This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 3
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. We’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

In our third episode of the TAL + SM crossover series, we explored SAPIENS’ approach to producing anthropological content for popular audiences. Ryan and Adam were joined by the digital editor of SAPIENS, Daniel Salas, to discuss the implications of using anthropology to engage the public through journalism. The episode focused on the questions How do you reconcile scientific and anthropological writing, and is this mixture a new genre? Is there a balance to be found between producing timeless “evergreen” stories versus current events focused content for audience engagement?

Be sure to check out the first and second episodes of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture” and Anthropology has Always Been out There.

What is SAPIENS?

Just over a year old, SAPIENS is a online content producer funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation with the mission to deliver anthropological stories and insights to worldwide audiences. A working collaboration between professional journalists and anthropologists, Daniel describes SAPIENS publications as “webby” kinds of stories that showcase “public anthropology’s footprints across the web”.

The SAPIENS team looks to popular science publication sites like Nautilus, Hakai Magazine, and Aeon as inspiration for how to weave together anthropology and science journalism on their own site. These sites are known for their “influx of content that is intellectual, that is based on scientific reasoning, it is based on offering in depth conversations and dialogues” and, as Adam states, “anthropology is really well poised for these conversations”. As SAPIENS is a relatively new enterprise the team strengthens its base by strategically syndicating anthropology-centric content from other science and political publications including Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Slate, Aeon, and The Atlantic. This also helps clarify SAPIENS target audience.

The editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, Dr. Chip Colwell, describes the work SAPIENS does as creating a “new genre” that incorporates the “key insights of anthropology with the tools of journalism”. The staff of SAPIENS are building this new genre by helping anthropologists and science journalists shape their research and findings into narratives with wide appeal.  

Fact, Fiction, Fidelity and Feeling

Following our conversation with Daniel we were struck by Chip’s concept of “creating a new genre” with anthropology. Now, anthropology is a discipline that dabbles. It’s a creative science that explores the human condition and opens worlds that are at once strange, yet familiar. Any reader of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, for example, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will recognize the deep lore and history contained within the pages of the books. Like these works of fiction, anthropology has the capacity to be both descriptive and generative. Anthropologists combine and contrast deep histories with current events, context with happenings; anthropology describes people’s lives so that we may generate other possible ways of being. Along with field interlocutors and through the course of everyday life, anthropologists generate events that can be ethnographically described, and such events offer us imaginative renderings of past, present and future.

More than picking examples that share in deep expression of complex culture and language, whether of wizards, dwarves, elves, and orcs – these tales captivate us in complex webs of other social realms that capture something real. Illustrated well by Carole McGranahan in Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between, she writes that, “Fiction, for me, like ethnography, has always melded with a deep desire to understand and explain the world around me.” The line between fiction and ethnography can be fuzzy. In essence, the goal of a novelist and an ethnographer are remarkably similar, to elicit a deep truth about the human experience. Many works of fiction do this inadvertently. Socio-cultural Anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and Literary Scholar John Plotz have gone so far as to pair readings of the classic ethnographic text by David Schneider, American Kinship with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Oh the window into early 19th century aristocratic courtship!

However, novels tend to make for better reads. During Freethink 4: On Art, Creativity, and Bringing Awe back to Anthropology, Ryan and Adam spoke at length about the novels they’ve encountered, which instilled a deep and formative sense anthropological curiosity in them. For Ryan, Gary Jennings’ Aztec brought Ancient Mesoamerica to life. Even Michael E. Smith has written on the well crafted world imagined by Jennings, applauding his accuracy. For Adam, it’s hard to go wrong with the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, that pulls readers in to care so deeply for a larger-than-life family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo as if you’ve known them their whole lives.

As Lisa Wynn wrote in Ethnographic Fiction on Culture Matters, “I can only think of a small handful of ethnographies that have affected me in the way that a good novel can.” This sentiment is widely shared. To follow this point, Lisa created an extensive list of ethnographic texts which have captivating qualities, some of which might draw the reader in as well as a novel. An ethnography she points out, Phillippe Bourgois’ “In Search of Respect,” is a rare ethnography that enthralls its readers through gripping emotional complexity and vulnerability that so often characterizes the experience of anyone who crosses a cultural boundary. Yet, many anthropologists write about captivating social experiences, emotional hardships, journeys both external and within. How is it that more ethnographic texts aren’t best-sellers?

Carole McGranahan also poignantly characterizes the writing processes of academics in Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction. In that post, Carole notes that there are incentivized rewards for particular forms of writing. Perhaps this dynamic is changing (see Getting Credit). But Carole makes the case that ethnographic fictions do more to illicit something deep and real about the human condition that typical ethnography cannot. Carole writes, “In genre-normative ethnography, one can’t invent dialogue or scenarios that never were; one can frame, but not fashion. If I want to relate a conversation, I have to go back to my carefully typed transcripts. In our genre-normative writing culture, there are conventions that require diligence and care. As I write ethnographic fiction, I can transgress those conventions. I can flagrantly put real people in an imaginary situation to envisage an event that probably did not happen.”  This swapping of fact and fiction reveals a generative tension between writing for ethnographic fidelity and evoking feeling.

Ryan was first introduced to Jason de Leon’s The Land of the Open Graves when teaching Latin American Ethnography at Northeastern University. Jason uses ethnographic fiction to tell the harrowing tales of the humans who endured crossing the US Mexican border in the American Southwest. The text, which bounces back and forth between ethnographic and archaeological/or forensic reconnaissance and fictionalized stories, brings the border’s victims to life like a detective discerning crimes from material remains of the victims.

Much like Ed Liebow pointed out in last week’s episode, different career paths have different reward structures. This is worth a deeper reflection when we consider anthropological writing. There is a place for genre bending in anthropology.

Science Journalism, Anthropology, and Delivery

Speaking to anthropology’s genre-bending versatility, Daniel describes anthropology as “a whole universe of little nuggets that can change your perspective of the world and can bring you out of your provincial understanding or conceptions about what people are like, what culture is like, why people believe the things they believe”. Decoupling ethnographic findings from the writing itself, i.e. imagining them as nuggets, helps us conceptualize why anthropology is particularly well-suited for many genres. It’s no secret that data are malleable; the question is how people choose to frame and contextualize them. There’s a reason so many anthropology 101 classes teach Alfred L. Kroeber’s assertion that “anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities”.

As with creative writing, Anthropology employs many techniques that crossover into journalism as well. Like journalists, anthropologists have informants, collect data from the field, and support and contextualize findings with intensive research. In the end it comes down to delivery and time. Sarah Kendzior said it best in an interview with Ryan Anderson of Savage Minds “ethnography is journalism that takes too long. I mean that not pejoratively but as an affirmation of the discipline’s values –– long-term observation; scrutiny of methodological practice; respect for history; commitment to understanding local beliefs and traditions.” And of course upending genre conventions and learning to write anthropological data and insight anew takes work. But, Daniel points out, the most successful pieces on SAPIENS are those based on what anthropology does best: overturning common assumptions.

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Daniel Salas received a BA in Anthropology from New York University and a MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. He joined the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 2011, where he currently holds the title of Communications Coordinator. Daniel has also played a key role in conceptualizing SAPIENS and currently serves as the site’s Digital Editor.

 A review of Euphoria by Lily King. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press (2014).

The last time Margaret Mead appeared as a character in a best-selling novel was over fifty years ago. In Irving Wallace’s The Three Sirens (1963), Dr. Maud Hayden (the Mead stand-in) finds her world turned upside down by the discovery of a Polynesian island where, as America’s foremost anthropologist, she leads a team of researchers who encounter “people from a simpler, happier society, free from the inhibitions and tensions of the 20^th century.” The novel’s dust jacket informs us that the culture of the island is “a shocking assault, a challenge to their most cherished beliefs about love, sex, marriage, child rearing, and justice.” So profound is this encounter that the researchers end up studying their own desires, fears, and passions. Of course, this trashy potboiler had no redeeming social value, but interest in the Mead character, the tension between a repressive West and a permissive Polynesia, and the interplay between professional fieldwork and private lives attracted many avid readers.

Lily King’s new novel, Euphoria, draws on our enduring fascination with Mead. Is there another anthropologist who could attract the public’s attention in a work of fiction? Euphoria even bears some superficial resemblance to The Three Sirens. As one reviewer summarized its story line, an anthropological study plunges “three young anthropologists into a deep and passionate love triangle which begins to threaten not only their careers but their very well being.” Yet Euphoria is a serious novel with characters based loosely on Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson.

Set in early 1930s colonial New Guinea, Nell Stone (the Mead surrogate) and her anthropologist husband Schuyler Fenwick or Fen (Fortune) are fleeing a difficult field site. Emotionally and physically exhausted after studying the “bloodthirsty” and warlike Mumbanyo, they journey by boat through the steamy, mosquito-infested Sepik River region, an area rich in ethnographic possibilities. There they encounter Andrew Bankson (Bateson) who had been doing fieldwork in the Sepik for some time. Isolated and frustrated, Bankson had become suicidal. But after meeting Nell and Fen, he is rejuvenated. They enjoy each other’s company. While socializing with the young couple and discussing their mutual interest in fieldwork, Bankson introduces them to a new tribe, the female-oriented Tam.  As Nell and Fen commence their study of the Tam, Bankson becomes increasingly enamored of Nell, intellectually and erotically. You can probably guess where this is headed (Spoiler alert: there is something about hot stone massages.)

The story line is, of course, based on the Mead-Fortune-Bateson triangle that King first read about in Jane Howard’s Margaret Mead: A Life (1984). Inspired by this story, King’s retelling is not limited by its details or outcome. While the novel is “based on a true story,” it is not a historical novel; it is a novel of the imagination that takes place within a recognizable historical framework, blurring the genres. In her acknowledgments, King lists the ethnographic, biographical, and autobiographical sources that helped her develop her characters and the overall context of the novel. Yet as King herself tells us in an essay about the writing of Euphoria, “I had slipped out of the shackles of history, made a clean break with fact. And I set off into the jungle of my imagination.” King deliberately falsifies and distorts history to give the novel a life of its own. As she wrote the novel, even the thin disguises that she gave the characters and tribes became irrelevant to her.

Anthropologists may want to read Euphoria because it received high praise in literary circles, including a glowing review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. It is a very readable work of fiction. We will most likely read it because, unlike other novels involving fieldwork (Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinskiand Mating by Norman Rush, for example), Euphoria hits closer to home. We immediately identify with the Mead, Fortune, and Bateson characters and want to know what King will do with them. After all, they are part of our disciplinary DNA. Despite the author’s disclaimer, we wonder about the relationship between the novel and the limited knowledge we have of what actually happened in the Sepik so long ago.

In Euphoria, readers meet a strong, inquisitive, tireless researcher in the character of Nell. Fen and Bankson are also fleshed out, and so is the fieldwork process. The characters discuss contemporary issues such as subjectivity, positionality, and the different perspectives that individual ethnographers bring to the field. Bankson asks, “When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?”In the novel, Nell, Fen and Bankson observe and comment on each other’s fieldwork styles. They experience serious illness, the stress of fieldwork on relationships, and the work in fieldwork, as well as the creative “invention” of the cultures they study. King tells their story, in part, through their letters, fieldnotes, and journals, providing an unusual dimension to their work and lives. “Euphoria” refers to that point fieldwork when, for the first time, everything starts to make sense to Nell. Things become familiar; the confusion and frustration of the first months in the field give way to a period of intense productivity and sympathetic understanding.

Euphoria has some small touches that only anthropologists may appreciate. There is a Ruth Benedict character and the mention of Boas.  There is a presentation of the never-published “theory of squares,” a grid of generalized orientations (aggressive/compliant, pragmatic/creative, etc.) that Mead and Bateson developed onto which cultures and perhaps individuals could be mapped. They wanted to move beyond the details of analyzing individual cultures and, like Benedict, examine universal patterns of culture. This theory was the culmination of long and intense discussions between Mead and Bateson, the capstone of their intellectual interactions in the Sepik. It appears prominently near the end of the novel. The culmination of Nell and Bankson’s romantic interests also finds a place at the end of the novel (Did I mention hot stone massages?).

Much of the recent commentary from anthropologists about Euphoria has involved the accuracy of the portrayal of the characters, especially Reo Fortune, although King reminds us that they are literary creations, not literal ethnographers. We can live with this. Her portrayal of indigenous New Guinea people is more problematic. We learn relatively little about the people with whom these ethnographers work. In the first few sentences of the novel, the Mumbanyo (a surrogate for the Mundugumor) have thrown a dead baby in the river; we later learn in passing that they also kill their twins and may be cannibals. The Tam and other groups receive more attention, but they are a mashup of different New Guinea groups and not well developed. So the ethnographers are more interesting than the people they study. It would be helpful to have more commentary on Euphoria from specialists like Deborah Gewertz, Fred Errington, Nancy McDowell, and the many other ethnographers of New Guinea who may be concerned about how the groups they know appear in the novel.

Euphoria is selling well and may renew public interest in Margaret Mead. The last three decades have not been kind to her. Derek Freeman’s deeply flawed critique of Mead’s Samoan work severely damaged her reputation. Now, as a character in Euphoria, Mead is once again an engaging presence. There may even be a movie based on the novel, and Mead could receive more attention. Would this be a good thing for anthropology? Should we be euphoric? Irving Wallace’s Three Sirens never made it to the silver screen. And although actress Lindsay Wagner (of ‘The Bionic Woman’ television series) bought the movie rights to the story of Mead’s life in 1980, it too was never filmed. Now rights to Euphoria have been optioned, and the talented Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and several episodes of the television series Masters of Sex) is set to direct. Who will be cast as Margaret Mead? My nominee is Michelle Williams. Stay tuned….

In a 2007 article, Ruth Behar called ethnography a “blurred genre that had to mesh the description of a people and a place with a ritual incantation of the theoretical literature” (154).  This is both a distinctive strength and a limitation of ethnographies. Sometimes it can be jarring to read an ethereal passage of text, perhaps a haunting description of a person or a place, only to be jolted into reality by theoretical paragraphs that yank us down to earth. Yet this is part of the necessary work of our social science: viewing the unique situation of the anthropologist’s fieldwork through theoretical and comparative lenses.

Despite its lack of theory, however, fiction can still offer social analysis. Sherry Ortner once suggested that American novelists were ethnographers whose commentaries on society were just as important as their aesthetic contribution (Laterza 132). Novels can be useful in teaching because, like good ethnography, they humanize the struggles of people one might not hear from otherwise. The Sudanese author Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, for example, offers an excellent portrayal of post-colonial malaise and hybridity. Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building is another novel I use in class to illustrate topics such as urbanization, sexuality, and social class in Cairo.

In her blurred genre essay, Ruth Behar suggests that reading fiction can teach ethnographers about setting a scene and creating strong characters. And, in response to Ryan’s last post, she also explores different ways that anthropologists can intersperse dialogue into their narratives.  I would further argue that writing fiction itself can be a useful exercise. Some of us turn to fiction writing to create worlds resembling the ones we know, but which contain events that never happened. Fiction allows for the “what if,” the bringing together of invented characters in realms that we may know well, and then watching what happens. Unlike ethnography, there is no need to stay true to the people that one meets in the field. Liberalities can be taken with place and setting as well.

I wrote a novel, The Gift, about a college student who gets involved with an academic couple looking for an egg donor. One member of that couple, Peter, is a former Peace Corps worker now pursuing a doctorate. He is unreasonably attached to his Peace Corps past, trying to reconstruct the history of the town where he was stationed through colonial texts that are themselves projections of European fantasies.  I had fun describing Peter’s obsession with colonial documents about the imaginary Sidi Maarif, rumored to have once been a matrilocal society famous for its stunning tapestries, which explorers reported would “fetch a higher price in the markets of Marrakech than a caravan of gold” (104). Although now, Sidi Maarif is a rundown shadow of its formerly colonized self, it was once said to “reward the visitor with her ample pleasures, possessing potable water, palm trees overflowing with fruit, and inhabitants who are as pleasant and hospitable as the most lavish of desert shaykhs.” In creating Peter, I wanted to fashion a character still in love with Orientalist representations even though he is supposed to know better. I have met people like Peter, though he is still only a work of fiction.

There are anthropologists who have crossed over and become exclusively fiction writers, such as Amitav Ghosh, Tahmima Anam, and Camilla Gibb. Their work reflects an anthropological sensitivity to the people and places they write about, which they explore in a deep and nuanced way.  We can also learn from anthropological science fiction, a topic unto itself, which also contains intriguing cultural critiques.  Fortunately for those of us interested in blurring genres, we have the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, whose journal, Anthropology and Humanism, has room in its pages for reflections on these issues, as well as literary experimentation. As storytelling is a way people make sense of the world, so might we, as anthropologists, take it seriously, both as a form of social analysis and as another outlet for our own observations of reality.

Behar, Ruth. 2007. “Ethnography in a Time of Blurred Genres.”  Anthropology and Humanism 32(4): 145-55.

Laterza, Vito. 2007. “The Ethnographic Novel: Another Literary Skeleton in the Anthropological Closet?” Suomen Anthropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 32(2): 124-34.

An associate professor of anthropology at Rollins College, Rachel Newcomb is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and writes book reviews for The Washington Post.  Her books include an ethnography, “Women of Fes,” and a novel, “The Gift.” For more information, you can visit her website.

Given my interests and experiences, my toehold criterion seems to leave me with only so many fictional reading options to choose from. But early this spring I came across one short story and one novel fitting it to a T.

Will Mackin’s New Yorker piece “Kattekoppen” is narrated by a member of a Tier 1 Special Operations unit in Logar Province. Mackin provides next to no biographical details regarding the narrator, who expresses almost no opinions or emotions and is blessed with preternatural powers of observation. This makes for an eerie and magnetic character.

I was drawn to the story because several of the narrator’s observations describe things I have experienced in my own life but which I had not seen portrayed in fiction (or non-fiction, really). Take, for instance, the description of the attitude taken towards food in a place where you can’t just pop out to the corner store:

Apparently, Levi had loved these candies as a kid, and his mother was under the impression that he still loved them. But he didn’t. So he set the Kattekoppen on the shelf by the door, where we kept boxes of unwanted food.

Perhaps “unwanted” is too strong a word. Better to say that no one wanted that particular type of food at that particular time. Everyone knew that a time would come, born of boredom, curiosity, or need, when we would want some Carb Boom, squirrel jerky, or a Clue bar. But, until that time, the food sat on the shelf.

Or of the effects of sleep deprivation:

There was no time to sleep. My fingernails stopped growing. My beard turned white. Cold felt hot and hot felt cold.

I practically jumped up and down when I read the part about fingernails. I may even have said aloud, “Yes, that does happen!”

Finally, there is a wonderful description of synesthesia brought on by sunlight on snow—covering everything was a pristine layer of snow, which dawn had turned pink—something I have seen a lot of myself. I have no experiential knowledge whatsoever of Afghanistan or of life as a Navy SEAL, but the details which did ring true with my own experiences opened me up to the story.

Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being is narrated by two characters. Naoko is a Japanese schoolgirl who, importantly, has spent her pre-teen and early teenage years in the United States. Ruth is an American novelist living and working on an island off the Pacific Coast of Canada.

I was drawn to the story because I had previously read Ozeki’s short story “The Anthropologists’ Kids,” told from the perspective of the son of a Yale faculty member and clearly drawing upon Ozeki’s own New Haven childhood. Ozeki has said elsewhere that she created the story to “tak[e] the piss out of the academy … in the most respectful way.”

I know Ozeki’s father Floyd Lounsbury’s work very well via my focus on Iroquoian studies. He was and will always be the dean of Iroquoian linguistics (should you be wondering about his affiliation with an anthropology rather than a linguistics department, he came of age at a time before the work undertaken by anthropological linguists had been shifted to linguistics departments and later supplanted by linguistic anthropology) and also did work of note in my real wheelhouse, kinship.

I learned of Ozeki’s novel via an NPR interview in which she mentions Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s book Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms as an inspiration and source for A Tale for the Time Being. This sold me on reading A Tale for the Time Being, as Ohnuki-Tierney has been a favorite writer of mine for a while. When I did pick up the novel Ozeki’s comfort in utilizing Ohnuki-Tierney’s work as well as other anthropological concepts was striking, though not surprising given that she is to the anthropological manor born.

A Tale for the Time Being is a story about the creative process which involves multiple universe theory, Zen Buddhism, and Japanese youth culture. I know very little about any of the four. But the novel had plenty of other hooks for me. I enjoyed the textual presentation. There are footnotes, appendices, and a scholarly apparatus which make it look and feel less foreign to my anthropologically-conditioned reading eye. In addition, as someone possessing some experience with editing I enjoyed the choice of presenting Nao’s narrative as something of an edited manuscript.

What I enjoyed most about the novel was Nao’s so clear as to be painful self- and social awareness, qualities springing from being cultivated within multiple but never accepted by any social environments. Which is pretty much what Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is about, a film I really liked despite always having been a Marvel guy and finding Superman the most boring superhero ever. Perhaps not coincidentally, superpowers also find a place in the narrative of Ozeki’s novel.

– Matthew Timothy Bradley

Chafe, Wallace L. 2000. “Floyd Glenn Lounsbury.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144 (2): [226]–29.

Mackin, Will. 2013. “Kattekoppen.” The New Yorker, (March 11):60–64.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 2002. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ozeki, Ruth. 2013. A Tale for the Time Being. New York: Viking.
—————– 2006. “The Anthropologists’ Kids.” In Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience, ed. by Chandra Prasad. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.