Why would fiction have any importance for anthropologists?

Professor Ruth Finnegan FBA
Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences (The Open University)

I had often heard of ‘fiction  and anthropology’.  Well, being into narrative and the sociology of knowledge, I had, vaguely. But I hadn’t read much about it, and certainly didn’t think that it could possibly have anything to do with an upright (uptight actually) academic practitioner like me.

Truth to tell I was rather  suspicious of it too. Wasn’t it one of those post- modern self-indulgent navel-gazing excuses for never getting down to the hard grind (well it is, isn’t it, even if enjoyable, or anyway satisfying,  as well) of writing up the ethnography  you’d been funded to  complete and , presumably, share with the world. The few books I’d read that seemed to belong to that category, like (ages ago, at Oxford) Return to Laughter, I found pretty depressing anyway, not at all like my fieldwork. I felt, self-righteously,  that I,  unlike these novelists (‘novels’!) was  puritanically moral, having published lots of (non-profitmaking) stuff about  my fieldwork.

But now I wonder. Not only have I found  myself embroiled in the very thing I scorned (of which more a little later) but face  it – the ‘po-mo’ folk have got something right. What, after all, is the anthropologist’s perception of reality based on? Or anyone’s?  Have we not all read Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality? Or other works in the anthropology of knowledge? Do dreams and that unproven entity ‘the unconscious’ not somehow convey a kind of grasp – or at least an alternative, possible, view - of the world?  Might not poets arguably have as true and deep an understanding as the ‘scientific’ observer? We would leap with joy onto a novel by one of the  ‘them’ we purport to study as giving  unique insight into ‘the facts’ of experience (the latter, blessedly, no longer an automatically  dirty word in the social sciences)? Why not the same for the careful participant observer, a kind of partial insider at the least,  that is the  anthropologist?
I’d made such points about poets and about alternative world views often enough in my teaching and writing - in theory. I wonder why it never occurred to me to apply it to myself.

And now I find myself in the middle of it. For I have written and  published a novel (Black inked pearl:  a girl’s quest, Garn Press, 2015) – or rather, as you will see, not myself written but somehow been given it. Here, in my old age, is another field for my observing and reflecting.

How did it come about? Every year I visit New Zealand to see my daughter and granddaughter there. I find it a liminal place of revelation and discovery – home but not home, up over and down under, a night that is at the same time day, place of new technology and old wisdom, part but not part of our oldening world.

Two years ago, in that place of becoming, neither the one nor the other (how anthropologists will recognize this condition), I started having a series of strong dreams. As an anthologist, though not, I think, as a person, I had always taken dreams fairly seriously and knew (vaguely) that a few anthropologists such as the wonderful shamanic Barbara Tedlock, had written about them . But these dreams were different.  I can only describe them as ‘power dreams’, visions if you like. I thought of them at first as kind of non-dynamic, non-verbal, tableaus: visual , for that is how we commonly conceptualize dreams. But now I see they are not the ordinary sensory perceptions but rather more intense nodes of feeling, ones that I felt had to be shared. And so – as I lay half-waking half-sleeping, liminally again, words seemed to gather, irrespective of my conscious will,  coming inward from around the edges of my brain. The next morning I found they were ready to be written down as if from dictation. It was much the same process as when I was transcribing  into writing the taped stories of my African fieldwork days. But for the novel I always remembered  the words until I had a chance to transcribe them, then, once written I forgot them, totally . Though I recall the outline of the plot, the actual words no the page, now re-read a dozen times or more, are a constant surprise to me.

Six weeks, partly back in England, and it was done. A chapter a night. The final, 50th, chapter came a little later. I think it was probably always there, I just was slow in seeing it waiting for me.

Now that the novel is published I read it with amazement. Because it comes from dreams I feel in many ways that it is not mine but from some origin beyond me (an experience I hope in time to write about further). I also now see how surprisingly related it is to my academic work. Narrative – ‘true’ or not - and poetry, have always been among my central interests and publications (Limba stories and story-telling, Tales of the city, and Oral poetry for example);  it is satisfying to find myself unexpectedly a practitioner as well as observer.

As a number of reviewers have pointed out (but I did not realise while writing) the novel, partly autobiographical, grows out of, and echoes, my earlier work.  One perceptive reviewer put it well – a surprise to me but then I saw that this was right:
‘She has said that the words were dictated to her ready-made from dreams. But only someone with her personality, background, knowledge and academic abilities could have dreams like this’.

It is also, like the African stories of my field research, notably oral, rhythmic, sonic (surely those echoes must have come through to me as I lay half-waking). Also, as Karin Barber points out in her perceptive editorial review, it is in some ways a true African novel.  For I find that have been, unawares, developing something of a new genre – or rather one that, like many African novels, stretches the boundaries to include in the one work elements of such (accepted) genres as novel, short story, mystic poetry, fantasy, autobiography, theology, myth and Dante-esque epic.

My experience has led me into further intellectual work on dreams and on the cross-cultural experience of the ethereal - whatever exactly that is:  terminology is a constant problem in such studies (Entrancement, an edited volume with many keen and highly original  anthropological essays, is coming out later this year with the University of Wales Press – braver than most! – and a single-author reflection on the concept and evidence for ‘the shared mind’, hopefully next year, with Callender Press).  I had not realised there was so much serious interdisciplinary work on these subjects, and by hard-nosed scientists too. Surprisingly there seems to be rather less by anthropologists than you might expect (I know of some of course but would love to hear of more – anyone out there?)

A little more on the novel itself: I have always been interested in language and its poetic, so looking at the novel with fresh eyes, have noticed – as will also be evident to anyone who wishes to read, or even just momentarily glance at  the text - that it often stretches conventional  English language by using plentiful  verbal, orthographic, and grammatical innovations, chosen to fit the rhythms of the dream-infused text. In its oral and sonic qualities, best appreciated in an audio version (planned) and closely related to its unique stylistic character, it builds both on my memories of the feeling of speaking school-learnt texts aloud, and on the experience of listening to Irish and African story-telling. So although a genuine novel – a love story, a parable – it also in this way too comes out of my anthropological, African and literary experience. Without that it could not have been written, and is thus, a novel, a true continuation of my academic work.

As an encapsulation of ‘reality’ (one of the novel’s themes being the ambiguity between dream and reality) I now feel that,  like other novels by anthropologists and (indeed) historians,  that mine is indeed another way of capturing and conveying the nature of our world as well as of the Irish and African worlds I have so gladly experienced in my personal and intellectual life. Is this less of a contribution to our anthological understanding than carefully wrought field reports? I would love to have any responses on this subject both about the experience of writing / constructing / creating fiction, and the novels themselves. Also abut the nature of dreams – has anyone else out there, apart from Coleridge and Milton, been inspired, either personally or in their observations of other peoples,  by dreams leading into writing? 

I now think, needless to say, that the anthropology of fiction, and the cross-cultural fictions of anthropology are among the most exciting and challenging fields of anthropology today, and, indeed, ones that could greatly inspire students.