Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human

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Description

Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature. He insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology's engagement with the contemporary world.

Reviews

"In Stuart McLeans brave and beautiful book, the question is how do we live now. But here, living is a social-aesthetic-political-material fabulation of virtualities, events, and singularities. Context and history are not givens but modes of engagement, expressive media exceed human intentions, and anthropology carries forward the worlding of alternatives."Kathleen C. Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects

"Fictionalizing Anthropology productively and creatively extends, expands, revitalizes, and modifies a very old and long abandoned anthropological tradition: comparison. Stuart McLean creates a vibrant theoretical framework to rethink representation in literary and anthropological theory."Eduardo Kohn, McGill University

"Fictionalizing Anthropology asks us to jump into the void and apprehend the puzzling, unlimited repository of philosophical concepts given by the universe, individuated itself through myths, metaphors, performance art, bodily fluids, Inuit spirits and cunning trickery." European Association of Social Anthropologists

Author Bio

Stuart McLean is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He is author of The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity and coeditor of Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing.