Panels > Literature, Writing and Anthropology in the Americas: Indigenous Standpoints and Disciplinary Rejuvenation

“What does the ethnographer do? He writes.” In The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), this is how Clifford Geertz phrases the conceptual crisis that North-American anthropology is going through, based on the blurring of the line between anthropology and literature. If anthropology can reflect on its own literariness, one can ask what the author who draws on anthropology is doing. Of course, this relationship is not radically new in the USA, and even less so in Latin America, where a confusion of discursive modalities has been at work since the colonial period: for instance, missionary chronicles or captivity narratives belong to literary genres common to both sides of the continent where they appeared at different eras, and which account in their own way for indigenous societies and mentalities. These literary investigations, and later the scientific activities of the anthropologists, are questioned by the birth and development of indigenous literature and theory, whose open objective is to liberate themselves from “ethnographic entrapment” (Theorizing Native Studies, Andrea Smith and Audra Simpson eds.) and who work towards unravelling the local status of indigenous thought imposed by ethnographic investigation, in order to constitute its global dimension. Thus, literature seems to possess the power to disarticulate the long-established anthropological dichotomy between the studying subject and the studied object: this is further proved by the attested presence of ambivalent figures in both Americas as early as the 16th century, such as the metis chronicler, the native ethnographer, or the anthropologist-novelist. However, this dichotomy also concerns both halves of the continent as a whole: North America, like Europe, has walked all over the anthropological field of South America, and has long considered its occupants as topics of study. Such developments have contributed to the blurring of the frontier between truth and fiction, and between scientific discourse and literature, on a continent where crossing borders (whether topographical or ideological, legal or illegal) has always been a problem which even today remains tirelessly relevant: can anthropology be a literary model? What is literature worth as a process of investigation? More than thirty years after James Clifford wished for more representation of the informants' authority, anthropology in the Americas is reinventing itself within notions of dialogue or polyphony, which invalidate the hierarchy of voices between subject and object; and also by returning to the elemental indigenous “writing lesson”, not to teach it but to learn from its representation or its re-conceptualisation by anthropologists, Native or not, such as Scott Lyons (X-Marks, 2010) and Pierre Déléage (Lettres Mortes, 2017). Between literary fictionalisation and the representation of writing, to what extent does literature offer anthropology the means to rejuvenate as a discipline, while drawing from it new ways to think about its own in/scription?

Thursday, September 23rd, 9am-11am

Centre de Colloques, room 5

Organizers :

- Ysé Bourdon (University of Chicago)

- Mathilde Louette (LARCA – Université de Paris)

Interventions :

Patrick Imbert (Université d’Ottawa) – Différences entre l’analyse anthropologique des Inuits nomades par l’anthropologie et le recours à la "grounded normativity" dans le non-dualisme queer autochtone

Vinicius Maluly (Mondes Américains – EHESS) – Les autochtones selon Auguste de Saint-Hilaire : un territoire reparti

Julie Métais (LAMC – EHESS) – Les voix de l’ethnographie. Politiques des écritures sonores (Mexique)

Davide Tamburrini (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) – Recalling Memory to not Lose Identity : the Texcocan Pictographic Histories of the XVI Century