Between Anthropology and Literature (PDF)

In this original volume, literature becomes both a creation and creator of culture with anthropology as the observer/reader/interpreter. The dual role of literature and the repositioning of anthropology allow for a multiplicity of possibilities in reading, writing about, and interpreting people, places and perspectives, real or imagined. Crossing the traditional boundaries of the canon, the authors deal with fiction, poetry, and drama and cover an array of literary and anthropological concerns from the more palpable ethnographic studies to the liminal discussions of ritual. In an exciting new approach, they bring together in a common space those elements of both disciplines that remained disparate only because they remained separate.
The collections suggests that these two core disciplines are not static, bounded entities but instead fluid sites of shifting cultural currents and academic interests; that neither literature nor anthropology is a unified, self-contained discipline; that critical discussions in each field do not emanate from a single centre but originate from a variety of sources and intersect at various, sometimes non-contiguous points. Most importantly, the essays conclude that the origins, sources and intersections of the two disciplines are constantly revised, reconceived, or replaced, breaching boundaries that lead not to chaos but rather to creativity and new possibilities of understanding and explicating texts, both literary and anthropological.
The authors of this volume all address the ways in which the language of social science fuses with that of the literary imagination and contributes to the ongoing debate on the merits of interdisciplinarity. The essays fit excellently with the current interest in cultural studies and challenge students, both undergraduate and graduate, to see texts not as isolated artefacts, but as parts of a larger global and cultural matrix.