curranthro-theory-building

Theory & Argument Building (curranthro-theory-building)

At CA, evidence is not a contribution until it is attached to an argument other anthropologists can use — and argue with — elsewhere. A Major Article anchors the CA✩ Treatment: international commentators will press the concept, the mechanism, and the scope. So the argument must be bold enough to be worth commenting on and robust enough to survive published critique with the author's Reply still standing. This skill turns fieldwork, material, or measurements into theory: explicit concepts, mechanisms or interpretive logics, scope conditions, and positionality, in the idiom of your subfield.

When to trigger

• The ethnography/data are rich but the conceptual payoff is thin or too safe to commentate on
• A reviewer said the paper is "descriptive," "undertheorized," or "just a case"
• You need to state concepts, mechanisms, and scope conditions explicitly
• You must make your positionality and relationship to the field part of the argument

Build the argument (by mode of work)

Ethnographic / interpretive paper

1. Concept — define the key analytic precisely; distinguish it from neighbors and from the interlocutors' own terms (say where you keep their term and why).
2. Interpretive logic / mechanism — the social process: who does what, with what meaning, under what constraints. Make it legible without flattening complexity.
3. Evidence-to-claim link — show which fieldwork moments, utterances, or materials ground each claim, and what would have disconfirmed your reading.
4. Scope conditions & portability — where the argument holds and where it does not. Portability ≠ universalizing the particular.

Archaeological / biological paper

• State the substantive question the material/biological evidence addresses before the methods.
• Keep inferential assumptions transparent (taphonomy, dating, sampling, comparative frames).
• Translate findings into a claim about social life or human variation anthropologists can use, not only a site- or specimen-specific result.

Linguistic-anthropology paper

• Show what the language practice indexes (identity, power, ideology, cognition) beyond its form.
• Connect the discourse/grammar analysis to a cultural or social argument readers in other fields share.

Reflexivity & positionality (a CA hallmark)

• Make explicit who you are in this field — your relationship to interlocutors, how access shaped what you saw, and how your position bears on the interpretation. Reflexivity is part of the argument's credibility, not a confessional aside — and it disarms a predictable line of commentary.

The "commentary stress test" (CA-specific)

For a Major Article, run the argument through three imagined Comments before you submit:

1. The skeptic of the concept — "the concept is just X renamed." Can you show it does new work?
2. The reach skeptic — "this only works for this case." Can you state portable scope conditions?
3. The cross-subfield reader — "I don't see the stake for my field." Have you named it? If you cannot answer all three, the theory is not yet ready for the CA✩ Treatment — tighten it into a general logic or reframe (back to curranthro-topic-selection).

Anti-patterns

• Thick description with no portable, debatable concept (rich case, thin theory)
• A concept so cautious that no commentator would bother engaging it — the wrong fit for a Major Article
• Universalizing a single ethnographic particular with no scope conditions
• Concepts named but never grounded in specific evidence
• Erasing positionality / writing a "view from nowhere" in an interpretive field
• Importing a deficit framing of communities rather than their own analytics

Output format

【Core claim】one sentence
【Concept】the key analytic, defined
【Mechanism / interpretive logic】the social process
【Evidence link】what grounds it / what would disconfirm it
【Positionality】how the author's relation to the field bears on the reading
【Scope + portability】where it holds / who else can use it
【Commentary stress test】answers to the three imagined Comments
【Next】curranthro-research-design

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — concept-mapping, qualitative-analysis, and comparative tooling
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — CA scope and intervention expectations