This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was Not Her traces a relationship between an anthropologist and his interlocutor that equally verges on friendship and antagonism. Eschewing well-trodden anthropological approaches which focus on identity or suffering, Meyers delves into …
I don’t know if I’ve ever written anything I felt less sure about. I know there’s nothing new about drawing attention to the uncertainty that accompanies the act of committing thoughts and encounters to the page in the form of ethnography. I’m sure vanity plays no small part in this. But for me, the question of reception feels unavoidable in …
There isn’t an easy way to synthesize this book. Sure, one can say that it’s a literary ethnography about relations—their volatile and fraught nature. One can also say that this is a book about the return—about why previous worlds return to us, or why “we” return to sift through their broken shards. Or about how seemingly impersonal forces impel us …
I read All That Was Not Her through the night on a non-stop flight from Chicago to Abu Dhabi, riveted under the beam of my single light in the darkened airplane cabin. I was on my way back to Kathmandu for the first time in three years, absorbed in a book about anthropological imperfection.
It is refreshing to read a …
“The point is that here the issue of death is not one among many occasions to turn to anthropology but, with few exceptions, the only one.”[1]
Todd and Beverly, co-subjects, somersault through text, careening toward undoing. To an extent, All That Was Not Her is a slow motion, smoldering reiteration of the (anti) human condition across abstracted chapters and …
[All] [that was not her]
[All that] [was not her]
[All that was] [not her]
[All that was not] [her]
Lists, he made, a kind of series.
When is a series a set?
To close a set, the all, requires the exception: her.
Beverly as exception.
A woman.
This woman.…