The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature PDF
Preview The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature
The Anthropological Imagination in Latin title: American Literature author: Emery, Amy Fass. publisher: University of Missouri Press isbn10 | asin: 0826210805 print isbn13: 9780826210807 ebook isbn13: 9780826260406 language: English Latin American literature--20th century-- subject History and criticism, Literature and anthropology--Latin America. publication date: 1996 lcc: PQ7081.E64 1996eb ddc: 860.9/98 Latin American literature--20th century-- History and criticism, Literature and subject: anthropology--Latin America. Page iii The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature Amy Fass Emery Page iv Copyright © 1996 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 00 99 98 97 96 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emery, Amy Fass, 1957- The anthropological imagination in Latin American literature / Amy Fass Emery. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1080-5 (alk. paper) 1. Latin American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Literature and anthropologyLatin America. I. Title. PG7081.E64 1996 860.9'98dc20 96-27401 CIP This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Mindy Shouse Typesetter: BOOKCOMP Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Garamond & Arial Page v TO MY PARENTS, ELI NORMAN AND CONSTANCE CONVERSE FASS Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix 1. The Anthropological Imagination 1 2. The "Anthropological Flâneur" in Paris: Documents, 24 Bifur, and Collage Culture in Carpentier's ¡Ecué-Yamba- O! 3. The Eye of the Anthropologist: Vision and Mastery in 43 José María Arguedas 4. The Voice of the Other: Anthropological Discourse and 70 the Testimonio in Biografía de un Cimarrón and Canto de Sirena 5. The "I" of the Anthropologist: Allegories of Fieldwork 93 in Darcy Ribeiro's Maíra 6. Sa(1)vage Ethnography: The Cannibalistic Imagination 109 in Juan José Saer's El Entenado Afterword: The Anthropological Imagination and the 126 Question of a Latin American Postmodernism Bibliography 139 Index 153 Page ix Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jean Franco for being an incisive and always interested reader of this work when it was becoming a dissertation, and for valuable suggestions that aided its metamorphosis into a book. I am grateful to Diane Marting for bringing Clarice Lispector's short story "A menor mulher do mundo" to my attention, and for useful comments. Ted Emery has been supportive of this project and its author in countless ways, and I would like to thank him with all my heart. An early, shorter version of chapter 2 was published in Hispanic Journal and is reprinted here with the editor's permission. All unattributed translations are my own. Page 1 1 The Anthropological Imagination The conjunction of anthropology and literature in twentieth-century Latin American literary textswhat I am calling the "anthropological imagination"is a wide-ranging phenomenon that encompasses the surrealist primitivism, negrismo, and indigenismo of the first half of the century, the prolific testimonial genre that began in the 1960s, and the "popular culture modernism" of the transcultural novel as theorized by Angel Rama. Major Latin American writers who can be said to share a specifically anthropological focus are many, and include Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, José María Arguedas, Carlos Fuentes, and Augusto Roa Bastos. Interest in anthropology's relation to literature and vice versa has emerged in recent years, following the poststructuralist challenge to science that has made both anthropologists and literary critics conscious of the rhetorical strategies they share. Historians and discourse analysts have pointed out that supposedly objective scientific discourses such as history and anthropology deploy plot structures and narrative devices that are subject to analysis in the same way as those of any literary text. At the same time, the postmodern critique of master narratives and universalizing systems finds in anthropology, whose focus is on the marginal, the local, the Other of totalizing Western paradigms, a discipline at the heart of postmodern sensibility. The anthropological imagination has been fundamental in the ongoing process of defining Latin America's identity since Columbus arrived in the Page 2 New World and found it already inhabited. But while the first writings about an Other in Latin America begin simultaneously with the Conquest itself, interrelations between literature and the formalized discipline of anthropology emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when anthropology acquired institutional status as a science. Roberto González Echevarría has recently signaled the importance of anthropology for twentieth-century Latin American writers as "a set of given discursive possibilities . . . within and against which much of Latin American narrative is written."1 However, González Echevarría's discussion of the development of the novel in relation to nonliterary discourses (in the colonial period to the discourse of law, in the nineteenth century to that of science, in the twentieth to that of anthropology) avoids any mention of specific schools of thought or paradigms of anthropology. In this study I will look at how the exposure of twentieth-century Latin American writers to the discipline of anthropology and the various rhetorical styles and strategies specific to its various schools (cultural anthropology, functionalism, ethnography, etc.) is inscribed and recoded in their texts. An important consideration will be the extent to which Latin American writers conform to, and diverge from, metropolitan paradigms. I will also examine how changing images of the Other are reflected in anthropology and literature, and finally, I will discuss how the current disciplinary crisis in anthropology reverberates or is prefigured in Latin American writing, as well as anthropology's relevance to the vexed question of a Latin American postmodernism. In general, my focus for this study has been the novel, for it is in the open-ended space of the twentieth-century experimental novel where inherited anthropological and literary conventions have been explored,
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