn’t serve) as a microcosm of something bigger. I wrote descriptively - almost creatively - but not anthropologically. I had tried to write descriptively and engagingly, like the writing major I was, though in her comments on my piece, the professor essentially told me I had forgotten to do the assignment. In college, I failed an anthropology assignment on thick description, the concept from which Dr.
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