The Time At Darwin's Reef: Poetic Explorations in Anthropology and History

Ethnographic Alternatives #12

by Ivan Brady

The Time at Darwin's Reef is primarily a book of storytelling through mixed genres--verse, prose, and painting. Brady's work is designed to draw out key dimensions of the poetics of anthropology and history embedded in creative writing--in the mix and on the margins of verse and prose, painting and writing, fiction and fact--to revisit the sometimes academically resistant idea that there is more than one way to say (and therefore to see) things. This is a poetic exploration of themes encountered in the academy's attempts to explicate reality, including travel through various cultures, times, and circumstances. The goal of this unique book is both analytic and aesthetic. It is also humanistic: a commentary on the human condition, of being and not being in a cross-cultural world. It will be of immediate interest to poets and writers who wish to explore anthropological poetics, to ethnographers and teachers of ethnographic method, and to instructors and students in creative and experimental writing.

Genres: Poetry, Anthropology

161 pages, Hardcover

First published December 28, 2002

Reviews

[Marc Bechtold · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generally speaking, anthropology and poetry are an interesting combination and offer lots of possibilities for expressing things impossible to mere ethnography. Some glimmers of this are definitely there in Brady's avantgardistic work, but they lack convincing basis and in the end do not really decenter the authority of the white male author.