Literature Reviews Disclose Existing Conversations
This blog is a repost. The original can be found at APU Writing Center’s Graduate Writing Blog.
In the previous blog post, I introduced the idea that literature reviews in the social sciences need to show not only what connections are being made, but also who is making them and how they are engaging those ideas. (If you’re in a professional doctoral program for nursing or physical therapy, then you are likely writing systematic literature reviews, which is a different genre entirely than what these blog posts address. As a result, the principles outlined in these blog posts may not be as applicable to your work.) For these reasons, doctoral students need to show what conversations are already happening when they write a literature review. In writing center sessions with doctoral students, I will often talk about this principle in relation to citing secondary sources.
When doctoral students ask me if they are “citing secondary sources correctly,” they ask this question out of a healthy fear of accidental plagiarism: they are often learning the conventions of whichever style guide their discipline uses and thus want to make sure they are correctly following the rules. However, citing secondary sources is often more than a mere technicality. Instead, I turn the conversation to show doctoral students how to demonstrate the academic labor of others.
To show what this looks like, I will use the work of ethnomusicologist Marie Jorritsma as an example. First, I will summarize her work for context, and then I will provide three examples where I paraphrase her work—the first where I occlude the academic labor she conducted, and the next two as appropriate ways of showing her academic labor.
In an anthology chapter title “Hidden Histories of Religious Music in a South African Coloured Community,” Jorritsma analyzes the congregational music practices and musical styles she experiences during church services in a colored community in South Africa (“colored” in this case means people of both European and indigenous origins). The purpose of her chapter is to demonstrate how song analysis can uncover aspects of a marginalized group’s history that is not a prominent part of a locale’s written (read: official) history.
Toward these ends, Jorritsma draws on the theoretical work of three scholars—James C. Scott (an American political scientist and anthropologist, b. 1936), Paul Connerton (a British social scientist and anthropologist, 1940-2019), and James Clifford (an American interdisciplinary scholar whose work greatly influenced method in anthropology, b. 1945). These influential scholars do not extensively cite each other; therefore, in this case, Jorritsma is conducting the academic labor of putting these scholars’ ideas in conversation.
For purposes of my literature review, I want to demonstrate how Jorritsma leverages the work of these three influential scholars in her own work. However, instead of highlighting the academic labor she has already conducted, the following summary reconstructs the conversation that she created (in a psuedo APA-way):
Taken together, James Scott’s (1990) theory of the ‘hidden transcript,’ Paul Connerton’s (1989) concept of social memory, and James Clifford’s (1986) attention to sound in ethnographic studies allows scholars to use music analysis to deconstruct cultural encounters (as cited in Jorritsma, 2016).
This summary neither meets my purposes, nor correctly follows APA conventions. Let’s address the APA first. Because I include the publication years for Scott, Connerton, and Clifford, my reader will assume (a) that I read these sources myself and thus also list them in my reference page, and (b) that I am the one putting these authors in conversation, not Jorritsma (despite the “as cited in” tag in the parenthetical citation).
True APA conventions would format this summary in the following way:
Taken together, James Scott’s theory of the ‘hidden transcript,’ Paul Connerton’s concept of social memory, and James Clifford’s attention to sound in ethnographic studies allows scholars to use music analysis to deconstruct cultural encounters (as cited in Jorritsma, 2016).
While this summary is not technically plagiarism—I did summarize Jorritsma’s work here—it isn’t as clear to the reader that Jorritsma already put these authors in conversation. At some point, I may need to read Scott, Connerton, and Clifford, summarize their work, and include them in my reference list. But here, I am interested in how Jorritsma deploys the ideas of these theorists rather than what the theorists have to say. Thus, this summary doesn’t allow me to demonstrate how Jorritsma leverages the work of these three scholars in her own work. Here is a better way to demonstrate that point: (again, in this case, all cited using APA conventions):
To demonstrate how cultural encounter can be reverse-engineered through music analysis, Jorritsma (2016) triangulated James Scott’s work on “hidden transcript,” Paul Connerton’s concept of social memory, and James Clifford’s attention to sound in ethnographic studies and then applied this framework to the congregational repertoire of a colored community in South Africa. Her work shows how music analysis can deconstruct cultural encounters.
This writing forefronts the academic labor that Jorritsma conducted, allowing me to demonstrate how she leveraged the work of these three scholars in her own work.
Grammatically speaking, we name scholars whenever possible and use active voice and strong verbs to highlight who is doing what. In this case, Jorritsma is the subject of the sentence and the agent of the action within the sentence—she “triangulated” and “applied” the work of these three scholars. Such grammatical choices show how scholars respond to, build on, challenge, critique, and question, each other’s work.
If I am writing a longer literature review, disclosing those connections in detail is appropriate. However, perhaps my purpose does not call for that much detail. Maybe I’m writing a seminar paper where Jorritsma’s work, not her foundational theory, is more important. This purpose calls for a more succinct summary of this pre-synthesized information, so all I need to say is the following:
Using a hymn sung by a colored community in South Africa, Jorritsma (2016) showed that ethnographic attention to social memory, sound, and deeper meanings of events allows scholars to demonstrate how past cultural encounters impact contemporary forms of musical practices in minoritized communities.
As these examples demonstrate, summarizing and citing complex ideas that involve others’ synthesis of previous work can be tricky on the page. Rather than just keeping the technical conventions in mind (“am I citing secondary sources correctly?”), keep in mind your purpose for summarizing and citing this work in the first place.
If you want to summarize foundational theorists (in our example, Scott, Connerton, and Clifford), then look up, read, and summarize their work yourself, and then cite their work on your reference page.
If you want to show how other scholars have leveraged the work of those theorists in their own work, then write in such a way that the scholar is the agent of whatever action is happening.
If you want to highlight the work of a scholar instead of highlighting the theories they employ, then you may not need to reference those foundational theorists at all—just summarize the conceptual framework the scholar has built.
In the next blog post, I will talk more on that first point to demonstrate more extensive conversations within your discipline.
Reference:
Jorritsma, Marie. 2016. “Hidden Histories of Religious Music in a South African Coloured Community.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Jonathan M. Dueck, pp. 228-247. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
