Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-326) and index.
Contents:
Part I : Anthropoligy : a fabulatory art. An encounter in the mist -- Talabot -- Fake -- Anthropologies and fictions -- Knud Rasmussen -- The voice of the thunder -- Metaphor and/or metamorphosis -- "They aren't symbols -- they're real" -- Part II : In between. Liminality : an old story? -- The dead have never been modern -- The God who comes -- Between the times -- Anthropology [does not equal] ethnography -- Fabulatory comparativism -- Part III : Gyro nights : inhuman culture / inhuman nature -- Islands beforea nd after history -- Papay gyro nights -- The time of the ancestors? -- In the beginning were the giants -- Tiamaterialism -- Blubberbomb -- A globe of fire -- Nighttime -- Afterword : Anthropology is art is frog.
Summary:
What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as evidence to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media-including language-that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of fabulation (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropologys recent ontological turn, McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropologys engagement with the contemporary world.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.