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- Convenors:
-
Nádia Farage
(University of Campinas)
Huon Wardle (St. Andrews University)
Mark Harris (Monash University)
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- Discussant:
-
Huon Wardle
(St. Andrews University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
The panel discusses junctions between the fields of anthropology, history and literary criticism via the problem of ‘the literary source’. It aims to contemplate issues on how to conceptualise and mobilise the written and especially the fictional source in the anthropological text.
Long Abstract:
The panel discusses junctions between anthropology, history and literary criticism via the problem of ‘the literary source’. Revisiting longstanding conversations that traverse the last half of 20th century around the legitimacy of anthropological uses of written sources, we see that these have revolved on giving voice to silenced categories. Literary criticism has convergently brought awareness to the uncertainties and shifts of context in reading sources. These debates further shaped the internal criticism of ethnography, with excellent results on issues including empowerment, political agency or co-authorship.
For historical or literary anthropology, there are further issues that derive from the very status of the written, and especially the fictional source. How is ‘a source’ of knowledge constituted? How to conceptualise this process of constituting a source? Borrowing from A. Gell we may envisage the source as endowed with a capacity to enchant and ‘trap’ thought, but we should not ignore the reverse relationship; the source is both agent and patient. The activity of following the traces that lead to the source (or that the source leaves behind so it can be discovered), suggests a teleological game-like relation between knower and what can be known. The source becomes the mythical origin point of the true knowledge created from it, but it can also play tricks on the would-be knower. Because of the power it holds to itself, and the power that the mind in pursuit of it entertains, the alliance of source and knower is a potentially dangerous one.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
The aim of my paper is to reevaluate Miklouho-Maclay's diaries of 1871-1872. These diaries are assumed to be the field notes. However other written texts of Maclay and the texts of his contemporaries show that ‘the Diaries’ are a literary text that highlights some facts and hides the others.
Paper long abstract:
My data from Russian archives and periodicals showcase how anthropological focus shifted from multispecies view on New Guinea to classic anthropological one-species in late 19th century. I will draw my data from diaries of early Russian anthropologist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay. Maclay spent more than 30 months on the North-East coast (today Rai-coast) of New Guinea. In 1872 Maclay returned from the Rai (Maclay) coast. On board the clipper “Izoumroud” he wrote several reports on his first stay in New Guinea, he discussed his stay with ship officers who wrote down these conversations. Later in 1880s after his return to Russia he has spoken to his relatives and the relatives discussed Maclay journeys with their friends. One of the friends of Maclay relatives became later a Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In his novel ‘Tales from the land of Papuans’ (Opowiadanie z krainy Papuasów) he depicts interesting facts that were not mentioned in ‘the Diary’. The aim of my paper is to compare these texts and showcase how ‘the Diaries’ were composed and what kind of facts distinguish then from a field diaries.
Paper short abstract:
This article aims to examine the role and poetic power of fiction within romantic relationships among Taiwanese youth, with the intention of reflecting on the extent to which their way of “feeling to know” will serve as a source of knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
This article aims to explore the potential significance of fiction in the production of anthropological knowledge, with a focus on that the youth in Taiwan express they are “feeling connected to” romantic fiction. My interlocutors occasionally gravitate towards contemporary narratives featuring characters who, like themselves, are contemporaneous and share similar educational backgrounds, values, and ways of thinking. Instead of attributing this phenomenon solely to the concept of identification, I seek to investigate the manner in which my interlocutors are drawn to romantic fiction despite their largely materialist views on relationships. Drawing upon Alfred Gell’s (2011) discourse regarding the function of fiction in enabling modern individuals, through an exchange of affective signals, to transform an unspecified one into a historically specific person for romantic engagement, I propose that the poetic power of fiction on readers/viewers may be related to their metaphorical associations with the signs emanating from fiction. I would then reflect on the extent to which their way of “feeling to know” will serve as a source of knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines how early 20th-century Brazilian proto-science fiction engaged with the beginnings of the science of hormones and glands, exploring how discoveries influenced literary narratives of bodily transformation, gender ambiguity, and the fluid boundaries between human and animal.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation explores the intersection of proto-science fiction and the emerging field of endocrinology in early 20th-century Brazilian literature. It examines how writers and readers of the time engaged with new scientific discoveries, particularly in endocrinology, to question the boundaries between animality and humanity, as well as the ambiguities surrounding gender. As endocrinology began to theorize the role of glands and hormones in shaping physical and subjective traits, it fueled imaginative narratives about bodily transformations, hybrid beings, and the blurring of gender lines. These proto-science fiction stories often depicted characters whose identities—human or otherwise—were marked by ambiguity, challenging conventional distinctions between gender and the human-animal divide. The influence of endocrinological concepts allowed authors to explore the malleability of the body, imagining how science could reshape the boundaries between the sexes and the species. This study argues that these early works were not only a response to scientific anxieties but also speculative spaces for questioning the limits of the human, sexuality, and the body. In doing so, they anticipated contemporary discussions about gender, taxonomy, and the scope of the human itself, positioning Brazilian proto-science fiction as a unique space for confronting the shifting biological and cultural borders of the time.
Paper short abstract:
How is historical imagination embedded in the writing of fiction? Approaching the subject from the perspective of social history, this presentation examines literary works to observe how they represent what subordinate peoples (the enslaved, dependents, women) do with what is done to them.
Paper long abstract:
How is historical imagination embedded in the writing of fiction? Approaching the subject from the perspective of social history, this presentation examines literary works to observe how they represent what subordinate peoples (the enslaved, dependents, women) do with what is done to them. Seeing fiction as archive also challenges us to acknowledge the imaginative act of constituting archives: historians assemble and interrogate an array of sources to offer plausible interpretations of given historical processes and experiences. They interrogate literary works in pursuit of questions of gender (challenges to patriarchy), labor (crisis of slavery and other forms of forced labor, the emergence of wage labor), scientific ideologies (race science, social Darwinism), relations between literature and the law (fiction as legal archive and fiction in the legal archives), literary models (romanticism, realism, modernism), and so on. Whatever the themes approached, the main objective of this presentation is methodological: what are the main characteristics of a critical process that calls for the slow reading of fictional works in search of the history pulsing within them?
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the novel The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma [(1915) 2015], by Brazilian novelist Lima Barreto, focusing on the intertextual dialogue with Tolstoyan pacifism. It will point out eventual convergences and tensions between ethnography, testimony and fictionalisation.
Paper long abstract:
Early literary criticism understood much of Lima Barreto's writing as overly biographical, therefore lacking in literariness. Such evaluation echoed ambiguously on his last novel, The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma [(1915) 2015], which was acclaimed as a masterpiece of the Brazilian literature of social critique after the author's death. Subsequent readings focused on his merciless critique of nativism and correlate militarist and authoritarian tendencies of the positivist ideology, which dominated the early years of Republican régime in Brazil. Notwithstanding this, the paper suggests that the critique of authoritarianism and militarism in The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresna has as an implicit counterpart in the pacifist ideal prevalent in the anarchist movement of the early 20th century. More closely, the paper contends that the novel resonates with Tolstoy's prolific production - both fictional and non-fictional - on pacifism and non-violent resistance. Such interlocution field will be used to explore the convergences and tensions between ethnography, testimony and fictionalisation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper revisits a classic case of the dialogue between ethnography and literature: the rhapsody Macunaíma, the Hero with No Character, by M. de Andrade [(1928) 1984]. It highlights the writer's dialogue with Pemon verbal arts, which were registered by the ethnographer T. Koch-Grünberg (1917).
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the dialogue between ethnography and literature in Mário de Andrade's landmark work, Macunaíma, the Hero with No Character [(1928) 1984]. As literary critics have widely recognized, Andrade drew extensively on the ethnographic research conducted by the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grünberg among the Pemon people of the circum-Roraima region between 1911 and 1913.
Andrade's personal copy of Koch-Grünberg's five-volume work (1917-1923), housed in the University of São Paulo archives, reveals his close reading and engagement with the Indigenous knowledge recorded, transcribed, and translated by the ethnographer. This includes etiological narratives, magical formulae, songs, speeches, and Pemon knowledge system at large, encompassing astronomy, botany, and zoology. Andrade creatively reworks these diverse elements in Macunaíma, juxtaposing Indigenous narratives with those of Afro-Brazilian origin, in a satyre that challenges Western literary traditions. This paper aims to re-examine such intertextual dialogue from the perspective of Pemon verbal arts.
Paper short abstract:
Moved by the characteristic attitude of naturalists in the first half of the 19th century, Schomburgk brothers described in a sensitive and empathetic way many indigenous and non-indigenous men and women, their habits, characteristics, beliefs.
Paper long abstract:
As important actors in the border conflict between the Brazilian empire and the British empire, and driven by the characteristic attitude of naturalists in the first half of the 19th century, the Schomburgk brothers described in a sensitive and empathetic way many indigenous and non-indigenous men and women, their habits, characteristics, beliefs. This paper looks at six individuals they describe. These descriptions can shed light on many historical and cultural aspects of the region and on the values and ideology of the two ethnographer brothers.