CASE STUDIES IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
George Spindler & Janice E. Stockard, Series Editors
Guidelines for Prospective Authors
2007
CSCA Series Overview
The Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology (CSCA) series was founded in 1960 under
the joint editorship of George and Louise Spindler, both anthropologists at Stanford
University. Since that time, more than two hundred Case Studies have been published
and the series has enjoyed wide readership in college and university classrooms around
the country and abroad.
Initially conceived as descriptive studies of culture and intended for classroom use, the
Case Studies were by design accessible, short, and engaging. Their authors were
anthropologists who had conducted extensive field research in diverse societies,
experienced professionals who had “been there.” The goal was to introduce students to
cultural differences, as well as to demonstrate the commonalities in human lives
everywhere. In the early years of the series, each Case Study focused on a relatively
bounded community – a cultural group, tribe, area – that could be distinguished by its
own customs, beliefs, and values. Of course, both anthropology and the CSCA series
have changed with the times.
Today the Case Studies reflect a world transformed by globalization, and an
anthropology committed to documenting the effects of the vast cultural flows of people,
information, goods, capital and technology now in motion the world over. In this twentyfirst century, the greater pace and reach of globalization has created an infinite number of
meeting points for peoples and cultures—and multiplied the sites and contexts for
cultural change.
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The CSCA series remains committed to providing undergraduate students with
descriptions of the distinctive features of the cultures of the world. However,
increasingly Case Studies authors are analyzing the sweeping changes underway today in
the wake of globalization, migration, urbanization and modernization. Today all
anthropologists, including the authors in this series, are faced with the task of
documenting these cultural changes and transformations and of deciphering the ways in
which the particular forms that change takes is influenced by the distinctive features of
specific cultures. A no less daunting project for anthropologists is to understand the
meaning of these changes for the people who live with them. Globalization and cultural
change in the 21st century present anthropologists with the challenge of studying (and
writing about) extraordinarily complex processes. The CSCA series reflects these
developments in the field of anthropology and the cultural shifts occurring in societies
around the world.
Planning Your Case Study: Audience, Writing Style & Voice
The advice we present below is intended to guide you as a prospective CSCA author in
the development of your manuscript. These are only guidelines, however, and we
recognize that each author has her/his own personal writing style and distinctive voice.
Beyond these general remarks, we suggest that each prospective author peruse several
different writing strategies employed by published CSCA authors, drawing on both
classics as well as recent series additions.
The CSCA series remains committed to the goal of providing authoritative and accessible
accounts of cultural diversity and change to a broad audience of students, predominantly
undergraduates in introductory anthropology courses at North American universities and
colleges. Therefore, you should plan your Case Study to engage this target audience of
students by writing at the appropriate level and avoiding the use of unnecessarily
technical jargon. In addition, the focus of your planned Case Study should be the
people(s) of a society, group, or place, their cultural systems, meanings and practices.
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Manuscripts that are organized around abstract theoretical propositions and intellectual
debates or are based on extensive literature critiques do not readily engage broad
introductory audiences, and therefore do not fit the CSCA series.
An important challenge for each CSCA author is to capture the imagination and interests
of today’s undergraduates. One proven strategy is to explain in introductory discussion
just why it is important for students to understand the people featured in your Case Study:
Why do their lives and current situation matter? What relevance do their lives have for
understanding our world today? How do these people and their culture serve to
illuminate our own cultural assumptions, ideologies and biases? In short, what does
studying them reveal about us, as well as about the world in which we cohabit? These
and other questions can be posed in an early, reflexive discussion that might also address
how you as an anthropologist initially came to live among these people and study them.
In general, a good strategy for developing your Case Study is to ground your discussion
in your own ethnographic project. Write reflexively, drawing on your own field
experience. Discuss your research problem and goals in the context of the people that
you met, observed, interacted with and interviewed. Describe their everyday lives and
relationships, as well as their attitude toward you. Whenever possible, quote your
informants, and consider using their photographs, where appropriate. In addition, create
the opportunity to introduce students to fieldwork practice by relating your research
experience and outcomes to the field methods that you employed.
Another strategy for engaging students is to write your account in the first person,
developing it as a personal narrative. You might try organizing your narrative in the form
of a story that takes students on a journey into another cultural world, each chapter
presenting a different dimension of their culture and your field experience. Write as
reflexively as you can, weaving into your account information about how you were
drawn to your research problem, how you designed your project and chose your methods.
Consider writing about problems you encountered in conducting your fieldwork, how you
overcame them and what you learned. You might also consider building suspense into
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the organization of your Case Study, revealing the outcome of your research piece by
piece, or presenting the discovery of critical ethnographic insights as a sequence of steps
or realizations. We encourage you to include personal anecdotes that you might not use
in other kinds of publications. Our final suggestion with regard to style and voice is to
keep your writing as lively and engaging as possible.
Of course audience, writing style and voice are all in some way related to the way in
which Case Studies are used, too. They are primarily intended for use alongside
introductory textbooks, providing a complementary in-depth ethnographic focus on
specific peoples and cultures. Instructors use Case Studies in various ways, however.
They assign them in combination not only with standard textbooks, but also with
monographs, ethnographic films, journal articles and online resources, as well as bundled
together with several other Case Studies. Because they are regularly used with basic
anthropology texts, Case Studies themselves do not provide lengthy discussions of basic
anthropological concepts. This general guideline does not hold, however, in the case
that your own study in some way challenges accepted theory or practice; in this situation,
providing a light review of fundamentals and terminology will be essential in order for
students to understand your own ideas.
A similar point can be made with reference to providing information on the history of the
people who comprise the focus of your Case Study. Most studies in the CSCA series
focus on contemporary peoples and the effects of the processes mentioned above, i.e.
globalization, migration, urbanization and modernization. In some places, the local
response to these larger forces will bring minor culture changes, but in others cause total
cultural transformation. Still elsewhere cultural continuities or resilience will constitute
the dominant response to these vectors of change. Cultural appropriation, revival,
resistance and re-invention are yet other possible outcomes. In all of these cases,
however, some degree of historical context (“the way it was”) needs to be provided so
that students will understand and care about the current situation (“the way it is now”).
Experience has shown that to appreciate culture changes at work in a society, students
need to fully understand the cultural baseline. In short, each CSCA author needs to plan
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precisely where and how to provide the historical ethnographic context necessary for
your explication of the present.
Format of the Published Case Study
Books in the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology series are published in a standard
6 3/8 inches by 9 ¼ inches trim size, 125 to 200 book pages in length. This translates to
about 90,000 words or 250 to 300 manuscript pages, double-spaced with 12-point font
and 1-inch margins. Plan on organizing your Case Study into seven or eight chapters
(about 25 pages each), with two or three discussion questions at the end of every chapter.
In addition, each chapter should have 4 or 5 photographs, illustrations, tables, in total 35
or 40 images. When copyrighted materials are used, you as author must obtain and pay
for the rights to use these materials. (Instructions on how to do this, including
appropriate forms for obtaining English/worldwide electronic rights will be provided at
contract signing.)
Front matter will include a preface and acknowledgements, a map of the regions under
discussion and table of contents. You will be asked to provide a short biographical
statement entitled “About the Author.” You may choose to write a dedication and
include notes on terminology, a brief introduction, etc. The series editors will provide a
foreword entitled “About this Series” and “About This Case Study.” Back matter may
include a glossary of terms, a list of recommended and annotated readings (not more than
twelve), plus relevant URL’s, an index and appendix, if essential.
Please prepare manuscripts with reference to the guidelines published by the American
Ethnologist, and use their format for your citations and bibliography. Try to keep
citations and endnotes to a minimum. As a general rule of thumb, endnotes are either so
important that they should be incorporated into the main text, or so unimportant that they
are not needed at all.
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First Steps: Prospectus & Sample Chapter
Please send us a prospectus that outlines your plans for a Case Study and that includes a
discussion of the market in which it will compete (please list other titles), the
distinctiveness of your work, plus the basic concepts to be discussed, central themes to
be addressed, methods employed, along with any other pertinent information. Submit
this prospectus together with a sample chapter, detailed table of contents and your
Curriculum Vitae. Send these materials to both the Series Editor and Senior Acquisitions
Editor, below.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Janice Stockard, Ph.D.
Lin Marshall
Series Editor
Senior Acquisitions Editor
180 Hillview Way
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning
La Selva Beach, CA 95076
Belmont, CA 94002
jestockard@earthlink.net
lin.marshall@wadsworth.com
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