Fictionalizing Anthropology

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.

• ContentsProloguePart I. Anthropology: A Fabulatory Art1. An Encounter in the Mist2. Talabot3. Fake4. Anthropologies and Fictions5. Knud Rasmussen6. The Voice of the Thunder7. Metaphor and/or Metamorphosis8. “They Aren’t Symbols-They’re Real”Part II. In Between9. Liminality: An Old Story?10. The Dead Have Never Been Modern11. The God Who Comes12. Between the Times13. Anthropology ≠ Ethnography14. Fabulatory ComparativismPart III. Gyro Nights: Inhuman Culture/Inhuman Nature15. Islands before and after History16. Papay Gyro Nights17. The Time of the Ancestors?18. In the Beginning Were the Giants19. Tiamaterialism20. Blubberbomb21. A Globe of Fire22. NighttimeAfterword: Anthropology Is Art Is FrogAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"In Stuart McLean’s 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