An e- mail is (not) a letter: the ethnography of correspondence and the practice of saving letters and e-mails

Abstract

After a short introductory review of the letter as a subject of anthropological/ethnological research in a Croatian context, the article, based on a conference presentation, deals with the issue of saving letters and e-mails, regarded as an element that can help us in understanding personal texts that people write and send to each other and in characterizing them as letters or e-mails, or both. The title of the article refers to two ways of thinking about e-mails which are quite different, if not opposed to each other. According to widespread opinion, letters cannot be sent by an electronic mailing system, which means that personal texts must be strongly connected to one or the other of the two types of medium of communication. One type of text is connected to the paper-letter, to its materiality and other characteristics, and the other – to the e-mail. The article argues that this two-fold division or classification is too simple. The article is partly based on published correspondence and partly on ethnographic research which is limited in generational, gender, geographical, temporal and other senes; however, it remains open to individual perspectives of people included in a particular practice.