Humans are the “storytelling animal” (Gottschall 2012). We weave narratives to shape and make sense of the world around us—past, present and future. Over the last 20 years, there has been a resurgence of interest across the humanities and social sciences in the role of narrative in the creation, communication and consumption of meaning; there are now also growing calls in the sciences to learn from this research and to harness the techniques of narrative storytelling for more effective presentation and dissemination of scientific research (e.g. Dahlstrom 2014; Martinez-Conde & Macknik 2017). At the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, archaeology has a particularly well-developed literature on the role of narrative, built on a long tradition of critical reflection on reasoning and writing about the material remains of the past (e.g. Evans 1989; Hodder 1989; Terrell 1990; Pluciennik 1999, 2015; Joyce et al. 2002; Holtorf 2010. In part, this attention reflects the challenges of working with rich but incomplete, and often ambiguous, archaeological evidence that both demands and defies ordering into meaningful accounts. The result has been great experimentation with, and analysis of, different narrative forms. It is one specific form—fictional narrative—that is the focus of the present volume.

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

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how the story short A Man of the River Goes Home (henceforth MRGH) by Agnes Keith in her Land Below the Wind (1939) differs from the rest of the stories in this compilation. As an autobiographical work, Land Below the Wind deals mostly with the author's account of her own life and experience in Sabah during the British colonial era. This may include things she needs to endure, how she feels about the country and her inner thoughts as a white woman who just starting to adapt to a new life in Sabah. This paper is based on this particular short story (MRGH) since it demonstrates how the author changes her style of writing from an autobiographical to a creative mode (i.e transforming fact to fiction). In other words, this is among few instances where Agnes seems to offer a different stroke of her penmanship and that the language and element of fiction used in her narrative is particularized in such a way that it enables her to explore the life of the main character, Abu Nawas while at the same time reflects her own situation being away from home in North America. A Man of the River Goes Home as a short story also testifies Agnes's ability to critically empathise with the native during the era where colonial rules were taking its roots and that her narration of ‘Abanawas versus the White Man's Law’ definitely offers a perspective of a white woman spreading the message of humanity to her western readers amidst her ambivalent position as a wife to a colonial administrator.