Malmö University Publications
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination
Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society (KS), School of Arts and Communication (K3).
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, 2021-00938Available from: 2025-02-03 Created: 2025-02-03 Last updated: 2025-02-04

Open Access in DiVA

Provisional flyer(1053 kB)1 downloads
File information
File name ATTACHMENT01.pdfFile size 1053 kBChecksum SHA-512
bd56a78ebc5f1270335efd039db2bc79a73b58ac5b3444d0ece8d6a22912e0c2c144a0485b6b101c11b4cdb9b0c0f7dc445e06680206b0a150e434d2b17589a5
Type attachmentMimetype application/pdf
Points of Departure(268 kB)3 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 268 kBChecksum SHA-512
8f122f91b87ceb09aeb09be8c7ef8686dbd217ac7d0f8f24ecdd6d5d58dc33671d16d0b052408f8595fe135c4995c7e65f3c9c4adcb5a2ccb75837ab66674ac9
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Hemer, Oscar
By organisation
School of Arts and Communication (K3)
Humanities and the Arts

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 3 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

isbn
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

isbn
urn-nbn
Total: 22 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf