What anthropologists do is go live with people and experience life with them, observe them, hang out with them, participate in their lives, and attempt to understand them. That process of describing and interpreting other people requires raw description but also theory — ideas about people, what they do, how they make sense of their world, the sorts of problems they’re trying to solve.
Ideas help us make sense of raw description. But ideas are always already a kind of fiction, they’re made up, they don’t exist out there in the world (except maybe if you’re Plato). So our theories are made up, they’re fictions.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that stories, true or made-up, have a way of making sense of things. If we don’t understand what someone has done, we want to know the story of that act, and often when we know the story we have a sense of aha, I get it.
Honestly, one of the reasons I write fiction is I like writing fiction. I feel an impulse to tell stories, to make things up, to imagine things.
But another reason I write fiction as an anthropologist is to explore the ways stories, even made-up stories, have of giving a reader a sense of things: not just that they happened, but what it felt like, what the experience was like. I think that’s one of the main reasons people read ethnographies in the first place, not simply to find out that there are people over there who do such and such, but what it is like to be there with them.
If out of that comes some emergent understanding of what they do, so much the better.
I'm very curious about about how the parts of this novel that are fictional shine a light on the parts that are ethnographic, the description of death rituals. And vice versa, I'm curious what light the descriptions of rituals shine back on the novel.
Ideas help us make sense of raw description. But ideas are always already a kind of fiction, they’re made up, they don’t exist out there in the world (except maybe if you’re Plato). So our theories are made up, they’re fictions.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that stories, true or made-up, have a way of making sense of things. If we don’t understand what someone has done, we want to know the story of that act, and often when we know the story we have a sense of aha, I get it.
Honestly, one of the reasons I write fiction is I like writing fiction. I feel an impulse to tell stories, to make things up, to imagine things.
But another reason I write fiction as an anthropologist is to explore the ways stories, even made-up stories, have of giving a reader a sense of things: not just that they happened, but what it felt like, what the experience was like. I think that’s one of the main reasons people read ethnographies in the first place, not simply to find out that there are people over there who do such and such, but what it is like to be there with them.
If out of that comes some emergent understanding of what they do, so much the better.
I'm very curious about about how the parts of this novel that are fictional shine a light on the parts that are ethnographic, the description of death rituals. And vice versa, I'm curious what light the descriptions of rituals shine back on the novel.