{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02510778594978443, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003043367993913264, 'mean_word_length': 5.280254777070064, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
From Obscurity to Notoriety: The Renaissance of Mata Ortiz

injustices of slavery, the hypocrisies of social class stratification, and a national inability to see or accept other” (163). John Pulis considers how the literary work of Jean Rhys provides an insider’s window into Creole culture in Jamaica. In so doing, his close reading of Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea demonstrates the importance of “the ethnographic in the literary” (181), for Rhys opens “a window on an embryonic creole nationalism, a class or proto-class in the process of emergence, black but no longer African, released from the shackles of slavery, but not yet free, experiences the growing pains and struggles . . . following the breakup of the Empire” (184). Using close and perceptive readings of contemporary Irish fiction, Helena Wulff uses the term ethnografiction to hone in on the relationship between fiction and reality, between the ethnographic work and a work of fiction. Rather than situating the two genres in two distinct categories, she prefers to place them in a mutually influencing dynamic relationship that produces works that strive to express cultural truths. In so doing, they speak truth to power. Ward Keeler’s contribution is more directly related to how literature (fiction, memoir, and film) “can play on students’ interest in their own and other peoples’ ways of solving the problems of relationships with other people entail, in order to impact some measure of anthropological insight into their own lives” (244). In these essays, then, the contributors mine old and new literature for philosophically contoured anthropological insight. Such work is an undoubtedly valuable and theoretically productive pursuit. But I wonder if it is only one side of the coin of literary anthropology. What of the growing number of anthropologists who use fiction, memoir, experimental film, and multisensory installations to express anthropological themes? As is often the case in social science, the bulk of the discourse about various kinds of representation is writing about ethnographic writing or writing about fiction, memoir, drama, or poetry. It is a metadiscourse about representation rather than representation itself. In this volume, there is little mention of the institutional marginalization of narrative approaches to ethnographic writing and less discussion of the disciplinary constraints that wittingly or unwittingly undermine efforts to encourage more anthropologists to produce literary works. Institutional constraints to a more literary anthropology are, indeed, daunting. Are the memoirs, plays, or novels that contemporary anthropologists produce reviewed widely in our major journals? Do we encourage the next generation of anthropologists to take the disciplinary risks necessary to write and publish something that is literary—texts marked by characterization, the sensuous description of place and space, or the expression of the dramatic tensions that we commonly confront on our life paths? As it stands, this collection of creative and well-written essays will appeal to a wide audience of readers with a diverse set of literary sensibilities. But will it appeal to the cyber generation of anthropologists? Will it inspire our junior colleagues to write a play, a novel, or a memoir? I do think that the essays in the collection will convince social scientists to ask their students to read novels, analyze films, and ponder plays—from an anthropological perspective. But is that enough? Perhaps, but I think we also need a parallel anthology that speaks to our institutional constraints, an anthology with contributions from anthropologists who write fiction, memoir, drama, poetry, or who produce films and/or multisensorial art installations. Such an anthology would not only make the case for novel approaches to anthropology, but would also call for the use of multiple genres in our evocation of the human condition.