Fictional Worlds

Cambridge Scholars, 2018

The volume invites the reader to join in the debate regarding subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging through story telling with the social and historical changes that currently take place in the world. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction. On the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two field co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology lost its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, because of this, the ethnographic scope has opened up, towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnographic writing. In addition to this, the volume returns to authorship, discussed in direct relation to readership and spectatorship, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the authors of the volume contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled "Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world" (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled "Symbiotic Anthropologies" (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introductory Note ...................................................................................................1 Towards an Anthropology of Fiction Michelangelo Paganopoulos Part I: Literature Chapter One...........................................................................................................20 Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Rise of World Society Michelangelo Paganopoulos Chapter Two ..........................................................................................................47 A Bottle of Manchester United Chardonnay Keith Hart Chapter Three........................................................................................................73 Parallel Perspectives in Ethnography and Literature: Reflections from Assamese Literature Prarthana Saikia Chapter Four..........................................................................................................73 Beyond Ethnographic Surealism: Hauntology and Ethnography Carrie B. Clanton Chapter Five ..........................................................................................................97 The Working Day John Hutnyk Chapter Six ..........................................................................................................120 Multinational Banking Culture in India: Facts in Fiction Geetika Ranjan Chapter Seven .....................................................................................................130 Mario Lodi’s Educational Approach: Is this Relevant for Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century? Melania Calestani Part II: Film Chapter Eight.......................................................................................................146 Forest of Bliss: Un poème réaliste—On the Aesthetic Structure of a Poetical Documentarism Norbert M. Schmitz Chapter Nine........................................................................................................161 Notes from a Film: The Places from which We are Absent Marta Kucza Chapter Ten .........................................................................................................176 Sensorial Resonance as a Key Reading Tool into Migrants’ Experiences Monica Heintz Chapter Eleven....................................................................................................187 The Post-Socialist Aesthetics of Jia Zhang-ke and the DV Revolution Ishita Tiwary Chapter Twelve...................................................................................................196 Mapping the Rrise of Subversive Slave Consciousness in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper Ira Sahasrabudhe Chapter Thirteen .................................................................................................210 The “Other” Within: Constructions of Disability in Popular Hindi Cinema Shubhangi Vaidya

2013

When I aim to learn about a civil war or a revolution in a part of the world I know little about, my first impulse is to find a novel. Only afterwards do I compile a professional bibliography. In the language of this volume, I initially bypass the mode of worlding constituted by social science and by Western IR. Instead, I turn first to the transgressive worlding of fiction. How might this make sense even for a professional academic? Reading a novel and reading a professional article call for different dispositions. We are suspicious, alert and guarded when reading a scientific account. In contrast, while reading a literary narrative our "guard" is down. What raises our guard?

Literary Geographies, 2020

Cambridge Scholars, 2018

This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the contributors here contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled “Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world” (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled “Symbiotic Anthropologies” (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields.

At the crossroads of physical reality and an imagined, temporally & spatially unperturbed reality lies the category of nonfiction literature. Over the years, the credibility, the method of delivery, and other elements of nonfiction literature have been contested on various grounds. In an attempt to understand the fictional universe of nonfiction literature, as well as create a base to further study the cognitive effects and affects of the same, this paper aims to study three texts that are embodiments of three distinct styles of nonfictional narrative. One, a compilation of letters situated in the 1940s and 50s, exchanged between V.S. Naipaul and his family; the second, a memoir of an author – Joan Didion, in the form of new journalism, which recounts in a nonfictional manner, the fictional dilemmas of her late husband; finally, the third, another exchange of letters, however, based on ideas of insurgency and strewn with multiple perspectives on acts societally understood as ‘illegal’. It can be said, at the onset, that nonfictional narratives are diverse fields in which the mind is allowed to wander, yet still stay restricted within the space. These texts will serve to primarily create a reference point through which theoretical bases on narrative, representation, identity, and writing styles will intercept the multiple layers within the texts and bring about a roughly defined idea of the relationship between the humanities, the human, and nonfiction literature. In an exploration of this, and other concepts associated and intermittent, the paper aims to resolve one pertinent question on the ability of nonfictional literature to manifest in the minds of readers as fictional, while resting on the thesis that nonfictional literature is a means to creatively and explicitly express the real world that its writers and readers inhabit. It is not a form that is unchanging in the temporal sense, rather, one that moulds itself to creating an understanding of the current world we inhabit through the lens of a world that did exist.

Overland 182

2018

2012

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