Anthropology’s interest in fiction as method, and as ethnographic data, can be traced

to the literary turn in the 1980s, although the close relation between anthropology

and literature goes back to some of the early anthropologists who were also excellent

authors.The new orientation, sparked by James Clifford and George Marcus’s seminal

anthology Writing Culture, essentially entailed the unsettling of the former balance, in

classical ethnography, between the “ethnographic self” and the “personal self,” enabling

a plurivocality in ethnography that resembles the shifting subject positions of a novel.

From its original focus on the writing process and as an approach to literary methods

and formats, literary anthropology has grown and diversified to also encompass

the reading of literary texts, including fiction. A parallel tradition in visual anthropology

includes the cross-genre ethnofiction (Jean Rouch) and the use of fictional staging

as a method. Although blurred, the border between fiction and ethnography remains

asserted.