In Response to “In Praise of Makeshift Finishing”: On Makeshifting, Publishing, and Storytelling

Livelihoodsknow how thorough a storyteller he is.Chock-full of vivid scenes of the Choc goldfields in Colombia, the book reads like a subtle proposition in favour of the thrills and rewards of slow writing.It was the cumulative result, as Tubb recounts here, of his choice to spend the past few years revising his doctoral dissertation into a monograph, rather than committing himself to building a portfolio of publish-or-perish articles.Yet it is not an argument of slowness that Tubb is advancing in his petition for "makeshift finishing."In many ways, he is telling us the exact opposite: Do not overthink it; do not spend too much time perfecting the text; get the "something good enough" out there and have it interact with the world.His appeal to makeshifting is a call to align our publishing strategies with "a shorter, more imperfect, contingent, and temporary way of writing"; one in which our publications are not the end result of settled theories and steadfast strategizing, but unstable pieces that are formative of, and formed by, ideas that are always fluid and incomplete.Tubb's thought-provoking piece is categorically anthropological.Stop overplanning the big picture!Put your skill and industry in lockstep with the messy temporalities of ethnographic (and human) practice!To be sure, in his adoption of the makeshift, and attendant rejection of formulae, one hears echoes of previous anthropological critiques of formulistic planning-say, Ingold's (2020, 14) ruminations on "amateur rigour," or Scott's (1998) juxtaposition of state formation with mtis.Tubb's argument also brings to mind