ANT461H1

Literary Anthropology

This course engages the relationship between ethnography and other genres of expression. How has anthropology recruited poetry, visual art, literary fiction, and memoir in developing the genre of ethnography? How might we, in turn, understand anthropological themes and ethnographic expression in fiction, film, poetry, graphic novels, memoir, and visual art? We will read texts ranging from Bechdel’s Fun Home, Ghosh’s ethnographic postcolonial novels, Hurston’s blend of ethnography and folk studies, Le Guin’s science fiction, Moten’s musically informed critical theory, and Pandian and McLean’s collection of contemporary literary anthropology.