The house is coming from inside the call

Abstract

You are reading the first sentence of this essay. In fact, outside of this abstract and a brief introduction, there are only first sentences in this essay, all collected from anthropology monographs and articles. Anthropology is a promiscuous discipline, but there are only about half a dozen ways to begin an anthropology essay. I collect sentences into their tropes, organize the sentences within those tropes, then arrange those tropes among one another, so this text reads like an opening to an anthropology essay, despite being composed entirely of openings to anthropology essays. I'd like to say I got the idea from Christian Marclay's film, The Clock, a memento mori whose 24-hour narrative is driven by excerpts of movies that feature timepieces, but it probably came from a YouTube montage of Nicholas Cage screaming “Fuck” 40 times in 40 seconds. The expectations of academic realism as a genre transform this essay from archive to narrative: the text itself is theoretical, geographic, and historical nonsense, but it consolidates as an essay through the academic readers’ (your) efforts to suture discrepancies into cohesion. If this essay makes any sense, it's due to a magic trick realism performs on us. This might be worth thinking about whenever we read something that makes sense.