An abstract is a description of 150-250 words in which you summarize the essential points and findings of your paper. It is not meant to be an introduction, although it shares many of the same features of an introduction:

-o- statement of your paper's main argument
-o- overview of supporting points
-o- brief background information, if necessary
-o- mention of types of evidence to be used
-o- definitions of key terms which you will examine
-o- assessment of why your argument is significant

Samples of Abstracts:

1. Yulian Konstantinov, Gideon M. Kressel and Trond Thuen. 1998. "Outclassed by Former Outcasts: Petty Trading in Varna." In American Ethnologist 4.

People caught in circumstances of social upheaval differ in the ways in which they adjust to instability and change. Occasionally individuals at less privileged socioeconomic levels engage in socially devalued practices such as the small-scale trading enterprises that have been degraded ideologically during 45 years of communist rule in Bulgaria. In this article we explore the ways in which people adjust to change by examining ethnographically the practice of trader tourism in Bulgaria. We argue that such an examination supports a rethinking of the concept of boundaries, if boundaries are fluid sets of constraints that individuals negotiate when reacting to monumental stress. Specifically, we consider the reactions of population groups within Bulgaria to the post-1989 economic crisis. We also suggest that members of each group react in group-specific strategies of temporary inclusion, permanent inclusion, and exclusion.

2. Leshkowich, Ann Marie. 1999. "Order in the Streets, Control over the Future: State Campaigns to Eliminate Petty Traders in Socialist and Post-Socialist Vietnam." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Chicago: November 20, 1999.

While socialism and post-socialism are often depicted as distinct epochs, this paper highlights an underlying continuity between the two periods in Vietnam. By analyzing campaigns to eliminate petty traders, I suggest that the Vietnamese state has consistently sought to control commercial activity in urban spaces in order to protect its monopoly on envisioning and enacting the country's future.

In 1984, the socialist Vietnamese government moved to clear Ho Chi Minh City's streets of black market trade. Within weeks, police had fined or imprisoned the predominantly female traders and confiscated their wares. A decade later, the state again sought to eliminate itinerant peddlers, this time in the name of "restoring order and traffic circulation."

These incidents occurred at vastly different historical moments. In the 1980s, a communist government seeking to consolidate its control over a vanquished South denounced black market trade as a remnant of a decadent bourgeois past. By the 1990s, the government had embraced market-oriented reforms. In post-socialist visions of modernity, female street traders had come to represent a different kind of past: a backward subsistence economy which economic development must eliminate.

Focusing on female peddlers' life stories, I suggest that the state's antagonism stems not from traders' links to an undesirable past, but from their embodiment of alternative, uncertain futures less subject to state intervention. The Vietnamese government's recent attempts to clear the streets of petty traders thus form part of its ongoing battle to control, not just the country's economy or its urban spaces, but its future.

For more information, contact:  aleshkow@holycross.edu