Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination
2025 (English)Book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Anthropology's keen interest in fiction can be traced to the discipline's so-called 'literary turn' in the 1980s and 90s, instigated by the groundbreaking anthology Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, eds., 1986). But the close connection between anthropology and literature goes back to pioneer anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who were also prominent writers.
Several anthologies have been produced in the wake of Writing Culture; the discussion continues, and ‘literary anthropology’ is now a well-established sub-field that addresses literary studies as well as creative writing. Yet, anthropology’s courting of literature has largely remained unanswered. Some famous authors have a background in anthropology, e.g. Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin and Amitav Ghosh, but few – one of the exceptions being Ghosh – have systematically reflected on the relationship between the two practices, let alone consciously attempted to fuse them.
Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination explores the ‘intersection’ between anthropology and literature from the literary side, with the perspective of the literary writer, rather than the critic. The title is inspired by Argentinian author Juan José Saer's tentative definition of ‘fiction’ as ‘speculative anthropology’ and Ghanaian British philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's similarly tentative proposal for a literary tradition of ‘contamination’, going back to Roman playwright Terence’s fusion of comedy and tragedy. In this pioneer monograph, Oscar Hemer reinterprets Appiah’s ‘contamination’ as genre crossing and mixing, not between different literary genres but between fiction and discursive forms of writing – anthropological as well as philosophical and historical. His tentative ‘canon of contamination’ includes, for example, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the 'self-ethnographies' of Michel Leiris and Édouard Glissant, Jorge Luis Borges' 'fictional essays', César Aira’s ‘freaked-out ethnography’, Chris Kraus’ ‘theoretical fiction’, Zoë Wicomb’s spectral South African history – and the exemplary philosophy-by-fiction of J. M. Coetzee.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2025. , p. 289
Keywords [en]
Literature, Anthropology, Writing, Ethnography, Poetics, Colonialism, Postcolonialism
National Category
Humanities and the Arts
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-73583ISBN: 978-1-912385-62-1 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-73583DiVA, id: diva2:1934087
Part of project
Conviviality and Contamination, Swedish Research Council
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2021-009382025-02-032025-02-032025-02-04