Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature: Uneven Entanglements in European and South Asian Writing (New Comparisons in World Literature) 3031387031, 9783031387036

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NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE

Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature Uneven Entanglements in European and South Asian Writing

Lucio De Capitani

New Comparisons in World Literature Series Editors

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee Department of English Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK Sharae Deckard School of English, Drama & Film Studies University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. We welcome proposals for monographs, edited collections and Palgrave Pivots (short works of 25,000-50,000 words). Editorial board Dr Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA Dr Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden Dr Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK Dr Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA Dr Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, USA Dr Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK

Lucio De Capitani

Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature Uneven Entanglements in European and South Asian Writing

Lucio De Capitani Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venice, Italy

ISSN 2634-6095     ISSN 2634-6109 (electronic) New Comparisons in World Literature ISBN 978-3-031-38703-6    ISBN 978-3-031-38704-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38704-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: SHIGEMITSU TAKAHASHI / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Having started as my Ph.D. thesis, this book has gathered significant intellectual (and material) debts. My Ph.D. supervisor, Shaul Bassi, has supported me and helped me to shape this work since my very first days at Ca’Foscari University of Venice in 2015, and I am grateful and glad to continue to work alongside him at this stage of my professional life. I am also thankful to my thesis reviewers and committee for their precious insight: Cordula Lemke, Neelam Srivastava, Enrica Villari and Pablo Mukherjee. I would also like to thank the latter, alongside Sharae Deckard, as series editors of New Comparisons in World Literature, for recommending my work and sharing valuable feedback and commentary on this book at a later stage. Likewise, the contribution of the anonymous peer reviewers has been invaluable. Many conversations, exchanges and friendships have contributed to this book, directly or indirectly, over the years. Alphabetically, I would like to thank Stefania Sbarra, Sourit Bhattacharya, Silvia Boraso, Alessandro Costantini, Cristina Cugnata, Ilaria Giacometti, Angelo Grossi, Demet Intepe, Marco Medugno, Gloria Moorman and JungJu Shin. I am especially grateful to Anna Gasperini, Alice Girotto and Elena Sbrojavacca for their excellent suggestions regarding the lengthy process of transforming a thesis into a book. Lastly, I owe a particular debt to Alessandro Vescovi, who, besides first introducing me to Indian literature in English and

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consistently providing me with his guidance, has also offered generous and astute comments to the first chapter. My partner Teo has been with me since way before this project took any shape or form, and to him I can only say: longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead!

Contents

1 Ethnographic  Fieldwork as Point of Departure for World Literature  1 1.1 World Literature and Modernity  4 1.2 Anthropology/Ethnography and Fieldwork 12 1.3 Ethnographic Narratives 26 1.3.1 The Epistemological Status of Ethnographic Narratives 27 1.3.2 Ethnographic Authority and Style 31 1.3.3 Genres 37 1.4 Outline of the Chapters 42 Works Cited 48 2 Colonial  Ethnography and Uneven Intimacies in Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling 57 2.1 Intimacy and Ethnographic Fieldwork 61 2.2 Robert Louis Stevenson 64 2.2.1 In the South Seas: From Romance to Ethnographic Realism 64 2.2.2 The Scientific Tourist 69 2.2.3 Colonial Fieldwork and Queer Realism: “The Beach of Falesá” 80

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2.3 Rudyard Kipling 93 2.3.1 The Anglo-Indian as Cultural Insider 93 2.3.2 Colonial Typologies: “The Head of the District” 97 2.3.3 Love and/as Ethnographic Espionage: Kim106 Works Cited118 3 Militant  Ethnography and Internal Colonialism in Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi123 3.1 Militant Ethnography and Its Discontents128 3.2 Carlo Levi132 3.2.1 Christ Stopped at Eboli as an Ethnographic Critique of the State132 3.2.2 An Anthropology of Antifascism144 3.2.3 Monologism and Peasant Passivity148 3.2.4 After Christ: Peasant Political Consciousness and Third-Worldism152 3.3 Mahasweta Devi158 3.3.1 Counterinsurgent Anthropology in “Draupadi”158 3.3.2 Chotti Munda and His Arrow as Ethnography of Adivasi Struggle165 3.3.3 “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”: The Fieldworker-Activist as Ambivalent Ally175 Works Cited186 4 Patchy  Ethnographies of Neocolonial and Neoliberal Landscapes in Amitav Ghosh and Frank Westerman191 4.1 A Rush of Stories: Patchy Ethnography196 4.2 Amitav Ghosh199 4.2.1 Syncretic Humanism and Culture of Compromise: In an Antique Land 199 4.2.2 Dialogic Ethnography and Transhistorical Doubles205 4.2.3 The Hungry Tide: Ethnographies of the Environment213 4.2.4 From Mainstream to Convivial Conservation217 4.2.5 The Limits of Liberal Meritocracy (and Translation)225

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4.3 Frank Westerman232 4.3.1 El Negro and Me: A Multisited Ethnography of Neocolonial Development232 4.3.2 The Mirror at the End of the Journey238 4.3.3 Choke Valley: Disasters and the Mythologies of Science and Religion241 4.3.4 State-Sorcery in a Landscape of Uncertainty247 Works Cited255 5 Conclusion261 Works Cited267 Index269

CHAPTER 1

Ethnographic Fieldwork as Point of Departure for World Literature

A British trader on a Polynesian island, trying to distinguish friends from foes in a native society infiltrated by frontier capitalism; an adventure-­ loving boy, whose curiosity for the diverse people of the Indian Subcontinent turns him into the perfect secret agent of the Raj; an anti-­ fascist activist, exiled in a remote town in Southern Italy, looking at the local peasants as the key for a political renewal of his country; an Indian counterinsurgent specialist, using his knowledge of indigenous communities to hunt down their guerrilla fighters; a Dutch development worker, losing faith in the liberatory potential of his chosen profession; and an Indian ethnographer in rural Egypt, looking for fellowship across cultural difference. These are some of the characters that this book investigates, each of them a fieldworker engaged in a process of discovery of a community or place. The various entanglements between these researchers, activists, spies, traders, journalists and officers, and the people they engage with, result in what I call ethnographic narratives. And it is precisely a constellation of ethnographic narratives by six writers from Britain, India, Italy and the Netherlands—from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century—that this book is about. More precisely, this work pivots around three, interconnected focal points, the first being an engagement with recent debates on the concept of world literature, one of the main areas of discussion in literary studies

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. De Capitani, Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38704-3_1

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in the last two decades, often developed in conversation—or in conflict— with previous disciplinary formations such as postcolonial studies. Within the diverse landscape of world-literary studies, recent eco-­ materialist approaches, influenced by world-systems theory, have reimagined worldliterary criticism as a textual registration of capitalist modernity. This book takes its cue from this approach, which, I argue, manages to retain, in Aamir Mufti’s words, the “critical intelligence of the concept” of world literature (2016, x), paving the way for an overcoming of previous disciplinary boundaries in literary studies while also reorientating world literature towards a coherent methodological proposal. In line with this approach, I look for narratives that offer insight, from their diverse locations in time and space, on the dynamics of modernisation. But if world literature is reconceived as a registration of modernity, what exactly are we supposed to look for in literary texts? This brings me to the book’s second concern: rethinking a long-­ standing tradition of collaboration between anthropology and literature in the context of world-literary criticism. If anthropology—and, its methodological correlate, ethnography—have long been in dialogue with literary studies at least since the 1980s, they have remained remarkably absent from the debates on world literature. My proposal is to activate this connection by rethinking one of the key concepts of anthropology and ethnography—fieldwork—as privileged point of observation of modernity. Ethnographer-fieldworkers, I argue, historically have historically operated among and/or alongside those who have experienced modernisation processes first-hand and most violently—‘primitive’ and indigenous people, colonial subjects, marginalised communities in both the core and peripheral zones of the modern world-system, ‘beneficiaries’ of development programmes. As such, they variously act as witnesses, enablers and opponents of the dynamics of colonial and capitalist modernity, from the nineteenth century to the neocolonial and neoliberal era. In doing so, the figure of the ethnographer-fieldworker is central to a repertoire of narratives—encounters between scholars, officers, traders and native populations; insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; projects of modernisations and political renewal emerging from (or imposed upon) peripheral communities—that intersect with colonial and capitalist modernisation. Therefore, an engagement with various practices of fieldwork, to be understood through the history of anthropology and ethnography, can function as an effective starting point for new literary comparisons concerned with the literary registration of modernity.

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The final focal point of the book is the concept of ethnographic narratives, conceived precisely as convergence between world literature as registration of modernity, and the diverse realities of ethnographic fieldwork. I use the term ethnographic narratives to define texts that register fieldwork experience. This can happen at the level of plot, when a text dramatises fieldwork, staging the encounter between a fieldworker and the people they study; and/or because that text is a recognisable product of fieldwork experience of its author—that is, to follow George Marcus and Dick Cushman’s definition of ethnographies as texts, it is “an account resulting from having done fieldwork” (1982, 27). This bipartite definition is meant to include both first-person, non-fictional narratives centred around the ‘quest’ and perspective of a fieldworker—what I call fieldwork memoirs— and fictional narratives modelled after realist novels, focused on a comprehensive representation of social reality through a variety of perspectives—what I call ethnographic fictions. The literary texts that I engage with in this book are all ethnographic narratives that put into focus key dynamics of modernity. My rationale has been to select and juxtapose narratives in which specific forms of fieldwork relations within specific historical contexts register important nodes of modernity. I discuss how Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling— two major colonial authors engaged in shaping the imaginings of colonial territories within the late nineteenth-century Anglosphere—index the uneven intimacies of colonial fieldwork in a context of imperial and capitalist expansion. I explore how the writings of Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi—two writers that are interested in national (re)formation as a site of both change and injustice—offer an insight into the tricky position of activists-fieldworkers that ally themselves with peripheral communities in a context of internal colonialism. And I investigate how Amitav Ghosh and Frank Westerman—two contemporary writers that systematically juxtapose different geographies, histories and systems of knowledge to explore inequalities of the modern world-system—tackle the complexities of engaging with communities affected by global forces, ranging from neoliberal and neocolonial policies to oppressive environmental governance, for fieldworkers that are to an extent complicit with those very forces. This introductory chapter explores the three focal points of the book: world literature, anthropology/ethnography/fieldwork and ethnographic narratives. I begin by illustrating my approach to world literature, highlighting the methodological advantages of establishing uneven modernity as the basis of literary comparativism. I then discuss how anthropology

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and ethnography are a repertoire of stories and theories to explore (fieldwork) relations that index that modernity and hence function as a point of departure for world literature. The last sections, finally, discuss the characteristics of ethnographic narratives from three perspectives: their epistemological status, their relationship with the core concept of ethnographic authority and its stylistic implications, and the literary genres they can belong to.

1.1   World Literature and Modernity The idea of juxtaposing texts from multiple historical periods and sites emerges from my engagement with recent debates on world literature—a category that has been steadily gaining currency within literary studies in the last two decades. The term long identified a genealogy1 that includes interventions by Goethe and Eckermann (2014 [1827]), Marx and Engels (1908 [1847]), and Auerbach (1969  [1952]), but that was not, until recently, a site of significant critical interest. Alternatively, it designated an American pedagogical construct, namely introductory, ‘general’ literature courses offered to undergraduates (D’Haen 2012, 74). The current popularity and increased critical importance of the term is the result of radical shifts within literary studies from the late 1990s onwards, caused both by institutional pressures, such as the reorganisation of teaching and research within the neoliberal university, and by debates within the discipline on its scope and aims. In this context, with an increasing globalisation process unfolding, the humanities and social sciences were driven towards a distinctive global turn (Helgesson and Vermeulen 2016, 5). Since then, literary studies have increasingly moved beyond previous disciplinary formations—including national, postcolonial and comparative literature—towards a “new, maximally encompassing project” that is “premised on the assumption that the ‘world’ is one, integrated if not of course united” and that “pushes intrinsically in the directions of commerce and commonality, linkage and connection, articulation and integration, network and system” (Warwick Research Collective 2015, 5–6). World literature has become the favourite term to frame these new developments, cemented, in its critical relevance, by the work of Franco Moretti (2000, 2003), David Damrosch (2003) and Pascale Casanova (2004), even if the theoretical and methodological differences between these critics made clear that the concept was inherently contested. As Caroline Levine and Venkat Mani ask, “is world literature a canon, a collection, a mode of

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reading, a utopian dream, an impossibility?” (2013, 141). The question is still relevant: there is clearly no consensus on what world literature is or should be, nor, considering that the term is actively claimed by a variety of often competing critical agendas, can such consensus be reasonably expected. While debated, the concept of world literature is, no doubt, an increasingly predominant category within literary studies, systematically acquiring critical and institutional capital. As Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava sum it up: World literature has become a hegemonic force in the English humanities. It is fast becoming the way to theorize any literary field of the contemporary period that has aspirations to a global reach, subsuming postcolonial literature, minority literature, and “Anglophone”/“Francophone” theoretical models. (2017, 10, emphasis in the original)

For Ciocca and Srivastava, this is not a particularly healthy development, as they argue, commenting specifically on the ‘passage’ from postcolonial to world-literary criticism, that “the term ‘postcolonial’ retains a political edge and radical critique that is completely lost in the homogenizing term ‘world’” (11). Admittedly, however, the inherent radicalism of postcolonial criticism and literature has been debated for a long time, including by its practitioners and proponents.2 One may recall Graham Huggan’s description of postcolonial studies as an increasingly institutionalised field of academic research (2001, viii) that is (albeit, in his view, variously, and not irredeemably) complicit in the “global commodification of cultural difference”, even when that difference is, purportedly, oppositional to the global late-capitalist system (vii).3 If Huggan painted these aspects more as tendencies than totalising imperatives of the field (26), Neil Lazarus, more scathingly, defined postcolonial literary studies as a “pragmatic adjustment to the demise of the socialist-communist emancipatory movements” (2011, 9). If the radicalism of postcolonial studies, then, is not to be taken for granted, Ciocca’s and Srivastava’s anxiety towards the (lack of) political possibilities engendered by world literature as the next frontier of literary studies—especially as ‘replacement’ of postcolonial approaches—is nevertheless understandable. They are not alone, in fact, in their mistrust of world literature in this sense. Aamir Mufti, for instance, in analysis of the

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return of world literature that is reminiscent of Huggan’s or Lazarus’ critiques of postcolonialism, points out: The resurgence of world literature in our times—in academic discourse, in the practices of literary publishing, and in reading habits in the Global North and elite sectors of society world-wide—is in a strong sense a post-1989 development, which has appeared against the background of the larger neo-liberal attempt to monopolize all possibilities of the international into the global life of capital. (2016, 91)

Seen in this way, the turn towards world literature risks exacerbating rather than correcting some of the liberal, commodifying tendencies of postcolonial criticism and literature, while stifling their—albeit not always consistently expressed—radical potential. Indeed, there is definitely a reactionary vein in the current success of world literature, in the sense that, as Mufti puts it, it can easily work as an “intellectual correlate of the happy talk that accompanied globalisation over the past couple of decades” (xi)—specifically, I would add, of a liberal conception of globalisation as the establishment of a borderless world characterised by diversity, mobility and cultural and commercial exchanges. How then to hijack this paradigm shift so that it becomes a chance not to close but to open new avenues of radical critique, while overcoming, perhaps, the limits of previous disciplinary formations? Considering that neither world-literary nor postcolonial criticism are homogeneous fields, I believe these questions are less about embracing a totalising paradigm shift but more about, as Lorna Burns puts it, “a reconsideration of world literature […] as inseparable from the discipline of postcolonial studies” and “a rethinking of postcolonialism […] taking forward some of the lessons of contemporary world literature studies” (2019, 3–4). Ciocca and Srivastava themselves, for instance, acknowledge the usefulness of contemporary debates around world literature in spite of their affinity for postcolonialism (2017, 13). In a specular move, this book finds its theoretical foundation within a specific approach to world-literary studies which, I believe, retains the central anti-colonial stance of key strands of postcolonialism, and its attention to the histories of empire, but conjoins them with a much needed, more expansive historical framework, which in turn engenders useful methodological innovations and, in doing so, shapes a platform to discuss—as it is my intention—ethnographic narratives in the context of world literature.

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Such an approach comes from a materialist strand of world-literary criticism, which, while becoming more relevant in the last few years, was arguably inaugurated by Franco Moretti’s seminal article “Conjectures on World Literatures”. Moretti’s “Conjectures”, rejecting the idea that world literature could simply be “literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it” (2000, 55), offers an alternative by establishing a parallelism between the world literary system and the world-system of international capitalism as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. Wallerstein frames the world-system, in Moretti’s words, as “simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (55–56). The world literary system follows a similar pattern: “one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal” (56). The inequality between those inter-related literatures stems from the asymmetry of literary exchanges— with core literary cultures being disproportionately influential when compared to peripheral ones. More recently, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015), written by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC),4 has expanded some crucial insights of Moretti’s “Conjectures”. The collective takes its cue from the idea of connecting the discussion on world literature to Wallerstein’s world-system. Moreover, it draws inspiration from other previous engagement with world-systems theory in a literary context, such as Jamesonian Marxism, from which it borrows its specific conception of modernity.5 The preoccupation of the members of WReC is how literature can register, at a textual level, a key aspect of the capitalist world-system: the process of combined and uneven development. This concept is already present in Moretti through the “one-and-uneven” formula, but the collective retraces its origins in Leon Trotsky, who noted how capitalist production does not entirely supplant old forms of production and social relations, but is rather conjoined with pre-existing forces, archaic methods of production and local networks of power. Capitalist development is uneven, in the sense that “[it] does not smooth away but rather produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course” (12)⁠⁠. This focus on the combined and uneven development that characterises the modern world-system offers a cohesive perspective to look at literary

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texts worldwide, because combined and uneven development is framed as a crucial, if not the crucial aspect of capitalist modernity, which, in turn, following Frederic Jameson, is interpreted as a unitary phenomenon that happens everywhere simultaneously, albeit interacting differently with local conditions. As the members of WReC claim, “uneven development is not a characteristic of ‘backward’ formations only” (12) but a phenomenon that invests both the core and the periphery of the whole world-­ system, unifying them under a single capitalist modernity. In their view, capitalist relations are modernity, and they are enacted globally, although each locale experiences modernity in different ways. Literature that registers combined and uneven development, according to WReC, reveals itself as world-literature (with a hyphen, in reference to Wallerstein’s world-system). It is worth noting that their favoured term registration (which I also employ in this book when I state that ethnographic narratives register fieldwork experiences and relations) is meant to stress the complexity and intricacy of the relationship between literary form and social reality and highlights that a social reality can be encoded in a text through a multiplicity of formal strategies (Warwick Research Collective 2016, 544): hence, for instance, WReC’s interest for what they call, after Michael Löwy, irrealism—an aesthetic “founded on a logic of the imagination, of the marvelous, of the mystery or the dream” (2007, 194)⁠—which they claim is particularly effective to register capitalist modernity at the peripheries of the world-system. Moreover, this model of world-literature has very precise (self-imposed) chronological boundaries, starting in the nineteenth century, coincidentally with “the capitalisation of the world and the full worlding of capital” (Warwick Research Collective 2015, 15, emphasis in the original) that were the result of British and European colonialism. Finally, it is inherently suspicious of any theory of world literature and globalisation that conceives either of them as a level playing field, wishing away the structural inequality of the world-­ system (22). While not fully replicating WReC’s approach in my exploration of ethnographic narratives across various times and places of modernity, I borrow a number of methodological insights from Combined and Uneven Development and other materialist world-literary critics. First of all, I similarly take the modern world-system as a starting point of a new literary comparativism. I subscribe to the view that world-literary criticism, “instead of replicating postcolonial binaries (west/rest; north/south; first-­ world/third-world, for example)”, should employ “a multi-scalar,

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multidimensional understanding of the place of literature in the world-­ system” (Warwick Research Collective 2015, 547). The conceptual toolkit of world-system theory enables this kind of multi-scalar comparisons and connections across space through its division of the world between mutually constitutive cores, semi-peripheries and peripheries, which breaks away from the framework of ‘national’ literatures as well as from the rigid binaries of (some) postcolonial criticism. This approach also enables new comparisons across time through its recuperation of a longue durée6 perspective, questioning traditional periodisations in literary history (see Eatough 2015b). Overall, the advantages of a materialist world-literary approach over a specifically postcolonial one are aptly summed up by Treasa De Loughry, who points out that “a materialist world-literary theory […] responds to a perceived difficulty or conceptual incapacity in the field of postcolonial studies to grapple with a situation that exceeds anti-­ colonial temporalities or conditions” while simultaneously “[demanding] a new critical language to parse the complex and ongoing oppressions of an uneven world-system, rather than an over-determined use of the ‘postcolonial’”(2020, 4). Moreover, a central aspect of an approach based on Wallerstein’s formulation of the world-system is that core and (semi-)periphery represent “a relational concept, not a pair of terms that are reified, that is, have separate essential meanings” (2004, 17). This has a number of implications: first, core, periphery and semi-periphery are not stable, but they are prone to change over time, as a consequence of mutated economic conditions that result in new hegemonic configurations. Second, the presence of this tripartite structure exists both on a macroscopic and a microscopic level. This insight, if incorporated in our understanding of literary texts, both in terms of their content and in terms of their position within a literary world-system, is arguably a more comprehensive way to grasp the complexities of geographies and histories of power than essentialising categories such as the ‘Global South’ or ‘the West’. It is useful, for instance, to frame the existence of peripheral or core areas (as well as the relative power and influence of the writers associated with these areas) within larger peripheral and/or core zones. This complements effectively other formulations that try to overcome traditional postcolonial binaries such as the idea of postcolonial Europe (see Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2012; Ponzanesi and Colpani 2016) or that of internal colonialism (discussed in Chap. 3). This book, by connecting ethnographic narratives from various times and places, embraces both the multi-scalar perspective and the new

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periodisations that world-system theory enables and aims at expanding or overcoming previous ways of understanding literary history and criticism. It conjoins, under the shared project of charting modernity through fieldwork relations, narratives from the late colonial period (Stevenson and Kipling) and within liberation and anti-colonial temporalities (Levi and Devi) to more recent scenarios of neocolonisation and neoliberal development (Ghosh and Westerman), to highlight historical continuities. But it also juxtaposes explorations of peripheries-within-the-peripheries (Devi, Ghosh, Westerman), as well as of peripheries-within-the-core-areas (Levi), of modernity, tracing unevenness within national and regional formations. Moreover, it compares authors from different linguistic/national literary traditions that deal with colonialism, imperialism and capitalist development as interconnected phenomena—treating them as place-specific, differentiated investigations of a singular modernity. The most relevant methodological suggestion that this book takes from Combined and Uneven Development, however, is the very idea of refashioning world literature as “a creature of modernity” (Warwick Research Collective 2015, 50), that is, as an index of a specific conception of modernity. As mentioned before, WReC equates modernity with capitalist relations, which systematically produce combined and uneven development—in other words, capitalist modernisation. They also argue, after Jameson, for an understanding of modernity as a singular phenomenon that is, however, “everywhere irreducibly specific” (12), since, if modernity is defined as “the way in which capitalist social relations are ‘lived’”, the various concrete ‘experiences’ of modernity will necessarily be different “for the simple reason that no two social instances are the same” (12). Importantly, I see world-systemic approaches to world literature—and their conception of modernity—as compatible with, and indeed requiring, an intersectional perspective, as they need to tackle the “systemic constellation of gender, race, class, and ecology” (Deckard and Shapiro 2019, 8). In this sense, insights from two further developments of world-systems theory can be particularly fruitful. On the one hand, I am thinking of the (re)formulation of the world-system proposed by decolonial scholar Ramón Grosfoguel, who frames the modern world-system as the imposition, starting from the sixteenth century, of several “entangled global hierarchies” (2010, 70): a global class formation around a diversity of forms of labour; an international division of labour between core and peripheral zones; an inter-state system of political organisations institutionalised in colonial administration; and then racial/ethnic, gender, sexual, spiritual,

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epistemic and linguistic hierarchies that privilege respectively, European people, males, heterosexuals, Christians, western knowledge and European languages (70–71). On the other hand, it is also crucial to understand the world-system specifically as a capitalist world-ecology7 (Moore 2003), taking into consideration the way capitalism is an ecological regime that relies on exhausting commodity frontiers in its search for ‘cheap things’ to exploit8 (Patel and Moore 2018). Another important specification is that a shift towards a materialist world-literary criticism, especially from the standpoint of postcolonialism, does not simply replace a focus on empire with a focus on capitalism, but operates by making explicit the links between capitalism, imperialism and colonialism and their capacity to reconfigure economies, societies, cultures and ecologies. Melissa Kennedy points out that “capitalist motivations lie at the heart of empire” (2020, 24) and, in turn, that “capitalism is a metanarrative to which all colonies were subjected under imperialism and remain to differing extents implicated as members of the global world-­ system” (26, emphasis in the original). A recuperation of the capitalist principles behind colonisation and imperialism, in particular, enables an understanding of “the structures that connect colonial to neocolonial and neoliberal periods within a history of continuous capitalist relations” (24), thus actively stressing continuities that are visible only within a longue durée approach. By referring to the unevenness of fieldwork relations that I trace in the ethnographic narratives discussed in this book as a registration of modernity, I understand them as a product of all these interlinked dynamics and processes, presupposing a rethinking of capitalism as intertwined with colonialism and empire, and a vision of the world-system/world-ecology constituted by multiple, interconnected hierarchies. This is why, for instance, discussing relations of gender oppression within Robert Louis Stevenson’s colonial-capitalist frontier in “The Beach of Falesá” or how the neocolonial effects of capitalist environmental conservation structure class struggle in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide is, to me, a registration of one-and-uneven modernity. This idea of modernity as a privileged framework to understand world literature opens up a number of research trajectories. To paraphrase Eric Auerbach’s famous formulation, each project of world-literary criticism requires a point of departure9—“a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out of them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves

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occupy” (1969, 41–42). If we understand world literature as a literary registration of modernity, it follows that any material site that allows an insightful observation of its dynamics—as well as forms of resistance to them—is a valuable starting point for world-literary surveys. It is worth asking, then, what points of observation of modernity can work as effective points of departure for world literature. The proposal of this book is to look at ethnographic fieldwork as an Auerbachian point of departure, as a “firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena” from which modernity can be explored. More specifically, it posits narratives that textually register ethnographic fieldwork—about and/or emerging from ethnographic fieldwork—as a rich terrain from which modernity itself can be registered. The reason for this choice is explained in the next section, which details the way in which the history of anthropology and ethnography intersects with capitalist, colonial and imperial modernisation. It is precisely by registering these processes, which variously but unfailingly inform and constitute the experience of fieldwork, that ethnographic narratives, including the work of the six writers presented in this book, can reveal themselves as world-literary.

1.2  Anthropology/Ethnography and Fieldwork The conception of fieldwork that I employ in this book is constructed through an engagement with anthropology and ethnography. More specifically, I understand fieldwork as it has emerged, in its various forms, from the history of anthropology and ethnography, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. As I detail in the following paragraphs, anthropology and ethnography have historically evolved alongside empire, and consequently, capitalist and colonial expansion. This historical connection between anthropology and colonialism-empire-capitalism, on the one hand, is something anthropologists and ethnographers have become increasingly aware of, leading them to develop ideally more equal and just models of fieldwork, but that, on the other, nevertheless persists in new forms even today. I interpret the various forms of fieldwork (and fieldwork relations) within the history of anthropology and ethnography as an archive for the processes of modernisation that these disciplines have been shaped by, and that ethnographic narratives, in turn, can register, turning themselves into creative resources to analyse modernity (that is, world-­ literature). Anthropology and ethnography are, in other words, a source for a diverse cast of characters and of an array of situations that are

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intertwined with the unfolding of capitalist-colonial modernity; and, at the same time, provide theories and debates to critically discuss the specific uneven entanglements that these characters and situations enact or entail in a variety of historical contexts. It is therefore in order to introduce these various character types, situations and debates, which will variously reappear throughout the book, that I now undertake a (far from exhaustive) cavalcade through the history of anthropology and ethnography, and the various forms of fieldwork that have emerged from it. The inception of modern anthropology dates back to the nineteenth century, with what is usually defined as its armchair phase—a term indicating that its practitioners were mostly synthesising ethnographic materials derived from questionnaires and informants, or, as it was most often the case, from second-hand accounts of travellers (Stocking 1987, 79). Those accounts came from a variety of sources: explorers, naturalists, missionaries and colonial officers—all categories of ‘non-professional’ ethnographers that later generations of anthropologist-fieldworkers would dismiss and use as negative examples to construct their professional identity. In other words, in this phase, the anthropologist and the ethnographer were, generally, two distinct figures: theorists working in a metropolitan setting, and colonial ‘men on the spot’, data-gatherers and fieldworkers in direct contact—unevenly entangled, as it were—with various local populations. The ‘men on the spot’ were also actors, albeit in different roles, in colonial-­ capitalist expansion and primitive accumulation, thus rooting the data of early anthropology in colonial encounters. Anthropology, moreover, initially fashioned itself as “a general science of man, [aiming at] discovering social laws in the long evolution of humans toward higher standards of rationality” (Marcus and Fischer 1999, 7). This is abundantly clear in the work of Edward Tylor, whose anthropological definition of culture10 is generally considered the conceptual starting point of modern anthropology. Tylor argued that “mankind [is] homogeneous in nature, though placed in different grades of civilization” (2010, 7), proposing a unitary model of cultural evolution shared by all humankind that locates every human culture within a single developmental ladder. Within this model of unilineal cultural evolutionism, cultures at a similar ‘evolutionary stage’ could be compared. The idea of a single developmental ladder implies that ‘primitive’ cultures are also quite literally a mirror of the past, since they are located in an evolutionary phase that civilised cultures have already outgrown—arguably the most explicit case of what Johannes Fabian calls denial of coevalness (2002).

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This theoretical framework, as well as the ‘division of labour’ between armchair anthropologist and ‘man on the spot’, were both abandoned with the refashioning of the anthropologist as a theorist-fieldworker—as anthropologist-ethnographer—in the early twentieth century. By bridging the divide between theorist and fieldworker, anthropologists were now taking upon themselves the burden of ‘collecting data’ from the populations they studied. Their data was argued to be more reliable and unbiased than those of ‘amateur’ ethnographers like officers and missionaries. Bronislaw Malinowski, in his introduction to his ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), detaches his work from that of “untrained minds” that are, besides, “full of the biassed and pre-judged opinions inevitable in the average practical man, whether administrator, missionary, or trader, yet so strongly repulsive to a mind striving after the objective, scientific view of things” (2007, 47). What separates professional ethnographers from the ‘practical men’ on the spot, according to Malinowski, is that the latter possess scientific aims and methodologies to gather data; and that they put themselves in the proper conditions to do ethnographic work, that is, they take residence among the people they study, immersing themselves into their life: they blend in, in order not to disturb the regular flow of native life, but also take part in the communal life of the natives. As James Clifford puts it, anthropologists of Malinowski’s generation managed to establish a form of authority that was “both scientifically validated and based on a unique personal experience” (1983, 121)—that is, the ‘science’ of the developing ethnographic method and the experience of ethnographic fieldwork. It is also worth noting that the overall objective of anthropology also changed with Malinowski’s generation: rather than a general history of humankind, now the work of an anthropologist was conceived as the study of human cultures—or, more specifically, of ‘a culture’ among others (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 1)—to discover, in Malinowski’s words, “the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” (2007, 56, emphasis in the original). Consequently, unilineal evolutionism was replaced by cultural relativism, which invites to judge a culture through its very values and cognitive paradigms—an approach that was promoted with particular vehemence by Boasian anthropologists in the United States. Not unlike Malinowski’s emphasis of detached scientificity, which, allegedly, emancipated ethnography from colonial agendas, cultural relativism would come under attack from later generations of anthropologists, but its implications were deemed rather progressive at the time:

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Franz Boas, a life-long opposer of racism and xenophobia in the American society, used cultural relativism to oppose the innate ethnocentrism of evolutionary paradigms (Barnard 2002, 137).11 In the early twentieth century, therefore, the anthropologist-­ ethnographer-­fieldworker emerges as a recognisable professional figure, provided with special authority to understand alien cultures—a scientist that undertakes the task of applying a positivist epistemology to human behaviour and society. Their authority and knowledge are predicated on an almost supernatural power of observation (Clifford 1983, 125)—justified by their theoretical training: Malinowski claims that, once he managed to insert himself within Trobriand village life, “whatever happened was within easy reach and there was no possibility of its escaping my notice” (2007, 48). While this emphasis on the visual power of the fieldworker has a decisive distancing and reifying effect (see Fabian 2002, 118–123), the source of ethnographers’ knowledge is also, somewhat paradoxically, located in their participation in local life. Such paradox is accurately synthesised in the formula ‘participant observation’—a term first coined by the Chicago school of sociology (Okely 2012, 16)—that came to define the ethnographic method from Malinowski onwards (and whose ambiguities are further explored in Chap. 2). Nevertheless, the classic ethnographer is conceived as a self-reliant figure: not only because they deliberately work as a lone cultural outsider, but also because, compared to the armchair anthropologist, they are presented, at least in the original Malinowskian formulation, as less reliant on informers thanks to their capacity for autonomous observation—a position which, in turn, conceals the continuing presence of crucial informers on the field. Much of the anthropology and ethnography of the second half of the twentieth century could be framed as a revision, and at times as a rejection, of the Malinowskian conception of anthropology, itself a replacement (a synthesis, as it were) of the colonial ‘practical man’/‘man on the spot’ and the armchair theorist. The criticism of the classic anthropologist entails a revision of the political role of the anthropologist within the project of colonial-capitalist modernisation; a revision of the fieldwork experience itself; and a revision of the kinds of texts that the fieldwork experience produces. The first aspect is connected with the political and historical situation of the late 1960s, under the influence of the independence movements in the colonial world, the war in Vietnam and the civil rights and student movements (Bunzl 2002, xvii), which led to a sudden politicisation of

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anthropology and a revision of its relationship with colonialism and imperialism. Particularly important, especially for anthropology in the United States, was the discovery that anthropologists were collaborating to counterinsurgency programmes in Latin America (Project Camelot) and East Asia (Project Agile), provoking intense debate over the ethics of the discipline (see Sluka 2007, 272; Patterson 2001, 124–127). The unveiling of these collaborations re-evoked old associations between anthropologists and spies—a link that Franz Boas himself, as early as 1919, had ferociously attacked when he had protested against the activities of four anthropologists using their professional status as a cover-up for their identity as government agents (2005). In the ensuing debate on the ethics of the profession and its institutional entanglements, one of the harshest reactions was that of Kathleen Gough, who characterised anthropology as “a child of Western imperialism”, arguing that anthropologists “commonly played roles characteristic of white liberals […], sometimes of white liberal reformers” (1968, 12–13). Even this (far from radical) position, according to Gough, was being eroded in favour of more subservient forms of complicity in the post-war period, as anthropologists increasingly risked being co-opted into serving imperialist/capitalist powers in their attempts to reimpose their global hegemony after decolonisation—typically against the interest of the people they studied (17–18). Her proposal was instead a shift of the focus of anthropology to the study of both imperialism and revolution. Another important piece of the debate was the collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, which analysed the relationships between anthropology and British colonialism. In his introduction, Talal Asad, after pointing out that “anthropology is […] rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and the Third World” (1973, 16), characterised anthropologists, if not as active collaborators of colonialism, at least as complicit (ideologically and institutionally) in the political and economic order under which their discipline developed. Asad argued that while “the scientistic definition of anthropology as a disinterested (objective, value-­ free) study of ‘other cultures’ helped to mark off the anthropologist’s enterprise from that of colonial Europeans”, it also “[rendered] him unable to envisage and argue for a radically different political future for the subordinate people he studied and thus serve to merge that enterprise in effect with that of dominant status-quo Europeans” (1973, 18). In the same collection, Wendy James characterised the anthropologist in a colonial context, instead, as “a frustrated radical” (1973, 50), pointing out the

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history of attempts, on the part of anthropologists, to advertise the practical utility of their discipline to colonial authorities, while also vindicating their right to study native society independently from the ‘practical needs’ of colonial administration, thus fighting against co-optation. Yet even James’ interpretation underlines the collaboration—if not wholly harmonious—between anthropologists and colonial authorities. Other voices were more straightforward in their critiques. African-­ American anthropologist William S. Willis, in his article “Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet”, defined anthropology as “the social science that studies dominated colored peoples—and their ancestors—living outside the boundaries of modern white societies” (1972, 123). He also defined cultural relativism—one of the hallmarks of anthropology’s status as a progressive science—as a strategy to preserve the hegemony of white society in an increasingly decolonising world—as a theoretical correlate of more ‘inclusive’, less blatantly racist forms of imperialism that aimed at preserving coloured people as producers and consumers: In the nineteenth century, anthropologists used an explicit racist ideology to make colored peoples into different human beings than white people. Later, when scientific racism became less popular, anthropologists achieved almost the same result with the concepts of culture and of cultural relativism. The enculturation inherent in the culture concept was seen as having the power to mold most human beings into accepting and internalizing almost any kind of sociocultural arrangement. These arrangements, whatever their nature and political and economic basis, were then justified by the “dignity” that was accorded them by cultural relativism. (126)

Willis also questioned the role of anthropologists as defenders of the interest of non-white people: referencing the mid-century’s stance of some anthropologists on “sharing of the wealth of the colored world with colored peoples” (130), he pointed out that this “was also consistent with new imperialist aims adopted to parry the threat posed by colored liberation movements” (130). These reflections on the institutional status of anthropology entailed, in turn, a wave of reflections on the very nature of the fieldwork experience and a rethinking of the kinds of texts produced by the ethnographer. Significant contributions in this sense were carried out, later on, in what is variously called the postmodern, reflexive or textual turn, which was built on both the anti-colonial critique of the previous generation of

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anthropologists12 and on Clifford Geertz’s textualist and interpretative anthropology. Postmodern anthropology was most famously represented by Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, a 1986 collection of essays edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. This collection, as the title suggests, focuses on ethnographic writing, stressing its inevitably biased nature in spite of its claims to scientific neutrality, its institutional and historical location, and its historical dependence on colonial circumstances, as well as on the multiple forces at work in the production of an ethnographic text, including the long-silenced voice of native informants. Clifford famously argues in his introduction that “ethnographic truths are […] inherently partial—committed and incomplete” (1986, 7), which does not mean that ethnographic representations cannot be held accountable for what they claim, but rather that ethnographers must be fully aware of their representational limits, biases and political and personal entanglements, both within and outside the field: “acute political and epistemological self-consciousness need not lead to ethnographic self-absorption, or to the conclusion that is impossible to know anything certain about other people” (7). Clifford is stressing here the importance of reflexivity, arguably a lasting and crucial contribution to the ethnographic method from this phase. Reflexivity meant refusing to take for granted the neutrality of the ethnographer’s presence on the field by addressing its impact, by discussing the distortions in ethnographic knowledge produced by the wilful elision of the effects of colonialism on the anthropologists’ understanding of their subjects—in an attempt to single out ‘precontact’ social forms—and by exploring the anthropologist’s complicity with colonialism (Davies 2008, 13). These various waves and ways of rethinking anthropology, between the 1960s and the 1980s, variously reveal the anthropologist as playing a variety of roles: a liberal reformer in the colonies—a liberal imperialist, as it were; a frustrated radical; or, more disturbingly, a collaborator of imperialism, taking up the roles of the counterinsurgency agent or of the spy. Simultaneously, however, they produced alternatives to all these roles, concretely reimagining the practices of fieldwork and, in turn, of the figure of the anthropologist-ethnographer. The critical anthropologist became increasingly understood as a self-reflexive actor on the field whose actions should be guided by principles of dialogue, collaboration, reciprocity and partnership.

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In her historical account of the transformations of ethnography throughout the twentieth century, Louise Lamphere stresses four main areas of transformation of ethnographic fieldwork and writing (2018, 65): the acknowledgement of the historical, political and economic context of the communities that ethnographers study; the discovery of social diversity in the field and the attempt to bring forward a variety of voices both through fieldwork methods and through writing; the use of dialogical approaches in ethnographic writing; and the emphasis on the researcher’s reflexivity and their positionality on the field (65). As she argues, these transformations paved the way for even broader ones, including collaborative and activist approaches. As an example of the former, she cites models of research based on the principle that “community members are equal partners in all phases of the research, from problem definition to data collection, interpretation, and dissemination” (75). This includes transforming ‘informants’ into collaborators, and collaborators into co-authors of anthropological texts. Even when the informers, research assistants and ethnographic subjects do not explicitly take part in the writing process, their anthropological work should also be consistently rendered in the texts produced on the field—in other words, the process of textualisation should not result in an elision of the chorality and collective dimension of the fieldwork experience. Even more radical is the move towards activist anthropology (discussed in Chap. 3), which generally entails a political alignment between the ethnographer-­fieldworker and the people they study, on top of an explicit cooperation in setting the research goals, in the production of knowledge and in the dissemination of the results (see Hale 2006; Juris 2007). Activist approaches—often used to study social movements committed to forms of anti-capitalism and social and environmental justice—appear particularly timely within today’s new wave of politicisation of the discipline, in which analyses of neoliberal hegemony and radical global inequality have become increasingly common, alongside approaches centred around resistance to both (see Ortner 2016). They are also appropriate to the present context of “climate devastation, global authoritarianism, and labor precarity” in which contemporary anthropology is produced, with these aspects emerging not just “as ethnographic objects” but rather as “existential threats to the practice of anthropology” (Jobson 2020, 260). From such an account, it may seem that anthropologists—now committed to social justice and political transformation in an increasingly uneven world—have redeemed themselves from anti-colonial and

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anti-imperialist criticism developed since the 1960s, almost emerging as heroic figures. It is worth noting, however, that activist anthropology is not a hegemonic position within academia. Anders Burman, in his discussion of the Andean folkloric figure of the kharisiri—a vampiric demon that targets indigenous people and that he uses as a metaphor for contemporary mainstream anthropology—presents an indictment of what he calls “extractivist”/kharisiri anthropology, which: (1) is based on asymmetric power relations between anthropologist and “informant”; (2) is based on extractivist ethnography; (3) is Anglophone-­ centric; (4) publishes within an insular, closed system; (5) gives nothing, or very little, back (not even a text in a language that might be intelligible to the people with and among whom we work); and (6) keeps a distance (scholar activism is a no-no!). (2018, 60)

While Burman praises activist approaches to anthropology as “a source of inspiration for imagining non-kharisiri anthropologies” (61), he points out that extractivist anthropology is what neoliberal academia rewards, and remains the dominant paradigm within the discipline. The contrast between activist and ‘extractivist’ approaches to anthropology becomes particularly relevant if the discussion is extended outside academia, within the sphere of applied anthropology. Working outside academia is an increasingly likely perspective for anthropologists, given the current situation of job saturation within the university (Veteto and Lockyer 2015, 358). Although applied anthropology has been argued to be an effective road for an engaged practice of social justice (see Henry et al. 2013), it is also worth noting that, for aspiring applied anthropologists, “in the current global economy […], funding for practice outside the military-industrial-market complex is increasingly scarce” (Veteto and Lockyer 2015, 359). Therefore, contemporary anthropologists risk being cast, at best, in the old role of the liberal reformer that works within fundamentally exploitative systems (now often under the guise of development ideology and practice) or, at worst, in the equally ‘traditional’ role of the imperial collaborator. A particularly telling example of the latter, which could be used as a final vignette to this overview of the history of anthropology and its intersections with empire, colonialism and capital, is the case of the Human Terrains System (HTS). The Human Terrains System was a United States Army programme first drafted in 2005 (see McFate and Jackson 2005), running from 2007 to

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2015, and spending more than $725  million since its inception (Vaden Brook 2016). The programme was developed in the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and was conceived to embed social scientists into combat units on the field, allegedly to provide the US army with cultural knowledge of the ‘human terrain’ in which they were operating. This strategy was advertised as more humane and ‘less lethal’, reducing the need for military attacks in Afghanistan (González 2008, 21)—in this sense, the programme functioned as a propaganda tool to portray the United States as engaged in “kinder, gentler form of occupation” (González 2020, 228). There is perhaps no better illustration of this kind of propaganda than a 2005 article by one of the masterminders of HTS, Montgomery McFate. The article—bearing the (aptly) sinister title “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Case of Their Curious Relationship”— presents itself as a call to action for anthropologists. McFate characterises anthropology’s origins as “a warfighting discipline” (2005, 24) which “had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power” (24). She wants to reclaim this relationship in a positive light, as a glorious phase in the history of the discipline in which anthropologists could actually help the public good instead of barricading themselves in the Ivory Tower. As David H. Price comments about one of McFate’s more recent publications, “where many scholars find cautionary tales, McFate finds blueprints for improved means of using anthropology for militarized ends” (Price 2019, 970). McFate, of course, fails to mention that embracing politics that are oppositional to American imperialism and counterinsurgency operations would be another possibility to leave the Ivory Tower for anthropologists. In spite of the positive media coverage that the programme received, HTS could not ultimately conceal its numerous shortcomings, both in terms of its ideological, methodological, ethical premises and, eventually, in their execution. The programme generated fierce debates among anthropologists and, as early as 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) outlined in a statement that “the HTS project violates the AAA Code of Ethics, […] which mandates that anthropologists do no harm to their research subjects” (American Anthropological Association 2007). Later studies and investigations showed that the programme’s participants were involved in much more than providing sociocultural knowledge to commanders, their duties including data collection, intelligence gathering and psychological operations (González 2020,

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227), as well as interrogating detainees (Weinberger 2011). This, alongside tragedies, scandals and mismanagement, ultimately led to the termination of HTS in 2015 (González 2020, 232–233). In spite of its inglorious end, the programme remains to this day a compelling illustration of how ethnographic fieldwork, now more than ever, is a site of conflict in which the dynamics of modernity play out—through the relationship of ethnographers and their subjects, and the underlying political forces that shape their encounter. It is worth noting that, however easy it might seem to ‘debunk’ McFate’s vision of the ‘engaged’ (read militarised) social scientist, especially in the wake of the programme’s termination, her vision was granted significant public credibility. The HTS, as Vanessa Gezari argued, “was a giant cultural metaphor, a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalised age and driven by the ravenous hunger of defense contractors for profit” (2013, 198). I would argue, however, that the plethora of fieldwork experiences to be found across the history of anthropology have always been “a giant cultural metaphor” for the dynamics of colonial-capitalist, one-and-uneven modernity. The history of anthropology and ethnography is replete with actors that engage with key moments of the modernisation process—as either observer, collaborators or opponents—providing standpoints to observe the dynamics of (neo)colonialism, capitalist expansion, imperial domination, development programmes—as well as to observe various acts of resistance against them. The history of anthropology—more specifically, of ethnographic fieldwork—can then be conjoined with materialist world-literary studies if we take this history as a repertoire of characters and of situations whose narrative registration results in a compelling resource to understand modernity. In other words: what I suggest is to engage in a literary history and criticism that studies, in a comparative perspective, narrative registrations of ethnographer-figures that emerge from the history of anthropology, as well as their uneven entanglements with the people they research upon, under the assumption that these various experiences can register key (but also diverse) nodes of the modernisation process. This assumption, within this book, is my main rationale for choosing my corpus, which covers key historical standpoints to observe the dynamics of modernisation by analysing narratives that register different types of fieldworkers, different forms of fieldwork relations and different modes of anthropological imagination. That is why the book juxtaposes diverse texts and themes such as

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Stevenson’s and Kipling’s colonial fieldwork and its uneven intimacies; Levi’s and Devi’s militant fieldwork in the context of national (re)formation and internal colonialism; and Ghosh’s and Westerman’s patchy fieldwork as an exploration of instances of uneven development carried out in the neocolonial and neoliberal era. As registrations of a one-and-uneven, capitalist and colonial modernity, all these narratives, in my reading, are world-literary. I use the term ‘entanglement’ because the intimate nature of fieldwork has always enmeshed all the participants of fieldwork experiences in a web of relations; and the adjective ‘uneven’, because, within this entanglement, either the ethnographer benefits from at least a degree of authority and institutional power over the ethnographic subjects or, more generally, their encounter, driven by different needs, interests, worldview, with different stakes and rooted in socio-economic and cultural difference, is never on a level playing field. Ethnographic fieldwork has always produced uneven encounters in the background of an uneven modernity: it makes sense that literary texts that register these fieldwork experiences can, ultimately, provide a privileged route to envision various facets of modernity itself. As it might have emerged at this point, I follow the suggestion by Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink that a history of anthropology that only deals with academic, “pure” anthropology is incomplete and idealising (2000). Instead, both academic and applied anthropology, as well as ‘amateur’, non-professional forms of ethnography, are relevant for this discussion. This, in my view, compels us to recuperate the travel writer, the trader, the missionary, the colonial officer, the spy, the ‘culturally informed’ counterinsurgency specialist, the political activist working on-site across cultural and class difference, the journalist, the development worker and the cultural mediator as comparable fieldworkers that should not be studied in opposition to academic anthropologists and ethnographers, but alongside them, as protagonists of various ethnographic narratives—which anthropological and ethnographic theory and debates, in turn, can usefully illuminate. In other words, I assume that all these figures, to the extent that they are engaged in ethnographic fieldwork and perform the role of the ethnographer-fieldworker, do produce some form of ethnographic knowledge. I will discuss the exact forms that ethnographic narratives can take in the next section. A preliminary step, however, is, having reviewed the various evolutions of fieldwork in the history of anthropology, to set some

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boundaries for what I consider ‘ethnographic fieldwork’, in spite of my deliberately inclusive definition of anthropology and ethnography. What follows is therefore a definition of ethnographic fieldwork that is meant to include also practices that are ‘incidentally’ ethnographic and/or care little for the disciplinary norms or ethics of academic anthropologists. It is, however, constructed in conversation with the history of (academic) anthropology, which remains an essential point of reference for this capacious conception of ‘fieldwork’ and its historical, cultural, and political implications. That said, I define ethnographic fieldwork as follows: 1. Ethnographic fieldwork takes place in a site that the ethnographer-­ figure must enter. The fieldsite does not need to be understood as pre-­ existent, but is rather “negotiated, socially contingent, and emergent” (Middleton and Pradhan 2014, 357). Fieldwork may be one- or multisited (Marcus 1995; extensive discussion of multisited ethnography is key to Chap. 4). It may be conceived as ‘separate’ from ‘home’ or contiguous with it. 2. The aim of this fieldwork is an ethnographic exploration of a given community/communities or place/places, which results in cultural knowledge about that community(s)/place(s). It is worth noting that, while traditionally the ethnographer is understood as an outsider, they can also just as easily be an ‘insider’ (see Innes 2009). 3. The aim of obtaining cultural knowledge through fieldwork may vary, including research for (academic) publications, economic interests, various political, governance and intelligence objectives, various activist causes or even personal/spiritual uplifting. While the explicit objectives of an individual actor may vary, it is worth noting each form of ethnographic/cultural research is subject to socio-economical and institutional pressures that shape its practices and inform its conclusions and biases (see Burman 2018). 4. Ethnographic fieldwork involves undesignated relationality (Lederman 2013) and employs “open-ended intimacy as a scholarly knowledge practice” (598). This, alongside a more thorough discussion of participant observation is discussed in Chap. 2. 5. Fieldwork is embedded within a network of relationships that involve multiple allegiances, and forces ethnographers to perform multiple roles. For instance, as Kathleen Gough argues, (academic) anthropologists, since the beginning, “had obligations, first to the

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peoples [they] studied, second, to [their] colleagues and [their] science, and third, to the powers who employed [them] in universities or who funded [their] research” (1968, 17). These obligations can, of course, clash. 6. These relationships are inevitably uneven due to a plethora of motivations, including the different institutional or economic power of the ethnographer, the different involvement in the site in which they operate when compared to local inhabitants, the aforementioned multiple/conflicting roles and obligations, or historical relationships of power based on race or class, among others. Therefore, ethnographic encounters are never entirely on a level playing field— they are better understood as uneven entanglements. That does not mean, however, that the ethnographer-anthropologist is necessarily in control or consistently has the upper hand on the field (see Grieser 2016). As this list shows, I theorise ethnographic fieldwork as a single phenomenon that nevertheless can take several forms locally and that is, however, always uneven—a configuration that echoes WReC’s conception of one-­ and-­uneven modernity. Such modernity is what ethnographic narratives are suited to register, precisely by indexing unequal fieldwork relations— uneven entanglements. It may be clear, at this point, why a world-literary approach is a good match for the kind of exploration of ethnographic narratives I have in mind, arguably more than a postcolonial one. The conception of modernity I rely on encompasses, but is not limited to, colonialism and imperialism, which have been the more widely acknowledged, but not the sole, skeletons in the anthropological closet, to paraphrase Willis: the history of capitalist development—which is, besides, utterly intertwined with colonial and imperial expansion—is equally important, and so are all the other intermeshed histories of exploitation and value extraction, from gender to ecological ones. Fieldwork relations in a given locale, and the narrative(s) centred around them, should be understood as registering constellations of class, race, ecology and gender, enmeshed as they are in an interconnected web of inequality which constitutes a local expression of modernity. Moreover, the way modernity expresses itself is to be understood from a multi-scalar perspective—how, in each place, local forms of core-periphery relations are established at various levels. Fieldwork relations, also by virtue of their undesigned relationality, fully participate to this variability. Bringing both those aspects,

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among others, at the forefront of their methodology, materialist worldliterary approaches are suited to tackle the complex unevenness of fieldwork relations. That is not to say that postcolonial approaches are not able to productively intertwine with anthropology, a notable case in point being Graham Huggan’s work, which pioneered exactly this line of research. In his book Interdisciplinary Measures (2008), Huggan argues how anthropology and postcolonial criticism/theory have historically constructed each other as straw men—accusing each other of carrying out reductive forms of thinking and deeply flawed representations of cultural/colonial others (2008, 8). He then proceeds, in the four essays dedicated to anthropology in his volume, to “critically [assess] the formative role of anthropology both in supporting and subverting the cultural norms on which colonial/imperial authority rests” (16), in a reflection that brings together both anthropology and imaginative (postcolonial) literature. I share with Huggan the interest in evaluating both the shortcomings and potential of anthropological history and debates as problematic companions to literary studies to address histories of colonialism and empire—in a sense, this was the whole purpose of this section. But, with such kind of reassessment firmly in mind, ultimately this book focuses on a different critical operation: filling in the remarkable gap in terms of engagement between world-literary studies and anthropology by applying WReC’s methodology to an exploration of ethnographic narratives—and fieldwork—as registration of modernity and therefore as world-literary texts.

1.3  Ethnographic Narratives Having established a definition of fieldwork, as well as its potential for creating world-literature, I can return to the central unit of analysis of this book: the ethnographic narrative. I use the term ethnographic narratives to define texts that register—in WReC’s sense—fieldwork experience: they either dramatise it at a plot level, constructing stories in which fieldworkers and the people they encounter are the protagonists; or they are narratives that, while not necessarily representing fieldwork encounters, are nevertheless based on an actual a fieldwork experience undertaken by their authors—they are, in other words, “[accounts] resulting from having done fieldwork” (Marcus and Cushman 1982, 27). Both procedures can simultaneously be involved in the creation of an ethnographic narrative, namely when an author that has actually done fieldwork dramatises it

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within a narrative. Therefore, ethnographic narratives encompass a variety of textual forms. The following three sections discuss different formal and epistemological aspects of ethnographic narratives. Firstly, I address the implications of talking of ‘ethnographic narratives’ from an epistemological point of view; that is, I discuss the implications of working with a concept of ethnographic narrative that makes no significant distinction between literary texts that register fieldwork (the ones I focus on in this book) and ‘proper’ (i.e., academic/mainstream/formal) ethnographies. Secondly I introduce the concept of ethnographic authority, arguably as foundational for ethnographic narratives as the idea of fieldwork itself, and, importantly, an excellent route to discuss the range of styles that ethnographic narratives adopt. Finally, I detail the two genres of ethnographic narrative to which the texts I discuss throughout the book variously belong: the fieldwork memoir and ethnographic fiction. 1.3.1   The Epistemological Status of Ethnographic Narratives Throughout this book I consider literature and ethnography as fundamentally commensurable in their epistemological status as narratives, consistently with my belief that also figures that are not professional ethnographers can and do produce ethnographic knowledge. This assumption remains controversial; hence it deserves some commentary, which, in turn, requires a quick detour through the sub-field of literary anthropology, in which the debate on the epistemological status of ethnography and literature has mostly been carried out. The origins of this debate are to be found in the 1970s, as part of a more general discussion on the epistemology of social sciences. In the same years Hayden White controversially claimed that the historiographic text could, in many ways, be treated as a literary artefact (1978), Clifford Geertz’s interpretative anthropology started to blur the boundaries between literature and anthropology. Geertz claims that the analysis of culture is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning” (2000b, 5). Consistently with this approach, he advanced a number of claims about ethnographic knowledge aimed at reduced the distance between the epistemological status of literature and that of anthropology. These include the idea that ethnographic data is constructed (rather than found) by the ethnographer (9), that writing is the main activity of the ethnographer (19), that anthropological writings are “fictions”, in the sense that

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ethnographic knowledge is inherently contestable (29), and that culture can be understood “as an ensemble of texts” (Geertz 2000a, 452). Writing Culture, broadly speaking, inherited Geertz’s textualist approach. James Clifford’s introduction states how the volume wants to foreground the ethnographer as a writer, and ethnography as an art—meaning, however, “artisanal, tied to the worldly work of writing” (1986, 6). Hence, he defines texts written by ethnographers as both “ethnographic fictions”— which, like in Geertz, is a reference to their being made, constructed, rather than their being false—and “true fictions”—stressing that these texts are always “systems, or economies, of truth” (7). Postmodern anthropology has been often attacked, in John Comaroff’s words, for its “depoliticizing, dematerializing, unwittingly conservative tendencies”, as well as for “its reduction of ethnography to a solipsistic literary practice” (2010, 525). Nevertheless, its focus on the textual dimension of ethnography has allowed anthropology to be critically discussed in the mirror of literature and vice versa. Over the years, this discussion has given rise to the rather heterogeneous field of literary anthropology. Contributions to the field include essay collections such as Dennis and Aycock (1989), Benson (1993), De Angelis (2002), Cohen (2013) and Paganopoulos (2018), approaching different sides of this disciplinary intersection. A good summary of the variety of themes and research areas that, by now, can be identified as within the scope of this field is a recent Palgrave Book Series dedicated to literary anthropology, which advertises itself as studying “new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies”, exploring “the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing”. This rather diverse catalogue brings to the foreground that, at this point, literary anthropology encompasses several branches.13 The discussion that interests me, within this diverse sub-field of anthropology, is whether and when creative texts that represent/are the product of fieldwork can be legitimately framed as ethnographic. Claiming that ethnography is (true) fiction, as Geertz and Clifford do, may function as a way to stress the ‘literariness’ of ethnography, but it does not necessarily argue for the ‘ethnographicity’ of literature. In other words, even if we accept that to write an ethnography is to engage in some form of fiction, that does not necessarily mean that fiction (or creative writing in general)

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can be considered ethnographic. Are there meaningful distinctions to be made?14 A possible objection, for instance, is methodological: if we accept, as Daniel Fabre and Jean Jamin claim, that writers do not normally employ “anthropological methods and concepts in order to venture into their imagined, and largely, imaginary lands, to invent their characters or build up their storylines” (2012, 4), then it seems reasonable that ethnographies and literary texts “do not result in the same types of knowledge, either in nature or scope” (2). However, these assumptions are not always true: what about literary texts that are the result of intense fieldwork? What about literary texts that are informed by anthropological theory? What about novels written by anthropologists, informed by their fieldwork, or experimental or narrative ethnographies? Other arguments stress the ethical necessity to separate ethnography from literature—especially from fiction. Didier Fassin, for instance, argues that “while fiction could never claim to simply reproduce the real, the argument that it is faithful to reality gives ethnography a form of authority that has important ethical and political consequences” (2014, 53). Fassin takes as an example the television series The Wire, which was specifically lauded for its ethnographic imaginary in representing the gritty urban reality of Baltimore and its interconnected institutions (see Williams 2011). He points out that even David Simon, the main creator of The Wire, acknowledged that “the story is labelled as fiction, which is to say that we took liberties in a way that journalism cannot and should not” (2009, 29). Journalism is relevant for this discussion because its ethics of representation are supposedly similar to those of ethnography: neither discipline, as Simon points out, is allowed to ‘take liberties’ when representing reality. However, it is worth noting that also fictional texts are judged for the ‘faithfulness’ of their representations in the same way as ethnographies. The Wire, while celebrated for its realism, was also criticised, for instance, for the almost complete absence of black activism in its representation of Baltimore’s inner-city neighbourhoods (Atlas and Dreier 2008). Clearly the fact that its creator explicitly stated that the show did not simply reproduce the real was not enough to prevent criticisms about its representation. If we take seriously Clifford’s definition of ethnographies as economies of truth, what is the difference between a creative text (whether a book or a TV series) that elides certain aspects of the reality that it could instead choose to represent, and an ethnography that does the same? Certainly, creative texts have more ways to avoid accountability by

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appealing to their fictional status—in Simon’s words, by claiming that they are ‘taking liberties’—but they can only do that ethically, I argue, if they are transparent about what is or is not fictional, or at the very least if they alert their readers that some ‘liberties’ were taken in the first place. One case in point here is that of the celebrated Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński and his 1978 reportage The Emperor, a reconstruction of the last years and ultimate fall of the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I. The book is largely constructed through direct quotations from what are claimed to be former notables of the fallen autocrat. But, however genuine Kapuściński’s declared intent of “[recapturing] the world that had been wiped away by the machine guns of the Fourth Division” (1983, 4) might seem, the ‘interviews’ were later discovered to be full of interpolations. Most notably, the elaborated court language that the notables use is largely invented; and many suggestive details regarding the emperor’s court are historically inaccurate. A common defence for the book has been that it was not meant to be about Ethiopia at all, but it was rather meant as an allegory of the political situation of Poland—an interpretation that Kapuściński himself later endorsed (Ryle 2001). However the book is “presented unambiguously as factual reportage and asserts its claim on the reader’s attention as such” (Ryle 2001), thus creating a dissonance between how the reporter constructs his authority—claiming that the author has ‘been there’, and has gathered evidence from privileged informers—and what the book actually is—at best, an allegory or an aggrandised version of reality; at worst, an orientalist fantasy. Kapuściński’s case highlights the importance of the assumptions and expectations that readers have (or are invited to have) when approaching a text. C. W. Watson, for instance, argues that the difference between a novel and an anthropological text is to be understood in terms of expectations: Broadly speaking, in reading a novel we know we are being invited to extend our sympathies not to a general condition of things but to individual characters and circumstances […]. In reading an anthropological text, however, the invitation is not to implicate ourselves in the narrative in this way, but to come to a more distanced and synoptic understanding of a general and representative set of circumstances. The anthropological text may frequently refer to individuals, case histories and specific circumstances, but the intention of the writing is always very explicitly to draw the reader on to the level of a totalization. (1995, 78–79)

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I think approaching the differences between ethnography and literature in terms of readerly expectations is a more productive strategy than the methodological and ethical objections discussed so far. I have, however, reservations on Watson’s distinctions, not so much on his assessment that novels (generally) invite readers to sympathise with a cast of individual characters and ethnographies (generally) invite them to grasp at sociocultural syntheses, but that these invitations, and the expectations they produce, are exclusive to novels and ethnographies respectively. Instead, I argue that a literary text can be considered ethnographic if it manages to offer both invitations to its readers—sympathising with a set of characters and gaining a “synoptic understanding of a general and representative set of circumstances” (I am not sold on the fact that this understanding has to be “distanced”). Ultimately, as Ellen Wiles points out, “whether a piece of writing is valid and valuable as fiction and/or as ethnography surely depends on a collection of factors including context, emphasis, intention, authorial labelling, interpretation and quality, rather than by requiring it to be assigned to either discipline via a reductionist tick box exercise” (2020, 290). Wiles’ diverse “collections of factors” ultimately regulate whether readers can be expected to acknowledge that a text is able to offer convincing generalisations on a social reality, and hence be considered ethnographic, as in Watson’s definition. Of course, an ethnographic text that is specifically world-literary, according to the definition I employ, will also address, as part of the “general and representative set of circumstances” it explores, facets of colonial and capitalist modernity. 1.3.2   Ethnographic Authority and Style Ethnographic narratives need to convince their readers that their descriptions are believable and offer a generalised understanding of a certain fragment of reality. In other words, the text must advance a claim to ethnographic authority—a concept that now deserves a full discussion, since ethnographic narratives, in all their forms, automatically engage in issues of ethnographic authority. A discussion on ethnographic authority, and the way it can be variously constructed through the different styles of ethnographical narratives, is therefore a fundamental premise for this book. Moreover, the way a text handles ethnographic authority is a central part  of—or better: it is utterly interwoven  with—the way it registers

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fieldwork relations, and hence, in turn, is an important site of investigation for world-literariness. Geertz has famously elaborated what we could call a rhetorical theory of ethnographic authority that, while controversial, offers a useful starting point to understand how ethnographic authority is intertwined with the formal aspects of ethnographic texts. In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as an Author (1988), he interrogates the ‘authoriality’ of anthropologists, claiming that  the style of a given anthropologist is ultimately crucial to convince the readers of the reliability of their statements and generalisations—convincing your readers that you have “been there” in the fieldwork and gained precious insight as a consequence. Precisely because ethnography often consists in “incorrigible assertion”, since “the highly situated nature of ethnographic description […] gives to the bulk of what is said a rather take-it-or-leave quality” (Geertz 1988, 5), it is not, for Geertz, fundamentally falsifiable. Therefore, much of its claim to reliability—its ethnographic authority—rests, according to Geertz, in writing, in the ability to register lived experience in a convincing text, which is “the fons et origo of whatever power anthropology has to convince anyone of anything—not theory, not method, not even the aura of the professorial chair, consequential as these last may be” (144). In other words, ethnographic authority, for Geertz, is, ultimately, a rhetorical achievement. There are some caveats. Geertz’s argument lingers on the possibility that the voices that we decide to listen to might be chosen “out of whim, habit or […] prejudice or political desire” (6), but he promptly dismisses the idea to stress the absolute importance of the rhetorical skills of individual writers. In my view it is crucial to see these two aspects—stylistic power of persuasion and external circumstances—as interconnected: a writer with social and cultural capital with a specific audience will, after all, inherently command more authority than an equally skilled writer that does not possess that same capital, and this, of course, intersects with issues of race, gender and class. This also means that a professional ethnographer will also—anything else being equal—command more ethnographic authority than a non-professional fieldworker. That said, the point that ethnographic authority is connected to rhetoric (albeit not exclusively) still stands; and, more importantly, if it is reasonable that ethnographic authority in a text has (at least in part) a rhetorical and stylistic foundation, it follows that ethnographic authority can also be claimed by texts that are not canonically classified as (academic/formal) ethnographies and by non-ethnographers, to the extent that they deploy formal

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conventions and strategies that lead readers to read these texts as ethnographic. Of the six authors I discuss in this book, only one (Amitav Ghosh) has been trained as a professional ethnographer: and yet all of them, within their specific field, have been able to command a form of ethnographic authority, persuading their readerships of their capacity to accurately represent certain cultural and historical realities. And, throughout the book, I therefore highlight the formal strategies through which each of them tries to establish their ethnographic authority. But what are these strategies? Are they rigid or flexible? For the anthropologists of Malinowski’s generation, the answer was decidedly the former, as their claiming ethnographic authority from the ‘men on the spot’ also rested on connecting the professional ethnographer with a specific style and set of formal writing conventions that were granted a particular authority. Enters George Marcus and Dick Cushman’s ethnographic realism: a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of a whole world or form of life. […] Realist ethnographies are written to allude to a whole by means of parts or foci of analytical attention which constantly evoke a social and cultural totality. Close attention to detail and redundant demonstrations that the writer shared and experienced this world are further aspects of realist writing. In fact, what gives the ethnographer authority and the text a pervasive sense of concrete reality is the writer’s claim to represent a world as only one who has known it first-hand can, which thus forges an intimate link between ethnographic writing and fieldwork. (1982, 29)

The realist ethnography is, according to Marcus and Cushman, an approved genre on which the authority of classic anthropologists is founded; it presupposes fieldwork (more precisely, it connects reliability with fieldwork experience), as well as an author that is also a professional ethnographer (29). It follows, moreover, a rather long list of formal conventions: namely, it adopts a recognisable narrative structure; the ethnographer is an unobtrusive presence in the text; it features the markings—but not a full account—of fieldwork experience; it focuses on everyday life situations and on ‘common denominator people’; it aims at representing the native’s point of view; it systematically carries out generalisations based on particular data; it embellishes its findings through jargon; and it provides a contextual exegesis of key indigenous concepts, as a way to manifest linguistic expertise (31–37).

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Throughout this book, I will be referring to ethnographic realism as a style that employs at least some of these strategies to evoke ethnographic authority: for instance, both Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli have elements of ethnographic realism. They are clearly not classical realist ethnographies tout-court, since they are, after all, literary travelogues and necessarily deviate from Marcus and Cushman’s model. But they do, for instance, employ selective descriptions of fieldwork experience as a basis to evoke a social and cultural totality and thus authority. In other words, once the writers in these texts convincingly (i.e., unobtrusively) set themselves on the fieldsite, they establish their authority once and for all and are free to launch themselves into generalisations whose epistemological basis is not necessarily backed up by fieldwork descriptions. That is an ethnographic-realist strategy. Crucially, as conceived by Marcus and Cushman, ethnographic realism is already understood as unrealistic: while it premises fieldwork as a source of its knowledge, it conceals certain aspects of fieldwork—most of fieldwork, as a matter of fact—to provide the impression of a scientifically observed reality, while objectifying the subjects of its research. In their view, ethnographic realism fails at representing reality. That is why Marcus and Cushman argue that experimentalism in ethnographic writing is necessary to “demystify the process of anthropological fieldwork” (1982, 26). Experimental ethnographic writing, for Marcus and Cushman, is quite simply writing that, to do that, variously moves against the various formal aspects of ‘classical’ ethnographic realism, its epistemology and the forms of authority that it derives from. Examples of experimental ethnographies cited by Marcus and Cushman include, for instance, Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (2007 [1977]) and Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980). The former puts fieldwork experience on the forefront in a way that was inconceivable within classical realist ethnography; the latter, focusing on an extended interview with just one, by no means ‘common denominator’ individual, similarly violates its conventions. These, however, remain primarily academic texts—differently from the bulk of (literary) ethnographic narratives that I discuss throughout this book. It is worth stressing, however, that a rejection of the convention of ‘classical’ ethnographic realism does not imply a rejection of the ambition of representing reality—if anything, experimental modes are attempts to be more effective (if often less totalising and holistic) at representing reality, once it is agreed that the kind of representation provided by classical

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ethnographic realism is flawed. But what can replace ethnographic realism, and what kind of ethnographic authority results from this move? James Clifford’s typology of the various forms of ethnographic authority employed by ethnographers throughout the twentieth century is worth discussing here. Clifford lists four different types of ethnographic authority—experiential, interpretative, dialogical and polyphonic—that are connected to different narratological and/or stylistic choices. Ethnographic realism is connected to what Clifford calls experiential ethnographic authority—it showcases the experience of the ethnographer-fieldworker as a source of reliability. Interpretative ethnographic authority relies, instead, on framing the ethnographer as an effective interpreter (rather than observer) of cultures, seen as a collection of texts. Both experiential and interpretative authority, however, tend to be monological, filtered through the subjectivity and perspective of the individual ethnographer. The last two forms of ethnographic authority, instead, variously acknowledge the intersubjective and collective nature of ethnographic knowledge: dialogic ethnographic authority presents ethnography as a discourse, generally a conversation between subjects, highlighting the contribution of ethnographic subjects, informants and research assistants; whereas polyphonic ethnographic authority (after Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the polyphonic novel) sees culture as “an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions” (Clifford 1983, 136) that the ethnographer is supposed to recreate. The key feature of dialogic and polyphonic authority is that their claim to reliability is, paradoxically, based on a “dispersal” (120) of ‘monologic’ ethnographic authority—to more realistically represent a fieldwork in which multiple actors operate. To make a few examples: Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land, consistently staging a debate between its ethnographer-­ protagonists and his companions on the field, is a good example of dialogic ethnographic authority; Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”, characterised by a chorus of perspectives from which focalisation constantly shifts, is an example of polyphonic ethnographic authority. Each form of ethnographic authority, in Clifford’s model, can be loosely linked to stylistic techniques—a relatively simple example is incorporating significant portions of dialogue with informants as part of an attempt to highlight the collaborative and polyphonic nature of ethnography (139), as opposed to a ‘free indirect speech’ approach that “suppresses direct quotation in favour of a controlling discourse always more-or-less that of

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the author” (137). However, Clifford reminds his reader that even dialogical and polyphonic forms tend to be orchestrated—or edited—by a central authority figure, which actively works against “a utopia of plural authorship that accords to collaborators, not merely the status of independent enunciators, but that of writer” (140). The tension between monologism and chorality, and the various formal strategies they employ, will indeed be one of the central points of interest of my analysis: is ethnographic authority established by constructing a single, reliable voice or by allowing a chorus of perspectives to proliferate? Or a combination of both? The prevalence of monologism or chorality is also, as I discuss shortly, one of the points of distinction between the two genres of ethnographic narratives that I am interested in. And, lastly, the lingering tension between monologism and chorality will lead me to briefly discuss collaborative authorship as one of its possible resolutions—in the very final chapter. Ultimately, in the context of this book, the various formal features connected to establishing various kinds of ethnographic authority—ethnographic realism versus ethnographic experimentalism; monologism versus chorality—matter because they result in different registrations of the unevenness of fieldwork relations, and hence, if we assume that fieldwork relations are an index of modernity, of the world-system. This justifies the full semantic complexity of the concept of ‘registration’ introduced by WReC, which highlights the possibility of mimetic and non-mimetic strategies of literary mediation. An ethnographic realist text, which hides the way ethnographic knowledge was acquired alongside the full dynamics of fieldwork relations, may registers inequality precisely by assuming, for its ethnographer-figure/narrator, a position of epistemological privilege that hints at a material inequality of fieldwork. Conversely, a text that disseminates ethnographic authority is more likely to register inequality in a more straightforward (that is, mimetic) way, by carving the narrative spaces for those with experience of it to share their perspective. It is also more likely to be self-reflective about the uneven fieldwork relations that ethnographer-­ figures, narrators or focalisers participate in. But things are not always so neat: Christ Stopped at Eboli, for instance, is a text that explicitly registers the inequality of the world-system, indexed in the predicament of the rural victims of the (fascist and liberal) Italian state. But it is also a text that, constructing ethnographic authority through monologic- and ethnographic-realist strategies, glosses over the inequality of the uneven relations between the protagonist/narrator and the very people whose side he takes—relations that are in themselves a product and

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index of modernity. For such ambivalent ethnographic narratives, multiple kinds of readings are required to make sense of the process of registration of one-and-uneven modernity that these texts undertake: both readings go along with what the texts say and take notice of the dynamics of modernity they explicitly articulate and bear witness to; and resistant readings (see Wolfe 2010, 371) that read against the text by interrogating its “assumptions, its values, and its positions” (Janks 2010, 22) and unearth inequalities that the text may remove from view but nevertheless register.15 1.3.3  Genres Clifford’s typology illustrates how texts can make claims to ethnographic authority through a variety of formal conventions. Once the idea that ethnographic realism is the only style provided with ethnographic authority is questioned, alongside the exclusive claim to ethnographic authority of the realist ethnography as a genre, the formal possibilities are theoretically endless. Nevertheless, in this book I focus on two genres of ethnographic narrative to which the literary texts in my corpus variously belong: the fieldwork memoir and ethnographic fiction. Both of them function, within this book, as relatively stable (but by no means rigid) constellations of formal features through which, on the one hand, ethnographic authority is established; and, on the other, fieldwork relations and thus the dynamics of modernity are registered (and world-literariness is achieved). Genres are, according to Peter Seitel, “frameworks of expectation”, namely “established ways of creating and understanding that facilitate human interaction and the communication of meaning” (2003, 277). This definition fits with the idea, discussed above through C. W. Watson’s reflections on the various ‘invitations’ that readers can receive from a text, that the readers’ expectations are an important factor to establish whether a text can be read as ethnographic—whether it is able to authoritatively provide an “understanding of a general and representative set of circumstances” and hence possess ethnographic authority. In this sense, the two genres of the fieldwork memoir and ethnographic fiction signal to the reader, through different narratological configurations and formal features, that the text has ethnographic ambitions. If a genre is “a system whose formal components concur in satisfying specific symbolic needs” (Ercolino 2012, 250), both the fieldwork memoir and ethnographic fiction develop different formal components to assuage the need of

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establishing some version of ethnographic authority and to register fieldwork experiences. That does not necessarily mean, however, that readers are supposed to identify these texts as ethnographic in advance, since “interpreting a text within the framework of genre is far less a matter of knowing in advance exactly what the narrative’s world will look like and primarily a matter of picking up on and interpreting cues that, often subtly, tell readers what the world they are entering looks like” (Bracke 2020, 172). This ‘delayed’ genre assignation is particularly relevant for ethnographic narratives that are also literary texts, like the ones I discuss: differently from non-literary academic ethnographies—whose genre identity and hence claim to ethnographic authority (regardless of whether they are realist or experimental) can be staked in advance through paratextual elements and/or by the author’s professional identity—literary ethnographic narratives are particularly reliant on formal cues to persuade readers of their ethnographic authority. It is worth noting that my point in focusing on two genres of ethnographic narratives (and not others) is not that to claim that world-­ literariness is a characteristic of a specific genre of ethnographic narrative, nor that a restrictive set of formal and stylistic features holds the key to world-literariness—indeed, I think that all registrations of fieldwork are potentially world-literary, because of the inherent intersection between fieldwork and the dynamics of modernity that I have discussed earlier. Highlighting the two genres of fieldwork memoir and the ethnographic fiction is simply a way to acknowledge the two main patterns employed by the authors in my corpus to make claims to ethnographic authority and register those elements of fieldwork that illuminate the broader structures and dynamics of the modern world-system. Let us now discuss these two genres, starting with the fieldwork memoir. The fieldwork memoir’s genealogy leads back to travel writing, which has been variously conceived as a precursor of ethnography in general (Borm 2000), but also, historically, as one of the adversaries against which classical anthropology constructed its identity. Mary Louise Pratt, in particular, has written about classical ethnography’s debt towards the tropes of travel writing, specifically the “narration-description duality” (1986, 35) that characterises both genres—that is, the alternating of a personal account and ‘impersonal’ description of people and encounters. Pratt points out that ethnography has traditionally marginalised these personal accounts—on the basis that they would undermine the ‘scientific’ aspect

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of ethnographic research—but not suppressed them entirely. They were either published as separate accounts—“a recognizable anthropological subgenre” (31)—or incorporated within ‘proper’ ethnographies in a vestigial form, usually as openings (35). Fieldwork memoir, then, is an umbrella term that I use to discuss ethnographic narratives that resemble travel writing and/or the fieldwork accounts that Pratt talks about, including both travelogues and reportages, which feature prominently throughout the book. The formal features I use to identify this genre are four. Firstly, fieldwork memoirs employ the aforementioned narration-description duality that ethnography inherits from travel writing: it is not uncommon to see chapters dedicated exclusively to description of cultural and historical features—digressions that interrupt the narration, as it were. Secondly, they are generally non-­ fictional—they ‘sell’ the promise of a true journey. Thirdly, the narrative tends to be in first person—as in travel writing, which, in combination with the previous point, helps to create an overlapping between author and narrator; thus, fieldwork memoirs tend to rely more easily on experiential ethnographic authority. Lastly, they make prominent use of a quest narrative that is also inherited from travel writing. Tim Youngs describes quests as “probably the single most important organising principle of travel writing” (2013, 101), usually featuring a protagonist that “embarks on a mission, encounters impediments, removes them (more often than not), attains his or her goal and sets out on the return voyage, having increased his or her (usually his) own worth through the successful completion of the objective” (88). Importantly, the quest, according to Youngs, tends to be “for the benefit of the self” (94), that is, quests often run the risk of privileging the importance of the ‘quester’ and their needs over those of the people they encounter: The focus is on the searcher, and the tale is told from his or her perspective. When landscape, wildlife or people impede the hero’s progress, these are represented not as neutral but as hostile, or a test of faith, or as immoral; even evil. […] Listeners to and readers of the tale are positioned into sharing the hero’s perspective. They accept that the importance of the goal overrides the interests of whom he or she encounters along the way. (94)

Since fieldwork memoirs are often framed as quests, they tend to be centred—morally, emotionally, narratologically—on the persona of the

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quester, in this case of the fieldworker, meaning that fieldwork relations (and hence the dynamics of modernity, and thus world-literariness) tend to be registered by focusing on how the quester/fieldworker relates (both as character and as narrator) to the field/world. As for what the quest is about in these texts, a fieldwork memoir will generally focus on a quest for cultural knowledge—consistently with the nature of ethnographic fieldwork—even though this knowledge—like any form of cultural knowledge gathered on fieldwork—is not necessarily pursued for its own sake. Importantly, the quest in fieldwork memoirs will often be explicitly stated at some point in the narrative: examples include Robert Louis Stevenson’s declaration that his task, in writing In the South Seas, is to “communicate to fireside travellers some sense of [the] seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons” (1998, 5) that inhabit Polynesia; or Amitav Ghosh’s statement that his fieldwork in Egypt (In An Antique Land) aims to recover “a world of accommodations that [he] had believed to be still alive, and, in some tiny measure, still retrievable” (1992, 237). The second genre of ethnographic narrative I will focus on is ethnographic fiction. A working definition of this genre can be adapted from Janet Tallman, who defines the ethnographic novel, “from either insider or outsider”, as “one that conveys significant information about the culture or cultures from which the novel originates” (2002, 12). I believe this definition can easily be adapted to shorter forms of narrative—novellas and short stories—and morph into the wider concept of ethnographic fiction. Elaborating on Tallman’s definition, I see ethnographic fictions as less centred on the figure that I have previously defined as the ‘quester’— the fieldworker in search of cultural knowledge—and instead more focused on providing a comprehensive representation of “the culture or cultures from which [it] originates”—most notably, I add, through a proliferation of different voices and perspectives. That does not mean that the activities of a fieldworker—through which cultural knowledge is acquired—are never represented or are unimportant, simply that the explicit presence of an ethnographer-figure or of an ethnographic encounter is optional and, if it is present, tends not to overly centralise the narration. In other words, ethnographic fictions can simply be the product of fieldwork experience gathered by their authors, which is not necessarily acknowledged in the text, differently from the fieldwork memoir, which, in one way or another, has to represent fieldwork; and they do more easily accommodate a

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polyphonic approach with multiple perspectives—hence a non-­ monological, diffuse ethnographic authority. If travel writing is the model of the fieldwork account, ethnographic fiction finds its archetype in nineteenth-century realist narrative. Each time a piece of fiction is defined ‘Dickensian’ for its capacity to compellingly reconstruct a heterogeneous social reality, that piece of work is also being granted an ethnographic status that goes back to the implicit ‘anthropological’ quality that we assign to nineteenth-century realist novels, for instance to Victorian novelists like Eliot, Meredith, Thackeray and, of course, Dickens (see Craith and Kockel 2014, 690; and Stoller 2015, 144). Like the realist novel, ethnographic fiction is actually rather varied in terms of its formal characteristics and is best defined, for the purposes of this book, in opposition to the fieldwork memoir. Besides being more flexible in terms of having to represent the fieldwork experience it is based on, ethnographic fiction can feature both first- or third-person narratives. Since, as mentioned, it is not necessarily focused on a fieldworker, it is more easily polyphonic and multi-centred, focusing on a variety of viewpoints and a variety of interactions (rather than privileging the interaction between a fieldworker and other characters). Finally, as the name clearly suggests, it tends to be at least in part fictional in the strictest sense of the term (and not in the broad sense that Clifford or Geertz use). This means that some of its parts are expected to contain ‘liberties’, inventions—ranging from the presence of fictive characters to a fictional rearranging of real events. The narrative pact of ethnographic fiction is that the reader is supposed to distinguish between fictive and non-fictive elements, or at the very least be aware of their presence: the fact that Chotti Munda in the eponymous novel by Mahasweta Devi is a fictional character does not impede its claim to represent the predicament of the Munda adivasis throughout the twentieth century with ethnographic authority. Conversely, fictive elements within a fieldwork memoir would be perceived as inherently more suspicious and would undermine ethnographic authority. The distinction between fieldwork memoir and ethnographic fiction serves primarily as a working typology to introduce the broad sets of formal characteristics of the works I will be discussing throughout this book: whether they are, primarily, recounting the non-fictional quest (and perspective) of a fieldworker, who is also the first-person narrator of the text, following the conventions of travel writing; or fictional narratives more akin to (and that often are) realist novels, in which a social reality is represented in a comprehensive way through a variety of perspectives. I take

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both genres, however, not so much as rigid categories, but as ideal types of two different approaches to ethnographic narratives, each open to contamination and variation. By focusing on fieldwork memoirs and ethnographic fictions I do not exhaust the formal possibilities of ethnographic narratives—with world-­ literary potential or otherwise. There are other genres and sub-genres of ethnographic narratives that I do not touch upon in this book and that could register fieldwork dynamics in a way that makes them world-literary: one example could be ethnographic poems (see Maynard 2008). Some of the (sub-)genres or formal possibilities of ethnographic narratives that I do not properly address in the book, however, are discussed in the conclusion.

1.4  Outline of the Chapters Keeping up with the tentative tone of the previous section, I am aware that justifying the selection of a corpus of texts for critical analysis, especially when one is tackling a concept so vastly encompassing as that of world literariness as registration of modernity, is always going to be, up to a point, a self-defeating enterprise. Moreover, considering the sheer variety of texts that could be included under the umbrella of ethnographic narratives, the registration of fieldwork as an index of the world-literary is only partially helpful to narrow down my choice of works. But the choice of these six authors, and their division in three pairings (Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling; Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi; Amitav Ghosh and Frank Westerman), does nevertheless follows a rationale, based on covering a variety of diverse anthropological debates, historical fieldsites and patterns of fieldwork. Specifically, each author—and each paring—in this book has been chosen to register a set of fieldwork relations that uniquely illustrates aspects of modernity—(neo)colonial expansion, capitalist accumulation, combined and uneven development—in the framework of one (or more) historical contexts or spaces—the colonial frontier; national peripheries within processes of national (re)formation; postcolonies caught in neocolonial, post-disaster or post-development processes—that are conductive to such registration. Each chapter, moreover, is the occasion to address specific theoretical or stylistic questions—the role of intimacy in fieldwork relations; the extent ethnographic fieldwork can be militant and activist;

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and the way ethnographic narratives can meaningfully intertwine places, histories and epistemologies. I have limited myself to authors from the late nineteenth century onwards, under the influence of the idea that the modern world-system— and hence the dynamics of modernity—really begins to unfold in its characteristics in the nineteenth century, with “the capitalisation of the world and the full worlding of capital” (Warwick Research Collective 2015, 15, emphasis in the original) carried out by British and European colonialism, which is also my historical starting point. I do acknowledge, however, that those chronological boundaries could be meaningfully expanded: different accounts of modernity that put the stress on the importance of the early modern period16—and thus on early capitalism and colonialism centred around the Atlantic world, slavery, and the landscape transformations that all these processes enacted—urge critics interested in world-literature-­ as-registration-of-modernity to consider the importance of texts predating the nineteenth century. The choice of nineteenth-century colonialism as my starting point was also influenced by the fact that academic anthropology emerges, in a recognisably contemporary form, in this very century, in tandem with colonial expansion. In Chap. 2, I explore precisely ethnographic narratives developed within a context of colonial ethnography as well as within positivist/evolutionist anthropology. This is classical era in which ethnographic accounts and anthropological theorising are most prominently (albeit not uniquely) interwoven with colonialism and colonial capitalism, thus making these narratives an obvious vantage point for registering some crucial dynamics of modernity. At the same time, I am interested in how ethnographic narratives, with their complex formal mediation, can complicate (though not necessarily negate) a positivist understanding of fieldwork relations (based on detachment) as well an evolutionist anthropological mindset (based on typology and hierarchy). To explore all of this, the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling—two of the most popular Anglophone authors of the late nineteenth century whose colonial texts, however, are rarely compared—seems like an obvious choice. Therefore, Chap. 2 tackles colonial ethnographic narratives, specifically Stevenson’s Pacific writings and Kipling’s works about India. These texts, written and set in the late nineteenth century, illustrate two different fields of colonial history—the informal colonialism at work in the Pacific at the time Stevenson was travelling in the region; and the structured colonial governance of the British Raj that Kipling represents. Stevenson and

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Kipling rely on comparable, but not analogous, forms of experiential ethnographic authority that are rooted in the idea of “being there” in the colonies. I discuss the ambivalent nature of the colonial “being there” of Stevenson and Kipling, which variously incorporate a positivist ideal of objective/scientific knowledge—as well as colonial/Victorian anthropology—with the idea that ethnographic knowledge comes from an experience of intimacy on the field, although such intimacy, in a colonial context, is necessarily uneven—a fact that, I argue, Stevenson ultimately acknowledges and Kipling sublimates. Stevenson appears with the fieldwork memoir In the South Seas and the ethnographic fiction (novella) “The Beach of Falesá”, while, for Kipling, I focus on the first of his Letters of Marque, which I read as a fieldwork memoir, as well as on the short story “The Head of the District” and the novel Kim, both of which I read as ethnographic fictions. Chapter 3 takes its cue from the crucial insight, in world-systems theory, that core-periphery relations can be replicated within national boundaries. To discuss this idea, I rely on the concept of internal colonialism. I am interested in exploring how internal colonialism develops within processes of national (re)formation, for instance, as fascist and colonial states develop and/or are dismantled throughout the twentieth century. These are processes of state transformation and liberation that systematically come at the expense of certain parts of the nation, in an instance of combined and uneven development that is typical of modernity. Ethnographic narratives, exploring, through fieldwork, precisely the peripheral areas that are the victims of this internal colonialism seem particularly suited to register these dynamics of national-formation-through-exclusion and also to provide alternatives through a militant, activist approaches constructed from the field. This has led me to read together Carlo Levi, the great ethnographic explorer of a marginalised Italian South, and Mahasweta Devi, the Bengali grassroots writer activist and spokesperson for Indian adivasi communities. In Chap. 3 I explore how Levi’s and Devi’s writing emerges from a militant fieldwork among exploited, marginalised groups—South Italian peasants in the fascist era and indigenous communities in (post)colonial India—and highlights processes of internal colonialism at work in both nations. I discuss how the ethnographic aspect of their work lies in the urge to grasp radically different worldviews in order to contrast this internal colonialism effectively. Both writers, taking an explicitly partisan stance in favour of the subjects they encounter on the field, put the discovery of

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the subaltern at the heart of a project of political renewal that aims at including peasants and indigenous people within the nation. In this chapter, moreover, I discuss the complexities of militant fieldwork as uneven entanglement, arguing that Levi and Devi ultimately propose two different modes of engagement between partisan fieldworkers and the groups they study, characterised by different degrees of reflexivity. Significant space is then dedicated to Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, his fieldwork memoir of the time spent in the town of Gagliano (Aliano), where he was confined by the fascist regime, but I also discuss the Sicilian travelogue Words are Stones and Levi’s reportages from India. Devi’s work is addressed through a variety of ethnographic fictions: the short story “Draupadi”, the novel Chotti Munda and His Arrow and the novella “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”. Chapter 4 is both a thematic and stylistic investigation. I am interested in exploring a broad set of phenomena that characterise modernity in the last few decades—such as neocolonialism; post-disaster neoliberal development; the intertwining of uneven development and environmental discourse—and that fieldwork can be a witness to; but I am also interested in exploring how the global outreach of these phenomena becomes part of the formal structure of ethnographic narratives. In other words: if this very book—and arguably world-literature-as-registration-of-modernity— already implies the investigation of phenomena over stretches of time and space, what about a form of ethnographic narrative that self-consciously incorporates this heterogeneity within its poetics, while tacking the unfolding of neocolonialism and developmentalism? These are the aspects that connect the work of the Indian anthropologist-turned-writer Amitav Ghosh and the Dutch engineer-turned-journalist Frank Westerman. Chapter 4 establishes a comparison between Ghosh and Westerman, both known for connecting various locales and different historical periods, while also emphasising the encounter or clash between different systems of knowledge. I argue that their insistence on geohistorical and/or epistemological heterogeneity results in conceiving their ethnographic field sites (and their narratives) as inherently ‘patchy’: as landscapes that need to be connected to other territories and histories to be understood, and in which epistemological multiplicity is highlighted. The latter, for both of them, has a political relevance, as they show how the suppression of non-­ scientistic, subaltern epistemologies is linked to exposing communities and their environments to rapacious neoliberal/neocolonial governance and cultural imperialism, taking a host of different forms: m ­ ainstream/

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capitalist environmental conservation, neocolonial development work, post-disaster development; but they also analyse the very complicities of the fieldworkers that document these forces at work. I explore these aspects in Amitav Ghosh’s fieldwork memoir In an Antique Land and his ethnographic fiction (novel) The Hungry Tide and in Westerman’s literary reportages/fieldwork memoirs El Negro and Me and Choke Valley. The final chapter offers some final reflections on the advantages of working within a world-systemic/literary perspective, both in terms of visualising complex geographies of power and in terms of overcoming the need for neat periodisations. Most importantly, however, the conclusion addresses some of the limits of my corpus, offering examples of typologies of texts that I did not discuss (enough) throughout the book. I talk of the Refugee Tales short story collections as an example of fieldwork memoirs based on collaborative authorship, partly overcoming the lingering monologic tendency within this genre, while tackling migration policies and asylum as a key site of colonial and capitalist modernity. I then touch upon the idea of irrealist ethnographic fiction, in which the marvellous is intertwined with ethnographic exploration—a mode that appears only sporadically in the book. And, finally, I discuss the even more risqué proposal of reading (some) sci-fi/fantasy/speculative writing as ethnographic fiction—taking as an example the work of Ursula K. Le Guin—while sketching how also these creations can be world-literary when they mirror, in their speculative fieldsites, the dynamics of modernity.

Notes 1. According to Jérôme David, it is better to talk of multiple genealogies of world literature, as there is “no linear, cumulative history of what one calls ‘world literature’ since Goethe” (2013, 13). David lists four genealogies— philological, critical, pedagogical, methodological—that variously combine within the current debate, resulting in “the misunderstandings [being] more numerous at this point than the real exchanges” (13–14). I agree with David’s framing of the problem, but I contend that the proliferation of approaches has much to do with fundamental disagreements (and not only misunderstandings) on what function world literature should perform. 2. As Huggan puts it, “Few research fields can be as contested, not least by their own practitioners, as postcolonial studies, which continues to show every inclination to choose itself as the principal object of its own debates” Huggan (2008, 1).

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3. On this point, see also Brouillette (2007, 3). 4. At the time of the book’s publication, the collective included Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Graeme Macdonald and Stephen Shapiro. 5. For an account of the relationship between Fredric Jameson’s work and world-systems theory, see Eatough (2015a). 6. It is worth remembering that world-system theory inherits the concept of longue durée from Fernand Braudel and the Annales School (Wallerstein 2004, 18). 7. This combination of the concept of world-ecology and world-literary criticism has been employed, among others, by some members of WReC (see Deckard 2012; Niblett 2020). 8. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore define cheapness as “a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism’s crises” (2018, 22). 9. I clearly do not use Auerbach’s point of departure in a strictly philological sense. 10. “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 2010, 1). 11. For an analysis of the complex legacy of Boasian anthropology in the United States, to an extent epitomising the ambivalences of anthropology as a whole, see Anderson (2019). 12. The postmodern turn is often framed as a depoliticisation of earlier radical anthropologies of the 1960s and 1970s. It is worth noting, however, that the latter nevertheless powerfully informed the postmodern generation, even though their influence was (and is) often unacknowledged (Anderson 2019, 163). 13. According to Ellen Wiles, the three main branches of literary anthropology are: the study of literature as the subject matter of anthropology; the discussion of literature as a source of ethnographic knowledge; and the study of the different available styles of ethnographic writing (2020). 14. This question is distinct (and more complex) than asking whether it is possible to “mine literature for […] anthropological insight” (Stoller 2015, 145), which is, in my opinion, hard to deny—on this point, see Watson (2012). 15. For a discussion of the losses and gains of resistant readings, as well for a summary of the debates between different forms of reading (from symptomatic to surface reading, among others), see McKenzie and Jarvie (2018). 16. I am thinking of those expansions of world-systems theory that I discussed earlier: Jason Moore’s Capitalocene, with its emphasis on the “three cen-

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turies after 1450” as those in which capitalism enacted “the greatest landscape revolution in human history” (2016, 91); and, broadly speaking, decolonial thinking, which, differently from postcolonialism, “starts with the earlier European incursions upon the lands that came to be known as the Americas from the fifteenth century onwards” (Bhambra 2014, 115).

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Kennedy, Melissa. 2020. Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.26686/ jnzs.v0ins30.6507. Lamphere, Louise. 2018. The Transformation of Ethnography: From Malinowski’s Tent to the Practice of Collaborative/Activist Anthropology. Human Organization 77 (1): 64–76. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lederman, Rena. 2013. Ethics: Practices, Principles, and Comparative Perspectives. In The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology, 588–611. London: Bloomsbury. Levine, Caroline, and Venkat B. Mani. 2013. What Counts as World Literature? Modern Language Quarterly 74 (2): 141–149. Löwy, Michael. 2007. The Current of Critical Irrealism: ‘A Moonlit Enchanted Night’. In Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont, 148–162. Malden: Blackwell. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 2007 [1922]. Method and Scope of Anthropological Fieldwork. In Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Reader, ed. Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Jeffrey A. Sluka, 46–57. Malden: Blackwell. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Marcus, George E., and Dick Cushman. 1982. Ethnographies as Texts. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 25–69. Marcus, George E., and Michael M.J.  Fischer. 1999. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1908 [1847]. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company. Maynard, Kent. 2008. The Poetic Turn of Culture, or the ‘Resistances of Structure’. Anthropology and Humanism 33 (1): 66–84. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1548-­1409.2008.00006.x. McFate, Montgomery. 2005. Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship. Military Review 85 (2): 24–38. McFate, Montgomery, and Andrea Jackson. 2005. An Organizational Solution for DODs Cultural Knowledge Needs. Military Review 85 (4): 18–21. McKenzie, Cori Ann, and Scott Jarvie. 2018. The Limits of Resistant Reading in Critical Literacy Practices. English Teaching 17 (4): 298–309. https://doi. org/10.1108/ETPC-­01-­2018-­0017. Middleton, Townsend, and Eklavya Pradhan. 2014. Dynamic Duos: On Partnership and the Possibilities of Postcolonial Ethnography. Ethnography 15 (3): 355–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138114533451. Moore, Jason W. 2003. Capitalism as World-Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History. Organization & Environment 16 (4): 431–458. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026603259091.

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———. 2016. The Rise of Cheap Nature. In Anthropocene Or Capitalocene: Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W.  Moore, 78–115. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1: 54–68. ———. 2003. More Conjectures. New Left Review 20: 73–81. Mufti, Aamir R. 2016. Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Niblett, Michael. 2020. World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890–1950. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-­3-­030-­38581-­1. Okely, Judith. 2012. Anthropological Practice Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method. London and New York: Routledge. Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory since the Eighties. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73. Paganopoulos, Michelangelo, ed. 2018. In-Between Fiction and Non-Fiction: Reflections on the Poetics of Ethnography of Literature and Film. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Patel, Raj, and Jason W.  Moore. 2018. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. London and New York: Verso. Patterson, Thomas C. 2001. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. Oxford and New York: Berg. Pels, Peter, and Oscar Salemink. 2000. Introduction: Locating the Colonial Subjects of Anthropology. In Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, ed. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, 1–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Bolette B. Blaagaard, eds. 2012. Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives. London: Routledge. Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Gianmaria Colpani, eds. 2016. Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics. London and New  York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. Fieldwork in Common Places. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 27–50. Berkeley: University of California Press. Price, David H. 2019. Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire by Montgomery McFate (Review). Anthropological Quarterly 92 (3): 969–974. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2019.0049. Rabinow, Paul. 2007 [1977]. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Ryle, John. 2001. At Play in the Bush of Ghosts: Tropical Baroque, African Reality and the Work of Ryszard Kapuściński. Times Literary Supplement 27.

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Seitel, Peter. 2003. Theorizing Genres: Interpreting Works. New Literary History 34 (2): 275–297. Simon, David. 2009. Introduction and Letter to HBO.  In The Wire: Truth Be Told, ed. Rafael Alvarez, 1–36. New York: Grove Press. Sluka, Jeffrey A. 2007. Fieldwork Ethics. In Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Reader, 271–275. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1998 [1896]. In the South Seas. London: Penguin. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press. Stoller, Paul. 2015. What Is Literary Anthropology? Review of ‘Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology’ by Marilyn Cohen. Current Anthropology 56 (1): 144–145. Tallman, Janet. 2002. The Ethnographic Novel: Finding the Insider’s Voice. In Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse, ed. Rose De Angelis, 11–22. London and New York: Routledge. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 2010. Primitive Culture: Researches in the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. Vaden Brook, Tom. 2016. $725m Program Army ‘Killed’ Found Alive, Growing. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/03/09/ army-­misled-­congress-­and-­public-­program/81531280/. Accessed 29 January 2023. Veteto, James R., and Joshua Lockyer. 2015. Applying Anthropology to What? Tactical/Ethical Decisions in an Age of Global Neoliberal Imperialism. Journal of Political Ecology 22: 357–367. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. Word-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———. 2016. WreC’s Reply. Comparative Literature Studies 53 (3): 535–550. Watson, C.W. 1995. The Novelist’s Consciousness. In Questions of Consciousness, ed. Anthony P.  Cohen and Nigel Rapport, 77–98. London and New  York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034797. ———. 2012. Anthropology and Literature. In The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, ed. Richard Fardon et al., 248–262. London: SAGE. Weinberger, Sharon. 2011. Pentagon Cultural Analyst Helped with Interrogations. Nature. 2011. https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2011.598. White, Hayden. 1978. The Historical Text as Literary Artifact. In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 81–100. Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Wiles, Ellen. 2020. Three Branches of Literary Anthropology: Sources, Styles, Subject Matter. Ethnography 21 (2): 280–295. https://doi. org/10.1177/1466138118762958.

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Williams, Linda. 2011. Ethnographic Imaginary: The Genesis and Genius of The Wire. Critical Inquiry 38 (1): 208–226. https://doi.org/10.1086/661650. Willis, William S. 1972. Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet. In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes. New York: Pantheon Books. Wolfe, Paula. 2010. Preservice Teachers Planning for Critical Literacy Teaching. English Education 42 (4): 368–390. Youngs, Tim. 2013. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Colonial Ethnography and Uneven Intimacies in Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling

Between 1890 and 1891 Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling entertained a brief correspondence, initiated when Stevenson wrote an appreciative letter to Kipling, addressing him as Terence Mulvaney, the Irish soldier of Kipling’s Soldiers Three short stories (1890) (Stevenson 1995a, 414). Kipling replied as Mulvaney, and addressed Stevenson as Alan Breck Stuart, the Jacobite soldier of Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped (Stevenson 2014 [1886]), which prompted Stevenson to reply, in turn, as Alan Breck (Stevenson 1995b, 91–92). This playful exchange bears witness to their reciprocal, if perhaps not equal, admiration. Kipling, more than forty years later, would make a bizarre but unequivocal homage towards “Eminent Past Master R. L. S.”, in his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), by claiming that “even today I would back myself to take seventy-five per cent marks in a written or viva-voce examination on The Wrong Box, which, as the Initiated knows, is the Test Volume of that Degree” (Kipling 1990, 92–93). Stevenson, in his letters, often praises— albeit unfailingly with reservations1—the writer that Henry James had introduced him, in 1890, as “your nascent rival… the star of the hour” (Stevenson 1995a, 402). Soon after their exchange, the two almost had a chance to meet in person: Kipling, who was in Australia and New Zealand in 1891, had announced his intention to visit Stevenson in Samoa, but complications with the travel arrangements led him to return to India from Auckland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. De Capitani, Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38704-3_2

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(Kipling 1977, 93; Stevenson 1995b, 162). Stevenson expected another visit from Kipling in 1892, but also this prospective encounter never materialised (Stevenson 1995b, 254), and any chance of a meeting vanished with Stevenson’s death in 1894. The fact that Stevenson and Kipling should have met in Samoa, but did not, is an appropriate image for their missed encounter within literary criticism, in spite of compelling parallelisms. Kipling, in many ways, follows Stevenson’s footsteps as a practitioner, if not theoretician, of the late nineteenth-century romance—it is no chance that James had labelled Kipling as Stevenson’s rising rival, and it is precisely as admirers of each other’s adventure tales that the two had initiated their short exchange.2 More importantly, an engagement with colonialism and empire is central in at least a phase of their work. There seems to be a lack, however, of critical comparisons on this front. This chapter, first of all, fills this gap by elaborating on the different approaches to colonialism and empire in Stevenson’s Pacific writings and Kipling’s writing on India in the early phase of his career. It does so, however, by reading those texts through the lenses of ethnography and anthropology, looking at their works as ethnographic narratives, emerging from and describing experiences of fieldwork. A comparison between Stevenson’s and Kipling’s colonial/ethnographic writings, in particular, serves as an ideal standpoint to explore the uneven entanglements at play within colonial peripheries—that is, how colonial fieldwork registers the unfolding of a one-and-uneven modernity. To map Stevenson’s and Kipling’s narratives as both ethnographic and world-literary texts it is crucial to first qualify their different relationship towards their respective “fields”, which frames them as (different but comparable) ‘men on the spot’, that is, proto-ethnographers. For Stevenson Polynesia became, retrospectively, a final step in a complex existential and artistic journey. Stevenson had risen to literary stardom with works like Treasure Island (1999 [1883]) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1979 [1886]), forging his literary reputation by working within (as well as theorising on) the broad category of romance.3 Thanks to this success, when he later undertook his second trip to America, in 1887, the publisher S.  S. McClure proposed him to conduct a trip to the Pacific Islands, starting in 1888, in which Stevenson was supposed to write a number of travel letters that McClure would syndicate to newspapers and magazines. Travelling through the Pacific, however, drastically changed his approach to literature and life, triggering the “most dramatic” of the many boundary-crossings of his career (Ambrosini 2006, 33)⁠. Stevenson

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eventually settled in Samoa in 1890 and remained there until his death in 1894. During these six years in the Pacific he developed a strong interest in local cultures and history; he experimented with various forms of realism; and he became actively engaged with the political life of his surroundings, including reporting on the Samoan civil war (1886–1894) and ultimately siding with the Samoan factions that opposed imperial misrule. Kipling, by contrast, was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent the first six years of his life in India. After moving to England to continue his education, he remained there for ten years. He then went back to India, where he lived from 1882 to 1889, working as a journalist in Lahore and then, from 1887, in Allahabad. He then left India in 1889 to work in England and in the United States, having already become, like Stevenson before him, a literary celebrity. A significant part of his important fiction about India—including Kim (1901)—was not, therefore, written in India, which remained, however, the place where Kipling had first elaborated— empirically, ethnographically, as it were—a number of ideas and impression on colonialism, empire, cross-cultural relations and governance that crucially continued to inform his perspective as an unrepentant—but complicated—imperial ideologue. Epistemologically and politically, Stevenson and Kipling present us with seemingly opposite premises and outcomes. These differences, however, make for an interesting comparison on the crucial aspects of their experiences, writing processes and imaginative enterprises that do resonate with each other. Both of them were cast in the role of cultural mediators: as popular writers with multiple readerships around various core and peripheral areas of the late nineteenth-century world-system, they narrated historical and material specificities of Polynesia and India in a complex negotiation with the expectations of their readerships. Both are entangled in the complicated business of representing the colonial world for a variety of Western/imperial readerships that were variously unfamiliar—or familiar (only) to a degree—with the contexts they describe. The ethnographic nature of their work is foregrounded not only because they both adopt styles and tropes taken from various anthropological and ethnographic traditions—in particular, they both inherit a sense of ‘scientificity’ that derives from colonial and Victorian positivist ethnographies—but also because they both try to represent the colonial world reliably under the pressure of these audiences, to validate, in their eyes, their experiential ethnographic authority. Their physical presence in and familiarity with the locales they write about is a crucial part of this process, and the idea of

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“being there”—and hence being a reliable, objective source—is pivotal for both authors. But representing “faithfully” the colonial world may clash with the audience’s expectations, entangling both Stevenson and Kipling in the problem of exoticism. But it is on the issue of colonial intimacy that the parallelism between Stevenson and Kipling as ‘men on the field’/proto-ethnographers/fieldworkers becomes particularly interesting. As I discuss in the next section, defining the terms of intimacy within fieldwork is one of its foundational concerns of ethnography. What Stevenson and Kipling offer is different explorations on how intimacy is intertwined with ethnographic knowledge, which provides a different lens to read colonial fieldwork, as well as colonial anthropology. In turn, the (im)possibility of intimacy in colonial fieldwork becomes a way to discuss intimacy, more generally, within the inequalities of an uneven world-system. This is why the chapter begins with an exploration on the issue of intimacy in ethnography. The following part of the chapter is dedicated to Stevenson, specifically to his fieldwork memoir In the South Seas (1889–1891) and his ethnographic novella “The Beach of Falesá” (1893). As regards In the South Seas, I discuss how Stevenson, moving towards ethnographic realism, presents himself as a ‘scientific tourist’ that overcomes the exoticism of the ‘sentimental tourist’, a position elaborated in opposition to the expectations of his readership in Europe. This serves as a background—as well as a contrast—for a reading of “The Beach of Falesá”, in which Stevenson fully dramatises the contradictions of colonial fieldwork through the trader John Wiltshire, frontier colonialist and proto-ethnographer. Wiltshire— the story’s narrator and protagonist—learns to understand the people of the Polynesian island of Falesá—and gains the upper hand over his business rivals—only when he fully commits to (and lets himself be guided by) his native wife Uma. However, I argue, the intimacy and the knowledge that derives from his encounter with Uma coexist with Wiltshire’s holding on to colonial anthropological paradigms throughout his narrative, exposing, through narrative unreliability, the uneven entanglements of colonial fieldwork. As for Kipling, I examine one of his Letters of Marque, journalistic pieces written between 1887 and 1888, the short story “The Head of the District” (1890), as well as his novel Kim (1901). I show how Letters of Marque, as well as “The Head of the District”, conceives ethnographic authority over India as belonging to Anglo-Indian frontier administrators and journalists, in an attempt to defend their superior knowledge over that

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of ‘distant’ administrators with liberal principles or cosmopolitan tourist-­ travellers. This involves the construction of specific imperial typologies of caste, religion and race. In the final section of this chapter I discuss Kipling’s novel Kim. Its eponymous protagonist, Kipling’s boy-­ ethnographer-­spy, carries on the fantasy of an ethnographic knowledge achieved by creating comprehensive typologies of the ‘natives’, but his success as fieldworker is also linked to his curiosity, interest and ultimately love towards the Indian people he encounters on the field. I read Kim as Kipling’s most elaborate synthesis of top-down/detached and intimate ethnographic knowledge—a synthesis which, however, is more a recuperation of intimacy within a project of imperial governance than its subversion.

2.1   Intimacy and Ethnographic Fieldwork To discuss Stevenson’s and Kipling’s ethnographic narratives, I mobilise the category of intimacy. Intimacy has emerged as a central point of discussion in the midst of the critical rethinking of anthropology, but it has arguably always haunted anthropology, variously suppressed but never fully exorcised. Stevenson and Kipling are able to register both this attempt at exorcising intimacy through their insistence on a scientific, objective form of knowledge—in line with a positivist conception of anthropological knowledge—but also powerfully reintroduce intimacy in their writing by also stressing the importance of close ‘fieldwork’ relations as a source of ethnographic knowledge. In doing so, they variously highlight the contradictions and unevenness of the colonial fieldwork as an index of modernity. To understand why intimacy is functional to this discussion, it is worth looking at the ambivalent role the concept has played in twentieth-century anthropological discourse, which Stevenson and Kipling to an extent anticipated. Let us start with the very concept of participant observation, which can be interpreted as a compromise between intimacy and detachment—a way to keep the excessive intimacy that is inherent in the ethnographic method at bay. It can be argued that “the anthropological tradition of participant observation, undertaken in order to gain an intimate knowledge, demands the gradual formation of close connections, bonds and exchanges of various kinds” (Sehlikoglu and Zengin 2015, 23)⁠. On the other hand, anthropologists have also traditionally been worried about the dangers of ‘over-rapport’ and therefore criticised the idea of a total bodily and emotional immersion (see Irwin 2006, 157)⁠. As a consequence,

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‘insider’ or ‘native’ anthropologists, variously defined—for instance, native American anthropologists researching native Americans (see Innes 2009)⁠ or gay anthropologists researching gay communities (see Bolton 1995)⁠— have often been regarded with suspicion and targeted with over-rapport accusations, because they are allegedly too intimate, as it were, with the communities they study. With the emergence of critical anthropology, different paradigms—for instance, interpretative, postmodern and feminist ones—have instead insisted on the importance of “deeply personal, close, and emotional field work encounters” (Irwin 2006, 157)⁠ and put intimacy at the heart of their fieldwork. An important insight for this chapter, however, comes from Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (1995), whose starting point is addressing the distinctively ‘forbidden’ form of intimacy represented by sex on the field. In the introduction, Don Kulick points out that anthropologists, while often concerned with “the sex lives of others, […] have remained very tight-lipped about their own sexuality” (1995, 3)⁠. This is a mistake, because “erotic subjectivity in the field is a potentially useful source of insight”, which “performs, or, rather, can be made to perform, work. And one of the many types of work it can perform is to draw attention to the conditions of its own production” (5). In other words: The structural conditions that make sexual relationships between anthropologists and members of the communities they study possible in the first place are almost inevitably highly unequal and colonial. But having said that, […] sexuality seems to have the potential of bringing into theoretical and political focus exactly those asymmetrically ordered conditions. (22)⁠

A focus on the sexuality of researchers, therefore, can bring into the foreground what Steven Rubenstein calls the erotic economy on the colonial frontier (2004)⁠ in which ethnography is often embedded, and in turn can be used as a starting point to talk about the uneven relationship of (colonial) fieldwork as a whole. More broadly, an analysis of the desire of the ethnographer is functional, for fieldworkers, to “become aware of themselves as positioned, partial, knowing selves” (Kulick 1995, 18)⁠. Kulick’s insights can be extended to a broader notion of intimacy that encompasses sexuality, desire and sexual encounters but is not limited to these aspects. Margot Weiss argues for the importance of “a notion ethnographic intimacy that points beyond sexual identity” to “explore intimacy

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as a productive site of tension between the sexual and the social, the domestic and the transnational, and the personal and the political economic” (2020, 1357)⁠. This more capacious conception of intimacy highlights a variety of complex fieldwork entanglements, whose newfound prominence, in turn, reconfigures ethnography “beyond the reified relations between knowing subjects and objects of knowledge” (1358)⁠. Addressing intimacy, in other words, not only highlights inequalities inherent to fieldwork but is simultaneously a way to recognise the networked and collaborative process of ethnographic fieldwork itself. Kulick’s and Weiss’ takes on intimacy dovetail with perspectives that, complicating the neat, well-defined, hierarchical set of fieldwork roles of classical anthropology—researcher, research assistants and informers— conceive fieldwork as embedded in a more complex relationality. Jonathan Newman’s research on the role of his own family as companions on the field, for instance, leads him to suggest that: The ethnographer who does not want to explore the shadows of their own intimacies will always be on the run from their own research. […] The field is a fluid positioning: the field is our relationships with our (research) companions. Regardless of our research aims and travel tickets, our companions are our field. If anthropology is a relational pursuit, then anthropology is companion studies. (2020, 476)⁠

The idea of the field as relationships with companions—and of anthropology as companion studies—resonates with Emily Yates-Doerr’s reflections on how the presence of her children on the field led her to frame her ethnographic practice as “anti-hero care”, a rejection of the tradition of “the ‘lone fieldworker’—presumably male, presumably unencumbered by kinship—who would venture into the unknown to return with captivating stories” (2020, 234)⁠. Anti-hero care shifts the focus on a different learning experience on the field, which foregrounds the crucial, often surprising and unexpected, role of one’s network of intimate others. This has significant epistemological and methodological implications, because, as she adds, “having our ideas corrected or adjusted—another way of saying learning from others—is so much easier if you are not aspiring to be a hero” (241)⁠. None of these interventions simply formulates that developing and/or acknowledging intimacy makes fieldwork easier or inherently more equal, but they certainly point out that such move reveals the conditions of

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fieldwork, which, besides, are arguably the real important factors in determining the degree of unevenness in fieldwork relations.4 It is precisely from the perspective of fieldwork as experience of intimacy but also as a network of uneven relationships that Stevenson’s and Kipling’s tales can provide us a new perspective on the colonial encounter—and their texts become world-literary. While anticipating a theoretical conception of fieldwork in which ‘being there’ is central and the source of ‘objective’, detached ethnographic knowledge and authority—a-la-Malinowski, as it were—both writers craft stories in which such objectivity and detachment are ultimately belied by the importance of intimate bonds between fieldworkers and their subjects, friends, assistants, informers—that is, their companions on the field. They, in other words, anticipate the prominence of fieldwork in anthropology in the twentieth century; simultaneously, they enable a process of demystification of its ‘scientific’ pretensions, while not being, at times, immune to them; but also register, in the intimate encounters they foreground, the inequalities of colonial entanglements.

2.2  Robert Louis Stevenson 2.2.1   In the South Seas: From Romance to Ethnographic Realism The Pacific Islands, in the decades before Stevenson’s arrival, had already been penetrated by a variety of colonising forces, including various missionary organisations, who had been settling there since the end of the eighteenth century and had successfully established Christianity in the Pacific (Colley 2004, 12)⁠, as well as independent traders. Both categories, through “acts of private colonization” and “quasi-colonialist activities”, had been responsible for advancing the process of colonisation and capitalist expansion, creating a “shadow empire […] operating outside imperial boundaries”—an informal, unofficial colonialism intertwined with slavery and piracy in its search for native labour (Jolly 2007, 157). Moreover, the region had been radically transformed by the exodus of the natives from villages to major ports, the depopulation connected to indentured labour and the development of plantation economy, the transformation of the labour market with the arrival of capitalist economy, and the increasing number of mixed-race children (Keown 2007, 39)⁠. Stevenson travelled mostly in Polynesia—one of the three broad “geographical-cum-ethnological [divisions]” of the Pacific Islands created by the Europeans, the

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other being Melanesia and Micronesia (Thomas 2004, 297)⁠. Throughout his journeys, he witnessed (and wrote about) how these developments continued to unfold alongside more structured forms of colonial and capitalist penetration, which had begun in the 1880s, when companies backed up by various Western nations—France, Britain, Germany and the United States—had started an actual “scramble for the Pacific Islands” (Phillips 2007, 64)⁠. Stevenson’s Pacific writings function as an observatory on the colonial frontier of the Pacific Islands—commonly referred to, in his time, as ‘the South Seas’—starting from In the South Seas, a fieldwork memoir based on Stevenson’s exploration of various areas of Polynesia. Although the book was published posthumously in 1896, the materials that were later collected in it were initially meant to be the letters that Stevenson wrote for S. S. McClure. In this sense, therefore, this book is the first planned South Seas work. It covers the Marquesas, the Paumotus and the Gilberts, with a particular focus, in the last section, on the island of Apemama and his redoubtable king Tembinok. Stevenson—conflicted about the structure and the form these writings should take (Rennie 1998, xxvi)⁠—ultimately moved away from the letter format, writing prose pieces that merge travel writing, ethnography, political history and linguistics. This choice was influenced by a number of previous readings: from Herman Melville’s Typee (1996 [1846]) and Omoo (2007 [1847])5 to Victorian anthropology, such as the works of Herbert Spencer and E. B. Tylor. He was, more broadly, interested in Victorian evolutionism and Darwinism (Reid 2006, 3–5)⁠. All these different sources—not necessarily in agreement—make for a strong theoretical background for his ethnographic understanding of the Polynesians, as well as being important models for a writer that had “scientific” ambitions for his Pacific work. This was hardly what McClure expected, and also his readers, including his wife Fanny and his mentor and friend Sidney Colvin, were generally perplexed. In 1889 Fanny wrote Colvin: Louis has the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world for this book, and I am afraid that he is going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch Stevenson head that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and impersonal thing, comparing different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different people, the object being to settle the question as to whether they are of common Malay origin or not. Also to compare the Protestant and Catholic

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missions, etc., and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves. And I believe there is no one living thing who has got so near them, or who understands them as he does. Think of a small treatise on the Polynesian races being offered to people who are dying to hear about Ori a Ori, the making of brothers with cannibals, the strange stories they told, and the extraordinary adventures that befell us […]. (Stevenson 1995a, 303–304)⁠

Fanny’s letter functions as an effective starting point to highlight various conflicts underpinning Stevenson’s literary—and ethnographic—project in the South Seas. On the one hand, she frames Stevenson’s plans as a conflict between an impersonal, scientific kind of writing and a more personal—intimate, as it were—representation of Polynesia. As I discuss later, In the South Seas actually strikes an awkward balance of both, and, as I argue in my reading of “The Beach of Falesá”, Stevenson’s project is at its most effective when he tackles the colonial encounter (and its uneven intimacies) in a style that is far from ‘impersonal’. On the other, Fanny’s letter also illustrates a clash between a certain exoticism that was expected of Stevenson as a writer of romances and what we can call (in a deliberate anachronism) Stevenson’s ethnographic realism. Fanny’s concerns are exemplary of the anxieties of Stevenson’s literary advisors and of his readership about the developments of his writing. Indeed, when Stevenson started to produce ethnographic, political or historical works of non-­ fiction, the audiences were left craving for a supposedly more authentic “Stevensonian” voice (see Jolly 2009, 157).⁠6 Stevenson had been, in earlier phases of his career, one of the most refined theorists of romance, having written several crucial contributions that helped redefine this wide-spanning, heterogeneous genre. In particular, in “A Gossip on Romance” (1882) Stevenson defines romance as an a-moral narrative of the body, highlighting its subject matter in these terms: There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. (Stevenson 2017a, 128)⁠

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Stevenson’s theory of romance frames its focus on the body, practical problem-solving and adventure as artistically valid and intellectually compelling. At the same time, this circumscribes the romance within a space of fantasy and evasion, free from explicit moral reflection and the weight of psychological and moral development. Such limited focus is based on the belief that art, as Stevenson argues in “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884), is unable to represent the full complexity of human existence, and therefore should focus on exploring highly specific dimensions of reality and evoke specific emotions in its audience. It follows that writing a romance, at least according to Stevenson’s conception in the early 1880s, is quite the opposite of a holistic/ethnographic representation of reality. This is what Stevenson means when he says that art should not aim at “[competing] with life” (Stevenson 2017b, 143)⁠—a phrase found in Henry James’ “The Art of Fiction”, to which “A Humble Remonstrance” is a direct response. In the South Seas and the following Pacific writings have been interpreted as a rejection of this approach, to be replaced with a desire to understand reality—more specifically, the Pacific Islands—holistically, foreshadowing an intention to act within that reality. In her seminal Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (2009), Roslyn Jolly argues that Stevenson’s keen interest in anthropology, law and history were variously used to intervene intellectually and politically in the Pacific world, while at the same time changing Stevenson’s own previous approach to literature: This diversification of Stevenson’s activities as an author entailed a significant revision of the theory of literature he had developed through the 1870s and the 1880s. Then he had championed a romantic, non-realistic, and largely anti-utilitarian view of writing as play, the aim of which was to give pleasure […] but never to “compete with life” […]. Now, however, in his attempts to represent the contemporary Pacific world accurately in his fiction and non-fiction, and to intervene in that world through his writing, Stevenson was competing with life. (Jolly 2009, 25–26)⁠⁠

This influential reading of Stevenson’s Pacific writings establishes a strong connection between Stevenson’s scientific ambitions and his turn towards realism—a style aimed a representing accurately and holistically a piece of social reality. Since this describes the classical anthropological ambition to which the term ‘ethnographic realism’ refers to, I think this definition is

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appropriate for In the South Seas, which, besides, as I discuss, features also other key stylistic aspects of ethnographic realism. Stevenson’s ethnographic realism acquires important political and epistemological connotations as an antidote to exoticist imperial romance and its underlying ideology. Imperial romance, as a rule, ideologically supported real imperial conquest. It often featured “a racialized contrast between its British heroes and the savage population inevitably surrounding them, foregrounding violent action […], at the same time as representing the penetration of an unknown, exotic, and dangerous colonial terrain” (Steer 2015, 345)⁠. It is worth remembering, moreover, that the exotic is not “an inherent quality to be found ‘in’ certain people, distinctive objects, or specific places” (Huggan 2001, 13)⁠, but rather a mode of perception and consumption. As a mode of perception, exoticism “renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and […] effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery” (Huggan 2001, 13). As a mode of consumption, on the other hand, exoticism works through the “trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artefacts in the world’s economic, not cultural, centres” (Huggan 2001, 15). Both modes are characterised by what Graham Huggan calls, after Arjun Appadurai (1986, 28)⁠, the aesthetics of decontextualisation. As a romancer exploring the South Seas, Stevenson was expected to represent a strange but domesticated Pacific to be consumed, in the form of tales, in the imperial core—in the same way the Pacific was materially consumed through capitalist expansion. Stevenson, instead, opposed an exoticist view of the South Seas in favour of a more grounded, ethnographically nuanced portrayal resulting from his fieldwork in the Pacific. An example of Stevenson’s ‘ethnographic-realist’ resistance against exoticism is present in an exchange between Stevenson and Sidney Colvin. In 1894, frustrated by the excessive focus on native life that he found in Stevenson’s letters, Colvin wrote Stevenson: [Do] any of our white affairs [interest you at all]? I could remark in passing that for three letters or more you have not uttered a single word about anything but your beloved blacks—or chocolates—confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested, as shutting out your thoughts […] from the main currents of human affairs, and oh much less interesting than any […] of our own hereditary associations, loves and latitudes. (Quoted in Gray 2004, 159)⁠⁠

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Stevenson replied: Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my “blacks or chocolates”. If I were to do as you purpose, […] it would cut you entirely off my life. You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you? (Stevenson 1995c, 281–282)

Colvin’s assumption is that the Polynesians are an exotic prop in Stevenson’s existence, and by focusing on them Stevenson is fundamentally hiding from view under a colourful scenery. But Stevenson’s realist approach sees them as a part of the reality in which he is himself embedded, and hence finds perfectly natural to talk extensively about them. This approach is what leads to the descriptions of Polynesian life as part of In the South Seas, an extensive engagement with the Samoan Civil War in A Footnote to History (Stevenson 1895) and the abundance of native characters in his Pacific fiction. In this sense, one may argue that Fanny’s concerns about Stevenson’s scientific ambitions were unwarranted: his scientific ambitions ultimately led him to ethnographic realism, and hence allowed him to carve a new space for telling “all he [knew] of the people themselves”—only, not according to the terms of imperial romance. However, important distinctions need to be made within the corpus of Stevenson’s Pacific writing, which ultimately presents, at the very least, two forms of realism: on the one hand, there is what I call the ethnographic realism of In the South Seas, which for the most part does frame itself, as Fanny correctly puts it, as “a sort of scientific and impersonal thing”. On the other, there is the more critical—or, in Stevenson’s fortuitous choice of words, queer—realism of “The Beach of Falesá”, which questions the very possibility of scientific and impersonal ethnographic knowledge by registering the complex, uneven, emotionally charged intimacy of the fieldwork encounter within a colonial frontier. To address the latter form of realism, however, the limitations of the former must be discussed in detail. 2.2.2   The Scientific Tourist Ethnographic realism grants ethnographic authority to the researcher that employs the right methodologies—first of all, fieldwork—to reach a holistic, detailed portrayal of the native’s point of view. But the fieldworker

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within this style of writing simultaneously tends to evade (self-)scrutiny, as fieldwork itself, though framed as a crucial experience to produce ethnographic knowledge, is not (re)presented systematically: only its markings appear in the final text, but not a close examination of its unfolding. In my analysis of a few passages of In the South Seas my aim is, simultaneously, to investigate the move from exotic imperial romance to ‘scientific’ ethnographic realism, supported by the experience of fieldwork, that Stevenson undertakes; but also to discuss how the figure of the ‘scientific tourist’ he creates in the process, while functional to fend off exoticist representations and often mobilised for a criticism of capitalism and colonialism, also embodies the contradictions of classical ethnographic realism, including some degree of connivance with colonialism and capitalism themselves. It is worth remembering that I do consider an ethnographic-realist voice, which hides its privileged positioning within the world-system (and, more concretely, within fieldwork relations), as a registration of the system itself, which may coexist, as in this case, with mimetic registrations of modernity’s multifaceted inequalities. The first paragraphs of In the South Sea can be taken as a good example of the persona that Stevenson adopts within this book. Stevenson briefly explains the reasons that led him to start travelling in the Pacific and then settling in Samoa in 1890, adding that “if more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the foundation of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts of the sea” (Stevenson 1998, 5)⁠. This sentence stresses the fact that Stevenson has to change his authorial persona by “learning” a different way of addressing his readers. “[Addressing] readers from the uttermost parts of the sea” means taking up the role of the man on the spot—an ethnographer on the field. The distance that Stevenson establishes between himself and his readers is not only geographical but also epistemological— the kind of knowledge Stevenson is trying to pass on has changed from what his readers expect. At the same time, the passage intimates a certain overlapping between Stevenson’s expedition and colonial structures—he is, by his own description, a white man who relies on native labour, and the phrase “my black boys” implies both subservience and infantilisation. The first passages of In the South Seas establish a subtle conflict between, to use a phrase he employs shortly thereafter, “the scientific and the sentimental tourist” (6)⁠. With a slight oversimplification, the sentimental tourist is the romancer, the traditional travel writer. The scientific tourist is the

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ethnographer, the realist writer. But the two categories, anticipating deeper contradictions within the text, are not always oppositional, and to an extent they construct each other. For instance, Stevenson justifies his choice of the South Seas as his elected field by arguing that: no part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles and the Caesars. (5–6)⁠

This passage—which is also the statement of the quest at the heart of In the South Seas as a fieldwork memoir—gestures towards the romantic traveller by describing an audience of “fireside travellers” and evoking the idea of a (narrative) seduction. But while Stevenson may hint at fireside storytelling in the first part of the sentence, he then intertwines this image with the more scientifically oriented idea of describing the life of actual people, ending with a note that already anticipates an evolutionist theoretical background. This interpenetration of perspectives invites a few questions: does the scientific tourist oppose or complement the sentimental one? And to what end? The answer is complex because Stevenson’s idea of “scientificity” is grounded in an anthropological-evolutionist approach to culture, which, however, does not entirely follow the evolutionist orthodoxy and does not always result in predictable political alignments. The first two chapters of the book help clarify this point. After the introducing paragraphs, Stevenson describes his first landing on a South Sea island in the Marquesas. It is an “arrival scene”, the trope that Mary-­ Louise Pratt has famously foregrounded as a connecting point between travel writing and classical anthropology, and that typically sets the scene for the ideological background of a text (1986)⁠. Consistently, Stevenson’s arrival scene is functional to establish his transition from the sentimental to the scientific tourist, as well as to establish his experiential ethnographic authority by foregrounding difficulties that are then promptly resolved. In this passage, Stevenson meets his first Islanders, as his cabin is “filled from end to end with Marquesans” (Stevenson 1998, 9). The first contact is marked by the impossibility of communication. Stevenson is reduced to silence and utterly frustrated:

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A kind of despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or dwellers of some alien planet. (9)⁠

Stevenson manifests an explicit desire towards communication, but, initially, assigns “articulate communication” as an attribute of the traveller, and deafness to the natives. However, he is quick to add that such impression comes from a deficiency on the traveller’s part: having “journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easily remedied” is the reason why “my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images” (9)⁠—a deficiency in terms of linguistic skills but also of cultural knowledge. Therefore, on the one hand, Stevenson evokes and dismantles the characterisation of Islanders as brutes—from “furred folk” they are revealed as “fellow-creatures”. But, on the other, the encounter does not necessarily turn into an equal dialogue, for he also takes the chance to lay a strong, one-sided claim on ethnographic authority and capacity of cultural understanding by stressing the importance of a new methodology he possesses to bridge the gap between himself and the Islanders. The methodology Stevenson employs, and on which his ethnographic authority as a scientific tourist is based, follows, to an extent, the schemes of Victorian evolutionism, discussed in the previous chapter with special reference to Tylor—the unilineal evolution of culture, with the implication that primitive cultures are a mirror of the past of the advanced ones, and the fundamental comparability of different cultures on a universal scale. He employs what he calls the “Highland comparison” (14)⁠, juxtaposing the cultural predicament of the Marquesan Kanaka (“man” in Hawaiian language—the local term for Pacific islander) with that of the Scottish Highlander. He argues that the kind of political, economic and cultural onslaught that Marquesans are experiencing at the hands of the French colonists echoes the fate of the Highlanders throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with specific reference to the Highlands Clearances: It was perhaps yet more important [for Stevenson to engage with the Marquesans] that I had enjoyed in my youth some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not much beyond a century has

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passed since these were in the same convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding money as the means and object of existence: the commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the cherished practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume, proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving Highlander; long-pig [human flesh], pirated from the next village, to the man-eating Kanaka. (12)⁠

From this general observation Stevenson elaborates a fieldwork methodology, focused on the exchange of stories: These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not only inclined me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but continually modified my judgement. […] When I desired any details of a savage custom, or of superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism: […] the black bull’s head of Stirling procured me the legend of Rahero; and what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the Tevas of Tahiti. The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must rouse and share. (13)

What Stevenson attempts here is a trans-cultural exchange enabled by a sharing of what he deems “comparable” cultural items. At the same time, it is worth noting that it is the traveller that, armed with a scientific evolutionist methodology, must “rouse and share” kinship—the native, while conceived as a valuable interlocutor, is rather passive within this exchange, their stories being “fished” by Stevenson’s investigation. That said, Stevenson twists evolutionist paradigms to a more radical end. Specifically, tapping into Scottish history and culture to understand the Marquesans imaginatively allows Stevenson to frame traumatic cultural change in a framework of solidarity, introduced by Stevenson’s emphasis on “kinship”. Stevenson’s framework, by definition, denies coevalness (Fabian 2002) to the Islanders, and places himself, as the ‘scientific tourist’, in a privileged epistemological position; but at the same times allows him to find echoes of experiences of colonial conquest and

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capitalist assimilation in a history that he considers his own. The Highland comparison bears a particular political significance when considering that Stevenson’s work consistently engages  with the “losers” of modern Scottish history, like the Jacobites and the Highlanders, with a distinctively anti-colonial approach. Barry Menikoff, in his influential reading of the David Balfour novels, set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, argues that they are “at bottom an anticolonialist document, both a proclamation and an elegy for a vanished culture, a statement on the power of art to reclaim the past and reconstitute its victims and villains” (2005, 205)⁠. In the Pacific, Stevenson, thinking back at how the autonomy and culture of the Highlands was gradually dismantled, is able to look at Pacific cultures through a comparative framework that enables a fundamentally sympathetic gaze. Another reason why Stevenson manages to steer away, for the most part, from the politically regressive implications of an evolutionist paradigm is that In the South Seas ultimately mixes evolutionism with cultural relativism, “[hovering] on the edge of new anthropological relativism” (Reid 2006, 148)⁠. Two passages, in particular, show this tendency. One is Stevenson’s discussion about tapus (commonly spelled “taboos”). A tapu, in the Polynesian context from which the word originates, indicates a forbidden area, food or object. Imposing a tapu was, traditionally, a prerogative of Polynesian chiefs. Stevenson makes an argument for the fundamental rationality of (most) tapus, normally perceived as arbitrary and irrational by the Westerners, who, at the same time, naturalise their own beliefs and superstitions as rational and expect other people to respect them: “All the world must respect out tapus, or we gnash our teeth” (Stevenson 1998, 42)⁠. The other, and arguably more polarising, anthropological theme on which Stevenson tests his cultural relativism is cannibalism—a cultural practice widespread in the Marquesas. As Paola Della Valle argues, Stevenson’s position—and his relativistic stance more generally—are greatly indebted to Michel de Montaigne’s essay on cannibalism (2013, 51–57)⁠. Montaigne had reminded his readers, in 1580, that “each man calls barbarism whatever it is not his own practice” (De Montaigne 1958, 152)⁠. Comparing the cannibal practices of the Tupinambá natives of Brazil, based on a humane treatment of the prisoners, with the tortures practised by the Portuguese invaders, Montaigne points out that:

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there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit; in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine […], than in roasting and eating him after he is dead. (155)⁠

Stevenson echoes these words when he argues, thinking of the Polynesian cannibals, that “rightly speaking, to eat a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than oppress him while he lives” (Stevenson 1998, 70)⁠. It is perhaps the initial paragraph of the chapter on cannibalism that provides the most original insights, with Stevenson inverting the mainstream viewpoint and scrutinising the accepted practices of meat-eating in the West from the perspective of other culinary cultures or sets of ethical principles. Stevenson argues: Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue, will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it. And yet we ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and the vegetarian. We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs7 with ourselves; we feed on babes, though not our own; and the slaughter-­ house resounds daily with screams of pain and fear. We distinguish, indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog, an animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy, shows how precariously the distinction is grounded. (68)⁠

Like heated up steel that is suddenly quenched in water, Stevenson’s prose takes on a passionate and outraged vocabulary to suddenly shift to a detached and self-reflective stance that is able to calmly observe the situation from the outside. The paragraph, in this sense, epitomises one of Stevenson’s most significant attempts attempt to move from the sentimental to the scientific. At the same time, the chapter as a whole shows that also this stance— like ethical distinctions about meat-eating—is precariously grounded. When Stevenson finishes his examination of cannibalism—which he rationalises from a pragmatical point of view by stressing that the islands in which it was traditionally practised lacked steady sources of meat—the stylistic process is reversed and Stevenson reactivates the vocabulary of civilised outrage, intermixed with evolutionist racial hierarchy:

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It is right to look at both sides of the question: but I am far from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice. The higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part forgot, the practice before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-sail in their waters. It lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult, and among inveterate savages like the New-­ Zealanders and the Marquesans. (71)⁠

Stevenson’s language—reverting, with no relativist inflection whatsoever, to a lexicon that establishes a neat distinction between civilisation and savagery, and placing renewed importance on the racially understood “degrees of civilization” of the Pacific Islands—seems to be stylistically overcompensating for his previous relativist and ‘scientific’ reflections. This sudden shift is indicative of a fault line in Stevenson’s anthropological imagination, indicating an unresolved tension within Stevenson’s approach to Polynesian culture and history. What unifies Stevenson’s evolutionist and relativist tendencies is an aspiration towards positivistic scientificity, stylistically expressed in his ethnographic realism. As discussed in the first chapter, claiming to be an unbiased and detached observer of culture—a scientific tourist—in the context of the production of ethnographic knowledge usually coexist with a (variously hidden) connivance between anthropology and colonial power structures. Hence, it may be worth discussing how Stevenson’s appeal to scientificity coexists with his involvement in colonialism. A short digression on Stevenson’s actual politics in the Pacific Islands may help clarify this point. Stevenson maintained, as a rule, a rather critical stance towards colonial reality around him, especially of the structures of colonial governance he encountered in Samoa, as shown in A Footnote to History, where he denounced the corruption and malpractices of the colonial ruling class and defended the cause of Mataafa, the Samoan chief that opposed the government in charge. However, throughout his journeys, Stevenson nevertheless travelled within a context of colonial privilege and was not a systematic opponent of colonialism. Overall, as Ann Colley sums up, while Stevenson was in many ways opposed to the abuses of colonialism, in others he did value the presence of imperial institutions (Colley 2004, 6)⁠, wavering between anti-colonialism and liberal imperialism. Discussing Stevenson’s position in Samoa, Colley argues how easy dichotomies between imperialist and anti-imperialist are sometimes difficult to maintain in Stevenson’s case:

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[…] In a certain popular sense, Stevenson did conform to what is thought of as imperialism. Particularly in his first years in Samoa, he did subscribe to the principle that if a non-Western colony were to succeed, it required a strong and informed foreign leadership […]. Yet even such generalization is misleading, for Stevenson also increasingly came to endorse Samoan rule, Samoan culture, and Samoan ownership of the land. (137)⁠

Stevenson is, admittedly, a far cry from an imperialist ideologue like Kipling, who represents a somewhat complementary paradox: Kipling, as a norm, sees imperial authority and firm top-down governance as the only possibility against the descent of the colonies into chaos and barbarism and, within this perspective, allows the presence of spaces of kinship, solidarity and respect with those natives that accept colonial governance. Conversely, Stevenson’s outspoken support for native rule coexists with the fact that he was embedded within the practices of colonialism, which end up affecting his imaginative understanding of the natives and his proclaimed stance as an objective observer. Looking at one particular passage of In the South Seas allows these contradictions to emerge. While Stevenson is in the island of Butirari, in the Gilberts, a crisis ensues: the king of the island, convinced by some white traders, has lifted a tapu on liquor, with the result that most of the population has spent the previous ten days in drunkenness. Stevenson and his group start worrying that the situation might precipitate into a riot. Stevenson is particularly concerned because “a really considerable number of whites have perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their own misconduct, and the natives have displayed in at least one instance a disposition to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing but dumb bones” (Stevenson 1998, 176)⁠. Nods at cannibalism aside, Stevenson is adamant that the blame is ultimately to be put on the whites. But his language and imaginary at some point undertake—like in the chapter on cannibalism—a certain shift: Our talk that morning must have closely reproduced the talk in English garrisons before the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt that any mischief was in prospect, the sure belief that (should any come) there was nothing left but to go down fighting, the half-amused, half-anxious attitude of mind in which we were awaiting fresh developments. (177)⁠

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Stevenson here evokes an indeed very Kiplingesque sense of urgency, heroism and excitement in the context of a native ‘insurgency’, which is compared to the 1857 Rebellion in India. Indeed the whole episode represents a tonal and lexical shift towards a more conservative colonial perspective, focused on the maintenance of order and the crucial issue of governance. A particularly interesting passage is represented by Stevenson’s decision to go to talk with the only merchant in Butirari that is still selling alcohol to the natives to convince him to stop. In the ensuing dialogue, Stevenson uncharacteristically plays the role of the manly civiliser, ready to use violence and selflessly heroic. In this role, he brings to his senses a less savvy white man who is unaware of the actual danger of the situation, reminding him that “I don’t mind much about losing that life you talk so much of; but I mean to lose it the way I want to, and that is, putting a stop to all this beastliness” (186–187)⁠. Other Pacific writings present this aggressive colonial masculinity in terms that leave the door open for deconstruction (as in “The Beach of Falesá”), explicitly framing it as the gender ideology and practice of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Here, asking us to take this stance at face value, this episode suggests that the ethnographer-figure in this book is ready, at times, to respond to the fantasy of the heroic colonisers, to the expectations of traditional romance and its traditional way of understanding cultural others as a barbaric threat to order. As a further example of the shifts of Stevenson’s anthropological imagination, we can look at another passage of the Butirari episode. Stevenson remembers a brawl between two native women, carried out under the influence of liquor: One ugly picture haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man’s beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day’s work; the imagination readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects, on the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling pell-mell and hugger-mugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens of our cities; I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through Soho, and seen that which cured me of my dinner. (180)⁠

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The passage is sustained by three, interconnected epistemic operations: depicting the two native women as a paragon of bestiality; acknowledging that the same possibility for degeneration is indeed present within civilised human beings; and taking the London slums, in a comparative move, as an example of “heart of darkness” within the Western civilisation. Each epistemic operation is not necessarily at ease with the others: the first one relies on an exoticist imagery that is in line with traditional colonial ideology, and possibly invites colonial intervention; the second one, instead, is animated by cultural relativism and somehow undercuts the first position; the last one establishes a ‘scientific’, evolutionist comparison between islanders and slum-dwellers whose politics are even less clear: is Stevenson blaming the urban poor for their degenerate state or is he instead blaming the urban privileged classes for the poor’s predicament, just as he is ready, after all, to admit that it is the white men’s fault if the natives descend into violence? Is the comparison meant to grant a point to the natives or to the urban poor, or to signal the difference between himself and both groups by the grace of class and culture? Overall, the passage is dominated by a politically ambivalent “slippage between race and class” (Phillips 2005, 41)⁠ that, as Lawrence Phillips remarks upon while commenting on another travelogue, The Amateur Emigrant (Stevenson 2004 [1895]). Ultimately the scientific tourist of In the South Seas is a complex creation: he borrows heavily from evolutionism, but neither is his evolutionism orthodox nor can his politics and imagination be neatly defined as imperialist or anti-imperialist. The crucial facet of this authorial and scientific persona that productively compares with “The Beach of Falesá”, however, is how his anthropological knowledge is, in line with Aníbal Quijano’s assessment of anthropological knowledge in general, “the product of a subject-object relation” (2007, 172)⁠. With this Quijano means a form of knowledge that emerges under the assumption that it is possible to produce knowledge as isolated, rational individuals that apply themselves to the study of a fundamentally inert “object”. Quijano sees the subject-­ object relation as typical of a colonial paradigm; but, I would say, it belongs, more broadly, both to positivist and capitalist subjectivity; and is an implicit ideology in ethnographic realism as a formal choice. The scientific tourist of In the South Seas, armed with a confident fieldwork methodology, supports, as a rule, the idea of a subject-object relation in knowledge production—of detached control over a passive ethnographic material, as the passive role assigned to Marquesans in the first, crucial pages of the book, which detail his methodology, shows. It is

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my argument that Stevenson in “The Beach of Falesá”, a text about the intimacy and entanglements in which (colonial) ethnographic knowledge is produced, as well as about the inequality and violence of its context of production, results in a much more controlled, lucid and self-aware examination of the contradiction of colonial fieldwork, putting the very ethnographic realism Stevenson had previously relied upon in serious crisis. 2.2.3   Colonial Fieldwork and Queer Realism: “The Beach of Falesá” The novella “The Beach of Falesá” was initially published as part of Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893) alongside two short stories, “The Bottle Imp”  (Stevenson 1996b) and “The Isle of Voices”  (Stevenson 1996c). The latter two are actually supernatural tales, which Stevenson planned to publish as a part of a volume of fairy tales—in fact, pairing them with “The Beach of Falesá” was an editorial choice that Stevenson initially opposed (Stevenson 1995b: 350). Nevertheless, he later admitted that both the novella and the fairy tales did somehow belong together: they all possessed what he called “a queer realism, even the most extravagant, even ‘The Isle of Voices’: the manners are exact” (Stevenson 1995b, 436). There are two ways of looking at Stevenson’s intriguing but underdeveloped formulation of “queer realism”. As regards the two fairy tales, their realism is arguably “queer” because they present a peculiar combination of descriptive realism—an accuracy to manners and details, the construction of a believable and recognisable setting—while featuring a supernatural plot. But how is the realism of “The Beach of Falesá”, specifically, different from other forms of realism? How is that work a form of ‘queer’ realism? A possible solution is to present Stevenson’s queer realism in “The Beach of Falesá” as a counterpoint to the ethnographic realism of In the South Seas, stressing how the former is actually a form of critical realism that challenges some crucial stylistic features of the latter. In particular, it replaces the more ‘impersonal’, detached scientific tourist with a fieldworker and narrator whose evolving ethnographic understanding is messily entangled in the uneven intimacies of the colonial frontier; these entanglements between fieldworker and colonial world are, moreover, explicitly exposed for the reader to see, and not strategically deployed to establish ethnographic authority through a show of savoir-faire on the field—as in Stevenson’s overcoming of language barriers at the beginning of In the South Seas. While still striving for a holistic representation of

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Polynesian society, and still rejecting the exoticist gaze of the sentimental tourist, “The Beach of Falesá” is simultaneously an analysis of colonial ethnographic paradigms, juxtaposed with forms of knowledge production that are, instead, networked and relational—emerging from the act of acknowledging intimate (but often exploitative) relationships on the field. “Falesá” is a first-person narrative. The narrator and protagonist, John Wiltshire, is a British trader working for a European company that is sent to the (fictive) island of Falesá to start a business. Wiltshire, “sick for white neighbours” (Stevenson 1996a, 4)⁠⁠, is easily won over by Case, another resident trader, who offers Wiltshire to get him a Polynesian lover, to be enticed with a prospect of a false marriage. Wiltshire agrees, and Case quickly finds a suitable girl, Uma, who is soon ‘wed’ to Wiltshire through a fake marriage contract.⁠ While Wiltshire does not back off, he is ashamed by the deception, and, after he is left alone with Uma, grows genuinely fond of the girl. Yet the next day Wiltshire finds himself entirely isolated. Nobody comes near his house, nobody buys his wares. Wondering whether he has been tabooed, Wiltshire is tempted to ask Uma for explanations, but decides to go to Case instead, who promises that he will parley with the island chiefs on Wiltshire’s behalf, as Wiltshire does not know the local language. The consultation, however, leads to nothing. It is only at this point that Uma, realising that Wiltshire has absolutely no clue of what is going on, informs him that the taboo belongs to her, and he was involved in it as soon as they got married. Uma had been told by Case that Wiltshire knew of her condition and did not care, and it is now clear that Case has planned to set up Wiltshire with Uma to get rid of a rival. Wiltshire could, at this point, leave Uma to get his business back on track, but, driven by what he now calls love, decides instead to look for the help of a missionary, Mr Tarleton, and to marry Uma with a legal ceremony. What follows is an investigation in which Wiltshire, seeking the help of various actors, tries to get back at Case, who is revealed to have woven a series of elaborate (and often murderous) plots to control natives, traders and missionaries on the island, besides being the one that spread rumours that Uma is taboo in order to isolate her and having a chance to obtain her favours. Most importantly, an islander reveals to Wiltshire that Case is supposedly in league with a major evil spirit, Tiapolo, whom he worships in a shrine in the forest. Wiltshire decides to investigate and unveils Case’s tricks: using aeolian harps and luminous painting, Case has led the natives to believe that the place is haunted and he has dark sorcery at his command. Wiltshire returns into the woods during the night, to blow up the

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shrine, but he is joined by Uma, who has come to warn Wiltshire that Case is coming to kill him. What follows is a final confrontation in which Wiltshire manages to kill his rival. The ending reveals that Wiltshire and Uma, still happily married, have left Falesá and have several children, with Wiltshire discarding his plans of returning to England to open a public house. While the plot of “The Beach of Falesá” contains some ‘romantic’ elements, in the sense that “the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life” are all important, it inherits from In the South Seas the ambition of sketching a detailed, holistic ethnographic portrait of island society. “Falesá” depicts not only a variety of island types, but also their mutual relations—Roslyn Jolly, in fact, comments that one of the chief features of realism in the novella is the “representation of the manners of various social groups in an outpost of empire at the end of the nineteenth century” (Jolly 1996, xxvii)⁠. There are, first of all, the Westerners, divided in traders, missionaries and beachcombers (i.e., Westerners ‘gone native’ that inhabit the liminal space of the beach).8 As agents of informal colonial capitalism, the traders—like Case and Wiltshire—are represented as they try to establish their influence within native society, with their goods, force, deceit and diplomacy. Case’s relentless machinations, in particular, are illustrative of the pervasive nature of the traders’ presence in island communities, but also of how the role of these private enforcers of colonialism and capital, operating outside official imperial jurisdiction in the context of informal Pacific colonisation, is often that of an illegitimate figure, whose connection with imperial power structures is mostly rhetorical (see Jolly 2007, 161–166). Traders are, moreover, in conflict with the missionaries, both for their diverging aims and for their different approach to the natives, as Wiltshire reminds the reader: “I didn’t like the lot, no trader does; they look down upon us, and make no concealment; and, besides, they’re partly Kanakaised, and suck up with natives instead of with other white men like themselves” (Stevenson 1996a, 34)⁠. But also the missionaries are a mixed lot. Although we are presented with the well-mannered and politically savvy Tarleton—a respectable authority figure, albeit an almost sinisterly pragmatical one in how he approves of Case’s demise—the story also offers us the example of a French missionary, Galuchet, who strikes Wiltshire as “so dirty you could have written with him on a piece of paper” (17)⁠. Both the trader and the

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missionary can indeed precipitate in the more disreputable category of the beachcomber, and indeed Galuchet’s dirtiness is matched by Randall, the titular owner of the local trading post that Case has usurped. Randall, who quite aptly oversees the false marriage ceremony, is described as “squatting on the floor native fashion, fat and pale, naked to the waist, grey as a badger, and his eyes set with drink” (8)⁠, and represents the apotheosis of beachcomber dissolution. The fact that Randall is squatting “native fashion” may lead to the impression that his degeneration is connected to his ‘going native’. However, virtually all the natives in the story are considerably more dignified than the whites—including Wiltshire—which makes them an unlikely source for Randall’s state. The chiefs of the island, even if observed through Wiltshire’s suspicious eyes, are fundamentally civilised individuals: Five chiefs were there; four mighty stately men, the fifth old and puckered. They sat on mats in their white kilts and jackets; they had fans in their hands, like fine ladies; and two of the younger ones wore Catholic medals, which gave me matter of reflection. […] I was just a hair put out by the excitement of the commons, but the quiet civil appearance of the chiefs reassured me […]. (23)

The native chiefs are honourable and dignified—although the Catholic medals, as Wiltshire picks up, hint to the fact that their rule has actually been infiltrated by the evangelisation process. Still, the dignity of native rule is upheld by the narrative, which grants a native the occasion to speak with the Westerners in his own terms on at least one important occasion— Wiltshire’s encounter with Maea, a chief that approaches him right after Wiltshire returns from his first trip into the woods. Maea lets Wiltshire know that he would also like to see Case overthrown, and having this kind of backup is crucial to convince Wiltshire to carry on with his plan—he understands that blowing up the shrine and exposing Case’s tricks might actually be a valuable move to gain support on the island. Quite crucially, through Maea, Stevenson inserts a native player in the match against Case. Wiltshire is not a solitary white adventurer—he needs the active collaboration of various parts of island society in order to defeat his rival. Juxtaposed with the representation of the natives, Randall’s state works not as a commentary on native society, but of the Westerners that invade it. The story, as Lawrence Phillips argues,

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shows us not the threat of degeneration, but a degeneration that is already internalised by the European characters […] Stevenson’s vision suggests that it is the Westerners themselves who contaminate local cultures, peoples and politics, encouraging greed, competition, drunkenness, violence and deceit. (2007, 75)⁠

What Stevenson ultimately represents is a profoundly contaminated society, infiltrated by an informal (often illegal) but pervasive form of colonial capitalism—in which all the white characters, from the relatively benevolent like Tarleton and Wiltshire to the most scheming and ruthless like Case, are involved in. The narrative foregrounds the power struggles as well as the aggressive and multifarious ways in which Westerners (both traders and missionaries) infiltrate and gain a hold in the native social tapestry—a process in which the natives are clearly the victims, although, importantly, not clueless or naive ones. The novella is, in this sense, a snapshot of the Pacific Islands world under the fin-de-siècle imperialism. The fact that Falesá is an invention helps establish its emblematic status: it is “the original island, a metonymy of the South Seas, a symbol of all Polynesian islands” (Largeaud-Ortéga 2009, 124)⁠⁠. As “The Beach of Falesá” registers societal networks, tensions and struggles in the Pacific world, I read it as an ethnographic fiction (novella), particularly effective in representing cultures in flux under world-systemic forces. Stevenson boasted, in a letter to Sidney Colvin, that his tale encompassed an immense amount of details about the South Seas, claiming that “you will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale, than if you had read a library” (Stevenson 1995b, 161⁠). Sylvie Largeaud-Ortéga takes this as an indication that the story is to be read specifically as an anthropological library (2009, 118)⁠. Indeed, she argues how Stevenson is accurate in the representation of Polynesian cultural specificities, even if they are hidden within the fast-paced unfolding of the plot. For instance, while the Western reader rightfully perceives the marriage scene as the representation of an outrageous scam, a ‘native’ reading of the scene shows how Uma and her mother, believing the marriage to be genuine, carry out the proper rituals of a Polynesian marriage, captured with ethnographic precision (122–128)⁠. The irony is that Wiltshire is rightfully married to Uma according to the Polynesian custom, even though he does not realise it. But it can also be argued that Stevenson’s representation arguably transcends both readings by showing how the

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marriage is, ultimately, an adulterated mediation—by global exchanges— of local customs. And yet, in spite of inheriting and developing the ethnographic ambition of In the South Seas, the narrative structure and style of “The Beach of Falesá” ultimately defies the conventions of ethnographic realism, particularly its reliance on an authoritative, self-sufficient, ‘scientific’ subject-­ fieldworker. Instead, the reader must explore the island through a patently flawed and inadequate perspective: Wiltshire, whose biases, material connivances and intimate entanglements are shown to produce a colonial anthropological imagination that grows gradually conflicted—but is never fully overcome—over the course of the story. There are three fundamental aspects that need to be considered in examining this process: one, Wiltshire—our ethnographer-figure, whose anthropological imagination is under scrutiny—is the unreliable narrator of the story; two, Uma is conceived as the foil of Wiltshire’s delusions, and in particular forces the reader to recognise Wiltshire’s progress not as solitary ethnographic quest but as a collective enterprise, determined by the intimate entanglements he develops on the field; three, their encounter is mediated in a disturbing way by Case, who reminds the reader of the exploitative system in which these entanglements are produced. Wiltshire’s arc in the story may seem, at first, fairly straightforward. He starts off as a fundamentally racist, entitled and seemingly unscrupulous character, and ends up as a responsible father and caring husband in an interracial marriage. But his personal growth, interestingly enough, does not stop him from falling back into the racial anxieties that, in theory, he should have left behind and overcome by virtue of his experience, and consistently characterise his narrative voice throughout the text. Indeed he has overcome them, but up to a point: the beauty of Wiltshire as a character and as a narrator is that “the insight and the blindness coexist side-by-side” (Jolly 1999, 481)⁠. When we first meet him, Wiltshire’s desire for the company of whites makes him an easy prey for Case’s machinations. His sense of racial and epistemological superiority is what drives him for the first part of the tale—and brings him into trouble. In particular, when he discovers that he is being shun by the Islanders, he decides not to talk with Uma about it (at first), because “it’s a bad idea to set natives up with any notion of consulting them” (Stevenson 1996a, 21)⁠. In doing so, he delays the only conversation that could actually solve the mystery, as it eventually happens. Later, during the consultation with the chiefs, he is adamant about his rightful

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place on the island, asking Case to translate the following speech to the island chiefs: You tell them who I am. I’m a white man, and a British subject, and no end of a big chief at home; and I’ve come here to do them good, and bring them civilisation; and no sooner have I got my trade sorted out than they go and taboo me, and no one dare come near my place! […] if they think they’re going to come any of their native ideas over me, they’ll find themselves mistaken. And tell them plain that I demand the reason of this treatment as a white man and a British subject. (23–24)⁠

Wiltshire’s speech focuses on the need of establishing control on the part of the ethnographer-figure—the control of the knowing ‘subject’, as it were. Wiltshire is patently not aligned, here, with the relativist-inclined, ‘scientific’ tourist of In the South Seas, but in one crucial way, however, they are similar: they both value their own individual ability to observe and navigate the field cognitively. The scientific tourist obtains this certainty through his comparative methodology. The trader-fieldworker by subscribing to an individualist subjectivity of the (frontier) capitalist supported by a narrative of racial and cultural superiority. Of course, this passage, presented in direct speech, may be attributed to the ‘old’ Wiltshire. But, surprisingly, also Wiltshire-as-narrator, who should know that this speech will not help to escape his predicament, and that should have revised his notions about European-Polynesian relations, comments on his own words in this way: That was my speech. I know how to deal with Kanakas: give them plain sense and fair dealing, and I’ll do them that much justice—they knuckle under every time. They haven’t any real government or any real law, that’s what you’ve got to knock into their heads; and even if they had, it would be a good joke if it was to apply to a white man. It would be a strange thing if we came all this way and couldn’t do what we pleased. The mere idea has always put my monkey up, and I rapped my speech out pretty big. (24)⁠

All of this is wrong, according to Wiltshire-as-narrator’s own experience: the unfolding of the story demonstrates that he had no idea how to “deal with Kanakas”, that they definitely are much more lawful than the rogue traders that arrive on their islands, and that the fact that those traders “do what [they] please”—besides, also in violation of British imperial law (Jolly 2007, 163)—is exactly what his own narrative is exposing. On top of that,

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and ironically enough, Wiltshire is relying on Case as translator in this exchange, who in all likelihood manipulates the speech to ensure that the taboo is not lifted; hence Wiltshire’s control of the situation really amounts to very little. Still, the narrator seems to be unaware of these inconsistencies, endorsing the epistemological stance, the ethnographic confidence and perspective of his former, less experienced self. Wiltshire as a narrator is telling the story with the benefit of hindsight, but this rarely affects how he articulates, throughout the story, his imaginative understanding of the natives, often in contrast with the actual relations that he establishes with them. It seems that Wiltshire is failing to make the connection between his ideas and his experiences, retrospectively trying to justify his notions, if not his decisions. Wiltshire’s contradictory statements culminate in the final paragraph, which is, in many ways, a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance: My public-house? Not a bit of it, nor ever likely. I’m stuck here, I fancy. I don’t like to leave the kids, you see: and—there’s no use talking—they’re better here than what they would be in a white man’s country, though Ben took the eldest up to Auckland, where he’s being schooled with the best. But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half-castes, of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half-castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got. I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find the whites? (Stevenson 1996a, 71)⁠

The ending epitomises Wiltshire’s conflicted colonial anthropological imagination, not only thematically—stressing Wiltshire’s mixed emotions—but also rhetorically. The last two sentences, in particular, abruptly shift between Wiltshire’s crude outbursts of racial denigration and genuine expressions of paternal love. His daughters are imagined, simultaneously, as less-than-human “half-castes” and as human beings; and the significance of his life choices is seemingly denied by the fact that he cannot abide the prospective of his daughters marrying other Islanders. Yet the stability of Wiltshire’s perspective is not simply undercut by his own contradictions; that is arguably the pars destruens of Stevenson’s operation. The pars construens is represented by his relationship with Uma, who represents an effective counterpoint to Wiltshire’s obsession with maintaining his ethnographic authority, nudging him towards a shared ethnographic authority based on collaboration and intimacy. Uma

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claims the role of fieldwork companion of Wiltshire’s ethnographic efforts—or better: the presence of Uma transforms Wiltshire’s solitary attempt at mastering the fieldsite of Falesá into a collective enterprise which develops outside his full control. The tale is actually crowded with ethnographic companions that grant Wiltshire precious insights on the island—such as Mr Tarleton the missionary or Maea—but none of them is more important than Uma, who directs Wiltshire’s search with arguably more authority, in the reader’s eye, than her husband. The key moment of ‘dispersion’ of Wiltshire’s ethnographic authority is the passage in which Uma reveals how Case manipulates the tapu customs to ostracise herself and then Wiltshire; but there are several interactions between Uma and Wiltshire that undermine Wiltshire’s epistemological dominance of the events. For instance, when Uma is worried about Wiltshire’s confrontation with Case’s patron spirit, Tiapolo, she discusses with Wiltshire how he can even the scales, listing both Queen Victoria and Maea as possible allies. Their dialogue arguably displays Uma’s ‘native notions’ for comedic effect, but simultaneously highlights her perspective as profoundly insightful: “Victoreea, he big chief?” “You bet!” said I. “He like you too much?” she asked again. I told her, with a grin, I believed the old lady was rather partial to me. “All right,” said she. “Victoreea he big chief, like you too much. No can help you here in Falesá; no can do—too far off. Maea he small chief—stop here. Suppose he like you—make you all right. All−e−same God and Tiapolo. God he big chief—got too much work. Tiapolo he small chief—he like too much make—see, work very hard.” “I’ll have to hand you over to Mr. Tarleton,” said I. “Your theology’s out of its bearings, Uma.” (48)⁠

While Wiltshire may dismiss Uma’s theorising as confused native theology, she pins down effectively the strategy that Wiltshire ultimately uses: not relying on his status as a British subject, but weaving a local network of alliances. Wiltshire, in other words, initially thinks of himself heroically, and therefore as a self-sufficient fieldworker. But he is led to understand that he depends on the ethnographic insights of those close to him. In this sense, Uma and Wiltshire’s partnership might be interpreted as a form of

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anti-hero care (Yates-Doerr 2020)⁠: a form of fieldwork learning that stems from allowing yourself to be guided by your intimate others, a process activated by intimate acts of caring. From this perspective, it is worth remembering how the novella contaminates romance with the domestic novel, only for the latter to have the upper hand, as Roslyn Jolly suggests: “while the story is a generic hybrid, its deepest and most consistent affiliations are with the feminine realm of domestic fiction” (1999, 463)⁠.⁠ Jolly’s argument is that Stevenson’s focus on domesticity, juxtaposed with an adventurous ending, works as a revision of traditional imperial romance: adventure loses its element of carefree evasion, not (only) because it is messy, morally bankrupt and physically excruciating, but also because it is yoked to domesticity. Embracing this domesticity—its acts of care and intimacy—is what allows Wiltshire to survive the dangerous ethnographic fieldwork of Falesá. Following this line of interpretation also highlights a possible way in which “Falesá” is ‘queer’ realism in a contemporary sense. ‘Queer’, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, refers to the awareness that “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (1993, 8)⁠. While gender identity is not the main focus of the novella, it is worth noting that Wiltshire has to abandon a distinctively male-coded framing of fieldwork investigation in favour of a female-coded form of fieldwork relationality. I read this process as a queering of the “the ‘lone fieldworker’—[…] male, […] unencumbered by kinship” (Yates-­ Doerr 2020, 234)—that triggers a dismantling—albeit not fully acknowledged by Wiltshire-as-narrator—of Wiltshire’s way of framing cultural others, on multiple levels. A significant moment in this sense is when he first travels through the woods. Wiltshire has been previously lectured by Uma about the dangerous spirits (aitu) that can be found in the wilderness, to which Wiltshire has responded with a metaphorical shrug. And yet, when he is actually crossing the woods, his reaction is less self-assured: But the queerness of the place it’s more difficult to tell of, unless to one who has been alone in the high bush himself. […] It’s all very well for him to tell himself that he’s alone, bar trees and birds; he can’t make out to believe it; whichever way he turns the whole place seems to be alive and looking on. Don’t think it was Uma’s yarns that put me out; I don’t value native talk a

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fourpenny−piece; it’s a thing that’s natural in the bush, and that’s the end of it. (Stevenson 1996a, 51)

Wiltshire’s reaction to “the queerness of the place”—a place that threatens the rationality that Wilshire has framed, previously, as specifically white and masculine—is interesting. He wants to reassure his reader that he does not value Uma’s tales, but his argument that imagining spirits “[is] a thing that’s natural in the bush” paradoxically erases the epistemological differences between the (female or female-coded) Polynesian Kanaka and the (male) British trader. Wiltshire effectively reveals his own vulnerabilities towards the spirits of the place. The ending of the tale does not support the existence of supernatural forces—Case is exposed as a cheap trickster— but Wiltshire’s subjective experience nevertheless creates deep cracks in the edifice of his rationality, queering colonial epistemology and ethnographic realism. The tale, consistent with Don Kulick’s idea that focusing on a fieldworker’s sexuality and desires provides insight into the uneven conditions of fieldwork, also explores the ambivalent side of colonial intimacy and the various forms of exploitation of the colonial frontier. Even more interestingly, it strikes a fine balance between showing the reader the genuine affection between Uma and Wilshire and highlighting how it is produced and intertwined within exploitative social arrangements. Uma, after all, is introduced to Wiltshire by Case, who tries to assuage Wiltshire’s scruples by hinting that she is a prostitute (or can be treated as one), trying to orientate their relationship towards an exploitative dynamic: “‘I guess it’s all right,’ said Case. ‘I guess you can have her. I’ll make it square with the old lady. You can have your pick of the lot for a plug of tobacco,’ he added, sneering” (Stevenson 1996a, 7)⁠. Wiltshire will eventually reject the deception at Uma’s expense, but Stevenson, at the beginning of the tale, shows how she is unambiguously commodified by both men. The commodification of Uma alludes, moreover, to the commodification and exploitation of the Pacific Islands as a whole—a perspective that the two traders, both harbingers of capitalist expansion, share. The fake marriage comments on Case’s and Wiltshire’s moral failings, but also hints at the economic and political systems that allow these failings to prosper and to be weaponised for exploitation. In the same way as Wiltshire’s voice is characterised by an unresolved tension between upholding and dismantling feelings of racial superiority,

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the passages in which Wiltshire falls in love with Uma register how he is genuinely able to create bonds of care while being conditioned, on a systemic level, to see her as a commodity (an erotic and exotic object to be possessed), or as a primitive in an evolutionist-hierarchical sense (a child or an animal, not as a subject with full rights). Right after the fake marriage, for instance, Uma and Wiltshire are alone for the first time, strolling towards their new home, Wiltshire comments: “I felt for all the world as though she were some girl at home in the Old Country, and, forgetting myself for the minute, took her hand to walk with” (12)⁠. Engaging in “romance” with Uma as he would do with an English girl necessarily means to “forget himself”, because Wiltshire implicitly agrees with the idea that colonised females are, vis-a-vis the normative model of the white, European woman, “not-human-as-not-women” (Lugones 2010, 747)⁠— which is possibly also why his mixed-race daughters, inhabiting a less definite space, confound him so much. Hence he assures his audience that he is “one of those most opposed to any nonsense about native women”, that he is “ashamed to be so much moved about a native” and that he had “made [his] vow [he] would never let on to weakness with a native” (Stevenson 1996a, 12–13)⁠—statements that, however, in typical Wiltshire fashion, are belied by how he ultimately acts throughout the narrative. In the same passage, describing Wiltshire’s desire, he characteristically both upholds and discards discard the exoticist fetishisation and commodification of the native woman: [She] looked so quaint and pretty as she ran away and then awaited me, and the thing was done so like a child or a kind dog, that the best I could do was just to follow her whenever she went on, to listen for the fall of her bare feet, and to watch in the dusk for the shining of her body. And there was another thought came in my head. She played kitten with me now when we were alone; but in the house she had carried it the way a countess might, so proud and humble. And what with her dress—for all there was so little of it, and that native enough—what with her fine tapa and fine scents, and her red flowers and seeds, that were quite as bright as jewels, only larger—it came over me she was a kind of countess really, dressed to hear great singers at a concert, and no even mate for a poor trader like myself. (12)⁠

Wiltshire begins the passage by patronisingly picturing Uma as a submissive figure, akin to a child or a dog, as well as a passive object of desire to be gazed upon; but then the focus is turned towards the admiration for

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Uma’s demeanour, which foreshadows the bond of respect between Uma and Wiltshire in the rest of the tale. The ambivalence of Wiltshire’s desire—deeply informed by colonial and capitalist relations, but also able to partly transcend them in a form of love rooted in equality—emerges most powerfully in one of the pivotal passages of the novel, when Wiltshire confesses to Uma that he does not want to lose her and that he will remain at her side in spite of the taboo: She threw her arms about me, sprang close up, and pressed her face to mine in the island way of kissing, so that I was all wetted with her tears, and my heart went out to her wholly. I never had anything so near me as this little brown bit of a girl. Many things went together, and all helped to turn my head. She was pretty enough to eat; it seemed she was my only friend in that queer place; I was ashamed that I had spoken rough to her: and she was a woman, and my wife, and a kind of a baby besides that I was sorry for; and the salt of her tears was in my mouth. (29)

A focus on Wiltshire’s erotic subjectivity, in this passage, properly reveals itself as a powerful source of insight, showing that indeed “many things went together” in shaping Wiltshire’s relationship with Uma—and in fact the idea of “many things [going] together” is a perfect synthesis of Wiltshire’s unresolved intellectual and emotional turmoil throughout the novella. The passage describes a form of relationship in which a lingering paternalism and desire towards an exoticised, eroticised other, but also gratitude towards the friendship and companionship she offers, and an overall sense of decency, all contribute to create a bond that is genuine in spite of (or within) the exploitative system that produces it. The tension is not resolved, but it is interesting that Stevenson should end the passage on the inherently concrete detail of Uma’s tears reaching Wiltshire’s mouth. The image perhaps describes the way Wiltshire is able to love best: trusting and nurturing the solidarity that comes from sheer human proximity and shared predicaments, which he is able to feel in spite of all his rationalisations. I read Wiltshire in “The Beach of Falesá” as a flawed fieldworker that functions as an effective counterpoint to the overly competent scientific tourist of In the South Seas. Jointly analysed, these two figures register how colonial fieldwork combines attempts at control, domination and the ambition towards impersonal, objective modes of knowledge with uneven, messy intimacy—a combination that can variously reinforce and/or hide

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exploitative modes of encounter, but also offer spaces for liberation. In doing so, Stevenson’s colonial fieldwork reveals itself as a site of modernity and hence a site of world-literary narratives. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to Kipling, in many ways located on the opposite end of the political spectrum when compared to Stevenson. Nevertheless, Kipling similarly engages with a complex and ambiguous relationship between scientific ambition in producing ethnographic knowledge, colonial fieldwork and uneven intimacy.

2.3  Rudyard Kipling 2.3.1   The Anglo-Indian as Cultural Insider Compared to the Pacific Islands that Stevenson explored, the India Kipling wrote about was already a decisively more institutionalised colonial world. Kipling experienced India and wrote about it in a phase in which the British imperial system reached its apogee, following the re-structuring and regimentation of imperial spaces and governance in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion (Meatcalf and Meatcalf 2001, 123)⁠ as the colonial rule of the East India Company was replaced with the imperial governance of the Raj and thus the British Government took control of South Asian territories—a reorganisation in which ethnography, as I discuss later, played an important role. But Kipling engages with this world, by his own description and right from the beginning of his career, as a self-defined partial insider. In a poem first appeared, in an abridged version, as the heading of chapter 7 of Kim, Kipling defines himself as “two-sided man”: Something I owe to the soil that grew— More to the life that fed— But most to Allah Who gave me two Separate sides to my head. I would go without shirts or shoes, Friend, tobacco or bread, Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head. (Kipling 2009, 139)⁠

The poem can be read as Kipling’s endorsement of a dual cultural heritage and as such is a good starting point to underline how Kipling’s position within Indian culture differs from Stevenson’s position towards Polynesia.

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Differently from Stevenson’s elective relationship with the Pacific Islands, Kipling’s relationship with India is a perceived as hereditary one—in spite of being, in practice, the foreshortened heredity of a colonial settler. Hence his position as ethnographer-figure is distinctively more ambivalent: Kipling’s status as an Anglo-Indian shares some traits with the native informer, while simultaneously granting him a position of ethnographic authority that colonial ethnography would typically deny to a native. That said, Kipling’s Anglo-Indian identity should also be understood in a more specific regional framework. Kipling worked as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette, a Lahore-based newspaper, from 1882 to 1887, before moving to Allahabad, where he worked at the Pioneer from 1887 to until his return to Britain in 1889. His first encounter with India as an adult, therefore, was carried out through the lenses of a Punjabi Anglo-Indian community, with whom he fundamentally identified from a cultural and ideological viewpoint. Indeed, his “Anglo-Punjabiness” crucially influences Kipling’s overall approach to the colonial other. Punjab had traditionally been the stronghold of a more conservative Anglo-Indian community, hostile to more liberal approaches to colonial governance. More specifically, Punjab had championed the so-called “non-regulation” style of government, particularly during the early phase of British rule of Punjab at the hands of John Lawrence, from 1849 onwards, after the two Anglo-Sikh Wars. The pillars of Lawrence’s “style” included the employment of an abridged version of the English law in order to allow a high degree of personal initiative to individual administrators and eliminate bureaucratic technicalities, as well as a distinctive preference for a pragmatical-military mentality that favoured quick, uncompromising and often violent administrative solutions (St John 2000, 63–64)⁠. This form of direct rule, moreover, had also the advantage of weakening the Sikh establishment (see White 2008, 224). In short: it was an authoritarian, direct and personalistic style of governance, particularly suited, in Lawrence’s view, to the harsh conditions of frontier rule (Punjab represented, after its annexation, the north-western frontier of the Raj); and whose advantages from a military standpoint were thought to be have been crucial in vanquishing the 1857 Rebellion (see St John 2000, 65). This was in stark contrast with a centralised “regulation” system of governance, based on the universal application of legal principles, and more accepting of an increased participation of educated Indians in administrative duties. The “Punjabi style”, instead, “[valued] direct experience and influence more highly than elaborate theorizing and protocol”

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(St John 2000, 69)⁠ and was fundamentally sceptical of the native capacity for self-rule. From the 1860s onwards this style of governance was gradually replaced by regulation models, with bitter disappointment of the Punjabi Anglo-Indian community, which further enhanced its ideological allure in conservative circles. Kipling fundamentally adheres to this ideological horizon, which provides him with a precise sense of his Anglo-Indian identity and a specific epistemological and emotional structure to engage with native Indians. It prepares the ground for the underlying hierarchy of the fieldwork relations he describes, but also for the romanticisation of the intimacies developing within those hierarchic relations. Moreover, his admiration for the Punjabi-­ style form of governance is directly connected to his fascination for (and frequent justification of) violence, unfailingly deemed as a reasonable response within those contexts in which colonial rule is threatened. On the other hand, it also results in the adoption, at least in its intentions, of an epistemological framework based on direct experience and aimed at appreciating cultural specificities. Kipling’s hostility to liberal policies in India and throughout the empire might therefore be framed as an ‘ethnographic’ concern for cultural specificity, albeit rooted in conservativism: liberal policies, for Kipling, “undermined India’s unique particulars”, because “they assumed the emergence of a world where once radically different countries became equivocal and interchangeable, where utilitarian government might be applied as well in Jamaica as in Punjab” (Bubb 2013, 398)⁠. It is worth noting, however, that Kipling’s fiction, while supportive of such an experiential approach, is not consistently based on intensive direct experience: for instance, Kipling never adventured beyond Lahore towards Afghanistan (Bayly 2016, 265)⁠, meaning that he never explored the frontier areas that are so important for his ethnographical, typological and ideological ordering of the Anglo-­ Indian world. An effective introduction to Kipling’s ethnographic persona—an Anglo-Indian with insider, direct field knowledge of India—can be found in the first pages of his Letters of Marque (1887 and 1888), journalistic sketches of the various Natives States of Rajputana—states that formally maintained their independence but unofficially recognised British Rule— and that I read as a fieldwork memoir. In the very first letter, Kipling undertakes a playful but forceful construction of his ethnographic authority by assuming the voice and the persona of “the Englishman”. This

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activates the complexities of Kipling’s position as an Anglo-Indian—as both an insider and an outsider in the Indian context (while also evoking, more subtly, his in/outsiderness in the context of England) and allows Kipling to “[present] himself as a very particular kind of Englishman, one who lives and works in India, and who is […] crucially, one of a small elite”, while “[accentuating] his isolation and vulnerability, since he is travelling in India among Indians” (Condé 2004, 233)⁠. From this curious in-­between position, he launches his onslaught against the Globe-trotter— the superficial proto-tourist, and the straw man against which the (AngloIndian) Englishman, the insider/outsider in India—establishes his own experiential ethnographic authority. The description of a Young Man from Manchester that he meets on a train epitomises the archetypical Globe-trotter: A Young Man from Manchester was travelling to Bombay in order—how the words hurt!—to be home by Christmas. He had come through America, New Zealand, and Australia, and finding that he had ten days to spare at Bombay, conceived the modest idea of “doing India.” “I don’t say that I’ve done it all; but you may say that I’ve seen a good deal.” Then he explained that he had been “much pleased” at Agra, “much pleased” at Delhi and, last profanation, “very much pleased” at the Taj. Indeed he seemed to be going through life just then “much pleased” at everything. With rare and sparkling originality he remarked that India was a “big place,” and that there were many things to buy. Verily, this Young Man must have been a delight to the Delhi boxwallahs. (Kipling 1899, 7–8)

Kipling takes a certain malevolent pleasure in suggesting to the man that he has been swindled—a detail that confirms the utter cognitive helplessness of the Globe-trotter. By mocking the Young Man from Manchester, the Englishman constructs, by comparison, his self-portrait as an ethnographer-­figure. Whereas the Globe-trotter is only able to mutter platitudes, the Englishman, by implication, will be able to provide the reader with profound ethnographical insights. Whereas the Globe-trotter is generically pleased with everything, the Englishman knows how to navigate India and knows when and why one should be pleased or otherwise. Most importantly, whereas the Globe-trotter deals with exoticist notions, the Englishman, by implication, is attuned to the cultural specificities of India and claims an ‘ethnographic’, anti-exoticist stance.

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In this sense, Kipling’s narrative persona in this letter resembles the voice Stevenson adopted for In the South Seas, proposing himself as a ‘scientific’ tourist in direct opposition to a ‘sentimental’ one. Differently from the infamous Globe-trotter, the Englishman is engaged in a process of disenchanting India for readers with no experience of the Subcontinent, turning it into a world that can be realistically and ethnographically understood and in which it is possible to act in accordance with local specificities. It is crucial to understand that Kipling is making a connection between a form of benevolent exoticism and liberal politics—the ever-pleased Globe-trotters are, in this sense, “those who come to India and try to impose their ignorantly liberal ideas upon the country” (Sergeant 2016, 29)⁠. This contrasts with the authoritarian, Punjabi-style pragmatism, which is, allegedly, anti-exoticist and ethnographic, based on fieldwork and experience. The ethnographic accuracy of conservative Anglo-Indian worldviews, of course, is in itself questionable, and their ambition to be a “demystification of India” can easily mask their nature as “an alternative, self-justifying mythography” (Morey 2018, 110)⁠—a mythography of which an appeal to direct experience and authentic understanding of India is, however, a constitutive part. 2.3.2   Colonial Typologies: “The Head of the District” Considering the important epistemological work that the dichotomy between the Englishman and the Globe-trotter performs, it comes as no surprise that experiential ethnographic authority, in Kipling, is often connected to demonstrating familiarity, and showing the reliability of, a rather rigid set of typologies, particularly racial/ethnic ones. In his systematic reliance on colonial typologies—which paradoxically contrast with an ethnographic, experiential approach—Kipling’s imagination intersects powerfully with a distinctively imperial ethnographic/anthropological tradition, namely the ethnographic undertakings and anthropological theorising that were carried out on a grand scale by anthropologists-­ administrators at the service of the Raj. The general use of ethnography as an instrument of colonial governance, best exemplified in the rising importance of the decennial Census of India, prompted Nicholas Dirks to suggest that the late nineteenth-century British India may be characterised as an ethnographic state. Dirks’ idea is that after the Rebellion of 1857, the British, believing that such an event had its origins in a lack of cultural awareness on their part, grew increasingly interested in collecting

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anthropological knowledge on India, until anthropology became the crucial form of knowledge that the colonial state employed to determine its policies. In Dirks’ words, “the ethnographic state was driven by the belief that India could be ruled using anthropological knowledge to understand and control its subjects, and to represent and legitimate its own mission” (2001, 44)⁠⁠. This attempt at ethnographic mapping, Dirks argues, effectively created caste, religion and the tribe as modern categories. Dirks’ hypothesis is not uncontested. Zak Leonard, for instance, points out that borderland ethnography—like that carried out at the Punjab frontier—was more ideologically, theoretically and methodologically heterogeneous than an “ethnographic state” model may suggest: “the monolithic ethnographic state does not adequately account for the development of socio-cultural ethnography on the frontier, where the priorities of individual colonial agents were not always in accordance with the fiscal and military aims of the central government” and “socio-cultural ethnography was thereby comprised of a host of inputs” (2016, 195–196)⁠. C. J. Fuller, moreover, argues that British policies could sometimes be inconsistent with their anthropological findings, taking the 1905 Partition of Bengal as major example, while conceding that “colonial anthropological knowledge, especially about caste, commonly shaped the thoughts and actions of the men who ran the Raj” (2016, 256)⁠. Kipling echoes these contradictions: while his hostility towards the central Indian government and his focus on direct experience prevent Kipling’s writing from being subsumed under the epistemological project of a centralised ethnographic state, his writings also do engage with the broad racial typologies that are the pillars of the ethnographic state as conceived by Dirks, in particular the categories of martiality, effeminacy and criminality. These categories inform the “men of action” that are often the spokesperson of his anthropological imagination, supporting their claim to experiential ethnographic authority, but are also constitutive of a precise colonial hierarchy that informs fieldwork relations. An excellent example of how this plays out in a narrative context is the short story “The Head of the District”, first published in 1890 and then collected in the 1891 volume Life’s Handicap. The tale’s primary trope is that of counterinsurgency, a recurring political and epistemological framework in Kipling’s work, which, as a rule, pushes Kipling’s expressions of the anthropological imagination towards their most authoritarian extremes. “The Head of the District” is no exception. Moreover, it was published when Kipling had just left India to move to London, and is one

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of the first pieces he wrote for a metropolitan readership, which he deemed “ignorant and apathetic about its imperial responsibilities” (Sergeant 2009, 146)⁠, and hence in dire need of clear, unambiguous lectures about India and Anglo-Indian life by an insider of that community like himself. The counterinsurgency context and the British readership it is intended for both contribute to turn this particular short story into a highly typified and simplified illustration of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian Weltanschauung, especially his vision of the Afghan-Punjabi border where the story is set. It is therefore an excellent example of how Kipling experiential ethnographic authority is produced through hierarchical colonial typologies. At the beginning of the story, the District Commissioner of a remote frontier district in North-western India, Yardley-Orde, dies of fever, much lamented by his second-in-command, Tallantire, and by the Khusru Kheyl, the local Pathan tribe, which Orde has ‘pacified’ through his stern but just rule. However, animated by foolish liberal principles, the central government appoints a Westernised Bengali, Grish Chunder De, as new District Commissioner—a choice that both the British at the frontier and their tribal subjects regard as utter madness: it is unthinkable for the mere mockery of a true sahib to rule over the wild Pathans, who, besides, have nothing but contempt for the Bengali. A fanatical religious leader, the Blind Mullah, immediately seizes the chance to incite his clansmen to revolt. As soon as trouble begins, Grish Chunder De runs away in fear, while Tallantire loses no time and quickly quells the rebellion. Simultaneously, his loyal Pathan ally, Khoda Dad Khan, by publicly accusing the Mullah of having instigated a futile revolt, manages to have him killed and takes charge of the tribe. The story ends with Khan pleading his loyalty to Tallantire, which he proves by delivering two decapitated heads: the Blind Mullah’s, and De’s brother’s, who was mistaken for the aspiring District Commissioner and executed—a fact that no one seems overly concerned over. “The Head of the District” represents the North-western frontier as a dangerous place that can only be ruled through iron will and local knowledge—especially pragmatical, clear-cut and, most importantly, effective ethnographic classifications. To articulate this vision, the story employs a few clearly recognisable typological categories to an almost pedantic degree. David Sergeant regards this short story, alongside several narratives of this period, as mainly concerned with the construction, definition and validation of “a typological cast of imperial characters”, with the creation of an “Anglo-Indian world” that, compared to earlier short stories,

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is “far more schematic and hierarchic, more clearly to reflect an idealized conservative perception of it” (Sergeant 2013, 65)⁠. The story manages to encapsulate, in a compressed narrative space and using only three native characters, several major categories and foundational dichotomies of colonial ethnography (effeminate vs martial; martial vs criminal; loyal vs disloyal). Grish Chunder De, first of all, is the prototypical Bengali Babu. This type originates from the quite heterogeneous social group of the Bengali bhadralok that I discuss extensively in the next chapters, as both Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh emerge from this milieu. However, in this story and in Kipling’s fiction more generally, the Bengali Babu is essentially a caricature that mocks the results of providing the “effeminate” Bengali race with an English education: an over-intellectual, coward, outwardly westernised and ultimately incompetent half-man lacking in virility and physical prowess. The Bengali Babu is often the subject of Kipling’s hostility and mockery—perhaps precisely because, structurally, Anglicised Indians are direct rivals of Anglo-Indians as insider-outsider mediators within the structure of colonial power. This mockery is particularly prominent in “The Head of the District”, in which the narrator makes some effort to showcase how the Western education of the Babu cannot change his nature. The Babu may annoy Tallantire by “[talking] hastily and much […] after the manner of those who are ‘more English than the English’ of Oxford and ‘home’, with much curious book-knowledge of bump-­ suppers, cricket-matches, hunting-runs” (Kipling 1964, 112). However, as soon as the rebellion starts, he reminds everyone that he has not yet taken charge of the district, and, most crucially, his words are “not [anymore] in the tones of the ‘more English’” (114)⁠. Western education is only a veneer of mimicry that utterly shatters in time of crisis. If Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education—a significant step in the creation of an Indian anglicised elite—famously argued for the strategic benefits of relying on “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 2006, 375)⁠, Grish Chunder De’s role in story is to prove how clamorously ineffective such a hybrid seems to be in terms of administrative duties. The Bengali Babu is a very specific ‘regional’ character that, however, may also stand for the broader category of Indians from a variety of backgrounds and groups that the British considered unfit for military service. In colonial classifications, the effeminate Babu/Hindu is contrasted with the so-called martial races—groups that were considered loyal, fierce,

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honourable and trustworthy, to the extent that, as ethnographic classifications became more established, the Indian Army started to rely more and more on these communities for recruitment (see Fuller 2016, 255). Consistently with this scheme, De is contrasted with Khoda Dad Khan, the ideal native ally: virile and trustworthy, but utterly respectful of the ‘natural’ hierarchical-­ ethnographic chain-of-command that puts the British at the top, to the extent that he is totally dedicated to his British leaders and happy to be ruled by them, just as he deems unacceptable that a “black Bengali dog” (Kipling 1964, 109)⁠ should be anywhere near a position of power. The reference to blackness usefully reminds us that categories such as effeminacy and martiality are actively engaged in racialisation process—the Bengali and the martial tribal are produced, throughout the story, as racial (and gender) categories. Similarly, The Blind Mullah covers and reinforces a number of ‘ethnic/ racial’ threats identifiable through the classifications of colonial ethnography. He is, first of all, a fanatical, disloyal Muslim subject—a figure that generated considerable anxiety in post-1857 British India. In fact, the presence of two Muslims characters—loyal and disloyal—effectively showcases the ambivalent feelings that emerged towards the status of Muslims after the Rebellion (see Meatcalf and Meatcalf 2001, 106)⁠. On a more regional note, Kipling may also be registering two competing visions of the Afghan tribes, framed, in different descriptions, either as virile martial society or as fundamentally dominated by a corrupted priesthood (see Leonard 2016, 182)⁠. Lastly, as an unredeemable troublemaker, the Mullah echoes another successful ethnographic category, that of the criminal tribes. In colonial ethnography, this term worked as an umbrella term for the groups that the British considered dangerous, potentially disloyal, or naturally keen on criminal activity. Two Criminal Tribes Acts, in 1871 and 1911, officially sanctioned this form of classification. Kipling does not merely rely on these types as models to create his characters, but as narrative devices. The very unfolding of the plot demands that these characters unfailingly act as they are supposed to do according to this form of colonial anthropological knowledge. There is a perfect overlapping between what characters are supposed to be, how other characters describe them and what they actually do. “The Head of the District”, in this sense, could be defined as a “census-fantasy”. That is, it plays out the fantasy of a world that is satisfactorily mapped through a few ethnographic categories, which result in an effective guideline for practical action—realising, in a fictional setting, the ambitions of exhaustiveness

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and control of pan-Indian Censuses. It creates a (conveniently self-­ contained) world that has been thoroughly classified ethnographically and is therefore understandable and predictable, precisely in the way the various Censuses of India wanted, but never satisfyingly managed to do. In this sense “The Head of the District” can be productively compared with The Jungle Books, which also powerfully endorses the typological aspect of Kipling’s anthropological imagination. Kipling’s Jungle is rigorously divided into different species, each with their specific characteristics, each granted with some degree of autonomous legislation, but all supposed to obey to a shared Law. Animals, ultimately, represent neither specific ethnic types nor specific castes, but rather possible positions that the natives can adopt in the colonial context. Similarly to “The Head of the District”, however, those positions ultimately imply a form of ethnographic classification, and the mental scheme that produces ethnographic categories is fundamentally the same in both works. As Jopi Nyman argues: The animals of The Jungle Book can be divided […] into two main categories, the good and the bad […]. This division reflects not only gendered and national categorizations but also related moral judgements, naturalized as virtues. Whereas trustworthy wolves […], the rational brown bear and the reliable mongoose obey naturalized hierarchies and social contracts, the native snakes and degenerate monkeys seek pleasure and self-gratification in denying the authority of colonial rule. (Nyman 2003, 41)⁠

Nyman further argues that the Law of the Jungle is to be seen as a punitive colonial law (41)⁠, which consistently forbids the killing of Man, lest the entire jungle be invaded by “white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gong and rocket and torches” (Kipling 1996, 3)⁠. In line with this framing, one of the main villains of the saga, the tiger Shere Khan, perfectly fits the role of the criminal native, like the Blind Mullah (and like the Mullah, Shere Khan is also marked by a physical disability: he is lame). Shere Khan’s blind hatred of humans recklessly violates the Law of the Jungle, threatening the whole community with dire repercussions. The threat of Shere Khan is characteristically contained in the third story of the cycle: the tiger is killed off by Mowgli—the man’s cub raised by a pack of wolves and the protagonist of The Jungle Books—who has him trampled under a stampede of buffaloes. A similarly gruesome fate awaits the Blind Mullah, guilty of foolishly challenging British imperial power.

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Orde and Tallantire are, in many ways, the ethnographer-figures of the story, and their epistemological vantage point (shared also, in part, by Khoda Dad Khan, the loyal native) is fundamentally the same as that of the third-person narrator, who voices the same concerns, opinions and categories of the two Anglo-Indian characters. Thus, the tale could be said, from a narratological point of view, to be characterised by a false polyphony: it provides the reader with a variety of voices, but most of them are in complete ideological agreement, and their authority is so overwhelmingly established that they practically speak as one, recreating a de-facto monologism. The story clearly bestows them with ethnographic authority, as they are both familiar and endorse the knowledge that comes from colonial typologies and the fieldwork experience of the frontier. The moments in which this authority is bestowed upon are clearly marked—for instance, when Tallantire complains that his remonstrances about the De’s appointment have been dismissed: “[I] have been told that I am exhibiting ‘culpable and puerile prejudice.’ By Jove, if the Khusru Kheyl don’t exhibit something worse than that I don’t know the Border!” (Kipling 1964, 6)⁠. Moreover, Orde and Tallantire, within this ideological and ethnographic universe, play the key role of the Anglo-Indian frontier administrator. Opposed to other Western figures who, in Kipling’s view, are tragically detached from the urgency of frontier rule, such as the central government administrators that foolishly dispatch the Babu to the frontier (or the Londoners that are the tale’s intended audience), this kind of administrator is competent, grounded in local reality, self-sacrificing and brave. Orde and Tallantire are depicted as heroically dedicating themselves to the service of the empire, unfailingly protecting the same ungrateful people who may question their methods from the unending threat of barbarism. Differently from the government, whose knowledge is depicted as profoundly abstract and detached from the field, Tallantire knows perfectly well that, as the narrator explains, “what looks so feasible in Calcutta, so right in Bombay, so unassailable in Madras, is misunderstood by the North and entirely changes its complexion on the banks of the Indus” (110)⁠. Within this context of brutal counterinsurgency, it is instructive to discuss how the issue of intimacy emerges and what it tells us of the fieldwork relations presented here. The story does, in fact, portray a form of intimate bonds between certain Anglo-Indians and natives. However, it validates exclusively those bonds that can exist in accordance to the view of governance of an authoritarian anthropological imagination, which argues for the essential validity of certain ethnographic classifications and uses them

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to establish political and cultural hierarchies. More precisely, the story depicts an example of the trans-racial and trans-cultural brotherhood of “strong men” that Kipling most famously immortalises in his The Ballad of East and West. The ballad—also set on the North-western border—tells the tale of how an Afghan horse-thief and a British officer, in spite of being enemies, develop a bond of respect and friendship by admiring each other’s bravery and chivalry. The opening verse is perhaps one of Kipling’s best-known passages: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (Kipling 1897, 61)⁠

The first two lines of the poem are often quoted in isolation, which obviously leads to a simplified notion of Kipling’s conception of “East” and “West” as incommensurable and unable to reach a meeting point. All changes if the third and fourth lines are taken into consideration, indicating a way in which the differences between “East” and “West” can be temporarily suspended. This suspension of difference constructed via a homosocial contract is typical of Kipling’s practice of looking for circumscribed spaces of egalitarianism within his conservative worldview. As John McBratney argues, Kipling’s bursts of egalitarianism, throughout his fiction, have a distinctively masonic character: Kipling—a Freemason for most of his life—often creates “masonic-like spaces of magical fraternity” (2011, 26) in which some of his character can overcome the boundaries of race and class⁠. The masonic character of those spaces has several important corollaries: it implies an intimate, narrowly circumscribed relationship between a few individuals, which makes it ideal to be addressed within concrete ethnographic encounters; but also implies a temporary suspension, rather than an erasure, of subject-object, authoritarian and uneven relationships, suggesting that there are different times and different modes in which the colonial other can be encountered. Moreover, it reveals the fundamentally male focus of Kipling’s egalitarianism, consistently with his overall treatment of gender. For Kipling, manliness (often expressed in the access to various forms of violence) is a defining characteristic of his ‘positive’ colonial heroes and natives. His position is in line with the mainstream

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colonial/‘romantic’ tradition, as well as with widespread gendered typologies of colonial ethnography that he heavily relies on. It is at odds, on the other hand, with Stevenson’s more critical approach to masculinity. The particular form of egalitarianism that Kipling constructs by stressing the bonds of the “strong men” is, in itself, problematic, rooting equal relationships in a violent version of masculinity and in muscular bravado. However, in “The Head of the District”, differently from the ballad, this sense of brotherhood, even if it crosses racial barriers, is also patently enmeshed with a practice of dominance which clashes powerfully with any notion of equality. Indeed, Khoda Dad Khan does remember with pleasure the moments of conviviality spent with his Anglo-Indian overlords, but a close reading of his memories clearly reveals a fundamental unevenness in their relationship: In Yardley-Orde’s consulship his visit concluded with a sumptuous dinner and perhaps forbidden liquors; certainly with some wonderful tales and great good-fellowship. Then Khoda Dad Khan would swagger back to his hold, vowing that Orde Sahib was one prince and Tallantire Sahib another, and that whosoever went a-raiding into British territory would be flayed alive. (Kipling 1964, 108)⁠

Pleasing a tribal leader with food, “forbidden liquors” and adventurous tales seems a cheap price for the absolute control over the Khusru Kheyl, represented, with punitive gusto, in the image of transgressors flayed alive. But it is in the finale, when Khoda Dad Khan returns to confirm his loyalty to Tallantire, that the egalitarian respect between the “strong men” clashes with hierarchy. In spite of Khan’s instrumental role in repressing the rebellion, Tallantire dismisses Khan with these words: “[…] Get hence to the hills—go, and wait there starving, till it shall please the Government to call thy people out for punishment—children and fools that ye be! Count your dead, and be still. Best assured that the Government will send you a MAN!” “Ay,” returned Khoda Dad Khan, “for we also be men.” As he looked Tallantire between the eyes, he added, “And by God, Sahib, may thou be that man!” (122)⁠

The finale attempts to reconstruct a sense of mutual virile admiration to put the two men on even grounds, but this is undermined by Tallantire’s need to impose his authoritarian rule (in a bombastically gendered

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exclamation: please note the capital letters)—and Khan’s remissive, almost masochistically pleased, acceptance of this relationship. There is, in other words, an odd tension between an undeniably hierarchical, uneven relationship between the two characters and the (facade of) egalitarianism that the story employs to convey the mutual respect and intimacy between them. In its arguably clumsy execution—the story is not concerned with exploring the implications of this tension—“The Head of the District” allows me to start posing a few questions that I will explore more extensively in my analysis of Kim: what is the meaning of intimacy within a colonial system (as a specific formation within the modern world-­ system), which is structured, by its own nature, by the hierarchies of race and class? And does that intimacy interact with the construction of an anthropological authority and imagination? Does it reinforce a subject-­ object relationship or does it dismantle it? Can it have a genuinely subversive function or is it necessarily recuperated by that uneven system? 2.3.3   Love and/as Ethnographic Espionage: Kim In the previous sections, I have highlighted three main aspects of Kipling’s ethnographic narratives: the epistemological primacy of fieldwork experience; the equally important need to master ethnographic typologies to properly understand that fieldsite; and, within such uneven fieldsite, a tension between violent structures of power, expressed as racial hierarchies, and a circumscribed role given to egalitarian relationships of intimacy, friendship and trust. The latter suggests that an egalitarian intimacy is also a valuable source of ethnographic knowledge, seemingly in contrast with the top-down, subject-object form of knowledge creation that Kipling’s ‘ethnographic’ model of choice—that of the colonial administrator à la Tallantire, empowered precisely by fieldwork experience and typological categories—is endorsing. These three aspects, and especially the clash between egalitarian intimacy and hierarchical relationship as competing sources of knowledge, are addressed most extensively in Kim, to which now I turn. I read Kim as an ethnographic fiction (novel) in which Kipling proposes a resolution for the conflicting ethnographic models that can be found elsewhere in his fiction, sketching a paradigm for ethnographic knowledge that explicitly incorporates and values intimacy. Kim, in many ways, can hence be compared to “The Beach of Falesá”, as both works explore whether it is possible to establish spaces of empathy and intimacy within colonial fieldwork, and

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both wonder about which role intimacy might have in producing both anthropological knowledge and creating relations. However, Kipling’s different understanding of the colonial field—as necessarily uneven in terms of power dynamics but not (in his view) inherently exploitative— leads to a different result than Stevenson’s. Kim’s plot is fairly well-known: an orphan raised in Lahore after his parents’ death—his father, most notably, was a disgraced soldier from an Irish regiment—Kim is a resourceful, mischievous and clever boy, with a particular talent for languages, disguise, intrigue and persuasion. At the beginning of the novel, Kim befriends an old lama that is on a quest to find a mystical river. The two depart together, quickly developing a fondness for each other. After reaching the Grand Trunk Road, Kim finds his father’s regiment and is forced to temporarily leave the lama’s side to get a Western education. Simultaneously, he attracts the attention of Colonel Creighton, an ethnologist and spymaster that takes an interest in Kim’s abilities and initiates him into the Great Game—the (fictional) espionage war between British India and Russia for the control of the frontier areas— under the tutelage of a number of mentors: the Pathan horse-trader Mahbub Ali, the Bengali Hurree Babu, and the (ethnically ambiguous) jeweller Mr Lurgan. Kim struggles to remain, at the same time, the “friend of all the world” who is able to blend into any Indian crowd, the “sahib” he is supposed to be due to his whiteness, and the lama’s devoted chela (disciple). This predicament culminates in a mission he undertakes while he is once again wandering with the lama: Hurree Babu asks for his help to stop two Russian spies who are striking alliances with frontier kings to overthrow British India. At the end of the mission, Mahbub Ali and the lama (who has found the river) discuss Kim’s fate while the boy is sleeping, and the reader is left wondering whether Kim will continue playing the Game or follow the spiritual path shown by the lama—although, crucially, as I will argue, these missions are not incompatible at all. The novel ends with the lama announcing Kim that he has found illumination, and he has returned from his enlightened state to guide him to salvation. Kim’s critical reception has often focused on the issue of the identity of the titular character—not surprisingly, considering that, on different occasions, he asks himself precisely “Who is Kim?”. This recurring question interrogates the numerous, diverging aspects of Kim’s life and personality: Kim is an Indian-passing street urchin, a spy, a Buddhist monk, a sahib— or perhaps none of those things or all these things at once. In particular, it

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is the perceived degree of loyalty towards the lama and towards the Great Game that is usually pivotal in assessing the ultimate meaning of Kim’s arc in the novel, and hence who Kim, ultimately, is. For instance, Edward Said’s famous examination of the novel—included in Culture and Imperialism—explicitly reads Kim as a coming-of-age story whose protagonist is slowly integrated in the system of British domination over India, learning to exercise mastery over the colonial world (1993, 176)⁠. For Said, the Great Game stands for the techniques of knowledge and panoptical surveillance deployed by the British to rule India, and, consequently, he firmly locates Kim within the orbit of British imperialism and the Great Game: “Kipling never forgets that Kim is an irrefragable part of British India: the Great Game does go on, with Kim a part of it, no matter how many parables the lama fashions” (175)⁠. Said, therefore, takes for granted that Kim becomes a spy at the service of the government at the end of the novel. Said has a point in seeing in Kim the ideal imperial spy: certainly this is what Creighton sees in him, and it is the reason why he argues rather cynically that “the boy mustn’t be wasted if he is as advertised” (Kipling 2009, 122)⁠. It is debatable whether playing the Great Game as it is represented in the book means to actively take a policing or surveillance role. In response to Said’s argument, David Sergeant argues that: Kim and the other spies are perceptive and productive observers of other people, but we hardly see them involved in anything that might be termed “surveillance” in a policing sense, the close observation of a suspected person. Similarly, we see little or no evidence of “control”. So the novel realizes “surveillance and control over India” only in the sense that it shows Kim and others involved in activities that—in reality, if not in the novel—would have been involved in imperial networks of control; and that would have been directed—in reality, if not in the novel—at a set of people far more numerous and popular than the novel itself makes out. (Sergeant 2013, 192)

In other words, Kim and the other spies are not effective as a representation or even as a symbol for actual colonial policing and surveillance. To that it could be added that the Great Game as depicted in the novel—a spy game carried out between Russian and British India to control central Asia—never actually existed, in spite of having inspired many works of popular history and having become an idiomatic (and still current) expression to indicate the geopolitics of central Asia (Hamm 2013, 395–396)⁠.

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And yet, even if the connection with actual espionage is rather weak, we also need to consider that the spy is a category that was formative for the professional identity of ethnographers: the behaviour of spies is considered unethical for a professional ethnographer, but the association between the two remains unavoidable (Pels and Salemink 2000, 26)⁠. Kipling seems to understand this very well and, by stressing the double identity of the players of the Game as both ethnographers and spies, forces us to consider how, if not the historical context, at least the ideology of espionage affects the ethnographic encounters within the story. In other words: it is significant that Kipling chooses to represent ethnographers as spies (and vice versa) and imbue their work with a Great Game ideology—which certainly existed in reality, differently from the Game itself—in which perfect knowledge, manipulation and geopolitical mastery are intertwined as the ultimate goal. In doing so, even if they are not an accurate representation of a colonial surveillance apparatus or of realistic geopolitics, Creighton and his Ethnological Survey epitomise, in their actions, colonial modes of (ethnographic) knowledge, more specifically several of the strategies of imaginative understanding that have the ambition of achieving knowledge through the extensive, reliable typological classification of the Indians, seen as an object of intellectual manipulation and not primarily as interlocutors. Kim adheres to this pattern but, as we will see, complicates it. An excellent example of this imaginative pattern is the section of the book where Kim and the lama travel on the Grand Trunk Road—the “broad, smiling river of life”, flooded with “new people and new sights at every stride—castes [Kim] knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience” (Kipling 2009, 80)⁠. This section epitomises a trope that is used repeatedly to build the world of Kim in its diversity: the listing of ethnographic types—races, tribes and castes—which are presented as a primary source of knowledge on India. This plethora of little sketches is indeed lively and effective, and the narrator’s gusto in describing the variety of Indian life is certainly only matched by Kim’s delight in meeting new people and discovering new ways of life. But it is striking, especially for a coming-of-age story about a boy that is set on exploring a wider world, how little sense of puzzlement is to be found. Kim immediately deciphers the types he encounters, adapting his behaviour and language appropriately with great ease. Even if we are told that there are castes that Kim does not know on the Road, the potential difficulty of that lack of knowledge is elided, in that passage and elsewhere: the narrative presents a picture that is already transparent, within Kim’s knowledge or ready to be understood.

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Kim does not know everything at once, but he reduces to a minimum the gulf between the desire of knowing the unknown and the fulfilment of that desire. The moment in which he first meet the lama is particularly emblematic: “He stopped; for there shuffled round the corner, from the roaring Motee Bazar, such a man as Kim, who thought he knew all castes, had never seen” (33). The scene seems to be set for an intricate mystery that Kim has to struggle to solve, but Kim then proceeds to ask a few, well-­ chosen questions to the lama, before deciding to accompany him. It is clear that the lama’s mystery is quickly resolved for Kim, overwhelmed by the boy’s curiosity and desire for knowledge. Kim, in short, faces the unknown without the slightest inhibition and is always rewarded accordingly. Knowing India seems, indeed, too easy, even for an incredibly observant character like Kim—it seems indeed true that “one of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability” (Kipling 1987, 26), to paraphrase the opening of Kipling’s early tale “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw’”, only that here no ghostly apparition appears to vehemently give the lie to this statement. The novel, in this sense, is another, even more extensive census-fantasy, because it is, in fact, an ethnological census in the making, guided by a figure that has no difficulty in carrying out the task throughout the novel. It is, in the end, the same pattern of census-­ fantasy of “The Head of the District”, but replaces the dramatic tension of seeing this fantasy temporarily challenged and restored (like in the short story) with the pleasure of seeing it unfold smoothly and efficiently thanks to Kim’s unparalleled ethnographic skills. Significantly, however, Kim is capable of these extreme feats of knowledge because he is fundamentally curious and open-minded. These are qualities that are not lost on Creighton, when he instructs Kim about the way he has to behave with the natives: There is a good spirit in thee. Do not let it be blunted at St Xavier’s [the school where Kim is sent to]. There are many boys there who despise the black men. […] Do not at any time be led to contemn the black men. I have known boys newly entered the service of the Government who feigned not to understand the talk or the customs of black men. Their pay was cut for ignorance. There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this. (Kipling 2009, 129)

Creighton’s teachings resonate with Kim’s sympathetic attitude towards the natives. Indeed, both seek knowledge in an encounter with the native and rely on imagining the natives through ethnographic typologies to

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obtain that knowledge; both despise ignorance and are driven by a desire for complete understanding of those in front of them. They are, of course, very different in their aims. Creighton’s interest is ultimately control, in the broadest sense: he means to make practical use of that knowledge, as befits his position as spymaster. Creighton’s idea that a good player of the Game should never despise the “black men” is in no way an ethical statement. After all, when Father Victor, one of the priests that discovers Kim’s parentage, tells Creighton that he is a good man because he will take care of Kim, the Colonel hastily replies: “Not in the least. Don’t make that mistake” (124)⁠. On the other hand, Kim is fundamentally driven by curiosity and, ultimately, by emotional attachment. Kim is more interested in “the game for its own sake” (32) than in any grand project behind the activities he engages with. This gives Kim’s ethnographic insight the very edge that Creighton admires specifically because he cannot reproduce it— you simply cannot fake genuine emotional attachment and anthropological curiosity in its sheerest, disinterested form. A passage that illustrate Kim’s unique ethnographic vision is the sequence in which Kim is sent to Mr Lurgan to perfect his skills as a spy. Lurgan’s most important teachings take the form of initiating Kim to the Play of Jewels, a game that Kim plays against Lurgan’s Hindu boy-servant. The Play consists in observing a set of different precious stones, memorising their number and characteristics, and then listing them—with as many details as possible—once the stones have been hidden from view. Kim is initially rather clumsy at the Play, even when, at Kim’s request, the objects to be studied are changed from stones to different items found in Lurgan’s shop. Kim, bested each time, exclaims that “if it were men—or horses, […] I could do better. This playing with tweezers and knives and scissors is too little” (161). The Play of Jewels is ultimately aimed at recognising and identifying people, as proven by the fact that, in later sessions, Kim and the Hindu boy start playing not only “with veritable stones, […] with piles of swords and daggers” but also “with photographs of natives” (161). Yet there is a significant difference between Lurgan’s and Kim’s approach: Lurgan’s techniques want to teach Kim that natives are ultimately interchangeable with stones and daggers. The important thing is to hone one’s capacity for observation. Kim, instead, cares very little for inanimate things, but is instead attracted to living things with a definite agency, like men or horses. The crucial difference is that men and horses can be interacted with, and it is possible, eventually, to develop a bond with them. In terms of nineteenth anthropological conceptions, Kim is unknowingly

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ahead of his time: he instinctively knows that anthropology, the study of people, is very much not like any other natural science. This interest for people as human beings is consistent with Kim’s paradoxical attempt at transforming the calculating and detached Great Game—the solipsistic and instrumental putting into practice of a typological imagination—into a Game of Love—in which he mostly follows after his loved ones and learns from them, although he is not above deceiving them. The complex nature of Kim’s own Game, trying to balance genuine intimacy—love, as it were—and the manipulation required by spywork is particularly underscored in the eighth chapter. Kim is visiting Mahbub Ali, the Pathan horse-trader, during one of his escapades. Over the course of the chapter, Kim helps Mahbub to survive an attempt at his life. Yet, while containing its fair share of thrills and action sequences, the chapter is much more important for a number of conversations the two characters have about Kim’s identity and, most crucially, about their relationship. The kind of bond they establish is, in many ways, unusual. Mahbub is closely related to other Afghan characters in Kipling’s work, such as those encountered in the Ballad of East and West and “The Head of the District”. As such, he embodies the type of the Afghan nomad—oscillating dangerously between martiality and criminality. While this type, within a colonial typology, can normally be befriended only in the context of the ‘brotherhood of strong men’, in Kim his relationship with the titular character is presented in the other Kiplingesque mode of trans-racial bonding, the teacher-pupil relationship. It is worth noting that, in terms of emotional attachment, Mahbub is the other mentor that Kim loves as much as the lama (Vescovi 2014, 16)⁠, and it is not a chance that he is the one who joins the lama in the discussion on Kim’s fate at the end of the novel. Consistently, while painting the pragmatical, opportunistic mentality and the ubiquity of deception that characterises the Game, the episode is simultaneously replete with declaration of love and affection between the Pathan and the boy, carried out in the midst of salacious banter. Mahbub and Kim realise, at some point, that they both possess secrets and information about each other that could potentially allow them to cause each other’s downfall. This leads them to construct a space of honesty between them that transcends the deceptive nature of the Game—as Mahbub says, “All the world may tell lies save thou and I” (Kipling 2009, 140), precisely because there is no point in lying when they both have the means of harm the other. Kim replies that their shared secrets—and the possibility they both have to destroy each other—“[are] a very sure tie between

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them” (140). But the “tie”, a few paragraphs afterwards, takes the explicit name of love. While the two characters are still playfully discussing how easily they could betray each other, Kim acknowledges that the real reason he is loyal to Mahbub is not the threat of retaliation, but love: “I thought of that [Mahbub’s revenge] a little, but most I thought that I loved thee, Mahbub” (141). A few lines later, prompting Kim to reveal new information, Mahbub once again puts this relationship of absolute trust and love into focus: “Tell me for love. Our lives in each other’s hand” (141). In this sense the distance between Kim and Creighton, who does not take love into consideration, is noticeable. In the same chapter, Mahbub reminds Kim that Creighton spends money on Kim’s behalf “for a purpose, not in any way for love of thee” (140). If Creighton embodies the Game as a purely pragmatical function, Kim seeks human interaction while he plays the Game. Kim wants to have his cake and eat it too: he wants to enjoy the Great Game and he wants to play it proficiently, but he is not ready to disavow the importance of genuine bonds of love and friendship, hence turning the Game into a Game of Love. This contrast culminates in his attempt to go undercover as the lama’s devoted chela as part of the mission that he undertakes alongside Hurree Babu. Admittedly, the lama is harmed during the mission as a result of an encounter with the two spies, an event that seems to threaten Kim’s ability to maintain genuine intimacy (following after his loved ones out of friendship and curiosity) and spywork (which urges him to exploit them if needs to be, prioritising his ‘mission’) in a delicate balance, with no harm for the former or the latter. That incompatibility, however, is belied in the finale, in which the Great Game (subject-object, detached ethnography) and the Game of Love (the game of spirituality, friendship and intimacy) magically converge. The novel’s ending, in which the Lama and Mahbub discuss Kim’s fate, and Kim and the Lama have their final exchange, offers some further insight in how the novel frames ethnographic knowledge. The finale is notoriously controversial, and I agree with Sergeant that it is, to an extent, pointless to speculate on Kim’s final fate: Kim might not go on to become a Buddhist priest, but then again, neither does he go on to become a spy, for the simple reason that the novel ends and Kim ends with it. When looked at from this perspective, it is rather absurd that so many critics have devoted so much of their energy to speculating on what happens next, when blankness succeeds the final page. (2013, 163)

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Fair enough. But what is not left uncertain, at the end of the novel, is that the Lama’s spiritual path—which represents the Game of Love in its purest form, aiming at, to paraphrase the final line of the novel, “[winning] salvation for himself and his beloved” (Kipling 2009, 269)—is fully compatible with Kim’s working as a spy—the offspring of the Great Game. The Lama, consistently with his Buddhist beliefs, states that Kim’s occupation is inconsequential in his attainment of Enlightenment: “Let him be a teacher; let him be a scribe—what matter? He will have attained Freedom at the end. The rest is illusion” (266). While this could be read as the Lama having the last word on Kim’s fate, Mahbub Ali reads this in a different way: “now I understand that the boy, sure of Paradise, can yet enter Government service, my mind is easier” (266). Similarly to how Government Service and Spiritual Enlightenment are compatible, ethnographic knowledge is framed, throughout the novel, as both a matter of establishing control and a matter of establishing intimate engagements. But the fact that Creighton’s project (the Great Game) and Kim’s one (the Game of Love) are ultimately compatible should give us pause: if Kim’s disinterested desire for human interaction—and his spiritual uprising as the lama’s chela—can be fully realised within Creighton’s detached and instrumental gathering of knowledge for empire-making, how can the two perspectives be meaningfully opposed? Playing the game disinterestedly, “for its own sake”, is the only route Creighton cannot take to improve his own mastery of the Game, and the reason the boy is useful to him. Kim, hence, more than proposing a radically new attitude towards colonial India, complements the detached control of an authoritarian anthropological imagination through the genuine desire for intimate exchange that is supposedly its polar opposite. He shows, through his success throughout the novel, that intimacy is indispensable for ethnographic knowledge—but in a way that is compatible, and not disruptive, of an authoritarian form of knowledge collection, indeed contributing to perfect its methods. We are a far cry from another notorious ending in British fiction on India—the ending of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (1924), in which an Englishman’s asking an Indian “Why can’t we be friends now?” is answered with “No, not yet”, and “No, not there” (2005, 289) by the very landscape in which the question is asked, implicitly highlighting the contradiction between genuine intimacy and colonial relations. Kim, instead, represents friendship and intimacy as the cornerstone of that colonial social order—to an extent sublimating inequality through the triumph of individual friendship.

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With that in mind, it is possible to read in a new light one of Kim’s central passages: the moment in which the protagonist, recovering from the sickness that has befallen on him at the end of his final mission, starts to claim a definite grasp on the world: He did not want to cry—had never felt less like crying in his life—but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor less. (Kipling 2009, 264)

This passage has variously been interpreted in a very authoritarian sense— a culmination, as it were, of Kim’s alleged ascent to Sahibdom, and a very restrictive version of it, on top of that. Jesse Taylor, for instance, argues that Kim, at the end of the book, emerges in “prosaically and bleakly imperial” world—an aesthetically diminished, utilitarian world that he cannot see with the vivid voraciousness of his earlier days, but only within “the epistemological space of the sahib” (2009, 65)⁠. This passage is also central in Said’s reading, who takes it as the moment in which Kim acquires his “newly sharpened apprehension of mastery, of ‘locking up’, of solidity, of moving from liminality to domination”, which is “to a very great extent a function of being a Sahib in colonial India” (1993, 174)⁠. Seeing Kim’s newfound clarity as a function of an authoritarian imperial mission is legitimate, and indeed that “perfectly comprehensible” is a clear sign that Kim endorses an anthropological imagination that is fully confident in its capacity of classifying and organising reality. Kim’s anthropological imagination, after all, has also—and since the beginning—worked within a typological horizon in which things are to be known in their “proper” form and according to a specific function. Yet I believe that framing this passage as a loss of liminality and freedom, and as a utilitarian fantasy of control over a bleak imperial world misses why Kim is useful to the imperial project in the first place: the richness of his vision, able both to order the world through firm categories and to engage with it at an intimate level, which is present in this passage as well. The coexistence of both aspects is to be found again in the simultaneous presence of animate and inanimate objects: “Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to

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be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to”, which suggests that Kim’s clarity of vision does not entail a diminished aesthetic loss: if anything, Kim’s pleasure and joy may be said to have matured because they are now more focused on a sense of intersubjective interaction—through the idea of talking—rather than the focus on observation he had demonstrated, for instance, on the Grand Trunk Road. Yet this also means that Kim’s unique vision, his love, rather than opposing a more instrumental form of knowledge, and the material colonial-­capitalist order that this form of knowledge upholds, is recuperated within a project of imperial governance. If we deem the attempt to transform the Great Game into a Game of Love in Kim as a failed one, precisely because love is recuperated by espionage, we might read the novel, in the form of resistant reading, as an oblique reminder that colonial systems are inherently uneven, and, to paraphrase Forster once again, that friendship is impossible across the inequalities of a colonial system. But it is important to notice that the novel itself presents Kim’s attempt to merge control and intimacy as a success, with the boy emerging free from Wiltshire’s narrative idiosyncrasies and conflicted feelings generated by the colonial environment. In other words, Kim is Kipling’s most aesthetically accomplished proposal of a model of ethnographic knowledge which promises firm control, but that is, paradoxically, also based on a foundation of love. As such, Kim and “The Beach of Falesá” can be said to register the interweaving of unevenness and intimacy from two opposing perspectives: Stevenson’s Wiltshire—the product of an anti-colonial sensitivity—shows us that love cannot fully thrive within colonialism while urging us to do better in spite of the uneven fields in which we operate, as Wiltshire’s partial shift in allegiance—from his capitalist imperatives to Uma—shows; Kipling’s Kim—forcefully, movingly, seductively but disturbingly—urges us to believe that love can and should thrive within the colonial status quo, foregrounding instances of multicultural egalitarianism within the modern world-system as an alternative to liberation from structural inequality, which it naturalises and sublimates.

Notes 1. In 1891 Stevenson wrote to Henry James: “He [Kipling] amazes me by his precocity, and various endowment. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste” (Stevenson 1995b, 66). In 1892, in a letter to Charles Baxter, he compared Kipling’s poetry to that of William Ernest Henley’s latest collec-

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tion, rather unfavourably. The same year he wrote to James that “you and Barrie and Kipling are my muses three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made” (Stevenson 1995b, 450). In 1893, in a letter to Richard Le Gallienne, referring to the shifting taste in British letters, he mentions Kipling to argue that “the British pig returns to his vomit—to his true love, the love of the style-less, of the shapeless, of the slapdash, of the disorderly. Kipling with all his genius, with all his Morrowbie Jukes, and At-the-End-of-the-Passage, is still a move in that direction, and it is the wrong one” (Stevenson 1995c, 212). Finally, in a letter to Will H. Low, he complained that “here is a long while I have been waiting for something good in art” and that “even of the few best Kipling, I am excruciatingly conscious of the journalist at the back of them” (Stevenson 1995c, 236). 2. David Sergeant’s Kipling’s Art of Fiction 1884–1901 (2013), specifically in the chapter “Move to Fable, 1891–1900”, discusses Kipling’s fiction of this period from the perspective of Stevenson’s theories on romance (2013). This is also one of the rare comparisons between the two writers in the literature. 3. Stevenson’s success as a writer of romances heavily influenced his critical reception. Until the end of the twentieth century, when a new wave of Stevensonian criticism started to emerge, he was mostly dismissed both by traditionalist and modernist critics, most notably in F. R. Leavis’ 1948 study The Great Tradition (De Stasio 1991, 141–143)⁠. 4. As Katherine Irwin points out, “there is no inherent ethical advantage of subjectivity over objectivity, friendship over friendliness, intimacy over distance, celibacy over sex, crime over legality, disclosure over silence, or experimental writing over traditional discourse”; rather it is more important to look at how “how our relationships (intimate or distant), behaviors (norm-­ breaking or conventional), emotions (love or hate), writing (traditional or non-traditional), and other research choices are constrained by, work against, or reinforce social structures” (2006, 171)⁠. 5. Stevenson praises Melville as “the first and the greatest” of the writers “who have touched the South Seas with any genius” (Stevenson 1998, 23)⁠. In particular, Melville’s Typee (1846), which combines adventure, autobiography, philosophical speculation and ethnographic interest (Bryant 1996, xi)⁠, provides a precedent for Stevenson’s experimentation with generic hybrids as a strategy to represent Polynesian reality. 6. Ironically enough, Stevenson was arguably returning to an earlier (and similarly unappreciated) sociological mode of travel writing he had experimented with before—when he had written, between 1879 and 1880, The Amateur Emigrant, a travelogue that recorded his a transatlantic journey on a steerage ship to get to the United States.

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7. Stevenson’s lexical choice of “passions” and “organs” clearly references Shylock’s “hath not a Jew eyes?” monologue from The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare (another reader of Montaigne), which is also a reflection on the inclusion and exclusion of practices and beings from the boundaries of humanity—and also revolves around ‘unorthodox’ handlings of human flesh (Shakespeare 1964, 73)⁠. 8. Charne Lavery defines beachcombers as “what in anthropological terms are known as transculturites, those who leave behind one culture for another, who have in one way or another ‘gone native’”, inhabiting “the interstitial zone represented by the beach” (2017, 33).

Works Cited Ambrosini, Richard. 2006. The Four Boundary-Crossings of R.  L. Stevenson, Novelist and Anthropologist. In Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries, ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, 23–35. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayly, Martin J. 2016. Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bolton, Ralph. 1995. Tricks, Friends, and Lovers. Erotic Encounters in the Field. In Taboo. Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, ed. Don Kulick and Margaret Wilson. London and New York: Routledge. Bryant, John. 1996. Introduction. In Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ix–xxxii. London: Penguin. Bubb, Alexander. 2013. The Provincial Cosmopolitan: Kipling, India and Globalization. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49 (4): 391–404. Colley, Ann C. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Aldershot: Ashgate. Condé, Mary. 2004. Constructing the Englishman in Rudyard Kipling’s Letters of Marque. The Yearbook of English Studies 34: 230–239. De Montaigne, Michel. 1958 [1580]. Of Cannibals. In The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 150–158. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. De Stasio, Clotilde. 1991. Introduzione a Stevenson. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Della Valle, Paola. 2013. Stevenson nel Pacifico: una lettura postcoloniale. Roma: Aracne. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of the Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.

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Forster, E. M. 2005. A Passage to India. New York: Penguin. Fuller, C.J. 2016. Anthropologists and Viceroys: Colonial Knowledge and Policy Making in India, 1871–1911. Modern Asian Studies 50 (1): 217–258. Gray, William. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamm, Geoffrey. 2013. Revisiting the Great Game in Asia: Rudyard Kipling and Popular History. International Journal 68 (2): 395–405. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge. Innes, Robert Alexander. 2009. ‘Wait a Second. Who Are You Anyways?’ The Insider / Outsider Debate and American Indian Studies. American Indian Quarterly 33 (4): 440–461. Irwin, Katherine. 2006. Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships. Qualitative Sociology 29: 155–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-­006-­9011-­3. Jolly, Roslyn. 1996. Introduction. In Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales, ix–xxxiii. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Stevenson’s ‘Sterling Domestic Fiction’: ‘The Beach of Falesá’. The Review of English Studies 50 (200): 463–482. ———. 2007. Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction. Victorian Literature and Culture 35: 157–173. ———. 2009. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession. Farnham: Ashgate. Keown, Michelle. 2007. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 1890. Soldiers Three. Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co. ———. 1897. Verses. 1889–1896. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1899. From Sea to Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1964 [1891]. Life’s Handicap. London: Macmillan. ———. 1987. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977 [1936]. Something of Myself. London: Penguin. ———. 1996 [1894–5]. The Jungle Books. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009 [1901]. Kim. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kulick, Don. 1995. Introduction. The Sexual Life of Anthropologists: Erotic Subjectivity and Ethnographic Work. In Taboo. Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, ed. Don Kulick and Margaret Willson, 1–28. London and New York: Routledge.

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Largeaud-Ortéga, Sylvie. 2009. Stevenson’s ‘Little Tale’ Is ‘a Library’: An Anthropological Approach to ‘The Beach of Falesá’. Journal of Stevenson Studies 6. Lavery, Charne. 2017. The Indian Ocean Meets the South Seas. Wasafiri 32 (1): 32–39. Leonard, Zak. 2016. Colonial Ethnography on India’s North-West Frontier, 1850–1910. The Historical Journal 59 (1): 175–196. Lugones, María. 2010. Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 2006 [1835]. Minute on Indian Education. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 374–375. London: Routledge. McBratney, John. 2011. India and Empire. In The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. Howard J.  Booth, 23–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meatcalf, Barbara D., and Thomas R. Meatcalf. 2001. A Concise History of Modern India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Melville, Herman. 1996 [1846]. Typee. A Peep at Polynesian Life. London: Penguin. ———. 2007 [1847]. Omoo. London: Penguin. Menikoff, Barry. 2005. Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Morey, Peter. 2018. Kipling and ‘Orientalism’'s: Cracks in the Wall of Imperial Narrative. Interventions 20 (1): 106–122. Newman, Jonathan. 2020. Anthropology is Companion Studies: A Study of Violent Relations During Fieldwork with My Family. Ethnography 21 (4): 461–480. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138119829495. Nyman, Jopi. 2003. Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distribution. Pels, Peter, and Oscar Salemink. 2000. Introduction: Locating the Colonial Subjects of Anthropology. In Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, ed. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, 1–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Phillips, Lawrence. 2005. Robert Louis Stevenson: Class and ‘Race’ in The Amateur Emigrant. Race and Class 46 (3): 39–54. ———. 2007. Colonial Culture in the Pacific, in Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. Race and Class 48 (3): 63–82. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. Fieldwork in Common Places. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 27–50. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21 (2): 168–178. Reid, Julia. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin-de-Siècle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER 3

Militant Ethnography and Internal Colonialism in Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi

“To the peasants the State is more distant than heaven and far more of a scourge, because it is always against them” (Levi 2000a, 78). With these words Carlo Levi, in Christ Stopped at Eboli, articulates the relationship between South Italian peasants and the bureaucratic, political and military apparatus at the service of the Italian ruling classes, especially (but not exclusively) in the fascist era. Levi’s book, a memoir of the time he spent in the town of Aliano as a political prisoner of the fascist regime, was published after the Italian Liberation from fascism in 1945. It proved to be enormously influential, radically shifting the terms in which the Italian peasant world was understood, while advancing a political vision that demanded a rethinking of the very institution of the liberal state. Since Christ’s publication—and especially in the last few years (Geroni 2018)— Levi has been extensively studied from a variety of critical and disciplinary perspectives. However, he is rarely approached from a comparative perspective that highlights convergences between him and writers operating in different cultural, historical and political contexts. This chapter takes its departure from this gap, proposing to read Levi alongside Mahasweta Devi, a major figure in Bengali literature. Devi is also a presence in the Anglophone postcolonial canon, mainly through the English translations of her works, which however remain rather understudied (Bhattacharya 2020, 106). She is known for her fiction on the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. De Capitani, Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38704-3_3

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adivasis, the indigenous people of the Indian subcontinent: her writing since the 1970s, deeply intertwined with her grassroots activism, has registered the ways in which the adivasis have experienced the state, similarly to Levi’s peasants, as “more distant than heaven and far more of a scourge”. This chapter elaborates on this fundamental similarity by reading Levi and Devi as militant ethnographers, whose works emerge from a similar combination of radical activism, ethnographic fieldwork and creative writing. Their work becomes an occasion to discuss the complexities, contradictions, as well as the transformative possibilities enabled by radical political engagements, during fieldwork, across cultural and class divides. These intersectional engagements on the field, through a comparison of their work, emerge as crucial sites of registration, in world-literary terms, of the inequalities of modernity as well as standpoints to reflect on which shapes resistance to these dynamics might take. A cursory overview of their careers immediately reveals their convergences. Levi, born in 1902 into the secular Turinese Jewish bourgeoisie, spent his early adulthood in the politically charged atmosphere of Turin in the 1920s, focusing on his medical studies, on painting and on political activity. The latter, gravitating towards antifascism, was the reason he was sent, in 1935, to Lucania (present-day Basilicata), as a confinato. The confino (confinement) was a common instrument of political repression during fascism: political opponents that could not yet be charged with actual crimes were sent to remote locations within Italy, where, cut off from their networks and surveilled by the local authorities, they were largely neutralised. Levi was sent to Aliano (called Gagliano in Christ, to imitate the local pronunciation), where he spent nine months. Before returning home, Levi witnessed first-hand the plight of South Italian peasants—among the poorest strata of the Italian population. Their predicament, generated by the convergence of local forms of oppression and the marginalisation of the Italian South at a national level, had only worsened during the inept fascist administration of both the rural world and the South (Morgan 2004, 119–124; Barbagallo 2013, 114). While Levi only wrote poetry and painted while in Aliano, his stay became the material for Christ Stopped at Eboli, the book he is still primarily associated with. Its success established Levi’s presence in the public sphere as a writer, also internationally and especially in the United States (see Beltrami 2016). After the war, Levi wrote one novel, The Watch (1952 [1950]), but mostly alternated between various forms of non-fiction writing—travelogues,

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essays and journalism—painting and a political career—he was elected senator in 1963, a few years before his death in 1975. Devi’s career as a creative writer is relatively more conventional. Born in 1926, she published her first novel—Jhansir Rani [The Queen of Jhansi], a fictional reconstruction of the life of one of the central figures of the 1857 Rebellion—in 1956. She then continued to write fiction—short stories, novellas, novels—until her death in 2016. Alongside her prolific fictional production, however, she is also known for a long history of political and social activism, as well as for her investigative journalism. Like Levi, her work is defined by an encounter on the field, specifically with the reality of adivasi life. The adivasis (or tribals, using a terminology that is problematically connected to the colonial period but is commonly accepted in India) are communities and ethnic groups that are not integrated in Indian mainstream society, representing a significant portion of the Indian population. The term “adivasi” means “first inhabitant”—connoting their status as the indigenous population of the subcontinent. Especially since the colonial period, they have experienced extreme exploitation and marginalisation, not unlike other indigenous populations all over the world: their cultures and societies have historically been disrupted by the (post)colonial administration, while the adivasis themselves have been used as cheap labour, forced into the semi-slavery under the various oppressive labour systems and evicted from their lands. Devi started visiting adivasi territories in the 1960s. In an interview with Gayatri Spivak, her best-known translator, she describes the beginning of her engagement with the adivasis in the Palamu district (at the time located in Bihar, currently part of the Jharkhand), one of her first experiences in adivasi territories: In 1965, I started going to Palamu. Of course my mental involvement was already there. I was interested in [the adivasis], but did not know very much. […] I have covered all of the district on foot. I walked miles, staying somewhere overnight, went from place to place. Thus the bonded labor system, in its naked savagery and its bloody exploitation of women, became clear to me. I started writing about Palamu. I also started getting bonded laborers organized. […] When I understood that feeling for the tribals and writing about them was not enough, I started living with them. Tried to solve the problem by seeing everything from his or her point of view. (Devi and Spivak 1995, xi–xiii)

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This passage describes her gradual embracing of adivasi rights activism, but it is only in the late 1970s that Devi, having just acquired a considerable pan-Indian fame with her 1974 Naxalite novel Hajar Churashir Maa [Mother of 1084] (2014b), starts focusing on the adivasis as subjects of her fiction in a systematic fashion, beginning with a novelistic rendition of the Birsa Munda rebellion against the British Raj, Aranyer Adhikar [Right to the Forest] (1986 [1977]). This chapter shows how the differences between Levi and Devi in many instances converge in mutually illuminating parallelisms. Both Devi’s and Levi’s writing emerge from an intensive fieldwork among an exploited, marginalised group on the background of internal colonialism. I use the term to indicate relationships of colonial domination enacted within national boundaries, “[denoting] extremes of categorisation and discrimination of people in a polity that is formally national” (Cooper 2005, 249), and characterised by “subordination, inequality, oppression, discrimination, economic exploitation, and geographical contiguity between the colonizing power and the colonized people” (Olusegun Adeyeri 2019, 230)—as it is the case for the South Italian peasants and Indian adivasis that appear in Levi’s and Devi’s works. Internal colonialism, in world-­ systemic terms, may be interpreted as a form of the replication of core-­ periphery relations on a national level, and indeed reading Levi’s and Devi’s work comparatively require the adoption of a multi-scalar perspective—one of the chief methodological points of materialist world-literary approaches—for their political interventions to be properly understood. The ethnographic aspect of Levi’s and Devi’s fieldwork (and of the literary works produced through it) lies in its attempt to grasp a radically different worldview in order to contrast this internal colonialism effectively—the necessity to understand a group in order to be able to support it. In other words, Devi’s and Levi’s fieldwork and ethnographic narratives are specifically conceived as a development of radical political activism. Their political practices are rooted in different contexts—antifascism and the struggle against the marginalisation of the Italian South for Levi; indigenous rights for Devi—but their politics can ultimately be seen as aligned and comparable. Juxtaposing these two writers allows us to tackle the phenomenon of internal colonialism in a comparative perspective, showing how it can be enacted both in a European nation such as Italy and in a postcolonial nation such as India. Both Levi’s peasants and Devi’s adivasis represent the terrain on which the failures of the various projects of nation-building (or,

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in a less charitable reading, the inherently exploitative nature of those projects) are most painfully registered. Both authors see the history of their country as a continuity. In particular, the historical condition of these subaltern groups has remained, for both authors, largely unchanged throughout the centuries, highlighting to the structural continuity between different political regimes that have ruled Italy and India: Levi sees precise continuities between liberal, fascist and post-war Italy, Devi between colonial and postcolonial India. Both writers put the discovery of rural subalterns at the heart of a project of political renewal that aims at including peasants and adivasis within the nation and in turn transforming the nation into a more just institution. At the same time, both authors interrogate how subaltern communities can face cultural and social change in a way that is emancipatory. From this reading, both Levi and Devi emerge as world-literary. Through the registration of fieldwork experiences and relations, they examine internal colonialism in various contexts that enable it (the fascist regime as an instrument of sustained class oppression, and its aftermath; the inequalities at the heart of the (post)colonial nation; and the exploitative logic of the State itself, including its ruthless developmentalism). This examination, in turn, functions as an indexing of the dynamics of an uneven modernity—and the strategies (of which colonialism and fascism are both examples) through which these inequalities are established and maintained in a variety of historical contexts. But their work is also world-­ literary because, highlighting the possibilities of (and the obstacles faced by) intersectional militant relations to be developed on the field, they also elaborate forms of resistance to those inequalities. The chapter begins with a survey of different theories of militant anthropology/ethnography, which provides a shared critical framework to discuss Levi’s and Devi’s ethnographic narratives as the registration of radical fieldwork. I then dedicate the following sections to Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. After discussing Levi’s intellectual background and the way it manages to transform internment into ethnographic fieldwork, I tackle the main political and anthropological arguments of Christ: I read it as a fieldwork memoir in which partisan side-taking is essential, and in which ethnographic exploration of the peasant world produces an ‘anthropology of antifascism’, functional to Levi’s political programme and his critique of the traditional conceptions of the state. However, I argue that Levi’s militant approach and narrative voice in Christ have some issues: he does not acknowledge the uneven nature of his relationships on the field

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and relies on an ethnographic authority that is ultimately monological, also in its style. In the final section dedicated to Levi, I discuss how his anthropological paradigms change in other fieldwork memoirs—the Sicilian travelogue Words Are Stones and Levi’s reportages from India, which explore, respectively, the political awakening of the peasant world in Italy and possible parallelisms with anti-colonial movements. I discuss the limitations of the second point, arguing that Levi’s Third-Worldism, resulting in an unsatisfactory analysis of the postcolonial state, calls for a comparison with Mahasweta Devi. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to Devi’s ethnographic fictions. It begins by exploring the connection between her political positions, the bhadralok milieu and the Naxalite movement. I argue that her approach is based on rejecting an anthropology of the indigenous populations of India that is informed by the needs of counterinsurgency. This is epitomised by the short story “Draupadi”, whose counterinsurgency setting allows her to introduce the negative model of the ethnographer that haunts her work. I then discuss Devi’s novel Chotti Munda and His Arrow, which I read as an ethnographic fiction (novel) that articulates Devi’s anthropological understanding of adivasi identity in the shadow of the Indian state as a continuous struggle. I conclude with the novella “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”, which I read as a self-reflective experiment on the role of the activist/writer/ethnographer that aims to help marginalised indigenous populations. The novella presents a profoundly humble vision of militancy, which ultimately translates into trusting indigenous people to know what is better for their survival, contrasting the modus operandi of top-down developmentalism.

3.1   Militant Ethnography and Its Discontents Before addressing Levi’s and Devi’s texts, the concept of militant/partisan/activist ethnography, which I use to frame their narratives, needs some clarification. I borrow this set of terms from a body of anthropological scholarship that, since the 1990s, has contested the classical understanding of the ethnographer as a detached observer, not only, as discussed in the previous chapter, to reinstate the importance of fieldwork intimacy but to promote fieldwork as the site of political activism. This approach, as a form of critical anthropology, also differs from textualist/postmodern anthropology. Shannon Speed (2006), indeed, explicitly contrasts, as reactions to the crisis of ethnography and ethnographical representation of the

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1970s and 1980s, the textualist, self-reflective re-imagining of anthropology with “the development of collaborative and activists approaches” (66). If the former signifies a rejection of colonial and imperialist complicity through a focus on the politics of ethnographic texts, the latter attempts to rethink, from a radical perspective, the political engagements an ethnographer could undertake during fieldwork. A possible starting point is Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ plea for “militant anthropology”, based on an ethnography that is “personally engaged and politically committed” (1995, 419). This means, for Scheper-Hughes, actively participating in struggles that ethnographers encounter on the field and siding explicitly with the marginalised communities they study. She describes how she decided to support the political battles of a squatters’ association during her fieldwork in north-east Brazil, even though some research opportunities would be closed to her as she abandoned her political neutrality. Yet, she did not regret her choice—not only because the women of the squatters’ association required her explicit political commitment to their cause to accept her presence as a fieldworker, but also because she started to find “little virtue to false neutrality in the face of the broad political and moral dramas” (411) that she encountered on the field. Militant ethnography, for Scheper-Hughes, rejects observation—the traditional activity of the ethnographer—in favour of “witnessing”: while observation is “a passive act which positions the anthropologist as a ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ (i.e., uncommitted) seeing I/eye”, witnessing “is in the active voice, and it positions the anthropologist inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being, one who will ‘take sides’ and make judgements” (419). Her militant anthropology resonates with Neelam Srivastava’s definition of partisanship. Partisans, she argues, “are characterized by their taking of sides, a commitment to a political cause that does not come from a filial relationship to their culture or nation but from an affiliative one, a chosen allegiance, as it were” (2018, 5, emphasis mine). This form of affiliative relationship—a position of cross-­ class and/or cross-cultural alliance—is a stance that militant ethnographers, usually outsiders with respect to the community they study, are poised to take. Schepher-Hughes’ main point is the ethical imperative for ethnographers to act as radical political actors on the field. Other militant approaches to ethnography generally share this premise, but further elaborate the epistemological and methodological aspects of the activist-scholar position. Jeffrey Juris, for instance, proposes a model of “militant

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ethnography” that does not simply put emphasis on the act of “taking sides” on the fieldwork but that is conceived, from the outset, as “collaboratively produced ethnographic knowledge [that] aims to facilitate ongoing activist (self-)reflection regarding movement goals, tactics, strategies, and organizational forms” (2007, 164). Conceived as knowledge for activists and produced with activists rather than about activists, Juris’ militant ethnography implies that, in order to grasp the logic of activist practice, researchers should become activists themselves. Crucially, Juris is also concerned with the issue of the output of ethnographic research, which must find a way to become useful, accessible and relevant for activists. Charles Hale offers an alternative model, making a distinction between cultural critique and activist research. The former manifests its political alignment through the content of its research, not by establishing relationships with a group in struggle (2006, 98), while the latter is “a method through which we affirm a political alignment with an organised group of people in struggle and allow dialogue with them to shape each phase of the process, from conception of the research topic to data collection to verification and dissemination of the results” (97). Crucially, Hale argues that, while cultural criticism can deconstruct problematic concepts or forms of knowledge, activist research has to acknowledge that some struggles do rely on positivist knowledge and potentially problematic theoretical tools—such as the language of indigenous rights employed by the activists that Hale was collaborating with in Nicaragua. According to Hale, activist research must, therefore, “deploy positivist social science methods and subject them to rigorous critique while acknowledging with acceptance the cognitive dissonance that results” (113). Hale argues, moreover, that activist research requires pragmatical analytical closure—it must be able to elaborate a critical position that enables praxis, although this does not mean that activist research is antithetical to theory. It must, however, necessarily produce theory “grounded in the contradictions that the actors themselves confront” (115). Hale’s sharp distinction between cultural critique and activist research, and in particular the idea that activism tends towards analytic closure, has been contested by Michal Osterweil. Her argument is that contemporary activism “is constituted by experimental, reflexive, critical knowledge-­ practices” aimed at developing more effective politics by “producing subjectivities that know, think, and do differently” (2013, 600). Osterweil insists that “complexity, critique, questioning, investigating, deconstructing, and writing (text)” (602)—that is, the practices that would be

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associated with “cultural critique” in Hale’s sense—can and do belong in activist spaces. More broadly, she warns against the risk of associating political action with the necessity of analytical closure, suggesting that “we should acknowledge that movements have to take political positions and make concrete demands even when they know full well that the situation is complex and that causes may not be simple, fully knowable, or transparent” (611). The task of militant ethnographers is to recognise and help the epistemological work done by activists, who may themselves be trying to find new concepts and words for new possibilities of political action. Some of the disagreements between Hale and Osterweil are connected to the different nature and contexts of the political struggles they study, which lead them to conceive activist research in different ways: one according to more traditional, one-way form of solidarity, in which the research-­ ethnographer has access to vital skills, tools and resources that are useful for a grassroots community, the other more reciprocal, interpreting the militant researcher as part of a wider network of activist groups (Juris and Khasnabish 2013, 25). Appreciating this difference is important because taking into account the specific situation at hand—including the characteristics of the group or community in struggle, or the urgency of a given struggle—is crucial to avoid generalisations on the benefits and the shortcomings of militant anthropology. An important corrective, in this sense, is represented by Alpa Shah’s work on Indian adivasis from the town of Tapu, Jharkhand. While sympathetic with the ethical premises of activist research, Shah points out that, in the context she operated into, “opinions, desires, and concerns of the poorest rural adivasis often contradicted and subverted those of the well-­ meaning urban-based middle-class activists, as well as those of local rural elites aspiring to rise up the class hierarchy” (2010, 11). Shah argues that the objectives of middle-class activists often run the risk of further marginalising the poorest strata of the adivasi population—for instance, forcing them to choose between adhering to a model of “eco-savage” or reject any possibility of obtaining some political agency. Faced with a situation in which a certain form of activism does employ categories that are harmful to the people that activists claim to speak for, Shah makes an argument for a critical anthropology that takes the risk of “produc[ing] an analysis that […] contradicts and subverts the empirical and moral premises of the arguments of activists” (28). Debates on the possibilities and shortcomings of militant ethnography highlight a number of issues, relevant for discussions about activism in

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general and that are useful when discussing literary texts in which activism within a fieldsite is thematised and registered, like Levi’s and Devi’s works. These debates foreground the ethical importance and theoretical insights generated by taking sides on a field—but also the complications involved in identifying which side to support—and how to support it. They force activists-scholars to confront a number of complexities connected to the interplay between action and theory: is action—activism—antithetical to critical complexity, theory or cultural critique? Or is activism without complexity useful at all? Lastly, they force anyone who is actively “writing culture” to reflect on the role that militant (ethnographic) writing plays in concretely helping the community they write about. In this chapter, my assumption is that there is much to be gained by reading Levi and Devi—as well as their characters—as militant ethnographers, and their works as militant ethnographic narratives. This perspective highlights how they variously register the contradiction and dilemmas, and also the importance, of militancy of the field, and how their works (and characters, and narrative voices) show how a partisan viewpoint, conjoined with fieldwork, can produce different, insightful, tension-ridden understandings of a given community. From the perspective of world-­ literary criticism, moreover, juxtaposing and comparing the insights from these ethnographic narratives is an important step to introduce reflections on experiences and practices of resistance to the dynamics of modernity— but also, crucially, to complicate the very category of resistance.

3.2  Carlo Levi 3.2.1   Christ Stopped at Eboli as an Ethnographic Critique of the State Carlo Levi—a doctor, painter, writer belonging to the Turinese Jewish bourgeoisie—seems at first an unlikely traveller into “the desolate reaches of Lucania” (Levi 2000a, 12). However, his scientific, artistic, cultural, and political formation provides him with precious intellectual tools to turn Gagliano, the site of his internment, into an ethnographic field. In this sense, the importance of his medical training can hardly be overestimated. Levi graduated in medicine but soon chose to focus on his activity as a painter. However, his medical knowledge turned out to be extremely valuable in Gagliano, where the peasants asked him to make use of his skills from the very beginning. This is perhaps the enabling condition that

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allows Levi to establish a connection with the peasants, allowing Levi to turn, in Scheper-Hughes’ terms, from an observer—albeit with an explicitly political positioning—to an activist-witness who acts within the fieldsite. As a Turinese, Levi emerges from one of the major political, economic and intellectual urban centres of peninsula, and certainly his “descent” into the peripheral South can be read as cultural shock, the discovery of a previously unknown reality that forces a radical rethinking of his political and epistemological categories. However, Levi is not a completely unprepared traveller: his stay is informed, first of all, by his engagement with the so-called Southern Question. The term indicates the political, economic and cultural issue represented by the development gap between the North and South of Italy, the latter being chiefly agricultural and dominated by latifundium, clientelism and feudal social relations. The Southern Question emerged, as a political problem, simultaneously with the Italian Unification in 1861 and quickly became a major point of political discussion. The development of a strong alliance between Northern industrialists and Southern landholders, however, prevented radical solutions like land redistribution in the South. This was the “monstrous agrarian block”1 that Antonio Gramsci famously attacked in his piece on the Southern Question, suggesting that it could only be defeated by an alliance between the industrial working classes of the North and the peasants from the South (2007, 135). The Southern Question generated a massive amount of political, cultural and economic discourse. A significant part of these reflections reinforced a vision of the South as primitive and barbaric. This is a development that Jane Schneider has no qualms about calling orientalist, stressing that North-South differences were articulated “in relation to a wider context for defining difference: the context set by dominant colonial and neo-­ colonial powers” (1998, 3) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the first crisis of brigandage following Italian unification, which basically cast Southern Italy into civil war from 1861 to 1864, the Southern Question took its “radical, oppositional contours” from the 1870s to the 1890s, when “contrasts became not only essentialized, but racialized as well” (3). Italian positivist anthropology was a prominent player in this process: Lombrosian criminal anthropologists, in particular, interpreted the social problems of the South through the lenses of biological determinism, arguing that Southerners were racially predisposed to crime. The result was a general criminalisation of the Southerners, but mostly of the

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rural poor, from which brigands chiefly stemmed. It comes as no surprise that Cesare Lombroso elaborated many of his ideas about race while he accompanied an anti-brigand expedition (Petraccone 2000, 154). However, alternative readings of the Southern Question stressed how the South was economically marginalised and exploited within the national context, reframing the debate in terms of internal colonialism. Levi was exposed to these thinkers, particularly to Gramsci, and was able to discuss the Southern Question with leftist Turinese intellectuals, most notably with Piero Gobetti, one of the leading figures of the Turinese intellectual and political scene in the inter-war era and one of Levi’s early mentors (Russo 1997, 1). Gobetti, in particular, provided Levi with a crucial occasion to rethink the Southern Question when he asked him to write an article on the conservative politician Antonio Salandra for his journal Rivoluzione Liberale [Liberal Revolution] (D’Orsi 1997, 11). Therefore, Levi’s reading of the South and of the peasants was guided by a theoretical preparation that oriented his interpretation of the social reality around him. However, to frame Levi’s stay in Gagliano as specifically militant fieldwork, it is crucial to discuss how his views on North-South relations connect with his anti-fascist politics. His form of antifascism was largely influenced by Gobetti’s, who argued that fascism is nothing more than the autobiography of the nation (1983, 165)—a natural development, an unveiling even, of the failings and authoritarian leanings of liberal Italy. It should be noted that Gobetti’s critique is not addressed at any liberal democracy, but specifically at Italian political culture, judged conformist, driven by self-interest, eschewing accountability and an ethics of responsibility, and therefore easily swayed into fascism (see Panizza 2016). While Gobetti’s thesis is not, therefore, a radical critique of liberalism tout court, it nevertheless offers the compelling idea that fascism (and arguably right-­ wing authoritarianism in general) reveals the systemic issues of a given polity. Levi accepted Gobetti’s indication and envisioned a fundamental continuity between liberal and fascist Italy. This premise is crucial to understand Levi’s interest for the peasants: it is precisely because they are excluded from the nation, history and power—and hence from fascism— that they harbour the key for the renewal of Italy. To unlock this potential, however, the peasant world must first be understood anthropologically, and Levi sets himself to do that by combining his theoretical knowledge, which also includes significant anthropological readings, with the insights he collects from his (enforced) stay in Gagliano. The result—Christ Stopped at Eboli—is ultimately an

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ethnographic narrative—a fieldwork memoir—that produces the anthropological construct of the “peasant civilization”. The anthropological aspects of Levi’s writings have been discussed at length: Giovan Battista Bronzini, in his seminal monograph on Levi’s anthropological imagination and influences, defines Christ as travel writing on the Italian South with an anthropological orientation2 (1996, 12). I am mostly interested, however, in how Levi produces a model of ethnographic fieldwork that is inherently militant and politically engaged. Levi’s ethnographic encounter with the peasants is framed within a context of a political project—a quest, as it were—with Levi’s gaze searching, in the derelict inhabitants of Gagliano, for cultural solutions against totalitarianism that would benefit both the peasant themselves and Italy as a whole. In doing so, I argue, his text is also world-literary, engaging with the dynamics of modernity in a way that transcends the Italian context—as Levi himself would explicitly articulate in later texts. Levi’s anthropological imagining of South Italian peasants emerges from the very first pages of Christ Stopped at Eboli. The book starts with an integrated preface to the whole text, modelled after the opening of classical epic poems like the Aeneid (Vitelli 2008, 69). Taking up the perspective of the peasants, Levi explains the core of their predicament: “We’re not Christians,” [the peasants] say. “Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.”3 “Christian”, in their way of speaking, means “human being”, and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We’re not Christians, we’re not human beings; we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. (Levi 2000a, 11)

“Christian”, as it is used by the peasants of Lucania, and Levi by extension, is an anthropological category rather than a religious one. This label encompasses all the members of Italian society that, differently from the peasants, participate in the state and benefit from its power, however marginally, and hence retain their status as human beings. Levi points out that the idea is symptomatic of a more general condition that has further, far-­ reaching implications: Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history. Christ never came,

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just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks, who flourished beside the Gulf of Taranto: none of the pioneers of Western civilization brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself. No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty. We speak a different language, and here our tongue is incomprehensible. (12)

This passage contains, in a nutshell, Levi’s view of the colonial relationship between the peasants and the (Italian) state. The peasant world has always been exploited by the representatives of “Western civilisation”—a rather loose, unarticulated concept that is identified with a list of scientific, philosophical, existential and economical concepts and practices that harken back to Greek and Roman antiquity, has his modern representatives in the Italian (fascist) bureaucrats and notables, and employs, as its unifying metaphor, Christ’s descending. This means that contacts between the two “civilisations” have only resulted in the systematic draining of the peasant civilisation, entrenching it in its misery. The point is not that the peasants have not experienced history, but that it was always imposed on them. In world-systemic terms, Levi frames the peasants as the victims of the modernisation processes, of combined and uneven development, reduced to an eternal periphery to be exhausted of its resources and potential. The direct quotation of a collective peasant voice to validate his thesis— “We’re not Christians”—deserves some commentary, as it anticipates important stylistic features that, as I discuss later, represent the main fault lines of Levi’s anthropological/militant project. This voice is, quite clearly, a “common denominator person” of the kind prescribed by ethnographic realism, not a real individual, which appears to validate the ethnographic authority of Levi’s own voice by reassuring the reader, early on, that the narrator speaks for the native’s point of view. This is of course an effective dramatical and rhetorical strategy to give more weight to Levi’s central argument and metaphor within the limited space of the preface. I argue, however, that this rhetorical procedure intimates at the way Levi incorporates (stylistically) peasant voices in the book as a whole: while they are memorably described in narrative sequences and portraits, the peasants, when cultural insights are being explicitly articulated, become a largely

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collective presence that Levi subsumes, as a disembodied and anonymous “the peasants” (or, in this case, a “we”), into his own voice, in a form of monologism. This monologism takes various forms throughout the book and steers the text, stylistically and epistemologically, towards ethnographic realism, especially as regards centralising the ethnographic authority in the fieldworker. As a consequence, Christ, as a fieldwork memoir, is, at the same time, very attentive to witness the inequalities that the fieldworker encounters in the field—the book is meant as an explicit, radical critique of those inequalities—but (in a way similar to Stevenson’s In the South Seas) is largely blind, silent or dismissive about the inequalities that exist within the fieldwork relation between its protagonist and the people he interacts with. This will be one of the main points of interest of a later part of the chapter. For the time being, let us focus on Levi’s two fundamental anthropological theses: the combination of cultural and economic marginalisation that afflicts the South Italian peasantry, and the absolute cultural difference between “peasant” and “Christian” civilisation that underlies such marginalisation. It is worth noting that the idea of a peasant civilisation that speaks a completely different “language” rests on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of prelogism and of an inherently different “primitive mentality”. Lévy-Bruhl is, indeed, alongside James Frazer, one of the main anthropological influences on Levi’s writing and thought (Bronzini 1996, 48). He conceives primitive mentality not as “a rudimentary form of our own” (as evolutionist anthropology would) but instead as “normal under the conditions in which it is employed, [...] complex and developed in its own way” (Lévy-Bruhl 1923, 33). Lévy-Bruhl defines the primitive mentality as prelogical, meaning that it is not (as) affected by the principle of non-­ contradiction—it “admits the simultaneity of data which cannot be coexistent either in time or space with us” (105). The primitives, surrounded by “the presence and agency of powers which are invisible and inaccessible to the senses” (60), live in a state of emotional participation with the universe, and their existence is contiguous with supernatural forces. Following Lévy-Bruhl, Levi argues that the peasants’ vision of the world is dominated by obscure forces, saturated in divine power and multiple, seemingly contradictory meanings, and trapped in webs of reciprocal influences:

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To the peasants everything has a double meaning. […] People, trees, animals, even objects and words have a double life. Only reason, religion, and history have clear-cut meanings. […] And in the peasants’ world there is no room for reason, religion, and history. There is no room for religion, because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not merely symbolically, divine: […] everything is bound up in natural magic. (Levi 2000a, 115)

From Lévy-Bruhl, Levi takes the idea that peasant “mentality” is fully autonomous from a “rational” way of thinking, embedding the peasants’ life within a world in which natural and supernatural overlap and contradictory phenomena coexist. It is worth noting that Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogism is riddled with ambivalences, which Christ inherits: it casts the primitive (or, in the case, the peasant) as a radical other from a cognitive point of view, but on the other hand, it also opposes the hierarchies of unilineal cultural evolutionism. The interesting aspect of Christ, however, is how these theses are used as a springboard to articulate a political discourse of solidarity. Assuming that the peasants represent a radical form of alterity, Levi wonders how, once it is properly understood and treated with the dignity it deserves, this alterity can provide key insights against fascism, one of the most nefarious products of “Christian” civilisation. Levi finds its answers by undertaking a militant and partisan fieldwork. The first act of this fieldwork is to encounter and reject the signori, the rural elite of the village. The most prominent of them is Don Luigino, the podestà (the fascist title for mayor)—an enthusiastic supporter of the regime, rejoicing in tormenting the political prisoners under his jurisdiction and in organising political rallies. Rejecting the world(view) of the signori is a preliminary condition for engaging the peasants: there is no possibility of neutrality, as the signori know well: Don Luigino warns Levi against the local population, claiming that he should not mingle with anybody. A similar advice is soon offered by Milillo, one of the local doctors, who reminds Levi that the peasants are “good people, but primitive” (21) and that since he is a handsome young man he should never accept wine or coffee from a local woman, lest she could serve him a philtre or a love potion. Levi ironically comments that he disregarded this advice, frequently drinking wine and coffee offered by the peasants (even the women), probably ingesting a significant amount of philtres. Instead of harming him, Levi speculates, they possibly granted him some form of insight on the local world: “perhaps in some mysterious way [the philtres]

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helped me to penetrate that closed world, shrouded in black veils, bloody and earthy, that other world where the peasants live and which no one can enter without a magic key” (22). Stating that he has, indeed, drunk the philtres has multiple narrative functions. Firstly, it allows Levi to foreground his openness to the world of the peasants, including the magic, folkloric side of Gagliano. A significant part of his ethnological explorations will involve precisely witches, spells, spirits, myths and popular beliefs, which are a crucial part of the peasants’ imaginative world. Secondly, it works as an act of construction of his ethnographic authority, reassuring the reader that he, almost through a mystical connection, is a trustworthy guide—he has the key to the peasants’ world. This is of course done at the expense of the authority—ethnographic or otherwise—of the signori. But importantly, the ease with which Levi bestows this authority upon himself—an authority that the reader is, at this point, supposed to accept on faith—bespeaks a lack of willingness, on Levi’s part, to interrogate his own positionality. This passage, tellingly, employs a masculine language of active (sexual) exploration and discovery, which creates a subtle but lingering sense of hierarchy (a subject-object relation) between the ethnographer-figure and the peasants. As Levi begins to describe the peasants, he simultaneously begins to characterise their relationship with the state. This relationship is crucial for Christ’s anthropological and political argument, resulting in what I call an ethnographic critique of the state. It is first explored as Levi comments on the frequent assemblies that Don Luigino is eager to organise due to colonial war the regime is waging in Ethiopia. This prompts Levi to reflect on the degrees of allegiance to fascism of Gagliano’s inhabitants. Levi points out that the representatives of the local elite are all members of the Fascist Party, because the party stands for power in the form of the state. No peasant is a party member for the exact same reasons—they do not feel entitled to power, and most importantly, they perceive the state as a natural calamity, treating it with the same resigned indifference reserved to a vicious storm, in a sense naturalising history: To the peasants the State is more distant than heaven and far more of a scourge, because it is always against them. Its political tags and platforms and, indeed, the whole structure of it do not matter. The peasants do not understand them because they are couched in a different language from their own, and there is no reason why they should ever care to understand them. Their only defence against the State and the propaganda of the State

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is resignation, the same gloomy resignation that bows their shoulders under the scourges of nature. (Levi 2000a, 78)

The peasants, in other words, see the state as a form of destiny, yet another natural-magical force that rules over their life. This way of seeing the state, however, seems to inoculate them against fascist ideology. The chapter significantly ends with a few peasants—those who did not manage to sneak out of town to the fields, to avoid losing a day’s work—gathered in the town square by Don Luigino and forced to unenthusiastically listen to fascist propaganda on the radio. The speech, Levi comments, comes from “a land of ease and progress, which had forgotten the existence of death and now called it up as a joke, with the frivolity of an unbeliever” (80). The passage does not literally validate the peasant’s vision of the state— Levi, after all, does not think that arcane interconnections control human life. However, he positions that as a more consistent interpretation of reality than the fascists’ militaristic faith in the state as a machine of infinite progress that can overcome death, or worse, distribute it to others at will, as it is happening in Ethiopia. It is worth noting that Levi insists on framing the peasants’ resignation as “passivity”. However, resignation could, also according to some of Levi’s descriptions, be interpreted in a different way. James Scott’s work on Malay peasants, for instance, suggests that resignation is often better understood as pragmatic (see Scott 1985, 324–327). The fact that peasants resign to oppressive material circumstances that cannot be changed at a given moment does not imply that the peasants are “so encompassed by an existing system of domination that they cannot either imagine its revolutionary negation or act on that negation” (335). In other words, resignation does not necessarily result in an inherently “passive”, hopeless attitude towards the existing order, and can be read as a temporary solution that can—and will—be abandoned if the circumstances change. In turn, “passivity” can at times be reframed as passive resistance, part of a broader set of practices that Scott calls everyday resistance, fought through “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on” (xvi). One of the characteristics of these everyday forms of resistance is that they are “informal, often covert, and concerned with immediate, de facto gains” (33). Yet they are crucial to ensure a subaltern community’s survival. Levi himself describes a number of examples of everyday resistance: the fact that the peasants, for

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instance, are trying to avoid, if not to subtly sabotage, Don Luigino’s assemblies; or the fact that they quietly, but stubbornly, elude the harmful and exploitative medical practice of Gibilisco, the other town doctor. Sure enough, Levi understands the potential of this resignation as a counterpoint to fascist ideology; but his overstatement of the peasant’s “passivity” lies at the heart, as I will discuss later, of some problematic aspects of his own relationship with the peasants. In another section, Levi describes the peasants’ relationship with war and history, which he uses to further define their understanding of the state. He observes that the peasants continue to treat the war preparations with scepticism and resignation—they know the war is an imposition from the “fellows in Rome” (Levi 2000a, 131). The war is yet another natural catastrophe, and Levi claims that it is not registered by the peasants as a historical event. Indeed, Levi claims that peasants are indifferent to historical memory, because history is the handmaiden of the state, their enemy. The only narrative based on past events that they hold dear is that of brigandage, which, however, is preserved in their hearts and minds in the form of a myth, rather than as a “proper” historical event. Post-unitary brigandage, which exploded after 1861, was a very heterogeneous phenomenon: partly genuine social revolt, partly the expression of the schemes of local elites involved in criminal networks; partly supported by former officials of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—the main power in the South before the unification—engaged in anti-“Italian” guerrilla. It is even plausible to read it as a civil war, considering the amount of troops that the newly unified Italy sent to fight in the South, as well as the number of victims involved in the resulting repression (Marmo 2016, 602–3). Regardless of the interpretation, the repression of brigandage reveals the presence of a strong colonial tendency in post-unitary North-South relations, most notably in the status of disposable, second-­ class citizens attached to the Southern poor. It took the shape of a civilising mission: a moralising enterprise through brute force, which cast the South in an explicitly subordinate role (Petraccone 2000, 62–65). The authorities focused on a criminal interpretation of brigandage, bypassing its social element (Graaf-Bartalesi 2011, 11). The authoritarian, colonial nature of such repression matters because Levi has no real sympathy for brigandage itself—as a social revolt, he sees it as anarchic, violent and (self-)destructive, and as a civil war, he sees it as colluded with local power networks, factionalism and reactionary groups. He values, however, the collective memory that the peasants have of it,

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and the way it positions them with respect to an oppressive state. Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of social banditry might be useful here, defining a relationship between the peasantry and peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported. (2000, 20)

This form of bandit-peasants relationship, which Hobsbawm based mostly on printed sources inspired by folkloric traditions, has historically been more mythical than real (Slatta 2004, 23–24). However, neither Levi nor the peasants are ultimately interested in the reality of the social bandit, but precisely in its myth. Levi claims that to narrate the story of the peasants one should conceive “a history outside the framework of time, confining itself to that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology” (Levi 2000a, 138). But, as Levi discusses elsewhere, a mythology is “the expression of a particular moral world, referred to the feeling that is its condition” (Levi 1948, 68). As such, the mythology of brigandage—of social banditry—turns out to be the moral memento of the elementary sense of justice that the peasant civilisation possesses—a latent impulse to resist the radical dehumanisation it has been subjected to. As Levi claims: “Every revolt on the part of the peasants springs out of an elementary desire for justice deep at the dark bottom of their hearts” (Levi 2000a, 139–140). The challenge is finding a way to transform the death-wish that Levi sees in brigandage into solidarity and political action. It is important to note here a divergence from Gramsci—a crucial influence for Levi’s conception of internal colonialism—specifically from Gramsci’s conception of subaltern history. Levi’s vision of brigandage as a desperate rebellion that ultimately does not change the status quo of the peasants may possibly echo Gramsci’s idea that “subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up”, and that “only ‘permanent’ victory breaks their subordination” (1971, 55). Yet, for Gramsci, the history of the subaltern groups should consist precisely in tracking down, from fragmentary evidence, the phases that a specific subaltern group experiences before reaching autonomy. This means considering the impact, on the subalterns’ consciousness, of events that, in themselves, does not result in a permanent victory—for instance, a failed uprising. On the other hand, Levi’s idea of subaltern

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history as a mythology dismisses the Gramscian task of reconstructing a factual history of the peasants, with the obvious risk of ignoring how the peasant’s oppression, however persistent, may change its historical configurations over time—they may be an eternal periphery, but not an unchanging one. The society that Levi encountered, in fact, had changed considerably in the previous decades, as a response to nineteenth-century, post-Napoleonic liberalisation (Davis 2016, 373), but in this phase Levi seems to deny that the peasant self-awareness may change by political and historical events. It is only in the post-war period that Levi will recognise a chance for the peasants to change their self-perception. This is also a difference with Devi that I address later in the chapter. At any rate, these passages on the state and on brigandage represent a fundamental groundwork to frame the peasants as potential allies against fascism. Levi’s anthropological reading of the peasants, however, fully reveals its importance if read jointly with his philosophical essay Fear of Freedom [Paura della Libertà], where, as Italo Calvino commented, Levi unfolds its general worldview and the lines of his reinterpretation of history (2010, ix), including his own theory of the origins of totalitarianism. To do so, he constructs a theory of the state, religion, freedom and art that is highly valuable to understand his engagement with the peasants of Gagliano. In Fear of Freedom, Levi defines “religion” as an attempt to keep at bay the sense of “the sacred”—a paralysing, primordial state, where no individual consciousness is possible. The sacred is, however, a part of every human being and is also the principle of creativity and freedom. Levi calls religion the attempt to exorcise the sense of the sacred through a sacrifice—banishing the sacred outside of one’s inner self and fixing it in symbols and rituals, making it understandable. This allows individuals to exist but enslaves them to idols, the fixed forms that religion turns the sacred into. The state can be one of those idols created to exorcise the fear of a peculiar form of the sacred—the mass, the indistinct human matter that represents the denial of relationships between individuals, while containing the potential for all relationships. Human beings, moreover, are constantly forced to perform sacrifices to keep the state-idol alive: sacrifices of their own individual autonomy; sacrifices of those social groups that are framed as foreigners; and the ultimate sacrifice, the collective holocaust of war. Ironically, the enslavement to the state prevents personal expression or freedom, casting individuals in a similar condition to the first, paralysing encounter with the sacred. Peace and

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creativity are only possible when human beings react to the sacred not by enslaving themselves to idols but by finding a way to retain their individuality within a free relation with otherness, constructing real human relations. In social terms, this means that “the divinisation of the state (and the servitude that results from it) will last until the end of social infancy, until each man, peering inside himself, won’t find, in his own complexity, the state in its entirety, and, in his own freedom, its necessity” (Levi 1948, 23). With this in mind, it is possible to understand the full implications of the relationship between the peasants, the ruling classes and the state described in Christ. Reading the situation in Gagliano through the lenses of Fear of Freedom, it is clear that, for Levi, the signori—but by extension all the supporters of the fascist party—have turned the (liberal and fascist) state into an idol. They maintain this idol through human sacrifices—the peasants and the targets of colonial violence being among the most prominent victims of this process. Conversely, the peasants are forced into a state of unfreedom and passivity, resigned to suffer destiny in its many forms, including the state. Yet within this collective state of paralysis—reminiscent of both the sacred and the mass—Levi sees the possibility to construct real human relationships. The historical, cultural and political agency that might enable this change, as I will discuss, is identified by Levi in the forces of anti-fascist Resistance, but the new relationships that this change should produce, for Levi, are to be modelled on the peasants’ elementary sense of justice. 3.2.2   An Anthropology of Antifascism Levi documents the capacity of the peasants to establish various relationships of solidarity. There is, first of all, the solidarity connected to the shared experience of the tyranny of the state. The peasants harbour a natural suspicion of everything that comes from the state and an instinctive sympathy for everything that opposes it. This includes the political prisoners of the fascist regime, who naturally gain their favour: “they look at them kindly, and treated them like brothers because they too are, for some inexplicable reason, were victims of [the same] fate” (Levi 2000a, 78). In the peasants’ detachment from the state, Levi finds a class that is utterly immune to fascism as an ideological phenomenon or to any form of state-­ worshipping, giving instead primacy to a sense of pre-political solidarity— pre-political in the sense that it has a rather spontaneous character and is

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focused on elemental values like fellow feeling in the face of shared oppression. In spite of this unarticulated political character, such expression of solidarity, in the context of a totalitarian state, represent the basis of a culture of resistance. Levi’s ethnography of the peasants contains, therefore, an anthropology of antifascism. Another form of solidarity that Levi explores has distinctively anti-­ colonial implications. Documenting the reactions to the Ethiopian war, Levi juxtaposes the fanatical enthusiasm of the “Christians” throughout Italy to the silent scepticism of the peasants in Gagliano: It seemed that school children and their teachers, Fascist Scouts, Red Cross ladies, the widows and mothers of Milanese veterans, women of fashion in Florence, grocers, shopkeepers, pensioners, journalists, policemen, and government employees in Rome, in short, all those generally grouped together under the name of “Italian people”, were swept off their feet by a wave of glory and enthusiasm. […] The peasants were quieter, sadder, and more dour than usual. They had no faith in a promised land which had first to be taken away from those to whom it belonged; instinct told them that this was wrong and could only bring ill luck. (131)

Levi registers, in one stroke, the fervour of the state idolatry, and the elementary desire for justice that leads the peasants to the conclusion that it is wrong to rob people of their land. The peasants, therefore, harbour a respect for justice and humanity that represents the basis of both antifascism and anti-colonialism. What arguably lies behind this spiritual disposition is the peasants’ knowledge of death—the same death that fascist propaganda on Don Luigino’s radio so frivolously evokes. It is precisely the “humbling contact with death” (Ward 1996, 164) that Levi must learn throughout his stay in Gagliano, but particularly through his medical practice. Practising medicine among the peasants is a multi-faceted transformative praxis. First of all, in spite of his witty remarks about philtres, medicine is arguably Levi’s true ‘key’ to the peasant world. Moreover, it allows Levi to learn a new ethos from the peasants, including a newly found awareness of death. It is, more broadly, the medium for an exchange of knowledge— technical, cultural and existential. When he is confronted with the magical remedies that the peasant traditionally adopt, for instance, Levi sees no harm in respecting them and think they possess a significant psychological value for the peasants. The peasants, besides, facilitate this integration by

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actively supporting and valuing ‘Christian’ medicine (if done properly— they have no faith, reasonably enough, in the incompetent local doctors). Healing the peasants, finally, becomes, the single act of political resistance that Levi can undertake during his stay: at some point, possibly due to the intervention of a jealous Gibilisco, Levi is forbidden from the authorities to attend to his patients. Levi’s choice to disregard the prohibition charges his practice with tangible political significance, turning it into the major catalyst of Levi’s process of transformation. Indeed, one of the book’s central epiphanies comes precisely when Levi has to travel to a nearby village to attend to a severely ill patient, in spite of the ban. The peasant that Levi is supposed to attend to is, however, beyond salvation. Levi, however, is able to channel the feeling of his own impotence into a sense of shared pain, and in turn into a sense of belonging and peace: Death was in the house: I loved these peasants, I felt their sorrow and the humiliation of my impotence. Why then such a great peace was falling on me? […] An immense happiness, never felt before, was in me, and filled me completely, along with the flowing sense of an infinite plenitude. (Levi 2000a, 214)

Levi’s own peace and happiness are arguably connected to the impression that, albeit in a limited fashion, within the narrow area of his medical practice, Levi can talk a language of life and death that the peasants also share, differently from the hollow propaganda of the state. Speaking this language allows him, as an individual, to be of service to a community. It transforms his medical practice into an act that is integrated in the life of the peasants, differently from the conception of medicine as “a privilege or jus necationis, a feudal right over the life and death of the peasants” (Levi 2000a, 23) that Gibilisco practises. This moment of happiness is to be counted among what Levi, in Fear of Freedom, defines as “one of the few living moments”, generated by the instances in which “the two opposite processes of differentiation and undifferentiation find a mediating point” (Levi 1948, 19). The ban, moreover, is not just the catalyst for Levi’s epiphany, but also the occasion to explore how the peasants have the potential to express themselves politically and creatively. After they hear that the sick man has died, and that Levi was allowed to attend to him only very late, the inhabitants of Gagliano are outraged and decide to turn to art, setting up an

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improvised play. The play features a good and an evil doctor fighting for the body and soul of a peasant, with the evil doctor ultimately triumphing with the support of the state, and proceeding to butcher his patient. The play, articulating the biopolitical power that the peasants are subjected to, allows Levi to showcase a potential for creative responses within peasant civilisation that anticipates the political awakening of the peasant movement in Words Are Stones—and like in the Sicilian travelogue, the new solution replaces the traditional response of peasant civilisation: brigandage. It is to provide a voice to this core of elementary sense of justice, awareness of death, human solidarity and potential for creativity that Levi attempts to find an integration between the peasant civilisation and his own in the context of a political project, detailed in one of the most famous passages of Christ—a sort of manifesto within the book. Presented as a result of fieldwork, and hence as a concrete understanding of the plight of the peasants, Levi’s manifesto rejects all the traditional forms of state as viable solutions of the Southern Question, be they fascist, liberal or socialist, or any other form “in which the middle-class bureaucracy still survives” (Levi 2000a, 237)—although he is adamant that it is under fascism that the plight of the peasants has reached its absolute peak. Levi’s view is connected to his peculiar form of antifascism, which, after Gobetti, sees in fascism the expression of a persistent tendency towards authoritarianism and exploitation in the Italian state, to be uprooted through a radical cultural, moral and political change he connects with the peasantry. As Levi argues, “unless there is a peasant revolution we shall never have a true Italian revolution, for the two are identical” (239). Levi suggests a specific way out: local autonomy, which in the case of the peasants would mean the formation of autonomous rural communities. Only through the political autonomy of every social body that makes up the state it is possible to reconstruct the state together with the idea of the individual at its core: We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis. For the juridical and abstract concept of the individual we must substitute a new concept, more expressive of reality, one that will do away with the now unbridgeable gulf between the individual and the State. The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind. This concept of relationship, without which the individual has no life, is at the same time the basis of the

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State. The individual and the State coincide in theory and they must be made to coincide in practice as well, if they are to survive. This reversal of the concept of political life, which is gradually and unconsciously ripening among us, is implicit in the peasant civilization. (240, emphasis mine)

The idea of the individual—and the state—as a nexus of relationships clearly echoes the philosophical paradigm of Fear of Freedom, which posits that the only individuals that are free are those who fully embrace relationality without fear of losing themselves, and the only free state is the one that grants to the individuals their full autonomy. For Levi this idea already exists, in a latent state, within the peasant civilisation. It is crucial to notice that Levi’s political suggestions are framed within a national context. This is understandable considering the Resistance background that surrounds Christ, written during the German occupation with what Sergio D’Amaro calls Resistance-oriented mentality [mentalità resistenziale] (2003, 81)—that is, Levi’s perspective is that of a post-fascist Italy that the Resistance might get to build. Moreover, Levi, at the time he is writing the book, was a member of the Action Party, a liberal-socialist political formation active from 1942 to 1946. Inspired ideologically, among others, by Gobetti, the Action Party, in the immediate post-war era, was one of the most uncompromising political forces in terms of refusing to accommodate any residual fascist presence in the new political panorama—which was one of the reasons for its short life. Levi and the Actionists tended to consider the Resistance as a civil war, hence a radical point of crisis of the idea of Italy that called for a rethinking of the nation (Ward 1996, 16–22). Yet, what are the implications of this focus on national renewal for Levi’s anthropological understanding of the peasants? Arguably that Levi sees the peasants as marginalised, but rightful, citizens of the Italian nation-state. As much as he values peasant civilisation, he also believes in solutions to their plight that revolve around a rethinking of the nation as a whole. Autonomy means allowing the peasants to participate to the nation-state in their own terms, although reaching this objective would necessarily change, in his view, the very nature of the state. 3.2.3   Monologism and Peasant Passivity While practising a model of militant fieldwork that aims at establishing solidarity with the peasants and integrating them into a post-fascist nation,

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Levi is not very interested in interrogating the nature of the relationships that he establishes on the field. First of all, since passivity is a crucial aspect of his anthropological understanding of the peasants, he carves out for himself a dominant position within fieldwork, framing himself, by contrast, as an inherently active agent. The way he subsumes the voice of the peasants—as a collective entity—into his individual one is one of the main stylistic devices for this operation, but there are others, mostly linked to the fact that his ethnographic authority, within the narrative, is fundamentally monological: the peasants provide Levi with raw data for constructing his anthropological interpretation of their civilisation, but are never given the chance, within the text, to discuss or question Levi’s interpretations. These aspects allow me to explore the contradictions of activist fieldwork and activist (ethnographic) writing as they are presented in Christ. More specifically, Christ highlights how, regardless of an explicit desire to construct networks of solidarity with a marginalised subject, activists are still liable to impose potentially harmful meanings on their (potential) allies. Their desire for solidarity, moreover, does not automatically erase the hierarchies between themselves and the subaltern they speak for. Both issues emerge through Levi’s relationship with Giulia the witch. Giulia is Levi’s privileged informant in Gagliano. As a witch—an expert in sorcery and local folklore—she teaches Levi everything she knows about popular magic and is one of the most fully flashed-out characters of the book, meant to represent Levi’s concrete link with peasant culture. This is how Levi describes her: Giulia was a tall and shapely woman with a waist as slender as that of an amphora between her well-developed chest and hips. In her youth she must have had a solemn and barbaric beauty. […] her almond-shaped, opaque, black eyes had whites with blue and brown veins in them like those of dogs. […] her wide mouth [was] with thin, pale lips, somewhat turned down at the corners in bitterness, opened when she laughed, over powerful, sparkling, wolflike teeth. Her face as a whole had a strongly archaic character, not classical in the Greek or Roman sense, but stemming from an antiquity more mysterious and more cruel which had sprung always from the same ground, and which was unrelated to man, but linked with the soil and its everlasting animal deities. There were mingled in it cold sensuality, hidden irony, natural cruelty, impenetrable ill humor and an immense passive power, all these bound together in a stern, intelligent and malicious expression. In billowing veils and a wide, short skirt, firmly planted on legs as long and

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sturdy as the trunks of trees, her large body moved slowly and with harmony and balance, bearing proudly and erectly on its monumental and maternal base the small, black head of a serpent. (Levi 2000a, 104–105)

Giulia, in her archaic, solemn nature and alien character, embodies peasant civilisation as Levi sees it. The portrait invites the reader to respect Giulia’s “barbaric” dignity, similarly to how Levi invites the reader to respect the peasant civilisation as a whole. And yet the portrait is quite ambivalent. For instance, this description epitomises, to an extreme degree, Levi’s reliance on an animal vocabulary, comparing Giulia to a dog, a wolf and a serpent. As Roberto Derobertis argues, Levi systematically “[uses] metaphors, analogies, and similes related to the semantic field of animals” (Derobertis 2012, 162), especially in relation to women and children. This is ironic, considering that in the very first pages of Christ, Levi laments, through the voice of the peasants, that they are being regarded “simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild”. Arguably, Levi does not use animal imagery to suggest that this assessment is accurate, but his reliance on the semantic field of animality as a shorthand for cultural (but also gender and age) difference partly undercuts the sense of solidarity he tries to build. Giulia’s description, moreover, in its sensuousness and materiality charged with heavy symbolism, epitomises what Gigliola De Donato characterises as Levi’s combining a documentary impulse that grounds his tale in neorealist referentiality with a high degree of subjectivity: Levi’s peasant portraits in general, with their capacity to attach multiple layers of symbolical meanings to the various characters, are an example of this stylistic solution (2003, 44–45). This stylistic choice, I argue, reinforces Levi’s monologism: even when the peasants appear as individual characters, the fact that heavy symbolism is imposed on them tends to bind them to a fairly self-enclosed, self-referential horizon of interpretation, which offers little possibilities beyond what Levi offers. Levi, in other words, builds a strictly monological form of interpretative ethnographic authority. Giulia is also said to possess, oxymoronically, “immense passive power”, an expression that tries to convey how the peasants’ inherent passivity finds expression in character like her, who is clearly strong and confident and is, in first approximation, a far cry from being “passive”. However, in another passage dedicated to Giulia, Levi’s insistence on her (and the peasants’) “passivity” acquires more questionable connotations. At one point, Levi decides to do a portrait of Giulia. The witch, who works as his

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housekeeper, is in all respects a loyal and obedient servant, to the point that she makes it clear that she is ready to have sex with Levi, should he ever desire it—or, at least, it is Levi that frames Giulia’s proposals as a service: previously, he had described the women of Gagliano as incredibly forward, independent and proactive in expressing and pursuing their sexual desires. However, she stubbornly refuses to sit for a portrait. According to Levi, the reason for Giulia’s unwillingness stems from her belief that: A portrait subtracts something to the person who is being portrayed, an image: and, due to this subtraction, the painter acquires absolute power on the person who has sat for him. […] [Giulia], who lived in the world of magic, was afraid of my painting […] due to the influence and power I could have exercise on her by extracting an image from her. (Levi 2000a, 150–151)

Levi, acting on this interpretation, opts for a drastic and disturbing solution: I understood that, to win this fear of magical nature, I should employ a magic that was stronger than fear; and this had to be a direct and superior power, namely violence. I threatened, therefore, to beat her and made as if to do so; in fact I actually started, without too much difficulty, as her arms were no stronger than mine. As soon as she saw my raised hand and felt the first blow, Giulia’s face filled with joy and she smiled beatifically, showing the full array of her wolf-like teeth. Just as I had imagined, she knew no greater happiness than that of being dominated by an absolute power. (151)

Levi basically admits to have beaten his servant to force her to sit for a portrait, but, interestingly, justifies his course of action through (and as a successful test of) his theory of peasant passivity. This is too convenient, suggesting that his interpretation is, at least in this passage, culpably biased. On the other hand, even if Levi were to offer a genuine insight into Giulia’s mind, he would be guilty of abusing its ethnographic knowledge to a very selfish end. What is problematic is not just the use of violence but the fact that Levi is forcing Giulia to do something he knows she is intimately opposed to. Yet, it seems that in this case, with his painting at stake, Levi is willing to treat Giulia’s beliefs as mere “superstition” to be dismissed, circumvented or, alternatively, exploited. This is a profoundly colonial mechanism, based on an acquaintance with (or construction of) local knowledge that is then manipulated for practical ends. It is ultimately, as Levi himself admits, an

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act of sheer dominance. Are we supposed to understand, from this passage, that the peasants’ ‘happiness’ at being dominated also extends to the influence of the state, which is, after all, an absolute power in their view, according to Levi’s own interpretation? At the same time, the passage is functional to establish Levi’s as a figure of ethnographic authority, since Levi “demonstrates” to the reader that his ethnographic interpretations are correct by using them to manipulate the peasants. The nature of this authority, however, is in this case embedded in uneven social relationships. The gendered dynamic of the passage, moreover, cannot be overlooked. The fact that it immediately follows Levi’s account of his refusal of Giulia’s sexual proposals forces the reader to find a connection between the two narrative moments. It is indeed significant that Levi’s rejection of Giulia’s sexual offer—which is, according to the narrative, made in a fairly spontaneous way—should be immediately juxtaposed by a moment of coercion, both physical and epistemic. Arguably, having registered Giulia’s sexual autonomy, Levi remarks on his own capacity for manipulation and violence to regain control of the relationship in the narrative and simultaneously brings her back within the reassuring framework of peasant “passivity” exactly when she is showing to be anything but passive. Overall, by reminding the reader that Levi could, if he wanted to, use violence against the peasants, this passage is perhaps the clearest indication that, despite Levi’s aim of political and spiritual integration by overcoming class, gender and cultural differences, they remain a latent, unaddressed background in his narrative. The monologic ethnographic authority and voice that Levi employs are complicit in hiding this displacement, orchestrating the peasants’ voices in a way that is not too threatening for Levi’s authority. 3.2.4  After Christ: Peasant Political Consciousness and Third-Worldism It is worth noting that Levi’s anthropological understanding of the peasants changes in later texts, adapting to new historical contingencies, such as the shift from the fascist to the democratic state and the emergence of the peasant movement in Italy, as well as to contexts outside Italian political reality. Levi’s focus on the latter is interesting because it explicitly articulates his ambition to provide insight on a world-systemic level, as a

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broader criticism of one-and-uneven capitalist and colonial modernity, even if this operation is not always successful. Levi is profoundly critical of the Italian political scenario after the Liberation, believing that the revolutionary energies of the Resistance have been suppressed. Nevertheless, after the fall of fascism, he sees a chance for the peasants to emerge from their immobility. This optimism emerges from the observation of a wave of political mobilisation coming directly from peasant cooperatives: the so-called post-war peasant movement, active especially in the 1940s and in the 1950s and leading to a significant number of land occupations. The response to such mobilisation was quite violent, resulting in a wave of repression from the state and the agrarian elites, helped by criminal organisations like the mafia or bands of brigands (Barbagallo 2013, 119–20). Levi, nevertheless, interprets this historical moment as the political awakening of the peasant civilisation. In this context of new possibilities of political and cultural transformation, Levi starts to put less emphasis on the difference between the peasant and “Christian” worlds—a dichotomy based on the static situation he had empirically experienced in Gagliano. Instead, he develops the concept of co-presence/coexistence of the temporalities [compresenza dei tempi]. Although Levi uses the concept in a number of ways that are not always consistent, the phrase generally refers to what he now frames as an anthropological universal: the capacity of each human being—and each community—to integrate different sensibilities, different visions of and ways of acting in world, which are both different ‘times/temporalities’ of human experience, but are also universal, synchronic possibilities of existence.4 In Levi’s view, any individual is asked to participate to a multiplicity of coexisting temporalities. As he explains in a passage of the Sardinian travelogue All the Honey Is Finished: How reality is multifarious! And how, in everything, in each of us, different and remote times coexist! And the more a person is alive, real, complex, the more this simultaneity of different conditions and situations, like geological strata, this eternity of history and prehistory, is present in this person. (Levi 2003, 92)

This connects with Levi’s idea of finding a mode of integration between peasant and ‘Christian’ civilisation—two different ‘temporalities’—that preserves each of them while enabling both to be affected and transformed by the other.

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The fact that Levi increasingly relies on the idea of different temporalities to talk about different lifeworlds and life experiences suggests that Levi’s anthropological understanding of cultural difference is inherently allochronic. Allochrony, in Johannes Fabian’s sense (2002), signifies enacting a denial of coevalness—refusing to acknowledge a cultural other as a contemporary. And yet Levi’s anthropology could be argued to be profoundly coeval, because the peasant’s “past” is (and should be) alive, meaningful and relevant—it is, in other words, contemporary. The coexistence of times is, in a way, a way of prefiguring a utopian mirror image of one-and-uneven development: a heterogeneity in material cultures, social relations and mindsets that leads not to further exploitation, but to solidarity and communion across different but valid lifeworlds. The newfound centrality of the idea of coexisting temporalities turns Levi’s post-war ethnographic narratives into an anthropology of cultural and political change, focused on men and women caught in a process of transformation, actively embracing the coexistence of the temporalities. The peasant movement, connecting the values and sensitivity of the peasant civilisation with modern political activism, is, for Levi, a crucial workshop for this process. His reading of the movement is largely influenced by his encounter with Rocco Scotellaro, a Lucanian poet, writer and activist. Scotellaro is the handbook definition of the Gramscian organic intellectual: born from a peasant family, he articulates politically and intellectually the world of the class from which he emerges. His poetry and two unfinished works—his autobiography L’uva puttanella (1955) and his sociological essay Contadini del sud (1954)—are extensive explorations of the peasant world of Southern Italy, not unlike Christ. Levi, who had befriended Scotellaro in 1946 (De Luca and Levi 2016, 667), saw him as the model of the peasant leader, combining an internal knowledge of the peasant world and an acute “modern” political awareness.5 Scotellaro’s political activity—abruptly interrupted by false accusations that lead him to a short but harsh experience of imprisonment—was also an example of the brutal opposition to peasant politics by reactionary forces that maintained their hold on the South in spite of the fall of fascism (Tranfaglia 2000, XVI). Scotellaro is a looming presence in the Sicilian travelogue Words Are Stones—not only because he was a travelling companion for a trip in Calabria that was initially planned as an integral part of the book (Levi 1955, 22–26), but because his political, poetical and existential model is arguably the basis for the peasant portraits that populate the narrative.

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Most notably, the peasant leader Salvatore Carnevale, a young activist in the small village of Sciara, killed by the mafia allied with the local landlords, echoes Levi’s description of Scotellaro. He is, like Scotellaro, a “true peasant leader” (162), able to articulate political struggle and cultural change in a way that is organic to the peasant world. Simultaneously, he breaks off, uncompromisingly, with the old structure of power that binds the peasants to social immobility and misery: “He had a clear mind, and understood that you can’t make deals, that the peasants had to rely on their own forces, that the peasant, to live, had to break off with the old feudal structure, can’t go for half-measures, can’t accept the slightest compromise” (162). Carnevale’s unwillingness to compromise with the mafia is precisely what leads him to a violent death, and provides the character with an epic dimension and a tragic heroism that is nowhere to be found in the anthropological portraits, riddled with mythical language, of Christ. Carnevale embodies the passage from social banditry to political activism: when Levi describes a photograph of the young man, he notices that his eyes look like those of Giuliano—a fearsome brigand cooperating with the mafia and responsible for a major slaughter of peasant protesters in 1947—but “with a sort of righteousness, of modest pride in his straight gaze, like that of someone that wants to build his own destiny” (186). The portrait of Francesca Serio, Salvatore Carnevale’s mother, articulates even more powerfully the new political consciousness of the peasants. As a woman who has recently lost a son, she is supposed to adopt the role of a traditional mourning mother. The funeral wail, in Ernesto De Martino’s definition, is a ritual action that moves within a mythical horizon, re-establishing a number of traditional values that grief threatens to compromise (2000, 55). Instead of adopting this traditional and ‘conservative’ role, Serio transforms herself into a political agent with a distinctive voice. Her transformation is announced by a strong symbolical and political act: she denounces the murder of Salvatore, breaking the silence that traditionally surrounds mafia crimes, ensuring the survival of the peasant movement in Sciara. Her portrait is a far cry from the descriptions of the peasant women in Christ—like Giulia. There are neither mythical nor animal connotations in her portrait, nor any attempt to portray her as “passive”. Levi depicts her as a person whose entire existence is circumscribed entirely within her speech: “she talks, she narrates, she reasons, she discusses, makes accusations, quick and precise, alternating between dialect and Italian, extended

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narratives and the logic of interpretation, and she is entirely in that continuous, endless discourse, all of her” (Levi 1955, 170). Serio’s articulacy is the core of her anthropological and political self-transformation from traditional wailing mother to political spokesperson of the peasants: “Thus this woman made herself, in a single day: her tears are not tears anymore, but words, and the words are stones” (170). Whereas the funeral wail runs parallel with the self-destructive rebellion of the brigand, the words-stones are the correlative of political action: Serio, like her son, is used by Levi to signal the possibility, within the peasant civilisation, of a shift to a political response to injustice. If Words Are Stones can be interpreted as a hopeful rethinking of Levi’s initial assessment of the peasant civilisation, his travelogues and reportages on a variety of non-Italian realities—most notably, India, China, Russia and Germany—represent his attempt to “test” his anthropological paradigms abroad. In this sense it is crucial to consider a 1964 letter to Giulio Einaudi, where Levi, juxtaposing his own biography with the recent history of the peasant world, suddenly shifts from an exclusive focus on the Italian South to a sort of Global South ante litteram: Levi says that he was lucky enough to enter adulthood “as that very world [the peasant world] came of age, in all the fraternal beings of all the Lucanies of every corner of the earth” (2010, xix). The sudden introduction of “all the Lucanies” of the world is indicative of a more universal conception of political solidarity in Levi’s worldview. Considering his focus on realities such as India and China, especially in the context of the 1950s, it is appropriate to talk of a specific Third-Worldist trend in Levi’s writing, if we understand Third-Worldism, in a loose sense, as “a sympathetic attitude held towards anti-imperialist struggles and revolutionary movements in what was formerly known as the Third World” that “transcended Eurocentric Marxist positions to take into account the political work of anti-colonial thinkers and activists” (Srivastava 2018, 201). Yet, Levi’s Third-Worldism is not without shortcomings. His trip to India, carried out in 1957 and resulting in a number of short articles for the newspaper La Stampa, is an interesting example in this sense. Levi rejects the idea of India as an incomprehensible other and suggests a fundamental equivalence with Italy. He argues that “[India] is not another world, an exotic civilisation, extraneous and distant” but “it is our world, our history; it’s us, in our antiquity and our modernity” (2014, 7). Consistently, he employs the theory of the state that had originally developed in Christ to describe the working of the colonial state. He describes

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New Delhi as “nothing more than an enormous hiding place […] that conceals the invisible dominated people to the sight of the dominators; and that, on the other hand, allow the latter to remain unseen, shut off in their palaces” (18)⁠ He concludes that the relationship between the world of the coloniser and of the colonised consists of “absolute incommunicability” (18)—an echo of the relationship between the peasants in Lucania and the state. Levi’s idea of the postcolonial state, instead, is constructed as a healing of the rift between the state and its subjects: he comments that now “the hiding place is not hidden any more, the eyes are open, the cows stroll through the gardens” (21). Levi, however, is arguably projecting his aspirations regarding the Italian state onto India, leading him to see the postcolonial state as the result of a popular revolution that is able to merge the peasant world with industrial modernity. This idealised (mis)reading of the Indian liberation process is epitomised by his hagiographic portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru. According to Levi, Nehru is fully immersed in the coexistence of the times, being a modern man that understands and values antiquity and Indian “tradition”, forged by the experiences of imprisonment and the peasant village. Nehru, in other words, brings the coexistence of the times within the sphere of high politics. Levi’s identification with the Indian prime minister is noticeable (Zaccaro 2003, 115): indeed, Levi’s post-war role as meeting point of “Christians and peasants”, of different temporalities— which he takes upon himself after an experience of prison and village life— seem to echo Levi’s portrait of Nehru. Needless to say, Levi’s depiction of Nehru largely discounts his caste and class position and more generally misreads both the Congress Party and the Indian national struggle. Arguably, the most revealing moment of the portrait consists in the retelling of a conversation between Nehru and film director Roberto Rossellini, in which, after Rossellini congratulates him on the construction on the Hirakud megadam, Nehru suddenly turns sorrowful. Levi interprets this sudden shift in mood as a proof of Nehru’s awareness of the dangers of power, thus proposing Nehruvian India as a model of industrial development at the service of the whole nation, kept in check by the ethical sense of responsibility of its leader. And yet Nehru’s inaugural speech of that very dam tells otherwise. As Debasree De reports: “In the inaugural ceremony of the Hirakud dam project, speaking to tribal villagers who were to be displaced by this dam in 1948, he said: ‘If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country’” (De 2014, 3). This accounts clashes with the idea of a leader that embodies the will of the people and

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rather represents a centralised power that rules with utter disregard for the weakest strata of the population. Levi, taking India as a model for a peasant revolution, fails to see how the postcolonial state and his leaders can replicate the inequalities of the institutions that preceded it. This is, in many ways, a failed opportunity, because Levi’s analysis of the Italian situation as a continuity of oppression does provide a blueprint to analyse the passage from colonial to postcolonial state. Levi fails to make this step, but such failure brings us quite naturally to Mahasweta Devi. Like Levi, she centres her literary, political and anthropological imagination on a specific subaltern group within her country that was historically forced into a relationship of internal colonialism by a variety of state formations. I read Devi not simply as mirroring Levi’s model in a different context, but as its critical revision, merging it with a radical critique of developmentalism and a self-reflective analysis of the uneven relationship between the activist-ethnographer and the subaltern.

3.3   Mahasweta Devi 3.3.1   Counterinsurgent Anthropology in “Draupadi” Similarly to Levi, Mahasweta Devi comes from privileged elite—that particular group in Bengali society that is commonly called bhadralok. As Joya Chatterji argues, the term carries “connotations of Hindu, frequently upper caste exclusiveness, of landed wealth, of being master (as opposed to servant), and latterly of possessing the goods of education, culture and anglicisation” (1994, 5). This heterogeneous social formation rose to prominence during the colonial period, initially accumulating wealth through acquired tenure rights after the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793. Over time, their land-based wealth allowed many of them to afford a Western education, which in turn allowed them to establish themselves as intermediaries of colonial power and to centre their identity precisely around education (Chatterji 1994, 10). Such investment in (Western) education resulted in many bhadralok playing a crucial part in the Bengali Renaissance, a cultural movement that, between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, aimed at combining ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ into a progressive humanism. The Renaissance resulted in a radical transformation of Indian intellectual life and literature. For instance, the Bengali novel, one of the major

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traditions emerging from the colonial encounter (see Chaudhuri 2012), was in large part a product of the social and cultural climate of the Renaissance. Figures like the Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy and Rabindranath Tagore are probably the best-known members of this cultural current. The perception of being entrusted with this heritage resulted in the bhadralok seeing themselves “as a cultured and enlightened class […] and standard bearer of progress and modernity” (Chatterji 1994, 12). This was often, however, a public façade that could hide a “disjunction between enlightenment in public life and orthodoxy in private” (Ray 2011, 59)⁠. This self-presentation also disguised “the extent to which the fabric of bhadralok pre-eminence in Bengali society was made up of a variety of strands”, including “their wealth and powers as a landed elite, their position at the top of the caste hierarchy, their privileged access to urban employment and to some measure of authority under colonial rule” (Chatterji 1994, 12). The bhadralok identity and its contradictions are an important premise for Devi’s engagement with the adivasis. For instance, while attempting to create a syncretic space between “tradition” and “modernity”, the core of the Bengali Renaissance was, as a rule, a high-Sanskritic tradition that left little space for cultural pluralism. Tagore is a significant exception: he took interest, for instance, in the Santal adivasis living near his school in Santiniketan, rethinking them, within a multiculturalist ideal, as “the pathway between local, national and international modernities” (Rycroft 2006, 174)⁠. This is why Amit Chaudhuri, in his introduction to one of Devi short stories, argues that her interest for the adivasis may be seen as a continuation of Tagore’s work (2000, 123)—a statement that makes particular sense considering that Devi did spend some time in Santiniketan as a student. But Chaudhuri also claims that Devi represents, first and foremost, a departure from the mainstream sensitivity of the Renaissance: her articulations also represent a critique of the Bengali Renaissance she was formed by; in her absorption with the non-Sanskritic universe of the tribals […] she marks a break with the high cultural, sometimes Brahmanical impulses that informed the secular sensitivity of the Renaissance. (2000, 123)

This break is important because it informs Devi’s broader political and cultural critique. In representing the systemic exploitation of the rural adivasis, she attacks the self-representations of the urban elite as humane, modern and civilised.

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Devi’s oppositional reaction to her bhadralok background is crucial to understand the nature of her militant stance, especially when compared to Levi’s own partisan position. Levi sides with the Southern peasants in opposition to the rural elites and those parts of Italian society that support fascist dictatorship. Yet, because he is effectively outside both groups, he is able to retain a fundamental faith in his own restricted milieu—a progressive (Northern) middle-class intelligentsia. Devi’s militant stance, instead, stands from a radical rejection of central assumptions of her own specific milieu. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Devi is concerned not only with re-imagining the adivasis in order to systematically oppose their oppressors, but also with scrutinising the ethnographer-figures that engage  with the adivasis, especially those that share her own social and intellectual backdrop. Arguably one of the primary subjects of Devi’s work is that there is little intellectual tradition from her background that can offer her genuine insights on the adivasis. This makes fieldwork perhaps even more urgent and necessary than in Levi’s case, as she feels to be in dire need of alternative sources of knowledge, but also more difficult, as “being there”, with the adivasis, is no guarantee to understand them or to be able to help them—she is fully aware of the uneven entanglement that her fieldwork represents. The opposition to bhadralok values, moreover, takes a further political connotation within the historical phase in which Devi starts writing about the adivasis, in the aftermath of the Naxalite movement. Started off as a local insurrection in the village of Naxalbari in 1967, this insurgency, initially directed against the “local oppressive landlord-police nexus” (Ganguly 2013, 59)⁠, soon sparked a number of similar insurrections throughout West Bengal and several other parts of India. The ideological origins of the revolt originated in the discontent of radical communist activists for the agrarian policy of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which largely backed off from its promises of land reform and large-scale land distribution (59). That said, the insurrection gained a considerable amount of followers not only among communist activists and radical students but also among peasants and adivasis. Indeed, the specificity of the Naxalite insurrection was precisely that it was able to mobilise a large number of adivasis (61). The aim of the movement, following Maoist thinking, was to seize control of the countryside and later move to occupy urban areas, but its bulk was repressed in 1972 (Shah and Jain 2017, 1165). Naxalite and Naxalite-inspired movements, however, remain active to this day, especially after 2004, when a massive Maoist insurgency,

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following the fusion of two large guerrilla formations, brought the fight against the Indian state to an unprecedented scale (1166). The Naxalite movement—in its historical phase, 1967–1972—represents, according to Devi’s interpretation, an uncompromising onslaught against exploitative, hegemonic forces in Indian society that translates into an act of solidarity with the rural subalterns. Indeed, it can be argued that it is precisely the engagement with the adivasis and the willingness to fight for and with them, rather than a precise political line, that Devi finds particularly important in the Naxalite insurgency. This is consistent with the fact that she refuses to label her political ideology, welcoming any kind of activism or struggle that benefits the adivasis. As she explains, “it will not avail to look for any definite politics in my writing. Sensitive persons committed to the cause of the persecuted stand at the centre of my works. […] Mentally, [those people from different political affiliations] share a common ground, a fact that does not appear contradictory to me” (Devi 1990, xx). In spite of her openness towards a variety of ideological positionings and tactics, the influence of the Naxalite struggle in Devi’s imaginary is also registered through the frequent trope of armed insurgency. Conversely, it is within the context of counterinsurgency that Devi can more clearly represent the hegemonic imagining of the adivasis that the ‘civilised’ urban elite uphold to defend their privilege—an anthropology of the adivasis informed by the needs of counterinsurgency. Therefore, the short story “Draupadi”, set in a counterinsurgency scenario, epitomises the negative model of the ethnographer implied in all of Devi’s fiction: a middle-class urban scholar that, while collaborating to the suppression of the adivasi fighters, claims to be comprehensively knowledgeable about them and sympathetic towards their situation—arguably the most pernicious intellectual stance Devi can conceive. “Draupadi” (originally published in Bangla in 1978) is set at the time of the first Naxalite uprising and tells of the hunt for two adivasi guerrilla fighters—Dulna and Dopdi/Draupadi Mejhen—conducted by a cerebral but ruthless counterinsurgency officer, Senanayak, a “specialist6 in combat and extreme-Left politics” (Devi 2014a, 21). Senanayak manages to find and kill Dulna, and, later, to capture Dopdi. He wants her to reveal the location of the insurgents’ hideout and, after a first interrogation proves unsuccessful, orders the soldiers to torture and rape her. The story, however, ends with an unexpected act of defiance: Dopdi/Draupadi, mangled and brutalised, exits the tent where she has been tortured—stark naked, in

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a reversal of the Mahabharata episode revolving around her namesake— and taunts Senanayak, pushing him with her maimed breasts. “Draupadi”, first of all, is an excellent example of Devi’s practice of partisan ethnographic description. As with any partisan description, it involves “choosing a side” on a field divided by political struggles. While in this text there is no stand-in character for the partisan fieldworker (as in “Pterodactyl”), this partisan side-taking is inscribed clearly in the way the story structure and narratorial voice interact: of the three sections of the story, it is only in the first one, dedicated to the army’s whereabouts, that the narratorial voice noticeably and repeatedly intrudes, through ironic jabs, at the particular kind of state-approved, bureaucratised violence that the army engages with. Case in point, the description of the early phases of the hunt for Dopdi and Dulna, that, from the soldiers’ perspective, seem to have disappeared into “Neanderthal darkness”—that is, they have taken cover among people that the army considers primitive and obscure. Devi clarifies that this expression deflects from the true darkness at hand, that of indiscriminate state violence, exposing, with remarkable sarcasm, the gap between the rule of the law and the exercise of power: “the Special Forces, attempting to pierce that dark by an armed search, compelled quite a few Santhals […] to meet their Maker against their will. By the Indian Constitution, all human beings, regardless of caste or creed, are sacred. Still, accidents like this do happen” (Devi 2014a, 20). Overall, the first part articulates quite clearly a satirical narratorial voice that the second one, focused on Dopdi, abandons suddenly and entirely, shifting to a rigorously internal focalisation and detailing Dopdi’s last mission from her point of view. This alters the reader of a shift in allegiance and ethnographic authority: the narratorial voice disappears because it yields narrative control to Dopdi, signalling an alignment with her cause and perspective. In contrast, when discussing the army, Devi’s authorial/ethnographic self wants to be acknowledged, so that its positioning is crystal clear and her capacity to attack her adversaries through her narratorial voice is fully deployed. But, in spite of its satirical undertone, the first part of the story is crucial, and interests me particularly, because it meticulously analyses the hegemonic imaginative paradigms, complicit in the adivasis’ oppression, that the dominating classes employ, converging here in the negative model of counterinsurgent ethnography. The first part of the story is, in particular, a character study of Senanayak as a counterinsurgent ethnographer. Devi investigates the interplay between Senanayak’s brutality and the

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specifics of his intellectual makeup. At the same time, she illustrates— through the dehumanisation that derives from a counterinsurgency setting—the colonial nature of the relationship between Indian mainstream and the adivasis. On the one hand, Senanayak illustrates the endorsement of a brutal counterinsurgent imagination that, inherited from the colonial period, translates smoothly into the postcolonial one. In many ways, Senanayak is the spiritual successor of Kipling’s Orde and Tallantire from “The Head of the District”, the two colonial administrators ruling the Afghan border with an iron fist and absolute confidence in their ethnographic knowledge of their subjects. But Senanayak is a far more disturbing figure. Devi mentions that “Senanayak is not to be trifled with” (Devi 2014a, 22)—an expression that, from the perspective of the satirical narrator of the first part, surely contains a hint of mockery at Senanayak’s sense of self-­ importance, but is also to be taken at face value. His dangerousness stems from the way he conceives the relationship between his theoretical knowledge and his counterinsurgent practice: Whatever his practice, in theory he respects the opposition. Respects them because they could be neither understood nor demolished if they were treated with the attitude “it’s nothing but a bit of impertinent game-playing with guns”. In order to destroy the enemy, become one. Thus he understood them by (theoretically) becoming one of them. (Devi 2014a, 22)

Senanayak maintains that he is, on an abstract level, sympathetic, but the inescapable administrative and repressive function of his knowledge leads him to embrace, in practice, an instrumental imagining the other. Within this framework, the other is an enigma to be solved, but the solution to this enigma is only aimed at a pragmatical classification that is to be exploited for military and administrative purposes. Senanayak’s objective is to identify Dulna and Dopdi so that they can be apprehended. He is very efficient in doing that: through Dulna’s last words—“Ma-ho”—he can identify both him and Dopdi as Santhal adivasis from a specific village. This information in turn allows him to decipher a song they “sang jubilantly in a savage tongue, incomprehensible even to the Santhals” (21), which turns out to be Mundari (Dopdi and Dulna use it to communicate in code with their allies). Once Senanayak is able to label them, the problem is solved—he can “understand” them, or, in his words, he “becomes” the enemy. But this transformation into the enemy is not meant to provide

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any sympathetic insight—it is directed towards the discovery of a way to better exterminate the adivasi other. In her foreword to the English edition (1997), Spivak points out that Senanayak is, in her reading, “the closest approximation of the First World Scholar in search of the Third World” (2014, 1)—an argument that she bases on Devi’s presentation of Senanayak as “a pluralist aesthete” that “for both sides of the rift within himself [can find] analogies in Western literature: Hochhuth’s The Deputy, David Morell’s First Blood” (2). As Spivak puts it: “in theory, Senanayak can identify with the enemy. But pluralist aesthetes of the First World are, willy-nilly, participants in the production of an exploitative society. Hence in practice, Senanayak must destroy the enemy, the menacing other” (2). Spivak suggests that specialist scholarship produced within hegemonic institutions is always implicated, in one way or another, in oppressive practices, regardless, or in spite, of its theoretical alignments. Senanayak, by presenting an extreme example of separation between theory and practice, becomes therefore a study of the cognitive dissociations—and the violence that they enable—that inhabits whoever is involved in the production of specialist knowledge on “the Third World”. Senanayak’s ruthlessness in practice is presented in a particularly effective way, particularly in the passage preceding Dopdi’s torture. In a chilling and powerful juxtaposition of the mundane and the horrifying, Senanayak orders Dopdi’s torture so that he can leave and have dinner: “At 8.57 Senanayak’s dinner hour approached, and saying, Make her. Do the needful, he disappeared” (Devi 2014a, 35). The “needful” is gang-rape and mutilation. Devi initially does not describe the rape itself, which is only alluded, immediately after the paragraph above, by referencing its unbearable length in Dopdi’s consciousness—“then a billion moons pass” (35). Its consequences, however, are shown in graphic accuracy after the deed is done—this includes the horrible mutilation of Dopdi’s breast, “bitten raw, the nipples torn” (35). After a short respite, Dopdi is raped again, and this time Devi, to capture the relentless and mechanic violence of the rape, portrays her in an impressionistic language as “a compelled spread-eagled still body”, crushed by “active pistons of flesh” that “rise and fall, rise and fall over it” (36). Devi explores how anthropological knowledge can provide a veneer of sophistication to the sheer exercise of violence. Needless to say, such violence, in this specific case, is powerfully gendered, adding a further layer of brutality to counterinsurgent imagination. However, Senanayak’s neat

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separation between theoretical order and violent practice is challenged when Dopdi, naked, wounded and covered in blood, confronts him. The terrifying confrontation she imposes on Senanayak—“Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid” (37)—is a physical and epistemological closing of the gap between subject and object of anthropological research. Yet Senanayak’s fear, following Spivak’s interpretation, is also the bewilderment of whoever does not normally confront the implications or complicity of their own theoretical and institutional position. As the embodiment of ethnographic knowledge at the service of state repression, Senanayak is the presence that all the other ethnographer-­ figures of Devi’s fiction (especially if they claim to be sympathetic and well-intentioned) must confront. 3.3.2   Chotti Munda and His Arrow as Ethnography of Adivasi Struggle If “Draupadi” offers a scathing critique of counterinsurgent ethnography, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, published in 1980, offers instead an extended representation of an adivasi community through the eyes of its leader, the titular character Chotti Munda. Through Chotti, born in 1900, Devi describes how the Munda adivasis and their way of life change from the last years of the Raj up until the immediate post-Emergency period. Chotti and his community face the plight of bonded labour—the practice of forcibly providing free labour to rural elites, usually for generations, in order to repay an initial, often trivial, debt—as well as abuses from the police and the local landlords. After Independence, they also have to face the brutality of the party politics of independent India and the robberies and killings carried out by paramilitary gangs—especially during the 1975–1977 Emergency period. Devi sees the novel as a repository of experiences that registers a quickly vanishing reality, a sort of ‘salvage anthropology’ stretched through time: “I have to document it, these things will vanish. And thus came Chotti Munda. In it, so many experiences, I had stored them so lovingly” (Devi and Spivak 2003, xii). On a similar note, in another interview with Arya Shachi, stressing that her work is primarily concerned with fidelity to real life, she points out that in Chotti Munda there is no single incident that she has not seen herself (Shachi 1998, 189). This is paradoxical for a historical narrative that, for a significant part, is set decades before her actual

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explorations of the adivasi villages. It is, however, consistent with her vision of adivasi history as a fundamental continuity in terms of exploitation and resistance from the colonial to the postcolonial period, to the extent that she feels entitled to use her experiences of adivasi life, somehow anachronistically, to “authentically” register the past. The book, in this sense, combines two fundamental threads of Devi’s production: a recreation of the past and the documentation of the present (Shachi 1998, 66). The documentary aspect of the novel is also highlighted by its distinctive use of its “sustained aura of subaltern speech” (Spivak 2002, vii), which Spivak translates in a noticeably non-standard English that, however, aims at maintaining, like in the original version, the “dignity of the speakers” (Spivak 2002, vii). Foregrounding continuity as a principle of adivasi experience in Chotti is, however, a position rooted in ethnographic knowledge. With particular reference to the adivasi revolts during the colonial period and their persistence in contemporary memory, Devi argues: When, in the 60s, I would go to Munda villages, their marketplaces or anywhere, they would talk still of Birsa’s uprising […]. I used to visit that region from ’63 to ’75 continuously. I have seen with my own eyes what the Emergency meant […]. The criminalization of politics, letting the lumpen loose in the lower caste and tribal belts. Inhuman torture and oppression. I have also seen resistance. That is the time when Naxal boys where harboured there, given shelter, allowed to escape. What Chotti Munda or my other stories and books depict is a continuing struggle. (Devi and Spivak 2003, ix)

Continuity means the persistence throughout the decades of a nexus of feudal agrarian relations that supports the illegal eviction of the adivasis, the appropriation of their land, bonded labour and other forms of discrimination and exploitation. It also means a “continuing struggle” sustained by historical memories of resistance and past insurgencies. It should be noted that Devi’s vision of adivasi history as a continuing assault on their way of living (and the material conditions that sustain it) presupposes the existence of an ancestral isolation of the various ‘tribes’ that was broken in colonial times. It is certainly true that the colonial period represented a moment of intensified exploitation through more centralised, rigid and bureaucratic re-organisation of adivasis and rural life in India that set the scene for the current oppressive regime. However, the

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belief in the adivasis’ original state of isolation is also a colonial creation, supported by colonial anthropologists that seemed to ignore that it was precisely colonial governance that had created the ‘tribes’ as isolated entities. In other words, early anthropologists “failed to appreciate the unprecedented nature” of the isolation they were witnessing to (S. Guha 1999, 201, emphasis mine). The pre-colonial history of the adivasis had been, up to that point, quite different. As Prathama Banerjee puts it: Historically, the hill and forest peoples of India […] were neither stateless peoples, nor peoples outside history, nor simple, non-hierarchical, egalitarian communities. Indeed they were fully involved in kingships, in land and forest politics, in tributary relationships with other groups, in particular occupational specialisations and even in commerce and war. They were also internally variegated, hierarchised and gendered communities. (2016, 231)

The assumption that the adivasis were living in peaceful, egalitarian isolation before the arrival of “modernity” is common among many contemporary adivasi activists, who deploy, strategically, a discourse of indigeneity to reinforce the adivasis’ claims to their political, civil and cultural rights (Shah 2010, 10–12). Also Devi often employs a discourse of indigeneity that, problematically, refers to the pre-colonial adivasi past as one of pristine isolation in communion with nature. However, within Devi’s fiction, this does not result in a nostalgic conception of the adivasi identity. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of Chotti Munda is the way in which Devi discusses how adivasi cultures should actively face cultural and political change. Devi argues, in Chotti Munda, that the ideal form of adaptation that they should embrace is subaltern solidarity. On this point she and Levi are close, especially if we consider that Levi explores the importance of peasant political awakening in Words Are Stones. Devi’s objective, therefore, is to relate adivasi history as a continuity, but also in the epistemological specificities that distinguish it from Western historiography, and to conjoin it with an ethnographic registration of adivasi culture both in its traditional specificities and in its capacity of political transformation. This project is meant to portray adivasi culture as permanently endangered but inherently alive and dynamic: as Filippo Menozzi argues in his reading of the volume Imaginary Maps, Devi establishes an “ethics of custodianship” that takes the form of “a call to transmit marginal experiences in their aliveness, a refusal to mourn the destruction of

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tribal cultures in the context where the life of these people is subjected to the neocolonial effects of ‘development’ plans” (2014, 60, emphasis mine). Taking the Munda history and culture as her privileged point of observation, Devi creates Chotti Munda as figure that can sustain this multi-faceted project: a larger-than-life epic hero that, however, is grounded in a realistic depiction of adivasi life, whose life is both exemplary and paradigmatic for an entire community and consciously articulates its values, its predicament and its hopes for a different future. Since the beginning of the novel, Devi establishes the narrative mechanism through which Chotti’s life is able to assimilate the experience of the community at large, as well as representing the Munda vision of historical narrative and memory: “His name is Chotti Munda. Chotti is of course also the name of a river. There is a story behind a river giving him a name. Stories grow around him all the time” (Devi 2002, 1, emphasis mine). Throughout the book, all the events of Chotti’s life are turned into stories, more specifically into songs. Songs are the Munda way of registering events and perpetuating historical memory. Crucially, they are constantly invented and modified to fit contemporary events—they are not “traditional” in the sense that they speak (exclusively) of a mythical past, although they take the shape of a mythical narrative. They are both a chronicle of recent events and a depository of past events, defining adivasi historical consciousness as contemporary. This contrasts decisively with Levi’s idea of a “timeless” peasant mythology, creating a subaltern history that is much closer to Gramsci’s conception. Chotti Munda becomes the catalyst and pivot of this never-ending narration. His heroic deeds are important victories in the community’s history. In an early episode, Chotti is forbidden to use his bow and arrows by a police officer, lest he may inspire or lead a revolt. Later, however, Chotti saves the officer from a boar, and the officer rewards him by lifting the ban. The event is transfigured—as a song—into a moment of collective pride that expands Chotti’s myth and Munda history at the same time—a triumph over an unjust and arbitrary power that is rightfully chastised. The song is a supernatural transfiguration of the events—Chotti, in the song, is able to transform a blade of grass into a spear: Ye picked a blade of grass Grass became spear Ye pierced t’ boar He died right away

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And Daroga? He said, Go ye brave man, Join all games, I was punished in this way Cos I banned yer play. (82)

Devi clearly relishes in her celebration of Chotti, although she grounds her hero in the reality of an oppressed indigenous person—Chotti bitterly comments that his deeds can do little to change his material situation: “A blade o’ grass turns inta spear, but if I don’ plough Tirath Lala’s field [the greedy and sly trader and moneylender], I’ve got nothing to eat” (82). Nevertheless, Chotti becomes such a key figure in the local community that the Munda start to incorporate his presence into narratives in which he was barely involved. Chotti becomes a receptacle of stories, unifying disparate events into a single, coherent narrative and enabling the emplotment (see White 1978) of Munda history. Arguably the central story that Chotti takes upon himself is that of Dhani Munda, an elderly rebel and a companion of the Birsa Munda, the leader of the 1895 insurgency against the colonial government. When a young Chotti begs him to teach him archery, Dhani accepts and begins to teach him, with reluctance at first, and then, once he understands that Chotti might be worthy of carrying on his legacy, almost in a frenzy. Ultimately, Dhani bestows a gift upon Chotti: his magic arrow, which never misses a shot. The magic arrow eventually becomes an integral part of Chotti’s legend. However, Devi explains that the arrow is “not magic in the narrow sense, but an arrow Dhani Munda wants to hand over. This arrow is a symbol for the person who will carry on that continuity. Chotti in an emblem of that” (Devi and Spivak 2003, x). But what does it mean to carry the arrow, to carry on that continuity— Birsa’s and Dhani’s legacy? The answer is far from straightforward. Dhani himself sets up the crucial dilemma for Chotti, when he reminds him of the necessity, for oppressed subalterns like themselves, to take up weapons, fight, and even kill—a teaching that goes against Chotti’s pacific nature. Dhani then goes to die—he decides to make a final public appearance, fully dressed in his battle attire, aware that this will provoke the retaliation of the authorities. Chotti understands the meaning of Dhani’s final act only later, after one of his young pupils, Dukhia, in an act of desperation, takes charge of a riot and kills his bond-master. Dukhia’s actions—not unlike Dhani’s—are seemingly pointless and suicidal, as the boy is swiftly

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tried and hanged. Yet, at this point, Chotti understands that “even with the knowledge that the outcome is death, in order to remain right with oneself, the humans created by Haramdeo [the Mundas’ god], having reached the twentieth century, must sometimes do certain things. Dhani and Dukhia did them” (Devi 2002, 55)⁠. The idea of remaining true to oneself—understood also at a collective level—is how the book frames the problem of how to carry on a legacy: it encompasses both the problem of whether or not embracing violence as a strategy of resistance and the broader issue of cultural change. Through Chotti’s dilemmas on how to lead his community and his choices about how to fight exploitation, Devi articulates her militant vision of the adivasis as the heirs of a cultural legacy, but, simultaneously, as coeval subjects, able to participate in a contemporary political discourse. Chotti embodies both aspects of this articulation of adivasi identity. On the one hand, he is asked to train the young Mundas in the ways of archery—Devi’s metaphor, in the novel, to describe the sense of continuity that Chotti tries to protect. But Chotti’s enthusiasm in doing so is combined with a reflection on how the Mundas are inevitably exposed to change. Devi, through Chotti, suggests that change should move in the direction of creating bonds of solidarity with other subaltern groups. Indeed, a crucial aspect of Chotti’s leadership is his ability to intertwine the Munda’s concerns with that of the Dalit community that live in the same village. In a conversation with Chhagan, their leader, he specifically connects the impracticability of traditional Munda life with the need for solidarity: So Chhagan! Our lot’s t’ same as y’alls. The old days wit’ real Munda villages r’gone. And all t’pahan’s [the Munda priest] power, gone. […] There’s one difference. Ye have caste stuff. To t’ Lala, to t’ Brahman, ye’re low caste […]. We have no caste diff’rence. And I bring it up, cos t’ village is now all mixed. Ye and us die together in famine, drought and bonded work. (Devi 2002, 101)

Chotti wastes no time to mourn the old days of Mundas’ isolated, self-­ contained existence, offering solidarity instead. Conversely, Devi is adamant that any form of political and cultural change that is imposed upon the adivasis can only translate into increased exploitation. Her criticism becomes particularly sharp when she reaches the Emergency period. Commenting on the first round of elections in the

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area and the extreme violence through which the whole process is conducted, Devi sarcastically comments: “The Chotti area graduates into modernity through the way in which the former Member was removed [he was blown up with a hand bomb], the elections were won through fraud and armed robbery, and the post-election contracts were divvied up” (189). In such a comment, the distinguishable tone of what I previously called the satirical narrator of “Draupadi”, who provides direct political guidance to the reader, emerges once again. Through this combination of seething anger and deliberate didacticism directed at the reader—so that no ambiguity is left on how the political context is to be interpreted— the novel, in these passages, resembles, as if this was an actual insert from a different kind of text, Devi’s investigative journalism, characterised by a sharp, plain, factual style but also by a consistent, simmering outrage.7 In this case, the satirical/journalistic interventions, however, are tasked with spelling out a crucial point for the readers: that the postcolonial state and the development it brings to rural areas is completely disconnected from a process of democratisation or justice. Devi’s idea of postcolonial India fits the definition provided by Pablo Mukherjee: “contemporary India is postcolonial in the sense that it is the site of an intensified exploitation (and, as ever, struggle against this exploitation) by a globalised ruling class” (2010, 6). The struggle Devi depicts is precisely against this form of ‘development’, a more brutal incarnation of old strategies of exploitation. Chotti’s struggle is a continuation of the legacy of previous peasant and adivasi uprisings. It is animated by the same—as Levi would say—elementary sense of justice. It is not, however, animated by the same messianic or religious zeal that drove the Birsaites or Titu Mir’s followers, nor is, for most of the novel, fought through violence at all. While Chotti’s vocation—according to Dhani—is that of a bow-wielding warrior, interestingly, he sets aside that role practically for the entire narrative. If one were to find a parallel in Western literature, he is more similar to Mozart’s Figaro than to Homeric heroes: he is a representative of a subaltern group, forced to coexist in an uneven relationship with feudal powers; he cannot openly antagonise or fight the patently unjust and exploitative practices of those powers, and he is forced to rely on his cunning and other strategies of resistance, such as in his ability to trick the powerful into supporting his cause or to neutralise their capacity to harm his people. For instance, he develops an elaborate plan to make sure that the attempted rape of a young girl, Basmati Oraon, is witnessed and stopped by Amlesh Kurana, a renowned scholar, to make sure he will intervene on their behalf.

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In this sense, the novel also focuses on several strategies of everyday resistance that the Mundas adopt. James Scott’s “weapons of the weak”, which I previously mentioned in reference to Gagliano’s peasants, are explicitly foregrounded in this narrative: it is quite obvious that, without a constant effort to disrupt the everyday exploitation of the Mundas, Chotti and his people would be completely swept away. Open rebellion is, to echo Scott’s assessment on why everyday resistance might be preferable to insurgency for rural subaltern communities (1985, xv), for the Munda, either dangerous or simply suicidal. Chotti’s rejection of violence, however, is not simply tactical but also based on ethical grounds, proving a crucial ethnographic and political point: that the moral high-ground of the Hindu mainstream in terms of civilisation is unjustified. As Devi argues: “Chotti is never raising his arrow to kill anyone, he is basically a civilized polite person” (Devi and Spivak 2003, xix). Only in the final scene of the novel, Chotti rises to the rank of a proper epic hero in a final confrontation with the authorities, triggered by the killing of Romeo, a Hindu supremacist and murderous enforcer working for the Congress Youth League. As all the Mundas and Dalits are gathered by the authorities, determined to find Romeo’s killer, Chotti stands up, appearing as a respected elder on which history has metaphorically been written upon, with “a million lines on his  whole face and body” (Devi 2002, 286). To protect the young adivasis that actually killed Romeo, he takes the blame upon himself. With this final act of bravery, leadership and defiance, Chotti fully fulfils his fate, merging with history and legend and connecting them with contemporary subaltern struggle: “As he waits he mingles with all time and becomes river, folklore, eternal. What only the human can be. Brings all adivasi struggle into the present, today into the united struggle of the adivasi and the outcaste” (287)⁠. The result of his efforts is demonstrated in the concluding passage—when Chotti is about to be arrested by the S.D.O. (Sub Divisional Officer): But instantly a thousand adivasi raise their bows in space and cry, No! The non-adivasi raise restraining hands. Chotti on one side, S.D.O. on the other, and in between a thousand bows upraised in space. And a warning announced in many upraised hands. (288)

Chotti’s apotheosis releases the full consciousness of a shared subaltern struggle—a continuation of a resistant adivasi legacy that nevertheless is grounded in the present.

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It is worth noting that Devi’s emphasis on the importance of a subaltern struggle, like in Levi, does not imply a rejection of the nation as a political arena. Indeed, Devi wants the adivasis to participate in Indian national life: elsewhere, in an essay, she laments that “India […] doesn’t consider them to be an integral part of society” (Devi 1997, 101). This sentiment is echoed in Chotti, in which she despises the way the adivasis were ignored by the struggle for independence, referred to only twice in the whole book. The first time, in 1930, Chotti notices some arrested Gandhian activists on a train, and asks, half-interested, who those people are. The second time, at the time of the Quit India movement—hence during one of the most intense phases of the Independence struggle—the narratorial voice bitterly comments: “The August movement did not even touch the life of Chotti’s community. It was as if that was the Dikus’ [non-­ adivasis] struggle for liberation. Dikus never thought of the adivasis as Indians” (Devi 2002, 96). Internal colonialism, for Devi just as for Levi, works by establishing second-class citizens within a nation. To explore the persistence of this marginalisation throughout history, the book presents a gallery of non-adivasi characters—British and Indian— and dissects their variously simplistic and/or exploitative imagining of the adivasis, starting from the colonial administrators. When rumours circulate among the police that Chotti has looted the granaries of Tirathnath, the local trader and moneylender, the British administrators debate on whether that area of the tribal belt is actually pacified. Remembering the revolt led by Birsa Munda 20 years before, a doctor comments: “playing the tuila, dancing the group dance and then shooting arrows. A most complicated people” (43). Juxtaposed with the description of the actual lives of the Mundas, such way of thinking seems particularly hollow. This is how Chotti sums up their situation: “Tirathnath says I bring people together. Yes, we’re bound together. By hunger fire. I haven’ roused anyone” (41). Through his essential but dignified rhetoric, Chotti shatters the ethnographic constructions that serve an administrative idea of order and would have his people framed as inherently ‘troublesome’. This narrative technique—switching back and forth from an official to a subaltern voice, mirroring the bipartite structure of “Draupadi”, in order to highlight dissect and demolish the former, in a contrapuntal confrontation—is sustained throughout the entire novel. In the postcolonial phase, in particular, Devi explores the position of the Hindu Right regarding the adivasis, which has historically been to deny the legitimacy of their status as indigenous people. Such position

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goes back to G. S. Ghurye, an influential sociologist with Hindu-nationalist ideas, who argued that the tribals were simply “backward Hindus”, and as such should be reintegrated into the mainstream of society (Bhukya 2008, 108). This line of argument has more recently been used by Hindutva movements to co-opt the adivasis to their agenda. Its implications, however, are far from benevolent, since the adivasis would obviously be at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, justifying an upper-caste hegemony over them. In Chotti, Devi explores the depths of the violent Hindutva anthropological imagination through Romeo, whose plans for the adivasis epitomise the exploitative nature of Hindutva ideologies hidden under layers of upper-caste paternalism: “Keep the untouchable and the tribal under your shoes. They live well that way. Everyone gets cheap labour. Sowing and reaping go well. And the biggest thing. The glory of the castes remain high” (Devi 2002, 207). It is worth noting that Devi explicitly connects these Hindutva positions to the rule of the Congress Party, highlighting the tolerance for Hindu fundamentalism even within this nominally secular organisation. Equally interesting is the perspective presented by the scholar Amlesh Khurana, who is sent to study the area in the early 1970s. In a surreal conversation with a local officer, Amlesh demands to visit a number of villages composed of a single caste or ethnic group. The officer replies that such villages are nowhere to be found, but Amlesh replies that this will not do: “This is the work of surveying by scientific methodology. The government will build project on this basis for the development of area” (228). A “scientific methodology” stands for forcing reality into a pre-existing theory. The contrast between abstraction and reality here works particularly well since Devi stresses repeatedly throughout the novel that Chotti is able to unite the adivasis and outcastes under his leadership—the reader already knows that Amlesh’s theory of separate groups in separate villages is flawed. Amlesh’s attitude, however well-intentioned, embodies a tendency, inherently connected to the development of the modern state, towards “representing only that slide [of reality] that [interests] the official observer” (Scott 1998, 3)—a process that, in turn, forces a given society to transform into the simplified reality that the state has envisioned to begin with. Amlesh’s vision of neatly separated villages, therefore, is not simply wrong: if implemented, it would erase the possibility of subaltern solidarity at the heart of the novel’s militant vision. The novel offers a glimpse of an alternative when Chotti meets a young Naxalite activist on the run. Instead of turning him in, Chotti decides to

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help him. During a short conversation, the boy seems animated by a genuine desire to understand the Munda. When Chotti laments that “Diku [non-adivasi] doesn’ grasp our sorrow”, the boy replies, “We grasped” (Devi 2002, 179). But when he leaves, he expresses his desire to come back again to learn more: “I learnt nothing at all. I’ll come again” (180). The boy, however, is caught and killed. The presence of the young Naxalite, however fleeting, foregrounds the necessity to listen to the marginalised other that activists want to talk for, warning against the pitfalls implied in an activism that claims to “grasp” a subaltern point of view. Such issues are explored in “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”. 3.3.3   “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”: The Fieldworker-Activist as Ambivalent Ally The ethnographic fiction (novella) “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”, originally published in 1987, is paradigmatic of the underlying tensions of Devi’s work regarding the ethnographic encounter between the adivasis and the non-adivasis, especially as regards the political and ethical responsibilities of the latter. Devi has called “Pterodactyl” the “abstract of [her] entire tribal experience” (Devi and Spivak 1995, xx), which can be interpreted in at least two ways. The first one is that the adivasis in “Pterodactyl” are conceived to register the shared experiences of all the different adivasi groups in India. Devi reinforces this point by conflating customs from different groups in the descriptions of the adivasis in the novella and inventing the central myth of the pterodactyl as the ancestral soul (Devi 1995, 196). This is a strategy to foreground a shared identity that can promote a unified adivasi struggle. Indeed, Devi is very explicit about this point in an interview with Spivak, stressing, at the same time, the national dimension of the adivasi problem: [Spivak:] Will it be right then to say that you are not trying to keep their separate ethnicities alive … [Devi:] No, no, no. [Spivak:] … but a general tribal identity as Indian. [Devi:] General tribal as Indian, not only that. They are Indians who belong to the rest of India. Mainstream India had better recognize that. (Devi and Spivak 1995, xvii)

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Minoli Salgado points out that this passage exposes important differences between Devi’s political programme and that of Spivak, whose readings/ translations of Devi’s work try to highlight the irreducible cultural difference between the various adivasi groups and a systematic opposition to nationalist discourse (Salgado 2000, 134–135). “Pterodactyl”, instead, carries out the (problematic) ambition to register a shared indigenous experience. Indeed, the relevance of the novella, according to Devi, goes, in fact, beyond the borders of India: “If read carefully, ‘Pterodactyl’ will communicate the agony of the tribals, of marginalised people all over the world” (Devi and Spivak 1995, xxi). Tellingly, the volume in which the English translation appears (Imaginary Maps) is dedicated to all the indigenous people in the world. It sets itself, as it were, as a world-literary text, aiming to tackle, within a specific historical context, global patterns of inequality. The other possible meaning of “Pterodactyl” being the “abstract of [Devi’s] entire tribal experience” is that the novella explores the meaning and difficulties of the ethnographic encounter with the adivasis on the part of a metropolitan intellectual/ethnographer. It is, in this sense, one of her most articulate experiments in self-reflection—an exploration of how it feels to encounter the adivasis, to witness the collapse of one’s epistemological tools and paradigms, and to be changed by the experience. This entails wondering how a form of activist fieldwork can produce ethnographic knowledge on the adivasis that is, simultaneously, true to their experience and able to concretely improve their lives. The character through which these questions are articulated is Puran Sahay, a reporter specialised in issues of caste- and state  violence, but somehow apathetic and frustrated. He is put to a test when his friend Harisharan, a low-ranking development officer, asks him to write on the living conditions of the adivasis in the Pirtha district, in Madhya Pradesh. Their plight is multi-faceted, but one of the most pernicious aspects of their situation is that, although people have been dying of starvation for a long time, Pirtha is not declared a “famine area”, but just a “drought area”. The reasons are both political and economic: in order to acknowledge the existence of the famine, the government would have to admit that the technological developments and political arrangements implemented during the Green Revolution have not helped those people at all; that the causes of the famine are not natural but human-made; and that the relief funds earmarked for the adivasis have regularly been intercepted by local elites. Once in Pirtha, Puran also investigates the sighting of an

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airborne creature—the titular pterodactyl. This apparition has cast the inhabitants of Pirtha into a state of mourning—to the point that they are refusing relief and letting themselves die, regarding the apparition as a visitation of their ancestral soul, which cannot find peace under the present circumstances. A boy, Bikhia, has engraved the creature on the wall of a cave. Harisharan is aware of the limits of the administrative framework but is determined to make the most of it—he wants to “use the system to unmask it” (Devi 1995, 112). As he explains Puran: “my need is to make a big noise in whatever way and put Pirtha on the map of Madhya Pradesh and therefore of India” (112). And yet, even before he arrives to Pirtha, Puran’s mission stumbles into a fully-fledged crisis, involving, on Puran’s side, a loss of faith in his anthropological imagination—the categories he uses to understand the adivasis—and in his ethnographic authority—his capacity to speak of/for the adivasi experience. Both aspects cast doubts on his ability to concretely help the adivasis in a meaningful way. Differently from the narrating voice of Christ Stopped at Eboli, whose ability to penetrate the peasant world is fundamentally never questioned, Puran immediately starts to lose faith in his capacity for genuine insight. This crisis is first engendered by the fact that his presence and in Pirtha is contested by the adivasis themselves. This emerges in particular when Shankar, a literate adivasi that acts as a spokesperson of the local community, starts narrating the plight of his people “as if he is singing a saga” (119). Shankar’s saga—capturing, not unlike the Munda songs in Chotti, the mythical and poetic approach to history of the adivasi communities— tells of the time when the Pirtha adivasis owned their land and were free to follow their customs, until the foreigners came: We were kings. Became subjects. Were subjects, became slaves. Owed nothing, they made us debtors. Alas, they enslaved and bound us. […] Oh, we climb hills, and build homes, the road comes chasing us. The forest disappears, they make the four corners unclean. Oh, we had our ancestors’ graves! They were ground underfoot to build roads, houses, schools, hospitals. We wanted none of this, and anyway they didn’t do it for us. (119–120)

Shankar’s lament ends with a rejection of any form of relief: “You can’t do anything for us. We became unclean as soon as you entered our lives. No more roads, no more relief—what will you give a people in exchange for the vanished land, home, field, burial-ground?” (120). The passage

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provides a concrete political statement with respect to the modern policies of development. A leitmotif of the novella is how planned development not only is blind to the adivasis’ actual needs but can also actively create material and cultural impoverishment and promote exploitation. “Pterodactyl” resonates with James Scott’s theory, in Seeing Like the State (1998), of how planned development can actively produce disaster. Scott lists four aspects that, in unison, engender this process. The first one is an administrative ordering of nature and society that tries to transform reality into a simplified, more manageable version of itself in a process of “state simplification”—an aspect I have already mentioned when discussing Amlesh Kurana’s vision of social reality in Chotti. The second one is “high-modernist ideology”, which Scott defines as “a […] muscle-bound […] version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws” (4). The third and fourth aspects are an authoritarian state that is ready and willing to use its power to enact high-modernist developmental schemes; and a prostrate civil society that is unable to resist those plans (5). Scott shows how this combination of factors often leads to full-­ scale disaster and socio-economic devastation on a massive scale. Large-­ scale development schemes are unable to adjust to various unintended consequences and unpredicted contingencies, frequently leading these schemes to fail, but since they tend to “damage earlier structures of mutuality and practice” (349), they produce heavily damaged and extremely vulnerable societies and ecosystems. The Indian Green Revolution that functions as background of “Pterodactyl” is a prime example of Scott’s high-modernist disaster: as a centralised, techno-political strategy to produce abundance in agricultural society, it was a “planned destruction of diversity in nature and culture to create uniformity demanded by centralised management systems” (Shiva 1991, 12). In the name of increasing agricultural production, the Green Revolution produced, in the long run, “diseased soils, pest-infested crops, water-logged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers” (12). The predicament of the Pirtha adivasi, decades after the implementation of the Green Revolution in the late 1960s (the novella is set in 1987), bespeaks its hidden costs and the underdevelopment it produced. The roads—a symbol of progress if there even was one—epitomise those paradoxes: Shankar suggestively describes the roads as “chasing” his people, while

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Puran remembers how an acquaintance of his had previously explained to him that the roads “have been built with the money sanctioned for tribal welfare so that the owners of bonded labour, the moneylender, the touts and pimps, the abductors, and the bestial alcoholic young men lusting after tribal women can enter directly into the  tribal habitations” (Devi 1995, 109). Puran’s position must initially be negotiated between Harisharan’s view—doing something for the adivasis is better than doing nothing at all—and Shankar’s—doing something for the adivasis is pointless and will end up making things worse. But the novella actually develops a variety of perspectives and positions that weigh on Puran’s choices, which are mirrored by the polyphonic style of the novella. Some sections start with quotations from articles of scientific literature, which Puran reads; some passages consist mainly of (sometimes fairly technical) dialogue between various characters; in other passages the narrative voice takes over, providing dry accounts characterised by a significant level of socio-economical detail, only to return, almost unexpectedly, to a character’s mind, and then move from one character to the other. This is a technique that Devi also uses in other works—as I discussed as regards narratorial interventions and multiple perspectives in “Draupadi” and Chotti—but that “Pterodactyl” brings to an extreme. Neil Lazarus, referring to two passages in which Devi shifts in and out of Puran’s and Bikhia’s perspectives, talks of “[a] ceaseless shifting of [the] representational lens” (2011, 156)”. This aptly describes the compositional principle of the entire novella, and particularly Devi’s strategy to describe complex social and cultural realities through rapid juxtaposition of different focalisations. This polyphony contributes to characterise Puran’s own voice as tentative, placing him in a less dominant position as far as his ethnographic authority is concerned and preparing the novella for a dispersal of ethnographic authority. Puran, in fact, takes the deliberate decision to set himself aside, a choice also reflected in a few crucial choices he takes on the field. In particular, he decides to refuse the meals that the Sarpanch and Harisharan have fixed for him and to take notes instead of taking pictures. As for the food, he understands that “one can’t come to Pirtha and return posthaste to look for good food in some government bungalow, it’s immoral” (138). As for the pictures, he explains Harisharan that he is “realizing how barbaric it is to photograph skeletal men and women” (147). Harisharan, pragmatical as always, comments unenthusiastically: “Please avoid that realization. Make an uproar about Pirtha” (147). Puran’s actions, however, are not

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self-serving, but try to conceive an approach that concretely starts from the adivasis’ point of view, in the hope of gaining their trust and serving their best interests. The opposite approach is illustrated by Kausalji, a well-connected relief worker operating in the Pirtha area. Kausalji argues that the only way for the Pirtha adivasis to survive is to leave their ancestral home and move to more fertile plains. The fact that they would abandon the sites in which their culture is embedded is of little consequence to him. Moreover, he has no scruples about taking pictures of the starving adivasis to gather the materials he needs for a show for his fundraisers in the West. The moments in which the pictures are taken are described by Devi as an act of unadulterated violence against “the self-respect of the hungry” (168), which the adivasis try to resist: Now the pictures are taken. The women cover their faces with the torn ends of their cloth. The men turn their faces away. The scene of an old woman holding a skeleton baby in arms taking lentil-rice in her bowl, is captured very well and when the tape recorder is held close you can catch the rattle in the old woman’s throat and her mumble as well as the child’s chirping wail. (169)

Kausalji believes that he is entitled to take the adivasis’ images and record their suffering voices because he has literally bought that right by providing relief. The forceful taking of the pictures of the starving adivasis epitomises a relationship in which they have no agency—they are objects that can only accept the decisions taken by a distant ethnographer-figure who supposedly knows better. In fact, the way a fieldworker deal with someone else’s image is a substantial test on the kind of engagement—equal or unequal— they aim to establish. It is not a chance that Levi’s most questionable moment as regards his relationship with the peasants is precisely his decision to force Giulia to sit for a portrait. In spite of the different nature of the media of painting and photography, the two sequences are fundamentally comparable, as both register a forceful appropriation of a subaltern’s image, allegedly for the greater good. Puran, instead, understands that there is ultimately a very thin line between Kausalji’s approach and the logic of exploitation: both deprive the adivasis of any control over their destiny. Puran, instead, tries to establish a communication point with the adivasis to understand how to better provide them with agency—while simultaneously undertaking a personal transformation as a journalist and as a person.

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The crucial moment of Puran’s transformation is his encounter with Bikhia, the boy who has engraved the image of the mysterious creature, and eventually with the creature itself. After some time spent in Pirtha, during a stormy night, Puran is visited by the creature in a dream-like sequence which, alongside the mysterious nature of the creature, removes the novella from a strictly realist framework to move into irrealism. After consulting some scientific literature, Puran identifies the creature as a pterodactyl. Or rather, a pterodactyl is what this creature reminds Puran of, although it does not actually fit perfectly into any scientific description. Right from the beginning, the “pterodactyl”, for Puran, is a working hypothesis that in itself contains an aporia: if the creature is really a pterodactyl, then it is supposed to be extinct, but if it is not a pterodactyl, then Puran has no clue about what the creature could possibly be. The other interpretation is the one Bikhia accepts: the pterodactyl is the soul of the ancestors of the Pirtha adivasis—a hypothesis that, however, begs the question of why the ancestral soul may have chosen Puran, an outsider, as its protector. The creature, in Puran’s view, is the carrier of an “earthshaking piece of news” (142), but he cannot understand it. He makes an effort to decipher the meaning of the pterodactyl’s glance and he makes several hypotheses, but can find no confirmation, as the pterodactyl, whose “dusky lidless eyes remain unresponsive” (157) to Puran’s glance, is “outside [his] wisdom, reason and feelings” (156). The pterodactyl may be warning him against the fundamentally destructive nature of all history, whose violence is only thinly veiled by the ideology of progress—“think if you are going forward or back” (157), Puran asks, presumably to himself. It could be the harbinger of a bio-technological dystopia—akin to the high-modernist, technocratic catastrophe of the Green Revolution—in which nature is enslaved, destroyed or twisted into horrific new forms, from “Deadly DDT greens” to “bloodthirsty octopus creepers, animal blood-filled / tomatoes” (157). It could be the spokesperson of the injustice committed against indigenous people, warning that “the collective being of the ancient nations is crushed” (157), or, specifically, against the Pirtha adivasis: “Have you come up from the past to warn us, are you telling us that this man-made poverty and famine is a crime, this widespread thirst is a crime, it is a crime to take away the forest and make the forest-dwelling people naked and endangered?” (157). But ultimately Puran must surrender: “No point of communication. Nothing can be said or written” (158). This contrasts with Bikhia’s

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experience, who seems to find a way to establish communication with the pterodactyl through their shared experience of death and extinction: “[Bikhia] has found some contact. He is a tribal, an aboriginal, you are much more ancient, more originary than his experience, both your existences are greatly endangered” (156). Like in Christ, the elemental knowledge of death represents a bond that crosses barriers—in this case even that between human and nonhuman. The pterodactyl, within the narrative, performs three, interconnected functions. Firstly, it embodies a number of “superimposed cataclysms” and “overlaid moments of extinction”, signalling “the return of death on a truly monstrous scale (Farrier 2016, 461). In this sense, Puran’s reflection on the pterodactyl’s meaning may be a response to Shankar’s saga—an attempt to rethink violence, as Shankar suggested, in its unfolding throughout time, unveiling trajectories and continuities of destruction that would be otherwise invisible. But while Shankar’s saga was the expression of a coherent historical vision born out of adivasi experience, Puran knows that his multiple interpretations of the pterodactyl’s meaning are simply hypotheses that he cannot confirm. This failure leads Puran to question in an even more radical way the depths of his knowledge, forcing him to rethink his previous experiences with the adivasis. For instance, at some point he realises “how little he understood when he travelled in Ranchi district from one Munda village to another till he finally learned about them from S.  C. Roy’s book” (Devi 1995, 158)⁠. Puran refers, here, to the Indian anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy, known for his works on various adivasi populations, published in the early twentieth century. The fact that he had to encounter the tribals in a textual form in order to “know” them— through a classic ethnographic monograph—seems now a clear sign of how superficial his previous engagement had been: “even after this deeply investigative analysis he knows nothing, has known nothing” (159). The second function of the pterodactyl is, therefore, to be the culmination of Puran’s epistemological crisis—consistently, besides, with its role as an irrealist irruption within a realist tale. The pterodactyl’s message, indeed, will be lost to Puran when the creature eventually dies. But Puran thinks that it might have been possible to understand the pterodactyl, had he been accustomed to cross the barrier that separates the ‘mainstream’ and the adivasis. Hence Puran’s encounter with the pterodactyl, while failing to establish a communication point, nevertheless, enables some insights as regards the relationship between the two groups. As Neil Lazarus comments:

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Puran, recognising the limits of his own culturally determined understanding, is able both to assess the social costs of what this understanding has bracketed or extinguished, and also to glimpse how the centuries-old pattern of marginalisation and destruction might even now begin to be unpicked. (2011, 159)

Puran is then at least able to asses a gap between the adivasis and the mainstream, which is historically forced on both groups by what Puran calls a lack of love. Such conception is articulated as Puran takes his leave from Harisharan. He argues that it was impossible to establish a communication point with the pterodactyl—the soul of an ancient civilisation—because “to build it you must love beyond reason for a long time” (Devi 1995, 195). Puran’s self-realisation comes to full circle: it is the lack of love—not only his but of an entire country—that blocks understanding and makes action pointless. And yet, as Puran admits his defeat and relinquishes his ethnographic authority on Pirtha, he is allowed to envision the beginning of a new cycle: “Love, excruciating love, let that be the first step. Now Puran’s amazed heart discovers what love for Pirtha there is in his heart, perhaps he cannot remain a distant spectator anywhere in life” (196). But what is “love”? The novella’s finale is hardly an endorsement of a romantic fusion with the adivasis. I would argue, instead, that love, in the novella, is conceived as tentative acts of trust. In order to unpack this last point, let us discuss the third way in which the pterodactyl functions within the story—as a mirror of adivasi subjectivity. While the pterodactyl, for Puran, works either as the symbol of a number of interconnected hypotheses about history or as a reminder of his epistemological limits, for Bikhia the creature seems to have a more decipherable meaning. Certainly, both Puran and Bikhia are engaged in interpreting the arrival of the pterodactyl, and indeed it is “a common struggle to grapple with the meaning of this event” that brings them together (Varma 2015, 110). However, Bikhia is more successful in his hermeneutical efforts. Grounded in the myth of the ancestral soul, he is able to draw wisdom from the creature: “Bikhia has received his ancestral soul. This is why his face is now so full of a quiet wisdom” (143). The nature of this wisdom seems to be about the choices that the adivasi community has to make in time of crisis. As the pterodactyl is about to die, Bikhia reads the flight of the pterodactyl—of the ancestral soul—as an example set in front

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of him to provide him with guidance to lead his people. Bikhia will emerge empowered from the encounter with the pterodactyl. He becomes “like an ancient chief of the community, venerated by all” (181). Bikhia is very much like Chotti—a figure of continuity that is able to scour the past to provide his people with new cultural solutions to survive in the present. Quite significantly, he oversees the planting of edible roots—a clear signal that, under his leadership, his community is now determined to fight for survival. In particular, by witnessing the ancestral soul take shelter at Puran’s side, Bikhia seems to be able to conceive a way in which adivasi culture, while embracing the necessity of finding a symbiosis with the mainstream, does not surrender to its totalising demands. This is epitomised by Bikhia’s last request to Puran: to join him and the rest of his people for a ritual oil bath, but also to leave immediately afterwards. Bikhia acknowledges the necessity of the foreigners in time of crisis: “after all is said and done it is true that this outsider had to be let into what was intimately their own, in fact their own dead ancestors’ soul” (182)⁠. But Bikhia is also adamant that there is a limit to this intimacy, which was indeed temporary. As Puran understands from Bikhia’s glance, “You remain you, and I remain me, and after this heavy phase is over each will return to the orbit of his life” (182). The first phase of love is an act of trust, which, on the adivasis’ side, signifies an acceptance of the outsider in time of needs. For the mainstream Indian, instead, the act of trust translates instead into an acceptance of the adivasis’ point of view even when it defies the logics of ‘rational’, high-modernist governance—an act of humility that accounts for the wisdom of the indigenous population in knowing what is better for their survival. More generally, it involves, as much of Devi’s fiction asks its readers to do, “to maintain sympathy and solidarity” for subaltern others “by accepting the failure in communicating with or understanding them” (Bhattacharya 2020, 130). With this in mind, Puran is finally able to write his report on Pirtha. His capacity to write the report stems from a newfound perception of the difference of his historical and cultural experience, but also from a newfound faith in the legitimacy of his way of acting culturally, which is writing: “let Puran be able to keep his faith in the pen. He is not a tribal […] How can he have faith in their faith? Puran must keep unshaken his faith in paper, pen and the printing machine. Puran has nothing else. If there is no pen

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there is no Puran” (185–186). And yet, when he writes the report, he has to acknowledge that the Pirtha adivasis are legitimate in their insistence on not leaving their hills, acknowledging their right to protect their “nearextinct ethnic being” (189). Puran, in his report (186–190), tries to sketch a series of practical plans that strike a balance between a sense of responsibility towards the adivasis and the necessity of trusting them with their destiny. His efforts mirror Devi’s own balancing act between a generalised political vision of the adivasis that must be embraced on a national scale to redress internal colonialism and a profoundly humble vision of militancy, which ultimately translates into an act of trust towards the adivasis. It is not a chance that the style of Puran’s report, pausing from the “shifting focalisation”, resembles the direct and factual style of Devi’s journalism. And, as a political programme—appealing to the responsibility of the mainstream for incorporating the adivasis in a national discourse and also defending the adivasis’ autonomy—the report opposes internal colonialism through a formula that is curiously reminiscent of Levi’s proposition in Christ.

Notes 1. All translations from Italian in this chapter are mine, unless specified otherwise. Most notably, all quotations from Christ Stopped at Eboli are taken from Frances Frenaye’s translation (London: Penguin, 2000). 2. The book was also influential on the history of Italian anthropology itself. For instance, it prompted Ernesto De Martino, one the most prominent Italian ethnologists of the twentieth century, to undertake fieldwork in Lucania (Raffa 1997, 203). 3. Eboli is a town located south of Naples, very close to Lucania (present-day Basilicata). 4. A different use of the coexistence of the temporalities can be found in the 1955 article named “History is present” [“La storia è presente”] (Levi 2000b, 38). 5. It is not a chance that one of the most important elaborations of the peasant civilisation after Christ is to be found in the preface he wrote for Scotellaro’s L’uva puttanella, in which Levi responds to the criticism that he, Scotellaro and many others (such as the economist Manlio Rossi-Doria and the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino) had idealised the peasant world, disregarding the industrial working classes—an accusation most famously voiced by Mario Alicata (see Sacco 1996, 199–203).

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6. All the words in italics are in English in the original text (Spivak 2014, 16). Indeed the (over)use of English jargon in the short story by the officers (something that even their soldiers comment and mock) is a further element of continuity between colonial and postcolonial counterinsurgency. What they use is, after all, a form of prose of counterinsurgency that they inherited from the British (see Guha 1988). 7. The collection Dust on the Road, which include a significant number of Mahasweta Devi’s activist, journalistic and—one could argue—‘properly’ ethnographic texts (i.e., non-fictional essays), is a good example of the style I have in mind. It notably lacks the flamboyant experimentalism of (some of) Devi’s fiction, as it can be observed in her shifting focalisation (see the section of Pterodactyl), or the impressionistic language used for Dopdi’s torture.

Works Cited Banerjee, Prathama. 2016. Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes. Indian Economic and Social History Review 53 (1): 131–153. Barbagallo, Francesco. 2013. La questione italiana. Il Nord e Il Sud dal 1860 a oggi. Bari: Laterza. Beltrami, Luca. 2016. Carlo Levi nella cultura americana tra gli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta. Forum Italicum 50 (2): 417–436. Bhattacharya, Sourit. 2020. Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­37397-­9. Bhukya, Bhangya. 2008. The Mapping of the Adivasi Social: Colonial Anthropology and Adivasis. Economic and Political Weekly 43 (39): 105–109. Bronzini, Giovanni Battista. 1996. Il viaggio antropologico di Carlo Levi: da eroe stendhaliano a guerriero birmano. Bari: Dedalo. Calvino, Italo. 2010 [1967]. La compresenza dei tempi. In Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, ix–xii. Torino: Einaudi. Chatterji, Joya. 1994. Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, Amit. 2000. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Edited by Amit Chaudhuri. London: Picador. Chaudhuri, Supriya. 2012. The Bengali Novel. In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana, 101–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. D’Amaro, Sergio. 2003. Alla ricerca delle mille Italie. In Carlo Levi e il Mezzogiorno, ed. Gigliola De Donato and Sergio D’Amaro, 77–84. Foggia: Carlo Grenzi.

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D’Orsi, Angelo. 1997. L’esperienza ‘gobettiana’ di Carlo Levi. In Carlo Levi: le parole sono pietre. Atti del convegno internazionale, ed. Giovanna Ioli, 9–22. San Salvatore Monferrato: Edizioni della biennale “Piemonte e letteratura.” Davis, John. 2016. Egemonie e resistenze: uno sguardo antropologico sui rapporti tra governi e contadini. Forum Italicum. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014 585816663892. De, Debasree. 2014. Nehruvian Vision of Sustainable Development for Tribals in India: A Critique. South Asia Research 34 (1): 1–18. De Donato, Gigliola. 2003. Cristo si è fermato a Eboli: Incrocio di culture e stili narrativi. In Carlo Levi e il Mezzogiorno, 37–47. Foggia: Claudio Grenzi. De Luca, Michele, and Carlo Levi. 2016 [1974]. Intervista a Carlo Levi su Scotellaro. Forum Italicum 50 (2): 667–669. De Martino, Ernesto. 2000. Morte e pianto rituale. Dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di Maria. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Derobertis, Roberto. 2012. Southerners, Migrants, Colonized: A Postcolonial Perspective on Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli and Southern Italy Today. In Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-­ Diop and Caterina Romeo, 157–171. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Devi, Mahasweta. 1986 [1977]. Aranyer Adhikar. Pune: Śrı ̄vidyā PrakāŚana. ———. 1990. Author’s Preface. In Bashai Tudu, xv–xxi. Calcutta: Thema. ———. 1995 [1987]. Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. In Imaginary Maps, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 95–196. London and New  York: Routledge. ———. 1997 [1991]. Land Alienation among Tribals in West Bengal. In Dust on The Road: Activist and Political Writings of Mahasweta Devi, 99–113. Calcutta: Seagull Books. ———. 2002 [1980]. Chotti Munda and His Arrow. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2010 [1956]. The Queen of Jhansi. Translated by Sagaree Sengupta and Mandira Sengupta. Calcutta: Seagull Books. ———. 2014a [1978]. Draupadi. In Breast Stories, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 19–37. Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books. ———. 2014b [1974]. Mother of 1084. Translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Devi, Mahasweta, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1995. The Author in Conversation. In Imaginary Maps, ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ix–xxii. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. ‘Telling History’. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Interviews Mahasweta Devi. In Chotti Munda and His Arrow, ix–xxiii. Malden: Blackwell. Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York and Cichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Farrier, David. 2016. Disaster’s Gift. Interventions 18 (3): 450–466.

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Ganguly, Avishek. 2013. Politics and Periodicals in the 1960s: Readings around the ‘Naxalite Movement’. In The Third World in the Global 1960s, ed. Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A.  Scarlett, 57–68. New  York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Geroni, Riccardo Gasperina. 2018. Carlo Levi dopo gli anni Zero. Italian Studies 73 (3): 338–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2018.1499284. Gobetti, Piero. 1983 [1934]. La Rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia. Torino: Einaudi. Graaf-Bartalesi, Daniela. 2011. Voci dal Sud. A Journey to Southern Italy with Carlo Levi and his Christ Stopped at Eboli. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Quinton Hoare and Gordon Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 2007 [1926]. Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale. In Nel mondo grande e terribile: antologia di scritti 1914–1935, 115–142. Torino: Einaudi. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. The Prose of Counter-Insurgency. In Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 45–84. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guha, Sumit. 1999. Environment and Ethnicity in India: 1200–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hale, Charles R. 2006. Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 21 (1): 96–120. Hobsbawn, Eric. 2000. Bandits. New York: The New Press. Juris, Jeffrey J. 2007. Practicing Militant Ethnography with the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, ed. Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle, 164–178. AK: Oakland, CA. Juris, Jeffrey J., and Alex Khasnabish. 2013. Ethnography and Activism within Networked Spaces of Transnational Encounter. In Transnational Activism, Ethnography and the Political, ed. Insurgent Encounters, 1–36. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levi, Carlo. 1948 [1946]. Paura della libertà. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1952 [1950]. The Watch. Translated by John Farrar. London: Cassell & Co. ———. 1955. Le parole sono pietre: tre giornate in Sicilia. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2000a [1945]. Christ Stopped at Eboli. Translated by Frances Frenaye. London: Penguin. ———. 2000b [1955]. La storia è presente. In Le mille patrie. Uomini, fatti, paesi d’Italia, edited by Gigliola De Donato, 37–40. Roma: Donizzelli. ———. 2003. Tutto il miele è finito. Nuoro: Ilisso.

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———. 2010 [1964]. L’autore all’editore. In Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, xvii–xix. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2014. Buongiorno, Oriente: reportages dall’India e dalla Cina. Roma: Donzelli. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1923 [1922]. Primitive Mentality. Translated by Lilian A. Clare. London and Woking: The Gresham Press. Marmo, Marcella. 2016. Briganti e brigantaggio in Levi e Scotellaro: la memoria intermedia. Forum Italicum 50 (2): 600–617. Menozzi, Filippo. 2014. Postcolonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance. Hoboken: Routledge. Morgan, Philip. 2004. Italian Fascism 1915–1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. 2010. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Olusegun Adeyeri, James. 2019. Colonialism Within and Without: The Old Oyo Empire in West Africa. In Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism: Unfinished Struggles and Tensions, ed. Dittmar Schorkowitz, John R.  Chávez, and Ingo W. Schröder, 227–245. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Osterweil, Michal. 2013. Rethinking Public Anthropology through Epistemic Politics and Theoretical Practice. 28 (4): 598–620. https://doi.org/10.1111/ cuan.12029. Panizza, Cesare. 2016. Introduzione. Piero Gobetti e il fascismo come autobiografia della nazione. In Piero Gobetti, L’autobiografia della nazione, 4–49. Fano: Aras. Petraccone, Claudia. 2000. Le due civiltà: settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia. Bari: Laterza. Raffa, Guy P. 1997. Carlo Levi’s Sacred Art of Healing. Annali d‘Italianistica 17: 203–220. Ray, Rabindra. 2011. The Naxalites and Their Ideology. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Russo, Giovanni. 1997. Attualità di Carlo Levi. In Carlo Levi: Carlo Levi: le parole sono pietre. Atti del convegno internazionale, ed. Giovanna Ioli, 1–8. San Salvatore Monferrato: Edizioni della biennale “Piemonte e letteratura.” Rycroft, Daniel. 2006. Santalism: Reconfiguring ‘the Santal’ in Indian Art and Politics. Indian Historical Review 33 (1): 150–174. Sacco, Leondardo. 1996. L’orologio della Repubblica. Carlo Levi e il caso Italia. Lecce: Argo. Salgado, Minoli. 2000. Tribal Stories, Scribal Worlds: Mahasweta Devi and the Unreliable Translator. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35 (1): 131–145. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current Anthropology 36 (3): 409–440.

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Schneider, Jane. 1998. The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism in Italy (1848–1995). In Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider, 1–21. Oxford: Berg. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. ———. 1998. Seeing Like a State. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Shachi, Arya. 1998. Tribal Activism: Voices of Protest. Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Shah, Alpa. 2010. In the Shadow of the State. Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Shah, Alpa, and Dhruv Jain. 2017. Naxalbari at Its Golden Jubilee: Fifty Recent Books on the Maoist Movement in India. Modern Asian Studies 51: 1165–1219. Shiva, Vandana. 1991. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Slatta, Richard. 2004. Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Social Bandit: A Critique and Revision. A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura En América Latina 1 (2): 22–30. Speed, Shannon. 2006. At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research. American Anthropologist 108 (1): 66–76. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2002. Translator’s Foreword. In Mahasweta Devi, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, vii–viii. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2014 [1987]. Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword. In Mahasweta Devi, Breast Stories. Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books. Srivastava, Neelam. 2018. Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tranfaglia, Nicola. 2000. L’eredità di Rocco Scotellaro. In Rocco Scotellaro, L’uva puttanella. Contadini del Sud, IX–XXX. Bari: Laterza. Varma, Rashmi. 2015. Representing the Adivasi: Limits and Possibilities of Postcolonial Theory. In New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India, ed. Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, 103–125. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Vitelli, Franco. 2008. Il ‘proemio’ del Cristo si è fermato a Eboli di Carlo Levi. Forum Italicum 42 (1): 69–82. Ward, David. 1996. Antifascisms. Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the “Actionists.” Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. White, Hayden. 1978. The Historical Text as Literary Artifact. In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 81–100. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Zaccaro, Vanna. 2003. Il viaggio di Carlo Levi in India. In Carlo Levi e la letteratura di viaggio del Novecento. Tra memoria, saggio e narrativa, 103–116. Foggia: Carlo Grenzi.

CHAPTER 4

Patchy Ethnographies of Neocolonial and Neoliberal Landscapes in Amitav Ghosh and Frank Westerman

A memorable scene in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide involves Piya and Kanai—the protagonists of the novel—reminiscing about the latter’s uncle, Nirmal. Kanai, trying to make sense of his uncle’s legacy, offers a striking portrait of Nirmal’s unique outlook on knowledge and storytelling: Nirmal was perhaps the least materialistic person I’ve ever known. But it was very important for him to believe that he was a historical materialist. […] For him it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in a way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories—of a kind. (Ghosh 2004, 282–283)

This portrait is arguably a thinly veiled declaration of poetics, describing Ghosh’s own art of narrative. A similar image—a knot of threads connecting disparate facts that turn into stories—appears in Frank Westerman’s reportage Choke Valley [Stikvallei]. Referring to his investigation into the mysteries of the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster, Westerman declares that his aim is to “dissect everything [that] has been said and written on the subject into separate fragments” and that, “by unravelling that tangle thread by thread”, he hopes “to trace which words have attached themselves to the facts, and how they have intertwined into sentences, metaphors and

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narratives”1 (Westerman 2013b, 22). The two passages may seem at odds—Nirmal/Ghosh string things together, Westerman disentangles them—but share a fundamentally similar visualisation of storytelling; that is, rendering legible a web of disparate facts that, were they not connected by a leap of the imagination, would not appear as a whole—that is, as a story. This chapter, by comparing these two writers, aims to explore this storytelling technique and its implications for the creation of ethnographic narratives—as always, with the assumption that the fieldwork relations they register shed light on facets of modernity, revealing these narratives as world-literary. In this case, modernity variously takes the form of neocolonial and neoliberal policies: uneven development in the post-colonies; the exploitative dynamics of mainstream/capitalist environmental conservation; and aid work as a tool of imperialism. But, differently from the other chapters, this thematic focus is subordinate to a stylistic parallelism. Specifically, I am interested in Ghosh’s and Westerman’s methodology of connecting the unconnected from a variety of perspectives: geographical, historical and epistemological. That is, both writers, on the one hand, construct narratives that span a vast geographical and historical scope, creating multisited and/or multitemporal narratives; on the other hand, they stage a comparison between a variety of systems of knowledge, such as various strands of scientific culture, poetic visions of the world, secular humanism and religious thinking. To understand why Ghosh’s and Westerman’s work is characterised by a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and a systematic search for insightful juxtapositions it is useful, first of all, to briefly sketch their literary and educational trajectories. Born in Calcutta in a bhadralok family, Ghosh was educated as a social scientist: his formation includes a B.A. in history, an M.A. in sociology, and, most importantly, a Ph.D. in anthropology, which led him to do ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt. However, Ghosh, who had never been interested in an academic career and “always wanted to be a ‘writer’, whatever that means” (Stankiewicz and Ghosh 2012, 539)⁠, soon followed his vocation and published his first novel The Circle of Reason, in 1986 (Ghosh 2011c). Research, however, has remained a key component of his creative process—as well as a recurring theme of his work, with many of his characters being scholars or erudites. Ghosh has most consistently relied on historical research, exploring various marginalised sides of the history of South Asia and of the Indian Ocean. Early examples of his historical forays include the reconstruction of a

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half-­ forgotten series of communal riots at the heart of his Proustian Bildungsroman, The Shadow Lines (2005c [1988]), and the hidden sides of the history of malaria research, transfigured into a science fiction thriller, The Calcutta Chromosome (2011b [1995]). This kind of research, moreover, is central to his several historical novels, most notably the Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, 2008; River of Smoke, 2011a; Flood of Fire, 2015), a historical saga on the First Opium War between the British Empire and China. But history is just one of Ghosh’s fields of investigation. The most recent phase of Ghosh’s production, which started with the publication of his influential essay on climate change, The Great Derangement (2016), has been almost entirely dedicated to the many facets of planetary environmental breakdown, with a particular emphasis on the role of nonhuman agency and nonsecular, subaltern and indigenous perspectives on the environmental crisis. He has, therefore, engaged with a broad range of disciplines, including political ecology, environmental history, indigenous studies and multispecies ethnography, particularly in his latest essay, The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021b). Most importantly, for my purposes, ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology—as methods as well as an epistemological paradigm he critically interrogates—inform at least two of Ghosh’s works, on which this chapter focuses: In an Antique Land and The Hungry Tide. The former is a fieldwork memoir based on his stay in Egypt as a young ethnographer (interwoven with microhistorical research), and the latter is an ethnographic fiction (novel) focused on the Sundarbans area of Bengal. Both, albeit differently, bear witness to Ghosh’s anthropological training, while being responses to Ghosh’s uneasiness with classical anthropology. Westerman’s educational background and his intellectual interests are also quite diverse, anticipating a keen curiosity for the encounter between systems of knowledge in and throughout various geo-historical realities. Born in a devout Protestant family in the Northern Netherlands, he studied tropical agriculture with the explicit aim, as he recounts in his reportage El Negro and Me [El Negro en ik 2004], to do aid and development work in the Global South. However, he later decided to become a journalist, a career that emerged quite organically from his field experience as an engineer and the reportages he wrote while working abroad as a student. Westerman made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent, most notably in the Balkans in 1992 and in Russia from 1997 to 2002, until he became a full-time writer in 2002. Differently from Ghosh, who is primarily a novelist, Westerman is exclusively a writer of non-fiction, specifically

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of literary reportages. For my purposes, I consider his literary reportages a form of fieldwork memoir: they are, consistently, non-fictional first-person narratives with a quest structure that both rely on and describe fieldwork experiences aimed at some form of cultural insight. Indeed, Westerman has recently argued that in his view one of the key differences between novels and reportages is that while “the novel can get by without fieldwork, the reportage cannot” (2022, n.p.), stressing the importance of fieldwork for his own practice of journalism. Considering his career as a foreign reporter, it comes as no surprise that Westerman’s books tend to have an international, often trans-national setting. Frequently dealing with multiple locales at once, his reportages variously follow and interweave the threads of political, intellectual and material history. For instance, Ararat (2009 [2007]) discusses the relationship between science and faith using Mount Ararat—in myth and history—as a starting point; Brother Mendel’s Perfect Horse [Dier, Bovendier, 2013a [2010] deals with the parallel developments of “scientific” racism and animal eugenics by delving into the history of the Lipizzaner horses; A Word A Word [Een woord een woord, 2016] discusses the different histories of anti-terrorism campaigns in various countries and their drastically different degrees of reliance on violence and diplomacy; We, Hominids [Wij, de Mens, 2018] interrogates the concept of humanity—and the limits of scientific ‘facts’—through the mirror of paleoanthropology. As this summary shows, Westerman’s reportages pivot around a specific, often unique and exceptional, phenomenon, trope, event or encounter that captures his imagination and guides his research and fieldwork. The points of departure of El Negro and Me and Choke Valley, on which I focus, are no exception, being, respectively, a chance meeting with a stuffed human body in a provincial museum in Catalonia and the unleashing of a mysterious disaster in Cameroon. Ghosh’s and Westerman’s weaving together of geographies, histories and epistemologies results, when it intersects with their depiction of fieldwork experiences, in what I call patchy ethnographic narratives— ‘patchy/patchiness’ being terms that I borrow from Anna Tsing, as discussed in the next section. In these narratives, fieldwork is shown as permeable, open to unexpected or hidden connections with faraway places and world-systemic forces; epistemological heterogeneity (but not necessarily harmony) is foregrounded; and people and places acquire new meaning and significance through a comparison with seemingly unrelated stories and locales. I am hence interested in comparing Ghosh and

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Westerman due to their shared preference for narratives that emerge from multidisciplinary research and fieldwork, and that embrace a patchy narrative structure that registers the dynamics of modernity within the world-­ system. It is also worth noticing that, in discussing their method, I am also reflecting on a style of world-systemic juxtaposition and/as critique that very much resembles my own world-literary project. As such, this final analytical chapter functions, in highlighting the risks and limits, but also the potential, of world-spanning juxtapositions, as a metacommentary on this book as a piece of world-literary criticism, and its attending to, in Nirvana Tanoukhi’s words, “the problem of crossing considerable divides without yielding to the fallacy of decisive leaps” (2008, 599). The chapter begins with an exploration of the concept of patchy/patchiness that I use to characterise Ghosh’s and Westerman’s ethnographic narratives. The following section explores Amitav Ghosh’s syncretic humanism, at the heart of his anthropological, political and ecological vision, as well as the ideological underpinning for his patchy technique. This leads to his fieldwork memoir, In an Antique Land, which, describing Egyptian village life in the 1980s through the mirror of a distant and seemingly unrelated historical record, establishes convergences across space and time while elaborating a critique of modernity and development. I then turn to Ghosh’s ethnographic fiction (novel) The Hungry Tide, which explores the Sundarbans region of Bengal from the point of view (and fieldwork experiences) of a cetologist, a translator and a former political activist. Through this framing, the novel wonders on whether the various ways of narrating as well as inhabiting this world— including that of nonhuman beings—can be subsumed within a humanist framework. It attempts to produce a shared understanding of that reality that pushes against what Ghosh calls supremacists forces, taking the form, in the novel, of caste and class oppression, aligned (or hiding behind) mainstream environmental conservation. I then discuss Frank’s Westerman’s literary reportages, focusing first on their relationship with colonial history and their multisitedness. I elaborate these aspects by discussing El Negro and Me, which, by reconstructing Westerman’s various journeys across the world that led him to the decision to abandon his plan to become a development worker, can be read as a multisited ethnography of aid work and neocolonialism. The final sections of the chapter are dedicated to Westerman’s reportage Choke Valley. This reportage uses the 1986 Nyos Lake disaster, which resulted in the death of thousands of Cameroonians, as the starting point to discuss how disasters

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can be differently narrated by science and religion, as well as other less hegemonic frameworks, based on a local context. Westerman, through a tripartite structure that highlights the clash between different epistemologies, interrogates how disasters are understood by various systems of knowledge, why this is the case and who benefits from each of these framings in the context of a post-colony subjected to neoliberal and neocolonial policies.

4.1   A Rush of Stories: Patchy Ethnography To conjoin Ghosh’s and Westerman’s ethnographic narratives I mobilise the concept of patchiness, as Anna Tsing employs it throughout her work. In her ethnography of the matsutake mushroom forests, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Tsing defines patchiness as “a mosaic of open-­ ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spacial arcs” (2015, 4)⁠. The term ‘patch’ is borrowed from ecology, in which it refers to an area in a landscape (another key term in her critical vocabulary) that is different from the surrounding areas. The term ‘assemblage’, in turn, refers to a gathering of multiple species that, in a given environment, influence each other (22–23). Within the book, Tsing sees patches as “varied social and political spaces”, which require “acts of translations” to be crossed (62). Her main example is matsutake mushrooms, whose cultural and economic meaning shifts from one patch to the other within the global commodity chain that connects Oregon-based pickers, buyers in Japan, and several intermediaries that facilitate this exchange. Commodity chains such as this connect various landscapes across space, as well as different histories, that not only contain a variety of social, cultural, political and environmental relations that distinguish them from each other but are also patchy—that is, heterogeneous, comprising several patches—in and of themselves. Elsewhere, Tsing, alongside Andrew Mathews and Nils Bubandt, defines landscapes precisely as “units of heterogeneity whose components—at any scale—are patches” (2019, 188). Patchiness, in other words, expresses heterogeneity at various scales while also acknowledging systems—like the global capitalist economy—that connects these spaces of heterogeneity. Ryan Jobson, commenting on Tsing’s, Mathews’ and Bubandt’s essay, describes the anthropology they sketch as “oriented toward permeable patches rather than hermetic fieldsites” (2020, 263), precisely because as the patch concept inherently

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“understands all landscapes as necessarily entangled with broader matrices of human and nonhuman ecologies” (262). Tsing’s ethnography tracks mushrooms across patches, landscapes and assemblages—from post-industrial forests to luxury restaurants in Japan— in what she calls the method of “[listening] and [telling] a rush of stories” (38). Her way of working and writing is reminiscent of an earlier model of ethnography: George Marcus’ multisited ethnography—an approach meant to study objects that are located beyond a single location (Marcus 1995),2 and that represented a reflection on how ethnography could attempt to study the world-system as a whole. One of Marcus’ suggestions to practise multisited ethnography is the methodology of “following” the object of study from one field to another. Marcus describes six different modes of following (106–113): following (1) people, (2) things, (3) metaphors, (4) plots, stories or allegories, (5) biographies and (6) conflicts. Tsing’s Mushroom, according to Terese Gagnon, is a perfect representation of Marcus’ mode of following “the thing” (2019, 290), that is, a “manifestly material object of study […] such as commodities, gifts, money, works of art, and intellectual property” (Marcus 1995, 106–107)— resulting in a multisited chase after the prized matsutake mushroom across various patchy landscapes—that is, heterogeneous, permeable ethnographic fields. The concept of patchiness has been further developed, in the aforementioned essay by Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt, as a way to put critical pressure on the concept of the Anthropocene, and in doing so, it makes an important link between geohistorical heterogeneity, multisitedness and epistemological pluralism. Tsing et al. argue precisely for a ‘patchy’ understanding of the Anthropocene—one-and-uneven, one might say—that contrasts the universalising narrative of humanity as a unified environmental factor, insensitive to the histories and temporalities of colonisation and capitalist accumulation,3 in an attempt to understand “radical difference when it happens both site specifically and on a planetary scale” (2019, 187). Within this reworking of the Anthropocene concept, they also stress the importance of exploring and compare, from an anthropological perspective, various forms of “systems-thinking”, juxtaposing “ecological models, nonsecular cosmologies, and political economies”: A key contribution that anthropologists can make to Anthropocene studies is to juxtapose these alternate kinds of systems-thinking— thus opening attention to multiple ways of gaining traction on observations of landscape

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structure. In addressing the spatial and historical unevenness that hides in plain sight in the Anthropocene, we need to find a way of addressing empirically the planetary scale of the Anthropocene without remaining naively beholden to its unitary pretensions. Holding in critical tension the diverse kinds of systems-thinking in ecological models, nonsecular cosmologies, and political economies offers such a way. (190)

A patchy ethnographic fieldwork, therefore, is not simply about crossing and connecting multiple fieldsites or histories, but foregrounds the epistemological heterogeneity it encounters along the way. In this chapter, I read Ghosh’s and Westerman’s own ethnographic narratives precisely as experiments in a patchy fieldwork, testing the heuristic potential of stringing together stories from different times and geographies, as well as highlighting the clashes between competing—or coexisting—systems of knowledge that occur within these spaces and histories. If modernity, understood as the unitary phenomenon that world literature investigates, nevertheless does not “[assume] the same form everywhere” but “is everywhere irreducibly specific” (Warwick Research Collective 2015, 12), Ghosh’s and Westerman’s ethnographic narratives as registration patchy fieldworks, in this chapter, function precisely as ways to explore both this heterogeneity—the irreducible specificity—and the singularity of modernity itself across multiple locales. It is important to stress that Ghosh’s and Westerman’s attention towards heterogeneity—their patchiness—is ultimately expressed in (and registers) uneven fieldwork relations: ‘patchy’, as I use it, is a cognate term of uneven, and stands in opposition to ‘global’, another term that could be used to describe, in my opinion incorrectly, Ghosh’s and Westerman’s multisited narratives of difference. Contemporary globalisation, which can be understood, in Anthony Giddens’ very broad definition, as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (1990, 64)⁠ is indeed explored in Ghosh’s and Westerman’s works, which register and respond to the effects of globalising processes, including foregrounding of the role of fieldworkers with elevated global mobility. Moreover, globalisation is central in the contemporary rekindling of interest for world literature, as I have discussed in the first chapter, and is a structuring element in much contemporary anthropology (see Appadurai 1996; Ribeiro 2014)⁠. It may seem tempting, at first

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glance, to define their ethnographic narratives, dealing with multiple, mutually influencing locales and histories, as ‘global’. However, I find the term ‘global’, as a descriptor, too intertwined with the liberal ideal of the borderless world—namely the idea that, in contemporary globalised reality, people, ideas and goods can all circulate freely and without restraints in a level playing field. If this is true for capital, it is of course not true for labour, from whose perspective globalisation is inherently a border regime, in which the capacity to overcome barriers is strictly regulated. Ghosh and Westerman, whenever they explore interconnected geographies and coexisting epistemologies, are always stressing the unevenness of the playing field that these connections and coexistences create or depend upon, including stressing the uneven relation between mobile fieldworkers (scientists, professionals, researchers) and those whose mobility is tightly policed or suppressed. Similarly, a recurring point in their narratives is that the suppression of subaltern epistemologies in favour of technocratic or managerial ones exposes communities and their environments to neoliberal and neocolonial exploitation. Their patchy ethnographic narratives register, at their core, uneven entanglements— and, as such, are world-literary.

4.2   Amitav Ghosh 4.2.1   Syncretic Humanism and Culture of Compromise: In an Antique Land One of the defining aspects of Ghosh’s intellectual outlook, and the ideological position behind his patchy technique, is his humanism, which draws much of its specificity from a dialogue with Tagore. As Carlotta Beretta argues, Tagore and Ghosh both share an interest towards the idea of a universal literature (2015, 253). In particular, in his essay “The March of the Novel Through History” (2005b [1998]), Ghosh elaborates a notion of literature that refuses “to be beaten into provincialism” (Ghosh 2005b, 109)⁠—in a rather overt reference to Tagore’s essay on “Visva-­ Sahitya” (2014 [1907]) [“World Literature”], he praises and endorses “a notion of universal ‘literature’, a form of artistic expression that embodies difference in place and culture, emotion and aspiration, but in such a way to render them communicable” (Ghosh 2005b, 108)⁠. As in Tagore, such conception of literature is rooted in both difference and translatability of experience—hence enabling a humanist conversation across cultures. As

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Beretta points out, Ghosh takes from Tagore (and arguably from the Bengali Renaissance as a whole4) a syncretic form of humanism. Tagore believes that “the humanity of men is a sign of their divinity”, which in turn can be grasped with the power of imagination that is at the disposal of a poetic mind (2015, 253)⁠. Ghosh adopts a more distinctively secular perspective, but in his books imagination, vision and (poetic) intuition, even if achieved through the pathway of faith, are valued alongside a rationalising and scientific discourse that is usually connected to secularism (254)⁠. A consequence of this syncretic humanism is that Ghosh’s position on the relationship between the “secular” and the “religious” is quite complex, dovetailing with the recent trend of “postsecularism”. This term indicates how “a new wave of philosophers and social theorists has [...] looked for a new common ground shared by atheists and faithful alike” (Ungureanu 2014, 1)⁠. Ghosh’s conception of religion is arguably post-­ secular, because he believes that religious and secular perspectives can and should—in principle—be translated into a shared language. For instance, in The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh proposes a form of “vitalist politics” to spearhead the struggle against climate change, involving, “living on Earth as though it were […] a living, vital entity” (2021b, 205). Since this political proposal emerges, strictly speaking, from a nonsecular worldview, he discusses at length whether nonsecular perspectives should be considered legitimate allies of (secular) climate movements. Ghosh’s position, ultimately, is that one should carefully assess to which political ends and to which material conditions each system of knowledge is conjoined. He argues that there is: a consistent pattern in the relationship between vitalist ideas and politics: almost always, beliefs in the Earth’s sacredness and the vitality of trees, rivers, and mountains are signs of an authentic commitment to the defense of nonhumans when they are associated with […] movements that are initiated and led by people who are intimately connected with the specificities of particular landscapes. By the same token, such ideas must always be distrusted and discounted when they are espoused by elitist conservationists, avaricious gurus and godmen, right-wing cults, and most of all political parties: in each of these manifestations they are likely to be signs of exactly the kind of “mysticism” that lends itself to co-optation by exclusivist right-­ wingers and fascists. (233)

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Only a careful scrutiny of the affiliations and political objectives of a nonsecular (environmental) movement should allow one to evaluate whether or not it is a force for good—lest one conflates the vitalist-oriented liberation politics of indigenous activists, the greenwashed talk of Hindutva politicians, and the mysticism of the ecofascists. That said, this scrutiny is necessary precisely because Ghosh sees the engagement across political formations that are guided by different epistemologies, in the case of the struggle against climate change, as unavoidable, for “[it] is of utmost urgency at this time is to find points of convergence on Earth-related issues between people whose concerns, approaches, life experiences, and identities may otherwise be completely different” (228). This is in line with Ghosh’s earlier reflections, such as his essay “The Fundamentalist Challenge” (2005a [1995]), in which he identifies an ideology and political praxis that is shared between secular and nonsecular formations and that he calls supremacism—“the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of geography” (2005a, 128). Ghosh is likely thinking of this overarching conception of supremacism, cutting across the secular-nonsecular spectrum, also in an interview with Citra Sankaran, in which he states that “fundamentalism […] is just a pure kind of politics which is seeking to, as it were, colonize every free space within us” and that, therefore, must be resisted “just as strongly […] as we resist  the sorts of secular attempts to colonize all our integral spaces” (Ghosh and Sankaran 2012, 14). ⁠Supremacism therefore is, within Ghosh’s worldview, an umbrella term for formations bent on imposing, for a variety of political aims, a model of humanity in an “anthropopoieutical frenzy” (Remotti 2013, 155)⁠—and its varieties range from religious fundamentalism and totalitarian doctrines to the free-market ideology. Resisting all these supremacist forces is the implicit task of Ghosh’s syncretic humanism, which aims at finding common ground among “people whose concerns, approaches, life experiences, and identities may otherwise be completely different”. It is no chance that Anshuman Mondal describes Ghosh’s writing as attempts “to choose both registers of modernity—humanism, secularism, syncretic nationalism, historicism—and those registers that resist or contest them— subaltern, postmodernism” (2007, 173)⁠. While I prefer to characterise Ghosh’s writing in terms of syncretic humanism—whereas, for Mondal, humanism is just one of the elements at play—I fully agree that Ghosh’s

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politics pivot around compromises between different, seemingly incompatible registers. A commitment to syncretic humanism results, in Ghosh’s fiction, in a fundamental tension between a desire for dialogue and a sense of the irreducible specificity of individual and cultural experience, which is both valuable and, potentially, a problem for communication. The encounters he portrays in his ethnographic narratives always strive towards the possibility of dialogue and mutual exchange but must confront the presence of a number of political, cultural and historical barriers. If we follow Tsing’s suggestion that what characterises the passage from a patch to another is an act of translation, then it is no surprise that Ghosh’s views on translation epitomise his position in this regard. In the previously quoted interview, when asked whether he believes in “ultimate translatability of languages and cultures” (Ghosh and Sankaran 2012, 5)⁠, Ghosh replies: Obviously we interact with each other through a surface of words which is always deceptive. So what’s the difference? There is always some sort of a patina which prevents, as it were, perfect communication. But that should be a given. It should be a starting point. […] If it’s difficult to translate, then find a way! Language allows you infinite possibilities; you just have to try a little harder. (Ghosh and Sankaran 2012, 5–6)⁠

This attitude can be extended to ethnographic encounters in a more general sense: Ghosh works under the assumption that there are difficulties, but it is always possible, in theory, to “try a little harder” to find a common ground. This is a fundamentally humanist attitude that believes in the possibility of dialogue, even when the act of translation must find a shared language between humans and nonhumans, or seemingly incompatible perspectives such as secular and religious worldviews. Ghosh’s vision, however, does not exclude the breakdown or impossibility of dialogue, especially in those historical circumstances in which there is no interest or advantage, from one of the two sides, to negotiate. Examples include the European conquest of the Indian Ocean trade (In an Antique Land), a massacre animated by the politics of caste and class (The Hungry Tide) or the bloodshed, driven by capitalist expansion, of the First Opium War in the Ibis trilogy. These are all instances in which, for Ghosh, some kind of supremacist force is at work—and Ghosh’s humanism does not go so far as to argue that common ground should be found with supremacist forces. With these significant caveats, Ghosh, in the

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fieldwork encounters that he explores in his ethnographic narratives, is nevertheless interested in testing the limits of a syncretic humanism that assumes that each “language”, in principle, could be translated and understood, if only partially. In an Antique Land (1992) is one of Ghosh’s early expressions of his syncretic humanism, and takes the form of a patchy fieldwork memoir—it registers a fieldwork in which different systems of knowledge encounter and clash, and that takes place in the shadowy presence of faraway geographies and histories. The book adopts fieldwork—more specifically, Ghosh’s stay in the two Egyptian villages of Lataifa and Nashawy among the local fellaheen (peasants) during the early 1980s, as part of his doctoral thesis— as a fieldsite to understand modernity, but the heuristic potential of this site is only activated by intertwining the fieldwork memoir with a parallel historical narrative. Patchiness is thus scripted in the very structure of the book, which consists of two alternating, interweaving narrative threads, creating a sort of double-helix, as Ghosh calls it (Ghosh and Aldama 2002, 90). In the first one, which could be characterised as microhistorical research (Vescovi 2011, 76), Ghosh reassembles the life of Ben Yiju, a twelfth-­ century Jewish merchant, working between Egypt and south-western India, and his network of friends, loved ones and business partners, including, crucially, his Indian slave Bomma, the “slave of MS H.6”. Ghosh follows their biography across multiple sites and uses their story to showcase what he calls “culture of accommodation and compromise” (Ghosh 1992, 228)⁠, which characterised, he argues, the pre-modern world of the Indian Ocean, in particular its mercantile culture. Such world, according to Ghosh’s reconstruction, represents an important historical precedent in terms of cultural pluralism and transnational mobility. Most importantly, trade, within this space, was also conducted, according to Ghosh, mostly without the use of force, a fact he interprets as “the product of a rare cultural choice” (287) discarded with the arrival of European colonial conquest. This reconstruction does present some significant distortions, as I discuss, but is foundational to inform the trajectory of the ethnographic part of the narrative, framing Ghosh’s stay in Egypt as a quest5 to retrace— or, perhaps, to envision—precisely the culture of accommodation and compromise. Recreating the biographies of Ben Yiju and Bomma is Ghosh’s attempt to evoke a syncretic civilisation that contrasts that “particular vision of the past” (95)⁠ in which people of different creeds and cultures—such as Jews

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and Muslims—are irrevocably partitioned. Bomma is identified as part of the Tuluva community of the Malabar coast, whose religion, like many groups in India, “was woven from an equal mixture of local forms of worship […] and the high Sanskritic tradition”, with the Tuluva “[participating] enthusiastically in the worship of both sets of deities” (252)⁠. This is in stark contrast with present-day Mangalore, where Ghosh, during a field trip, witnesses Hindutva ideology launching a full onslaught on religious syncretism. On the other hand, Ghosh points out how Ben Yiju, already established as part of a multicultural trade network, was probably married to Ashu, an Indian woman from the Nair community of the Malabar coast that he had freed from slavery. The fact that the marriage probably did take place, but was somehow unusual, is suggested precisely by the fact that Ashu is referenced only once in the whole corpus of Ben Yiju’s letters, “for only a marriage of that kind—with a slave girl, born outside the community of his faith—could have earned so pointed a silence on the part of [Ben Yiju’s] friends” (230)⁠. Also the relationship between Ben Yiju and Bomma is presented as a bond that defies cultural and class barriers. Although Bomma is Ben Yiju’s slave, Ghosh argues that their relationship was “probably more that of patron and client than master and slave, as that relationship is now understood” (259)⁠. Ghosh argues that the forms that slavery could take in the pre-modern world were “part of a very flexible set of hierarchies and often followed a logic completely contrary to that which modern expectations suggest” (260)⁠. He points out that several Hindu, Jewish and Muslim traditions within the Indian Ocean system offered examples of slavery as metaphors for quests for spiritual perfection, hence providing “human connections, pledges of commitments, in relationships that could just as well have been a matter of mere exchange of coinage” (263)⁠. For Ghosh, this conception of slavery—a set of “inarticulate counter-beliefs”—is important to argue for the existence of “a small patch of level ground” between “the matrilineally-descended Tulu and the patriarchal Jew who would otherwise seem to stand on different sides of an unbridgeable chasm” (Ghosh 1992, 263)⁠. Ben Yiju, Bomma and Ashu—and their respective relationships—therefore represent the capacity to suspend differences and find common ground, epitomising the “world of accommodations” that Ghosh (237) attempts to re-evoke⁠. It is worth noting, as Gaurav Desai has convincingly argued, that Ghosh’s reconstruction is marked by a number of historical distortions. Most notably, the idea of a fundamentally peaceful Indian Ocean trade is

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belied by the evidence of several internal rivalries between the various powers in the Indian Ocean and various historical attempts, also through the force of arms, to take control of the trade networks. As Desai points out, “it may be true […] that before the arrival of the Europeans no political power in the Indian Ocean ultimately succeeded in dictating the terms of trade, but it was not for lack of trying” (2004, 136)⁠. Similarly, Desai points out that the vision of pre-modern slavery that Ghosh relies on— and, I would add, is so crucial to align Ben Yiju’s relationship with both Bomma and Ashu as a free cultural choice in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism—ignores other instances of violence and of sexual and economic exploitation in the context of slavery of the Indian Ocean trade (138–140)⁠. These elisions in Ghosh’s reconstruction effectively anticipate a potential shortcoming of patchy narratives that juxtapose different histories and systems of knowledge. Reading a subjectivity with lenses that belong to another context, to another history, does allow that subjectivity to transcend the boundaries of a limited experience and illuminate aspects of another reality that would otherwise remain invisible. However, it is also inherently marked by the risk of mystification. But In an Antique Land, nevertheless, attempts—indeed, it entirely rests on this attempt—to rediscover these characters and the culture of compromise that they represent in the context of 1980s rural Egypt. How does this translation fare? 4.2.2   Dialogic Ethnography and Transhistorical Doubles The historiographical narrative of In an Antique Land—questionable as it may be in some of the interpretations—enables Ghosh to see 1980s rural Egypt with different eyes, establishing the quest of his fieldwork memoir—rediscovering the culture of compromise—and providing him with insights on how to read this fieldwork in the mirror of modernity. Ghosh’s historical narrative foregrounds—and in part overplays—syncretism in and between areas of the world and cultures that have been subsequently conceived as separate or explicitly antagonistic, as part of a broader attempt to patch together the pre-modern world of the Indian Ocean trade networks and the historical predicament of late twentieth-century Middle East. The historical narrative of In an Antique Land is thus projected onto the cultural and historical specificity of Ghosh’s Egyptian fieldwork and the ethnographic encounters that it engenders.

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Crucially, Ghosh’s quest to retrieve the culture of compromise, in present-­day Egypt, takes the shape of a dialogical ethnography. Ghosh’s text, in fact, “seeks to do away with the authoritative persona of the ethnographer, and to replace it with a dialogue between Ghosh and his native informants which continuously puts into question his narrative authority” (Srivastava 2001, 46)⁠. Seen from this perspective, the ethnographic encounters of In an Antique Land reveal themselves as moments in which multiple, different languages try, succeed or fail to find a common ground in a dispersed construction of dialogic ethnographic authority. Interestingly, this is arguably not the case of the historiographical part of the book, whose narrator/protagonist differs considerably from that of the Egyptian chapters: as Alessandro Vescovi points out in his narratological analysis of the text, the former is “always confident, master of his discipline, welcome by everyone with whom he comes in contact” (2022, 110). Vescovi suggests that this divergence is due to the different ways in which Ghosh subverts Western anthropology and historiography (113–114), respectively, and a dialogical approach, indeed, suits Ghosh’s critique of (classical) anthropology. The formal choices of the ethnographic part of the book and the way Ghosh describes fieldwork relations are actually a polemical response to the limitations of classical ethnography towards eliding the human and emotional aspects of fieldwork. In an interview, Ghosh explains his relationship with anthropology as follows: I liked anthropology, […] But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Anthropology, at least the anthropology of that time, was full of generalizations, and my mind doesn’t work like that. I can’t think about very abstract generalizations. I like to think about people, that’s what interests me, people, characters. The plight in which individuals can find themselves. In some sense that was not what anthropology was about.6 (Ghosh and Vescovi 2007, 131)⁠

In an Antique Land emerges precisely as a way to do justice to the human experience of Ghosh’s fieldwork, to sate the “nagging sense of dissatisfaction” that Ghosh felt after finishing his—strictly academic—doctoral thesis and the feeling that “everything that was important about my time in Egypt had been left unsaid” (Stankiewicz and Ghosh 2012, 536). Perhaps because they both emerge from a similar critique of classical anthropology, Ghosh’s narrative solutions, aiming to recover the concrete and relational dimension of fieldwork, share several concerns with postmodern anthropology. It is not surprising that James Clifford—one of the

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editors of Writing Culture—was very supportive of In an Antique Land (see Stankiewicz and Ghosh 2012, 532)⁠, stating that “as a formal experiment, the book’s spatial and temporal overlays complicate the notion of ‘field’ (and thus, ‘fieldwork’) almost beyond recognition” (1994, 26)—an assessment, as it were, of its status as a patchy ethnography. Ghosh’s book, in many ways, enacts many theoretical insights of the phase of postmodern anthropology that Writing Culture represents, forcefully rejecting ethnographic realism and its ideological implications. The ethnographic part of the text exposes the daily reality of fieldwork, including the fact that meaning, in ethnographic encounters, can only be constructed in a continuous negotiation with informers and companions. Ghosh, in particular, is especially keen on showing that he is subjected to a continuous scrutiny on the part of the local inhabitants, and his authority, moreover, is extremely precarious. The gap between traditional anthropology as an authoritative, hegemonic discourse and Ghosh’s actual experience of fieldwork is yet another reason why he distanced himself from traditional anthropology: as he argues in an interview with Claire Chambers, “anthropology was creating a kind of hegemonic voice. It was an authoritative voice, an authoritarian voice, and all the time I was in this village I never had that sense of authority. And essentially, this was because I’m Indian” (Ghosh and Chambers 2005, 29)⁠. The quote highlights that, consistently with the self-reflective attitude of the book, In an Antique Land does not focus on (and does not pretend to inhabit) a ‘universal’ ethnographical subjectivity but stages the concrete predicament of an Indian anthropologist, whose experience of Egypt is necessarily different from that of his Western colleagues. One of the fields on which the dialogic ethnography is played out—and the culture of compromise is enacted—is precisely in the numerous encounters between Ghosh’s secular perspective7 and the fellaheen’s (diverse) religious worldviews. These encounters include the comical clash between Ghosh and the devoted Ustaz Mustafa, who forcefully argues for Ghosh to convert to Islam, only to suddenly yield when he realises that Ghosh’s father would probably be upset at his son’s conversion; but also the more tense exchange between Ghosh and a group of village elders, who start to interrogate him on religious practices, such as whether Indians are circumcised or whether they really ‘burn’ (that is, cremate) their dead instead of burying them, which triggers Ghosh’s traumatic memories of an anti-Hindu riot in Dhaka. This episode, one of the moments in which the traditionally understood power relation between ethnographer and

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‘native’ is most explicitly subverted, does nevertheless offer an alternative to a simple hierarchical inversion, moving towards reciprocity and suggesting the villagers’ speaking back to the ethnographer is necessary: Ghosh’s friend Nabeel, trying to calm him down, points out that the elders “were only asking questions, […] just like you do; they didn’t mean any harm. […] These are just customs; it’s natural that people should be curious” (Ghosh 1992, 204, emphasis mine). The debates on religious customs, which are often the topic of Ghosh’s discussions with the villagers, culminate in one of book’s most famous episodes, which explicitly connects the ethnographic and the historiographical halves of the book as a way to provide a reading of modernity from the particular positionality of an Indian ethnographer based in rural Egypt. The co-protagonist of the episode is Imam Ibrahim, a character that Ghosh approaches to learn about traditional healing methods— which, ironically, the Imam has abandoned—and that he develops an antagonistic relationship with. Such antagonism escalates in a full-blown quarrel, which starts as an argument on the “primitive and backward custom” (235) of ‘burning’ the dead, as the Imam calls it. Ghosh and the reader are accustomed to this discussion at this point, but the argument takes a particularly vitriolic turn when the Imam argues that Ghosh, who has visited Europe, should know better. When Ghosh retorts that in the West they do, indeed, ‘burn’ their dead, the Imam makes a telling connection between civilisation, military might and development. Westerners, he claims, cannot possibly burn their dead, for “they’re advanced, they’re educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs” (235). Ghosh, overcome by “dilemmas and arguments that I could no longer contain within myself” (235), begins to aggressively brag about Indian military achievements, most notably India’s atomic armaments. Ghosh characterises this unexpected shouting match as “delegates from two superseded civilizations […] vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence” (236). The argument is only interrupted when Ghosh’s fiend Khamees intervenes, leading him away. Ghosh realises at this point that he has, somehow, become a participant and a witness “to the extermination of a world of accommodations that [he] had believed to be still alive, and, in some tiny measure, still retrievable” (237). The expression “world of accommodations” is an explicit indication that the squabble with the Imam is to be read in the mirror of the other half of the text: in fact, it echoes the later passage—in the historical narrative—in which Ghosh describes the European conquest of the

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Indian Ocean Trade: “as always, the determination of a small, united band of soldiers triumphed easily over the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise” (288)⁠. The argument between the Imam and Ghosh, in which only the rationale of violence prevails, prefigures, in a doubling and mirroring that is typical of In an Antique Land, a (past) event that still needs to emerge within the narration, asking the readers to link the two sections and think one through the other. The passage, importantly, register this particular ethnographic encounter as key to reading modernity from the perspective of various positionalities within a global periphery, united by the logic and mechanisms of uneven development. Ghosh characterises both him and the Imam as “travelling in the West” (236), that is, their relationship is reduced to and mediated through the language—and praxis and technology—of violence that has established the hegemony of the West within the world-system. This language is utterly intertwined with the idea of development—Ghosh characterises any exchange that does not employ these registers, within the discursive space that both he and the Imam have validated, as “a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development” (237). The logic of development, in short, forces the Imam and the Indian to relate to one another in the language of violent competition set by imperial and capitalist modernity. Crucially, however, this insight on modernity—and the fundamentally tragic nature of Ghosh’s encounter with the Imam—is achieved only through a doubling of the narrative through the historical half of the book: as Vescovi argues, “intertwined with Ben Yiju’s narrative, the same story [the argument with the Imam] becomes uncannily dramatic: modernity does not bring progress and prosperity, but dissolves century-old ties” (Vescovi 2022, 109). The world of accommodations sketched in the historical half becomes then a paradigm to start to reject the logic of capitalist and colonial modernity entailed in the idea of the “ladder of Development”, which is revealed as a trap for anyone, within the world-system, that is relegated to its peripheries. Consistently with the idea of a dialogic ethnography, Ghosh leaves to Khamees the task of re-introducing this alternative—the culture of compromise—in the present after the squabble between Ghosh and the Imam ends. Khamees cheers Ghosh up by assuring that he will come to visit him in India after he leaves, but adds that “if I die there you must remember to bury me” (Ghosh 1992, 237). Khamees’ final comment hints at “a possibility for understanding our differences—even if it’s an

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approach that is partial, incomplete, fragmentary”—achieved also by “[laughing] at them, and therefore at ourselves” (Merrill 2007, 122)⁠. What he performs, with his unwittingly comical comment, is the culture of compromise in practice. Not only the Imam episode but several of the ethnographic encounters in the Egyptian narrative acquire their full significance only in connection to historical part of the book, to the point that the two narrative threads are doubles of each other (Mondal 2003, 21)⁠. However distant they may seem, through a patchy narrative technique, Ghosh leads the reader to see Ben Yiju’s and Bomma’s stories and experiences as echoing those of the fellaheen. Thanks to the double-helix structure of the memoir, episodes from the historical and ethnographic part are juxtaposed in a way that foregrounds how both worlds are relevant to each other. This is particularly noticeable in a number of chapters that, by explicitly connecting the events of one part of the book to the other through thematic similarities or juxtaposition, validate a patchy imagining of the characters, who become, as it were, transhistorical doubles of each other. The most significant example is Ghosh’s friend Nabeel, previously mentioned as his rescuer after his traumatic meltdown. When Nabeel is first introduced, together with his best friend Isma’il, the readers find out that he ultimately ends up in Iraq as a migrant. The detail surprises Ghosh—who learns this fact from Shaik Musa, another old acquaintance, during a visit in 1988—because he had always imagined his friend would become an officer of the Agriculture Ministry, as he had been planning to do since he met him. Ghosh then narrates the story of Nabeel and his family. Born into a poor branch of an important local lineage, from a father who had accepted a “respectable” but badly paid job as a watchman, Nabeel is a serious and quiet young man that “never [says] anything or [commits] himself without a good deal of prior thought” (Ghosh 1992, 148)⁠. At the same time, Nabeel is ambitious, determined to redeem his family from poverty: Nabeel […] hated his family’s poverty, and loyal though he was to his father, he considered a watchman’s job demeaning, unworthy of his lineage […]. But there was a proud streak in him and […] he was determined to escape his poverty and improve his family’s condition. (150)⁠

This combination of determination and introspection—as well as his tragic story of emigration—frames Nabeel as a double of at least three characters: Ghosh himself, Ben Yiju, and Bomma.

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Nabeel, first of all, is a double of Ghosh, the ethnographer. This is explicitly foregrounded in the passage in which Ghosh, Isma’il and Nabeel are preparing tea in the young Indian’s desolate lodgings. After “running his eyes silently around [Ghosh’s] room, looking from [his] clothes, hanging on pegs, to [his] paper-strewn desk and the pots and pans stored in the tiny space that served as makeshift kitchen”, he points out that “it must make you think of all the people you left at home […] when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself” (Ghosh 1992, 152). Nabeel’s observation captures Ghosh’s attention, not only for its thoughtfulness, but for its fundamentally ethnographic nature: “It was the first time that anyone in Lataifa or Nashawy had attempted an enterprise similar to mine—to enter my imagination and look at my situation as it might appear to me” (Ghosh 1992, 151–152). Claire Chambers takes this as the core of Ghosh’s ethnographic philosophy: “the ethnographer’s most important quality should be empathy, the ability to put him- or herself in someone else’s shoes” (2006, 13)⁠. Nabeel, through accurate observation and empathetic effort, becomes an ethnographer in his own right. But since Nabeel eventually undertakes a journey of his own towards Iraq, his comment is not only an acute observation on his fiend’s inner world but also an intimation of his own future. But Nabeel is also a double of both Ben Yiju and Bomma. The chapter that introduces him ends with Ghosh asking Shaik Musa why Nabeel and Isma’il left for Iraq. The old man replies: “Why does anyone leave? […] The opportunity comes, and it has to be taken” (Ghosh 1992, 152)⁠. Ghosh then immediately switches back to Ben Yiju’s story: “To the young Ben Yiju, journeying eastward would have appeared as the simplest and most natural means of availing himself of the most rewarding possibilities his world had to offer” (153)⁠. The connection is explicit: both Nabeel and Ben Yiju are framed as young men trying to take their life in their own hands through mobility—although, while Ben Yiju’s career is depicted as an ascent towards a world of possibilities, Nabeel’s choices are significantly less glamorous and driven by coercion and necessity. Another partial parallelism is to be found in this description of Ben Yiju’s personality and talents: Ghosh points out that “his distinction of mind is evident enough in his letters, but he must have had, in addition, a certain warmth or charm, as well as the gift of inspiring loyalty” (158).⁠ Nabeel, once again, mirrors these qualities within his less privileged environment. He is gifted, like Ben Yiju, with significant intellectual qualities, and he is loyal as well as inspires loyalty, as his friendship with both Isma’il and Ghosh shows. The

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bond between him and Ghosh is strong enough that they keep corresponding regularly after Ghosh’s departure. Yet, at the end of the narrative, his traces start to get lost—he seems to recede into a phantasmal state of existence, like the historical figures that Ghosh must retrieve from the archives of history. When, in the epilogue, Ghosh is back in Egypt for another round of visits in 1990, a few weeks after the beginning of the Gulf War, Nabeel is not there. He is still in Iraq, and no one has news about him. Indeed, the final pages of In an Antique Land are replete with ill omens about Nabeel’s fate. Ghosh even reprises Nabeel’s comment about making tea for one person only, far away from home—remarking that “it was hard to think of Nabeel alone, in a city headed for destruction” (353, emphasis mine)⁠. In the final lines of In an Antique Land, as Ghosh is watching the news at Isma’il’s house, Nabeel’s fate, at least within the horizon of the narrative, is sealed into oblivion: watching a crowd of refugees trying to escape Iraq, soon to become the theatre of war, the spectators, including Ghosh, try to find him among the crowd, but to no avail: There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History. (353, emphasis mine)⁠

Significantly, a few pages earlier, Ghosh had discussed the last key document concerning his historiographical research on Bomma, kept in a centre for historical research in Philadelphia, proving that he had accompanied Ben Yiju as he resettled in Egypt during the last years of his life (349), and symbolically finding closure for Bomma’s story. The juxtaposition is, again, significant. Nabeel, with his disappearance, now closely resembles how Bomma was introduced at the beginning of the narrative, in the prologue. Indeed, the very first paragraph of the book clearly echoes its ending: “The slave of MS H.6 first stepped upon the stage of modern history in 1942. His was a brief debut, in the obscurest of theatres, and he was scarcely out of the wings before he was gone again—more a prompter’s whisper than a recognizable face in the cast” (13, emphasis mine)⁠. Also Nabeel, at the end of the book, has no face. But, more tragically, there seems to be no redemption from this obscurity within the space of the memoir, as in Bomma’s case.

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With this last, bleak parallelism, Nabeel emerges as the preferred mirror for Ghosh’s patchy imagination, containing in himself a number of other stories while simultaneously embodying the culturally specific experience of an Egyptian fellah: his empathy echoes Ghosh’s ethnographic self; his ambition echoes Ben Yiju’s aspirations; his disappearance in the midst of the war reminds the readers of the most common fate for people, like Bomma, that history deems inconsequential—vanishing into anonymity. It is significant that the shape that history takes, to erase Nabeel, is that of imperialist warfare, which, foreshadowed in the narrative by the Imam’s “guns and tanks and bombs” and the European conquest of the Indian Ocean trade networks, appear as the logical consequence of capitalist and colonial modernity. Ghosh’s double-helix structure—coming into full effect in the epilogue—creates a swirling tapestry of parallelisms that forces the reader to compare individual events and situations by connecting the highly specific historical and cultural contexts in which they are located. It is worth noting, however, that this operation, always runs the risk of stumbling into inadequate and inappropriate comparison. For instance, is Nabeel’s desire for a prosperous future even comparable, in its structure of feeling, to Ben Yiju’s ambition? Ghosh’s humanist imagination suggests that this is the case, but does not fully interrogate the limits and pitfalls of this patchy operation. These pitfalls, however, are instead addressed extensively in The Hungry Tide, in which the potential and the risks of ‘connecting the unconnected’—of patchiness as a narrative technique—is one of Ghosh’s fundamental concerns. 4.2.3   The Hungry Tide: Ethnographies of the Environment The Hungry Tide is, first of all, a handbook example of an ethnographic novel, providing, through the perspective of three different fieldworkers, a holistic representation of a specific, peripheral area of Bengal—the Sundarbans, the archipelago of islets covered in mangrove forests at the Ganges’ Delta. Crucially, for my purposes, it details the conflicts its inhabitants are involved in—especially those between local elites and subalterns—as well as their relationship with the environment, folklore and history of the region, investigating what these relationships and struggles can show about modernity as a whole.8

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The novel, set in the early 2000s, follows the American cetologist Piya and the Kolkata-born, Delhi-based translator, interpreter and entrepreneur Kanai. Piya’s family is of Indian origins, but she has little to no connection with her family’s culture—most crucially, she speaks no Bengali, the language of her parents. She arrives in the so-called tide country, instead, to study the fluvial dolphin orcaella brevirostris. Kanai, a narcissistic, urbane and self-confident polyglot, is coming to inspect a notebook written by his late uncle Nirmal, acquiescing to the request of his aunt Nilima, Nirmal’s widow and the head of the Badabon Trust, a local NGO based on the island of Lusibari. Nirmal, a communist intellectual and former university professor forced, in the early 1950s, to seek refuge in the Sundarbans with Nilima to avoid police surveillance, has worked all his life as a schoolteacher in Lusibari. His notebook turns out to be the account of his involvement with a group of refugees that were brutally evicted from the island of Morichjhãpi in 1979, with many of them being murdered in the process. Piya’s, Kanai’s, Nirmal’s and Nilima’s stories interweave with that of a local fisherman, Fokir, whose mother, Kusum, was killed in the Morichjhãpi massacre. Piya, after being swindled and mistreated by the forest guards that are supposed to escort her, happens to seek refuge and spend a few days on Fokir’s boat, only to realise he is deeply knowledgeable about the areas of the local riverine environment that the dolphins inhabit. She, therefore, recruits him as a guide for her expedition. Kanai, while reading Nirmal’s diary and discovering hidden truths about Morichjhãpi, his uncle, Fokir and Kusum, decides to join the expedition, mostly as an excuse to spend time with Piya, whom he is attracted to. At the same time, also Piya and Fokir, however, seem to be falling for each other, in spite of their inability to communicate verbally. While this unusual love triangle develops, the expedition, deep into the mangrove archipelago, is struck by a terrible storm and Fokir sacrifices himself to save Piya. In the aftermath, Piya resettles in Lusibari, to develop her research in collaboration with Nilima’s Trust, as a way to honour Fokir’s memory. The novel’s focalisation shifts around three main perspectives: Piya’s and Kanai’s (mostly in alternating chapters), and Nirmal’s, whose diary is read by his nephew. Alessandro Vescovi argues that this multiplicity of perspectives has a number of important functions: first of all, it allows the narrative to approach the Sundarbans through the perspectives of three ‘outsiders’, so that the reader is provided with a form of mediation to experience the culture of the region (2011, 89)⁠. In this sense, the three

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main characters can all be considered fieldworkers, cast in a number of ethnographic encounters with local inhabitants and actively engaged in an imaginative effort to make sense of their alien surroundings. Secondly, their limited perspective and the fact that their encounters within the Sundarbans culture follow the necessities of the plot—that is, a narrative logic, and not the supposedly ideal order in which the region should be approached to have a ‘proper’ understanding of it, as a traditional ethnography, instead, would do—allow the novel to arrange its material through an epistemological journey that mimics the randomness of reality (Vescovi 2011, 97)⁠. Various cultural details, words, stories and customs of the Sundarbans are mentioned casually only to reveal their full importance and significance later in the novel, and not necessarily within the perspective of the same character. Alternatively, Ghosh makes sure that only one character learns extensively of a specific aspect of the region, so that the reader is fully aware of the lack of knowledge of other characters when they are faced with the same item. The overall effect is somehow the opposite of Kim’s census-fantasy: no single character—nor the readers, at least when they first experience the plot—is able to achieve a complete knowledge of the Sundarbans, and they are often puzzled by what they see. All these procedures disperse ethnographic authority, which is not focused on a single ethnographer-­ figure. This is consistent with the trend Ghosh had already set within In an Antique Land, rejecting the stylistic and epistemological premises of ethnographic realism and monologic ethnographic authority. The book’s holistic ambition has little to do with a totalising (positivist) knowledge, but more with offering a heterogeneous and patchy snapshot of the region through these three perspectives. Vescovi also points out that each focaliser provides a unique epistemological standpoint: scientific for Piya, linguistic for Kanai and poetic/political for Nirmal (2011, 93)⁠—Nirmal, in fact, interweaves both a political and poetic understanding of life, ending most of his journal entries with quotes from Reiner Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (2021 [1923]). Like in In an Antique Land, the narratological structure paves the way for a patchy epistemology, setting the fieldsite as a place of encounter between different systems of knowledge that, crucially, also begin to overlap, inform, and clash with each other. Moreover, Piya’s, Kanai’s and Nirmal’s epistemological perspectives must also confront, crucially, systems of knowledge that belong to non-focalising characters like Fokir and his mother Kusum, who are, instead, ‘insiders’.9 To foreground this process, Ghosh

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establishes translation not just as an important plot point but as the central metaphor of the book. The novel is replete with comparisons between humans and nonhumans, between humans and the environment, between animals and political systems, between different modes of knowledge and systems of belief, whose encounter is often explicitly framed as (or necessitating) a translation. The book revels in leading its protagonists beyond their epistemological comfort zone, forcing them to ‘translate’ their languages and modes of understanding the world. So, scientific fieldwork and historical materialism dovetail with a holistic understanding of the environment, mammal behaviour becomes poetry, the practice of translation itself becomes a source of anthropological insight, and liberal cosmopolitanism is juxtaposed to a subaltern yearning for a better life. The patchiness of the novel is thus primarily epistemological, investigating the possibility—but also the legitimacy—of these transformations. One of the assumptions of the book, which Ghosh takes from Rilke (through Nirmal), is that we live in an inherently “translated world” (Ghosh 2004, 206) that humans—differently from animals, according to the German poet—can only experience through different mediations—which are, in many cases, interchangeable, but that we also need to be ready to decipher. The idea of a translatability between different life experiences and forms of knowledge was already a central feature of In an Antique Land, in which it was carried out by juxtaposing different times, places and cultures. In The Hungry Tide, the space in which translations can be enacted is expanded towards the world of nonhuman agents, so that the ethnographic encounters are not limited to the interactions between ethnographer and natives as human beings, but between ethnographers and an environment. With this word, by borrowing Pablo Mukherjee’s definition, I mean “the complex (and often conflict-ridden) web, field or system […] composed of the relationships between human and non-human agents or actors that define the history of the Indian subcontinent” (Mukherjee 2010, 5)⁠—or, for that matter, any area of the world. This definition clarifies that the environment is not outside history, nor does it assume an idea of “nature” that is antithetical to “culture”. Indeed “the environment” is a constitutive part of human culture—and as such is a fundamental part of an anthropological analysis. In other words, The Hungry Tide is a patchy collection of different, overlapping ethnographic voices dedicated to this peculiar environment and its human-nonhuman assemblages, each relying on a different

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epistemology. And if In an Antique Land argues for a dialogical anthropology, The Hungry Tide then asks its readers—and its characters—to extend this dialogue—that is, this collective production of meaning through ethnographic encounter—to nonhuman agents as well. The Hungry Tide, in this sense, anticipates Ghosh’s more recent interest for nonhuman agency, explicitly developed in The Great Derangement, Gun Island and The Nutmeg’s Curse. In these recent works, I argue, Ghosh tries to disentangle his syncretic humanism from the inherent anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene era—reacting, that is, to what he perceives to be a generalised trend, within realist literature and arguably within modernity at large, to focus the imagination on humans, disregarding nonhuman forces of various kinds, including climate change itself, “in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere” (Ghosh 2016, 65)⁠.10 To do so, Ghosh, quite characteristically, tries to find a common ground between humans and animals—to expand his syncretic humanism so that it includes nonhumans. Interestingly, a key part in establishing this common ground, as he puts in The Nutmeg’s Curse, is that both humans and nonhumans are capable of telling stories, reframing “the narrative faculty as the most animal of human abilities” (2021b, 204)—hence the responsibility of “everyone involved in the telling of stories” to “imaginatively [restore] agency and voice to nonhumans” (2021b, 204). While The Hungry Tide predates these reflections, they are clearly anticipated in the way the ethnographic encounters and the various epistemologies within the novel are often mediated by and interact through nonhuman presences: most notably the tigers and dolphins of the Sundarbans. 4.2.4   From Mainstream to Convivial Conservation To further stress the necessity of a dispersed ethnographic authority, each of the epistemological approaches employed by the characters to make sense of the environment of the Sundarbans carries contradictions, which emerge through fieldwork and, simultaneously, provide interesting viewpoints on specific dynamics of modernity: from the uneven power relations inherent in the politics of mainstream environmental conservation to the inequalities hidden in the liberal ideology of self-improvement and social mobility. Piya’s scientific outlook, for instance, is initially characterised by two main fault lines: she works under a form of positivist epistemology and, on the other hand, she espouses a version of environmental

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conservation—a mainstream conservation ideology—that is initially disengaged from the material predicament of the inhabitants of the Sundarbans—including, ironically enough, some of its nonhuman inhabitants. As Piya tells herself when she first starts feeling attracted to Fokir, her usual approach to scientific research is to “[make] a place into a field” through “the exclusion of intimate involvements” (Ghosh 2004, 112)⁠— which might seem even easier to accomplish in this case, considering that she speaks no Bengali. The fact that Ghosh, a trained anthropologist, is using the word ‘field’ here is of course no accident, hinting that, by considering a ‘field’ as a place with no intimate attachments, Piya is espousing a conception of fieldwork that is in line with Ghosh’s idea of traditional anthropology as focused on abstractions at the expense of human exchanges and, indeed, “intimate involvements”. Her mindset underlies an internalised ideal of positivist detachment that compels her to see the orcaella—and her work—as disconnected from the whole environment in which she carries out her field research. However, it is precisely the messy fieldsite Piya is dragged into, forcing her to engage with the environment of the Sundarbans in a more holistic, intimate and therefore critical-­ ethnographic approach that compels her to think about her scientific (field)work differently—that is, also seeing science itself in a more holistic manner, just as she is gradually pulled towards meaningful human relations. The first of Piya’s paradigm shifts occurs when she, alongside Fokir, makes a game-changing discovery about the daily movements of the dolphins—they follow the movements of the tides and ‘migrate’ twice a day to different pools—which allows her to understand the complexity of the watery environment of the Sundarbans. She realises that her study of the dolphins will require a significant amount of interdisciplinary effort: As she sat in the boat, thinking about these connections and interrelations, Piya had to close her eyes, so dazzling was the universe of possibilities that opened in her mind. There was so much to do, so many queries to answer, so many leads to follow: she would have to acquire a working knowledge of a whole range of subjects—hydraulics, sedimentation geology, water-­ chemistry, climatology […]. She had been sent to the Sundarbans for a fortnight, to do a small survey, on a shoestring budget—but to follow through on the questions now buzzing in her head would take not a week or two, but years, even decades. She had perhaps fifteen to twenty years of active field research ahead of her; she sensed that this project would consume all those years and more: it was the work of a lifetime. (125–126)⁠

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Piya realises that studying a single aspect of the Sundarbans necessarily requires moving away from her narrow field of expertise. This, in turn, requires the commitment of a lifetime—an argument in favour of immersive, long-duration fieldwork if there is one, paving the way for Piya’s positivist field to become a place, replete with attachments. But adopting a more interdisciplinary approach, by itself, would not necessarily enable this transformation from field (in Piya’s understanding) to place. Nor would it, by itself, steer Piya towards more holistic form of knowledge. To enable this change, Piya’s envisioning of the role she attaches to human beings—that is, the inhabitants of the Sundarbans—in her scientific fieldwork, and her understanding of their role within local human-nonhuman assemblages, has to change. The best way to observe this change throughout the novel is to look at her evolving relationship with Fokir. When she first meets him, her instinct is to romanticise him— in both senses: as her attraction grows, so does her tendency to see him as a ‘natural man’ in harmony with his environment. Their encounter has an immediate benefit: the emotional attachment towards Fokir and the fact that she learns to explore the Sundarbans with him at her side allows Piya to see her scientific work as embedded, rather than artificially isolated, from the broader environment of the Sundarbans, and she begins to conceive a place for human beings within ‘nature’, and not outside it. When she needs to map the riverbed with depth-soundings, she finds out that Fokir’s fishing technique—which consists in scouring the bottom of the river with a nylon line to gather crabs—actually helps her to accomplish her task. Her commentary is decisively charged with an erotic subtext, but she is right in her intuition that her scientific work is compatible with, and indeed helped by, Fokir’s livelihood: That it had proved possible for two such different people to pursue their own ends simultaneously—people who could not exchange a word with each other and had no idea of what was going on in one another’s heads— was far more than surprising: it seemed almost miraculous. Nor was she the only one to remark on this: once, when her glance happened accidentally to cross Fokir’s, she saw something in his expression that told her that he too was amazed by the seamless intertwining of their pleasures and their purposes. (141)⁠

Piya’s insights regarding the potential for integration between her science and Fokir’s craft, however, are enmeshed with her other biases: they confirm her idea of Fokir as effortlessly integrated in the natural ecosystem of

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the Sundarbans, just as she envisions her own work—because it serves the purposes of conservation—as by definition attuned with “nature”, which is the reason for their (as she puts it) “seamless intertwining”. The fact that the two of them cannot communicate verbally does not abate Piya’s enthusiasm in the slightest, and, at the beginning of their second expedition (the one also Kanai joins), she enthusiastically declares that “there was so much in common between us it didn’t matter” (268). Kanai—driven, to a considerable extent, by jealousy—is quick to point out that: There wasn’t anything in common between you then and there isn’t now. Nothing. He’s a fisherman and you’re a scientist. What you see as fauna he sees as food […]. You’re from different worlds, different planets. If you were about to be struck by a bolt of lightning, he’d have no way of letting you know. (268)⁠

Kanai’s defence of verbal communication as the hallmark of genuine connection ties in with his own trust in the power of words and translation. It also directly contrasts with Piya’s desire, expressed consistently throughout the novel, for a world where there is no need for translation (Rollason 2005, 6)⁠. Her attraction for marine biology is in part connected to her fundamental distrust of language and—pace Kanai—part of her attraction to Fokir is arguably related to the fact that their relationship is constructed without words. Kanai is ultimately proved right—but up to a point. What Piya is not considering is that Fokir’s relationship with the environment of the Sundarbans has been shaped into a conflictual one by world-historical forces, not to mention local caste and class conflicts. The central episode that exposes the limitations of Piya’s initial perspective takes place halfway through the novel and involves Piya, Kanai and Fokir as they spend the night in the outskirts of village that is attacked by a tiger. As the tiger is trapped, the villagers group up to catch and kill the animal. Both the readers and Kanai, at this point, have variously been exposed to the conflictual—but, as I will discuss, far from ‘natural’—relationship between humans and tigers in the Sundarbans, and are not surprised by the vengeful exhilaration of the villagers. Piya, however, is appalled, having understood the locals’ relationship with their environment within the framework of her own conservationism. From this perspective, it makes no sense for her that Fokir is now “in the front ranks of the crowd, helping a man

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sharpen a bamboo pole” (Ghosh 2004, 294)—it is a shocking betrayal of the idealised nature-loving fisherman she has imagined him to be thus far. If Piya is technically right when she is arguing that “you can’t take revenge on an animal” (294), she is blind to the broader set of politics that surround conservation in the region. It is Kanai—who, after reading Nirmal’s notebook, is himself on a journey to question his own liberal worldview—that connects the dots between mainstream conservationism and the oppression of tide country subalterns at the hands of the local privileged classes. Kanai points out to Piya that they are both complicit in creating and maintaining the antagonistic relationship between the lower classes and the animals in the Sundarbans, forcing them to kill each other to survive. Piya’s complicity stems from the fact that “it was people like you […] who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human costs”; as for Kanai, “I’m complicit because people like me— Indians of my class, that is—have chosen to hide these costs, basically in order to curry favour with their Western patrons” (Ghosh 2004, 301). Kanai’s interpretation exposes the chain of responsibility that connects the transnational ideology and practices of mainstream conservation, and both global and local elites. With mainstream conservation, Adam Büscher and Robert Fletcher indicate a broad set of attitudes that are unified by the belief in nature-people dichotomies, “especially through its foundational emphasis on protected areas and continued infatuation with (images of) wilderness and ‘pristine’ natures” (8). Mainstream conservation is also traditionally capitalist in its orientation, believing in the idea that “conserved nature can be turned into in situ ‘natural capital’” (2020, 3). Mainstream conservation is indeed at work in the Sundarbans, with deadly effects: Annu Jalais—an anthropologist that Ghosh worked with for The Hungry Tide—argues that conservation in the Sundarbans, promoted by the urban middle classes and also motivated by an economical investment in tourism and wildlife sanctuaries, has turned tiger protection into a badge of middle-­class cosmopolitanism, but, in turn, has reshaped the relationship between tigers and the people of the tide country so that “now they are pitted against each other” (2010, 197–198). Piya is not consciously supportive of a specifically green capitalist rationale for conservation, but she enables it by ignoring this chain of responsibility that bears down on the inhabitants of the Sundarbans—including, in the end, the tigers themselves, who are being locked in an antagonistic relationship with the humans. And while Piya certainly has, at this point in the novel, in part overcome the idea of a dichotomic nature-­people divide

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by allowing Fokir to exist within what she perceives as wilderness, she is prepared to accept humans within this wilderness only within certain parameters of behaviour. Those parameters, incidentally, are the same that the urban middle classes expect the lower classes of the Sundarbans to adopt towards their assets—their natural capital—even at the cost of their own lives. It is worth remembering, at this point, the source of Kanai’s political insight: Nirmal’s journal and, specifically, his transcription of a speech by Kusum—Fokir’s mother—delivered shortly before the final attack against the refugee community of Morichjhãpi. Kusum’s speech is also arguably one of the manifestos of Ghosh’s humanism, especially as regards the meaning of humanism from an ecological perspective. But it is also a historically situated sketch of the power relations of oppression and exploitation at work in the Sundarbans at both a regional and a global scale. As she and her fellow refugees are besieged by the government forces that are trying to evict them, she tells Nirmal that: the worst part was not the hunger or the thirst. It was to sit here, helpless, and listen to the policemen making their announcements, hearing them say that our lives, our existence, were worth less than dirt or dust. “This island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for from people from all around the world.” Every day, sitting here, with hunger gnawing at our bellies, we would listen to these words, over and over again. Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their names? Where do they live, these people? Do they have children, do they have mothers, fathers? As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil. No one could think this is a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived—by fishing, by clearing land and by planting the soil. (Ghosh 2004, 261–262)

Kusum’s speech defines the human experience as a series of livelihood activities enacted within and on an environment. While she seems to create a stark contrast between humans and nonhumans, she is actually rejecting the nature-people divide: human activity is defined precisely by being embedded in an environment. There is no human experience, for Kusum, outside a specific environment that is shaped by human interaction with

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nonhuman agents. Ironically, it is the government’s conservationist policy—as well as its global patrons—that enforces a rigid dichotomy between nature and culture, selectively persecuting human activity if it transgresses within the realm of “nature”, for opportunistic reasons that include systematic policies of class and caste oppression.11 Kusum, appropriating their own categories, uses them to carry out her accusation: assuming that a neat distinction between humans and animals does exist, as the government is repeatedly yelling at the settlers, then it is clear that the governments and its enforcers are the animals. Kusum’s words, through Kanai, re-emerge as a seething accusation against Piya’s limited understanding of the tiger lynching. Piya does try, in her conversation with Kanai, to regain a moral high ground by stating that she would be ready to give up her own life if that “might make the rivers safe again for the Irrawaddy dolphin” (301), and that, having “no home, no money, no prospects” (302), her position is, in many ways, not one of comfortable privilege. This rebuttal, however, exposes her privilege: her hypothetical martyrdom and her precarious career are still choices, whereas the deadly relationship between the inhabitants of the Sundarbans and tigers has been imposed on them. But in spite of Piya’s defensiveness, Kanai touches a raw nerve here, and, at the end of the novel, Piya’s position evolves towards a less messianic, less individualist and more politically productive stance. When she returns to Lusibari at the end of the novel, she stresses to Nilima that she does not want to “do the kind of work that places the burden of conservation on those who can least afford it” (397): in the conservation project she develops, this time, she sees the involvement of the local community as essential. Therefore, she turns to the Badabon Trust, which, in the novel, epitomises  successful community-based activism, in the hope of involving the local fishermen. Piya, in this way, moves from mainstream conversation to what Büscher and Fletcher frame as convivial conservation: a position that rejects both the nature-culture divide and the capitalist approach to conservation to “find a better way to ‘con vivere’, ‘live with’ (the rest of) nature” (2020, 9–10). However, a question remains: does Piya’s arc entirely invalidate her understanding of Fokir at the beginning of the novel? In other words, even if Kanai’s point about her e­ litist/ mainstream conservationist notions is ultimately taken, is it true that her work as a scientist and his work as a fisherman are fundamentally different, their worldviews are incompatible?

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Fokir has a deep respect for the dolphins, rooted in his religious beliefs. Like many inhabitants of the tide country, he is a devotee of Bon Bibi, a forest goddess whose mythology and ethics play a pivotal role in the novel. We learn from Nirmal’s journal—in which Fokir appears prominently— that he has been taught by his mother Kusum that the dolphins are Bon Bibi’s messengers. The reason he can bring Piya to the pool where she can observe the dolphins is that he has always gone there to honour Bon Bibi at his family shrine on the island of Garjontola. Considering this connection, Kanai’s idea that Fokir simply sees fauna as food is mistaken. It is worth noting that the dolphins also become the focus of Nirmal’s poetical imagination, when he is brought to Garjontola by Kusum, as he narrates in the journal. As a dolphin looks at him, he understands “why Kusum found it so easy to believe that these animals were something other than what they were. For where she had seen a sign of Bon Bibi, I saw instead, the gaze of the Poet” (Ghosh 2004, 235). The orcaella—like the tigers— are thus one of the main catalysts for the epistemological patchiness of the novel, which works precisely by translating forms of life and ways of seeing the world into “something other than they [are]”. If Fokir, as Kanai mockingly suggests, is not a “grass-roots ecologist” (297), his devotion to Bon Bibi does bind him to a specific conservation ethics. As Ghosh gradually reveals throughout the novel, Bon Bibi is believed to grant protection to those who go into the forest with a pure heart, who respect the forest by refraining from defiling it (for instance, by relieving themselves or by lighting fires) and only go into the forest out of need. In his afterword to Jungle Nama, his recent rewriting of the Bon Bibi Johuranamas, the epic poems that tell the story of the goddess, Ghosh points out that the values at the heart of the narrative—and hence of the Bon Bibi faith—are precisely “the ideas of limiting greed, and of preserving a balance between the needs of humans and those of other beings” (Ghosh 2021a, 77). Interestingly, this set of values would not be the only choice available to an inhabitant of the Sundarbans. Annu Jalais stresses how specific groups in the Sundarbans do embrace more “violent” forms of worship because they base their livelihood on activities that are not traditionally approved by the Bon Bibi ethics, like poaching or prawn seed collection. These activities are, at the same time, riskier, more lucrative and more aggressive towards the environment than traditional forest work (like Fokir’s fishing). Prawn seed collectors, for instance, use nets that have detrimental environmental consequences (see Jalais 2010, 115–123)⁠, as Moyna tells

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Kanai, stressing how Nilima attempted to ban the nets and failed because, “there’s a lot of money in prawns and the traders [have] paid off the politicians” (134).12 My point is that Piya’s concern for conservation—once it has become “convivial”—and Fokir’s stance—which does not represent the spontaneous set of beliefs of a “natural man”, but a set of affiliations determined both by his religious views and by his professional status—are comparable, in spite of the conflict presented the tiger-lynching episode. The novel’s ending celebrates their union and collaboration: even though, during the storm, Fokir dies and Piya loses most of her notes, she is ultimately able to preserve Fokir’s knowledge. She uses it as a foundation for her new project: her hand-held monitor—the only piece of equipment that survives the storm—has registered all the routes that Fokir has shown Piya in their few days of work together. Fokir’s religious and professional practices, intertwined with his devotion to Bon Bibi and her messengers, as well as his local knowledge, are hence translated and preserved into the language and technology of scientific fieldwork. Ghosh, in depicting Piya’s and Fokir’s relationship, is envisioning an example of “postcolonial custodianship”: “a living connection able to continue the other’s legacy rather than merely one’s own” (Menozzi 2014, pos. 16)⁠. Such custodianship would not be possible if Piya’s and Fokir’s worldviews were not, to a certain extent, translatable into each other. 4.2.5   The Limits of Liberal Meritocracy (and Translation) Kanai’s arc is in many ways complementary to Piya’s. At the beginning of the story, he is the representative of what I have called, earlier in this chapter, the liberal ideal of the borderless world—a liberal conception of globalisation, as it were. He believes in fundamentally meritocratic values, sees the people around him as equals engaged in fair competition that he is entitled to best with his talents, and, most of all, believes in social mobility and ambition as a driving force of human beings all over the world. He is serenely oblivious to his class privilege, which these meritocratic values conveniently conceal. The disconnect between Kanai’s liberal imagination and the privilege and power he wields is highlighted, for instance, when Kanai first meets Fokir, and hardly manages to interact with the fisherman, who replies to his inquiries mostly with obstinate silence. Kanai’s reaction is to blame Fokir’s personality, stating that he is “a peculiar, sulky fellow” (Ghosh

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2004, 217). Piya, on the other hand, provides an alternative (and persuasive) interpretation: Kanai has consistently used, throughout their meeting, “the kind of tone in which someone might address a dimwitted waiter, at once jocular and hectoring” (210), thus alienating Fokir’s trust. Kanai, instead, is consistently impressed by Fokir’s wife Moyna, whom he meets in the first part of the novel, being immediately struck by her determination: she is adamant about her desire of becoming a nurse and providing an education for her son Tutul. Kanai’s admiration for Moyna is profound and genuine, but it harbours a narcissistic side: Kanai could tell, from the sound of Moyna’s voice, that her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning. It was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world. It was as though, in listening to Moyna, he were looking back on an earlier incarnation of himself. (135)

Kanai sees Moyna as his double: an individual fully provided with agency that is entitled with the same ambitions and desire for self-improvement as he is. The limits of this form of imagination are Kanai’s inability to perceive alternative, meaningful possibilities for life as well as to appreciate the profound differences, in terms of privilege, between himself and a subaltern like Moyna: his ambition is not the same as Moyna, simply because, for instance, he never had to worry about food while he was following his drive to “better himself”, nor could he have any doubts about the chances to “lay claim to a wider world” that would be granted to him. It is Piya, again, that points out this aspect of Kanai’s imaginative world to the reader, when two of them are discussing the relationship between Fokir and Moyna. After listening to Kanai’s plea for sympathy for Moyna’s predicament—stuck as she is with a “backward” husband with no desire for what Kanai sees as self-improvement—she manages to see through Kanai’s ideological construction—just as thoroughly as he is able to expose her romantic idealisation of Fokir: She understood now that for Kanai there was a certain reassurance in meeting a woman like Moyna, in such a place as Lusibari: it was as if her very existence were a validation of the choices he had made in his own life. It was important for him to believe that his values were, at bottom, egalitarian, liberal, meritocratic. It reassured him to be able to think, “What I want for

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myself is no different from what everybody wants, no matter of rich or poor; everyone who has any drive, any energy, wants to get on in the world— Moyna is the proof”. Piya understood too that this was a looking-glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed through a rear-view window, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual past that was Lusibari. (Ghosh 2004, 219–220)

The passage, through its use of the image of the mirror, provides a commentary precisely on the act of projecting a certain life experience onto another. While this is the fundamental epistemic operation for Ghosh’s patchy narratives, it may ultimately result in a misreading of others—a fact The Hungry Tide often alerts the reader of. In this case, it limits Kanai’s ability to fully appreciate the specificities of Moyna’s experience and to see Fokir’s life as inherently worth living. Fokir is almost invisible to Kanai, precisely because he does not conform to Kanai’s image of what a fully accomplished human being is supposed to be. The specific epistemology through which Kanai understands the world is rooted in the practice—and not just the metaphor—of translation, which is understandable, considering his professional occupation as a translator and interpreter. Kanai’s ease with multiple languages is the correlate of his impression of being able to understand the world and complements his idea that people are the same, have the same drives and desires, and are hence readable, “translatable”, as it were, into a language, a culture, an ideology, a worldview that he is familiar with. Moyna’s experience is seemingly translatable into his liberal ambition; Fokir’s way of living is not, hence Kanai is tempted to dismiss it. Kanai’s equation between linguistic and anthropological knowledge is clearly expressed—and first questioned—when Kanai asks Moyna why she married Fokir, even though she knew of his frustratingly reserved personality. Moyna’s reply baffles him: She smiled, as if to herself. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said. He was nettled by the certainty in her voice. “I wouldn’t understand?” he said sharply. “I know five languages; I’ve travelled all over the world. Why wouldn’t I understand?” She let her ãchol drop from her head and gave him a sweet smile. “It doesn’t matter how many languages you know,” she said. “You’re not a woman and you don’t know him. You won’t understand.” (Ghosh 2004, 156)

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The full meaning of Moyna’s reply remains tantalisingly vague, but her point is quite clear: there is more to knowing the world than languages and words, a point that Moyna reiterates when, later, she tells Kanai that words are not the way to a person’s heart: “Words are just air, Kanai-babu […]. When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard” (Ghosh 2004, 258). Also in this sense, Kanai’s journey is complementary to Piya’s: while she desires a world without the need of translation, he desires a world where translation can provide perfect transparency. All of Kanai’s delusions collapse in a climactic scene. At some point during the final expedition on the river, Fokir convinces Kanai to follow him ashore, promising to show him some tiger tracks—sporting an attitude that Kanai perceives as defiant. As soon as they land, Kanai slips—as he does not know how to properly walk in the mud. Fokir lends him a hand to help him to get up, but Kanai, utterly humiliated and covered in mud, starts spewing obscenities, with an anger rising “from sources whose very existence he would have denied: the master’s suspicion of the menial; the pride of caste; the townsman’s mistrust of the rustic; the city’s antagonism towards the village” (326). In the midst of his caste- and class-inflected rage, Kanai understands that his commitment to values that are “egalitarian, liberal, meritocratic” is shaky, and depends on his implicit belief in the stability of the hierarchies he benefits from. Realising, perhaps for the first time, that Fokir might have his reasons to withhold his sympathy, Kanai, by thinking, once again, in translational terms, tries to see himself through Fokir’s eyes: Raising his head, Kanai caught a glimpse of Fokir’s eyes and the words withered on his lips. In Kanai’s professional life there had been a few instances in which the act of interpretation had given him the momentary sensation of being transported out of his body and into another. In each instance it was as if the instrument of language had metamorphosed—instead of being a barrier, a curtain that divided, it had become a transparent film, a prism that allowed him to look through another set of eyes, to filter the world through a mind other than his own. These experiences had always come about unpredictably, without warning or apparent cause, and no thread of similarity linked these occasions, except that in each of them he had been working as an interpreter. But he was not working now, and yet it was exactly this feeling that came upon him as he looked at Fokir: it was as though his own vision were being refracted through those opaque, unreadable eyes, and he were seeing not himself, Kanai Dutt, but a great host of people—a double

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for the outside world, someone standing in for the men who had destroyed Fokir’s village, burnt his home and killed his mother; he had become a token for a vision of human beings in which a man such as Fokir counted for nothing, a man whose value was less than an animal. (327, emphasis mine)

Kanai’s epiphany—which ends with a clear echo of Kusum’s speech—is clear from an ethical point of view—Fokir would be justified in thinking of him as his enemy. However, there is an ambiguity in the way he frames his insight: how can the feeling that Kanai is experiencing now, in Fokir’s presence, be exactly the same as the one he experienced in the instances of ‘transcendence’ he achieved during his work as an interpreter? Kanai frames two experiences that should be very different epistemologically as fundamentally similar: the feeling of penetrating the mind of another through translation, in which language becomes a “transparent film”; and seeing himself refracted in Fokir’s eyes—which are themselves “opaque, unreadable”. Both experiences are connected to Kanai’s being granted an insight connected to the perspective of another person. However, in the first case this insight involves the sensation of understanding the other completely, in the second case it is a realisation about himself that only uses the other as a refractive surface. At best, Kanai, changing the way he thinks about himself, manages to visualise what Fokir might possibly think of him. And yet Kanai stresses that the two experiences are the same— implying, “unreadable eyes” notwithstanding, that he might be having a genuine insight into Fokir’s mind. There are several ways to approach this conundrum. One is to argue that Kanai is transitioning from an ethnographic encounter embedded in an epistemology that aims at transparency and absolute translatability to a more critical and self-reflective one, based on the need of interpreting reality. The other possibility is that Kanai and arguably the whole narrative are not entirely clear on whether the subaltern other is “opaque, unreadable” or ultimately knowable. This ambiguity can be read as a symptom of the fact that the whole argument about language and translation, which the narrative returns to repeatedly, is not unequivocally resolved, as yet another scene, involving Piya, Fokir and Kanai, shows. Towards the end of the novel, Kanai gives Piya a translation of a part of the Bon Bibi Johuranama—the epic poem that tells the story of the goddess. We know from Nirmal’s journal (which Kanai has read) that Kosum “[has] told it to [Fokir] so often that these words have become a part of him” (Ghosh 2004, 248). Kanai, humbled by the experience on the

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seashore with Fokir, decides to translate a central passage of the poem, which Fokir had been singing, and give it to Piya. The nature of this gift is ambivalent: Kanai is declaring his love by acting as intermediary for a rival, introducing the translation by saying that he wants “to ensure someone’s happiness, even if it should come at the cost of [his] own” (353). Kanai presents the translation as an instrument through which Piya can finally reach Fokir’s subjectivity—albeit partially—but that will hopefully remind her of Kanai’s presence through some imperfections in the translation. In Kanai’s words: [The song of Bon Bibi] was the song you heard on Fokir’s lips yesterday. It lives in him and in some way, perhaps, it still plays a part in making him the person he is. This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as there are in my rendition of it I do not regret, for perhaps they will prevent me from fading from sight as a good translator should. (354)

If Kanai, by the end of the novel, has finally accepted that no perfect translation is possible, that the world is opaque, that it is already “translated” and that words cannot give a full understanding of it, here, however, the importance of words is here reinstated powerfully, not only because they are given a somehow material presence—Kanai talks of “words that are a part of Fokir”—but because the translation really seems to provide Piya with some genuine insight on Fokir. I linger on the issue of translatability as a central plot point and metaphor in the book because I think it illuminates the way in which the epistemological patchiness of the novel works, as well as its ambiguities. Those ambiguities are well exposed in Neil Lazarus’ reading: The Hungry Tide certainly plays with the idea that language is “only a bag of tricks”, and fundamentally anti-mediatory, just as it plays with the ideas of incommensurability and interlinguistic untranslatability. But the suggestions as to the inaccessibility of experience to language are of course precisely suggestions, that is to say, themselves based in language. In these terms the novel’s commitment to the humanist idea that all experience is communicable is nowhere more evident than when it seems to be proposing that some dimensions of experience are inexpressible through language. (Lazarus 2011, 151)⁠

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I wonder, however, whether Ghosh is not, as Lazarus suggests, staging an elaborated “play”, but an anxiety about the fact that, if all experience may be communicable, we still need to find the means—or the words—to do that and that we may ultimately fail. In this sense the novel is the expression of a genuine hesitation between the two ethical and epistemological possibilities of incommensurability and commensurability, which Ghosh, in creating his patchy fieldsites, must necessarily confront to propose a project of finding common ground between life experiences and systems of knowledge that would otherwise seem utterly different. The novel, sure enough, steers at least ethically towards commensurability. The ending attempts to reinstate the fundamental translatability of the forms of the experience, as we previously discussed with regard to Piya and Fokir. As for Kanai, it seems that even his belief in personal self-­ improvement, if purified from its classist underpinnings, is ultimately worth preserving in the end. Moyna is involved, part-time, in the managing side of Piya’s new research project, also teaching her Bangla in exchange for English. Tutul, on the other hand, is granted a college education through the money Piya is able to gather with a chain letter on Fokir’s behalf.13 The finale seems to respect Moyna’s ambition—understandably—but also validates Kanai’s imaginative understanding of her. The finale envisions a community of people that, after meeting each other on the field, are regenerated precisely by a syncretic humanism that insists on finding a way to translate different worldviews into a shared language. It is a patchy, place-based utopia in which Fokir’s forest ethics, Piya’s scientific research and environmental commitment, Kanai’s idea of “laying claim to a wider world” and Moyna’s complex yearnings find their place and meaning in each other’s company. It is crucial, however, to point out that this utopia is imaginable because it relies on “leav[ing] out […] the disconnected political forces that cannot relate to persons and localities, but are driven only by well-meaning concepts (at best) and global flows of capital” (Weik 2007, 136–137). In other words, Ghosh, in the finale, decides to simply leave behind those forces that can only be harmful or antagonistic towards this humanist community—supremacist forces, as it were. But, as the fate of the refugee community of Morichjhãpi reminds us of, those forces are not always happy to be simply forgotten. In this sense, such almost forcefully optimistic ending may lend the flank to criticism that argues that Ghosh’s work “is a case of fiction in retreat from the world, unable to face the crises of our times and seeking solace, instead, in some form or the other of writerly escapism” (Paranjape

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2012, 364)⁠. But, at the same time, it can be argued that Ghosh’s writing has always been more concerned, for better or for worse, for imagining alternative coalitions for coexistence beyond oppression—in a form of prefigurative politics—rather than forms of struggle.14 Like Nirmal’s journal, written by stringing together a patchwork of different systems of knowledge, The Hungry Tide relates experiences of fieldwork to intertwine different epistemological paradigms and worldviews so that they can ultimately occupy a shared space, a humanist conversation, that may offer alternatives to local and global mechanisms of oppression. I turn now to Frank Westerman’s reportages, similarly staging an encounter between different epistemologies in the background of world-systemic exploitation, but decidedly less optimistic about their possibility of conjunction.

4.3  Frank Westerman 4.3.1   El Negro and Me: A Multisited Ethnography of Neocolonial Development El Negro and Me, the first of Westerman’s works I discuss, fashions a narrative that crosses different times and places—a patchy, multisited ethnographic narrative, as it were—that reads, initially, as a reflection of the legacy of Europe’s colonial history at large. I contend, however, that Westerman’s strategy to address this continuing history speaks to a specifically Dutch context, and to how the Netherlands have historically failed to properly articulate their relationship with the colonial past and its legacy. Sandra Ponzanesi argues that while “the Netherlands has a voluminous history of colonial expansion to the East and West Indies”, it has “a very belated acknowledgement of its postcolonial status” (2012, 55)⁠. The result of this lack of acknowledgement is, according to Elleke Boehmer and Frances Gouda, that “the status of the Netherlands as an ex-colonial power remains unproblematized” and “debates—about race, racism and identity in university forums for example—are not seen to link up in any direct way with conditions in the country at large” (2009, 39)⁠. In the same vein, Gloria Wekker has also foregrounded the “strong Dutch attachment to a self-image that stresses being a tolerant, small, and just ethical nation, color-blind and free of racism and that foregrounds being a victim rather than a perpetrator of (inter)national violence” (2016, 39). This, in turn, is the driving force for the “important and apparently satisfying way of being in the world” that she calls white innocence (2). All these insights

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point at a context in which racism and the legacy of colonialism are commonly and vehemently denied, often with self-righteous outrage. Westerman’s work reacts to this silence, but often in an oblique way. With the relevant exception of his exploration of South Moluccan terrorism in the 1970s, which Westerman tackles in A Word A Word as a way of directly addressing the far-reaching outcomes of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, it is mostly through the mirror of other histories—through a patchy narrative strategy—that Westerman joins the debate on racism and colonialism in the Netherlands. What looks like a cop-out is often more like a feint: by addressing forms of colonialism and racism that seem alien to the Dutch public, Westerman is showing to what extent the Dutch belief in white innocence is misguided, when the connection is explicitly made, tarnishing this innocence by enmeshing it in the dynamics of the world-system. This strategy, which relies on setting up a patchy fieldwork, replete with different juxtaposed locales that are then revealed to be, in fact, relevant for the Dutch context, is executed quite effectively in El Negro and Me. Westerman does so by sketching two parallel journeys that, after straying away from the Dutch context, return to it in the finale. More precisely, like In an Antique Land, El Negro and Me features a double-helix structure, which connects seemingly unrelated locales and histories into a unified whole. In a similar way to Ghosh’s memoir, one part consists primarily of historical research into a subaltern figure almost erased from history—but interwoven with the tale of how the research was concretely carried out; the other one is a personal story of professional growth, which, however, gradually reveals the colonial and capitalist dynamics of modernity. The inciting event of the book is young Westerman’s visit to a natural history museum—the Darder museum—in Banyoles, Catalonia, during a trip in 1983. During this visit, a shocked Westerman encounters, as the locals call him, “El Negro” (‘the black man’, in Spanish), a taxidermied human that is the pièce de résistance of the Darder collection. Westerman has the uneasy impression that El Negro is looking at him, perhaps with disapproval. The reasons for this discomfort are not difficult to fathom: El Negro—a black man that someone (probably a European white) transformed into a piece of exotica to be exhibited in a museum cabinet— immediately appears as a blatant symbol of racism: Besides his intestines, he had also been stripped of his personality. He had no name and no one knew the date of his birth or death any more. All his

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characteristics had been lost, to the point that there was even confusion on the population he belonged to. For [the inhabitants of Banyoles] he was simply El Negro. Not Un [a] Negro. No. The Negro. (Westerman 2004, 20)⁠

El Negro is denied a personal history and also a collective one: his assumed ethnicity is reported differently on a postcard that Westerman buys and on the label on El Negro’s glass case in Banyoles. Similarly to how Ghosh, at the beginning of In an Antique Land, is driven by the desire of reconstructing Bomma’s life to bring him back to history, Westerman fantasises about finding out the identity of El Negro as a way to restore his humanity. This project, however, is temporarily set aside in favour of the more practical plan of becoming a development worker—an obvious career choice for a young student of tropical agricultural engineering—and in so doing redressing the misdeeds of the colonial past by bringing his practical, technological knowledge to “developing countries”. This naive position will be gradually dismantled throughout the narrative, but readers are at first introduced to development work and international cooperation as they appear to young Westerman, that is, charged with radical political significance: I wanted to become a development worker, someone who makes himself useful by transmitting practical knowledge to oppressed and exploited populations. The studies I had started—tropical agrotechnologies—trained engineers that devised and built irrigations systems in Third-World countries. (15)

This position is informed both by Westerman’s religious education and by the political climate of the early 1980s: he perceives a dramatic gap in the ethically rigorous Protestant education he has received and the reality of global imperialism at the dawn of the neoliberal era. Westerman’s experience with international cooperation and the reconstruction of El Negro’s “posthumous biography” (48) constitute the two fundamental threads of the book, advancing in alternating chapters and structured around different forms of spacial and epistemological “following” (in the sense of Marcus’ multisited ethnography). In one half of the book, Westerman describes a number of formative experiences over the years and in various parts of the globe—Jamaica, Peru, Sierra Leone—that ultimately led him to abandon his project of becoming a development worker to turn, instead, to journalism; in the other half, he tells of his attempt, started 20 years after his first encounter with El Negro, to

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discover what happened to El Negro after he was transformed into a piece of taxidermy—a quest that leads him to Paris, to Barcelona, to Banyoles once again and finally to South Africa and Botswana—believed to be, at the time of the book’s publication, the ancestral land of El Negro. The link between these two narratives is the evolution of the Western anthropological imagination towards racialised others, mapping a consistent pattern of racial relations, cultural supremacism and uneven economic relationships that variously intertwines the people of Banyoles, nineteenth-­ century taxidermists, European aid workers, Peruvian peasants, Sierra Leonean insurgents and post-apartheid South African citizens. Westerman, most importantly, by linking the story of El Negro with his experience of development work, gradually deconstructs the seemingly innocent and benevolent desire to foster development in “Third-World countries”. As he specifies in one early chapter, Westerman wants to incorporate his own experiences alongside the story of El Negro because focusing only on “a tale over El Negro that could make visible how whites saw non-whites” is “too general and therefore too disengaged” (49), in a deliberate combination of personal details immersed into broader cultural revelations that is commonly found in literary journalism (Hartsock 2016, 131)⁠.15 The ‘personal’ section of El Negro and me, exploring Westerman’s passage from agricultural engineering and development work to journalism, can be read as a series of somehow autonomous fieldwork vignettes in which the protagonist—Westerman—becomes gradually aware of the naive aspects of his initial Weltanschauung, in a coming-of-age, self-­reflective narrative. The crucial insight that the personal narrative of El Negro and Me elaborates is not so much about the nature of colonialism and imperialism—consistently framed as predatory and exploitative—but rather about Westerman’s initial blindness towards how the paradigm of aid work easily falls pray—to the point that it is very hard to disentangle from—to the very colonial and imperialist dynamics that, according to Westerman’s younger self, it was supposed to fight, often becoming complicit in the structure of neocolonial and neoliberal world order. Westerman’s reasoning echoes Mahasweta’s “Pterodactyl”, in her harsh critique of opportunistic, ineffective, or epistemologically naive aid work. Westerman’s solution, indeed, will be similar to Puran’s—taking up the pen. The book is hence about the developing of a political sensitivity on the workings of neocolonial modernity, but also about finding a creative voice, which makes it an appropriate occasion to discuss Westerman’s technique as a literary journalist/reporter. Westerman cites, as one of his main

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influences, New Journalism (see Battiston 2017), the heterogeneous group of literary reporters active in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s (including, most notably, Truman Capote) whose work was given a relatively coherent theoretical framework by Tom Wolfe, who coined the term. Wolfe describes New Journalism as a series of literary techniques that a journalist can use to expand a ‘bare’ piece of news— assuming that such a thing actually exists—into a complex sociological analysis. I am mostly interested in one of these techniques: “the scene-byscene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative” (1996, 46)⁠. The various autonomous fieldwork vignettes that constitute the ‘personal’ half of El Negro do favour indeed a “scene-by-scene” approach, meaning that, with the exception of a succinct historical overview that ‘sets the scene’, information is usually conveyed as a result of fieldwork interaction—for instance, as development of a conversation; as the consequence of an entry into an archive; or at any rate as a process that shows how and through which interpersonal dynamic knowledge was acquired. The narrative thus builds up through different scenes filled with dialogue and interaction, within a concrete setting. The political insight constructed through the ‘personal’ half of the narrative, therefore, emerges through the juxtaposition of series of fieldwork encounters all over the world over the course of several years, kept together by the presence of the journalist but otherwise working as separate scenes. This technique is particularly functional to create a patchy sense of ‘following’, in a multisited fashion, of both Westerman’s biography and the material and discursive formations of development in the global periphery. Basing knowledge on fieldwork interaction is also a way to avoid the “spurious kind of omniscience” that traditional journalism relies on (Hartsock 2016, 23)—in other words, to create a self-reflective rather than ethnographic-realist reportage. The various fieldwork scenes in this section variously illustrate a number of harsh lessons that Westerman learns over the years on the field. Particularly important is Westerman’s experience in Peru, in 1987. Westerman, who is doing an internship and gathering materials for his thesis, is assigned to the comunidad campesina of Cucho Esqueña to work as an anthropologist—as he puts it—to study the traditional irrigation system of the area. But Westerman’s experience in Cucho Esqueña results in two revelations: firstly, the irrigation system is embedded in local culture and based on such a delicate balance with the local environment that it cannot be changed or ‘improved’ without altering for the worse the life of

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the inhabitants. Secondly, Westerman realises that even in this community his presence is profoundly suspicious and that he is perceived as aligned to oppressive forces that have historically exploited the natives. At some point, a rumour circulates about the presence of a kharisiri—a folkloric, vampiric figure that steals the fat from his victims, who I have already touched upon in the first chapter as a symbol of a specifically extractivist anthropology (see Burman 2018). Westerman is told that he is probably the primary suspect, because he is a foreigner that has arrived in the community with seemingly good intentions—a pattern shared with a number of figures historically associated with the kharisiri, like past colonial masters, American secret agents or representatives of multinational corporations. By deploying this folkloric trope, Westerman, as a foreign expert, is thus associated with “all the other outsiders that had turned out to be extortionist and robbers” (Westerman 2004, 100). Development work, in other words, is revealed not as an uncomplicated, charitable choice to express solidarity with the oppressed but as entangled with a legacy of exploitation. It is at this point that Westerman sets aside his ambition of becoming a development worker to turn to journalism. He fully articulates his position in the chapter on his trip to Sierra Leone, where he goes to document, as a journalist, the ongoing civil war. Sierra Leone, in the narrative, becomes the exemplary case of a country that, in spite of decades of foreign aid, is not escaping endemic poverty and is precipitating into systemic violence. It is within this framework that he fully articulates the connection between development work and imperialism. His analysis covers a vast number of structural flaws in the system of foreign aid: the fact that it increases dependency; that development programmes are shaped according to “purely Western concerns, which [change] every ten years according to the dominating trend” (133); the fact that they impose cultural models, feeding a sense of Western cultural supremacism; and, worst of all, that is often conceived as a neocolonial project of structural adjustment. The latter point is proven, with remarkable bitterness, through an explicit reference to Dutch efforts to send tropical engineers to former colonies: Why did the Netherlands, in the fifties, decide to send out their tropical experts? 1. To place their former colonialists that had been sent away from Indonesia, and 2. to be on the spot in time “before the Soviet block could use gifts to take hold of less developed countries”—that was literally what was written in a 1954 governmental note. (135)

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Westerman, in short, fully comes to the realisation that the very project he had embraced in his youth is implicated on many levels in a neocolonial enterprise. But also his other project—the reconstruction of El Negro’s journey—is not devoid of complications. 4.3.2   The Mirror at the End of the Journey Westerman’s reflection on development work acts as a mirror for the story of El Negro, or rather the reconstruction of his “posthumous biography” which comprises the other half of the narrative. The explicitly stated quest of this section is to use El Negro and his post-mortem journeys to map “the evolution of European thinking on race” (Westerman 2004, 49). It is worth noting a fundamental ambiguity in Westerman’s project, which in many ways sets it apart from In an Antique Land. Although the first time Westerman had seen El Negro in Banyoles, he had fantasised of discovering who El Negro was, when he actually commits himself to the project, years later, he seems to be interested in El Negro primarily as a European cultural artefact and as a mirror for Europe—this is, actually, his explicit stance in one of the dialogues he has throughout the book (209–210)— rather than in a specific subaltern subjectivity or history. This allows Westerman to focus on a shared intellectual concern in the two sections— how Europe sees and exploits its racial others—but at the same time El Negro risks becoming exclusively an elaborated mirror for the European self, a predicament that the finale explicitly dramatises. There are four fundamental moments in El Negro’s posthumous journey: his passage from what is now Botswana to Paris, as part of the collection of the Verreaux brothers, two renowned naturalists that were personally responsible for snatching the body of a dead black man from his grave, in the early nineteenth century, and to transform it into the piece of exotica that Westerman sees in the museum; his passage from Paris to Barcelona in 1886, when El Negro is acquired by the naturalist Francisco Darder; his relocation in Banyoles, when Darder donates his entire collection to the city in 1916; and finally, after a ferocious public debate on the legitimacy of the presence of El Negro in a public museum, his final return to Africa, to be properly buried, in 2000, in what is “the first repatriation case of an African body from Europe” (Faber-Jonker 2018, 17).16 Following El Negro and his owners, in yet another series of dialogues, interviews and researches in various archives, allows Westerman to reflect on the cultural and power structures that facilitated the transformation of

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a black man into a taxidermic treasure. The France where the Verreaux brothers operate, for instance, is a place where racial hierarchies are enforced through Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionist paradigms, and where the civilising power of slavery—in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution—is a widespread belief. And Darder, on the other hand, turns out to be an enthusiast of the most decisively racist forms of anthropometry. Things complicate in the chapter where Westerman finally returns to Banyoles, which allows him to delve into the public controversy which led, ultimately, to the removal of El Negro from the Darder Museum, spearheaded by the Haitian doctor Alphonse Arcelin. Arguably the most interesting detail of the controversy is how the debate is hijacked by Catalan nationalist politics. In 1992, to protest against the increasing uproar against the presence of El Negro in the museum, the inhabitants of Banyoles reframe the debate as an offshoot of the struggle for Catalan independence, and El Negro as its symbol: Apparently no one was allowed to lecture the Catalans. And whether the interference came from Alphonse Arcelin or Kofi Annan, the Catalans, with El Negro, defended their recently recovered right to self-determination. […] In this showdown with Madrid they had turned El Negro into a mascot of the Catalan issue. (Westerman 2004, 185–186)

Westerman is not particularly interested in (and, indeed, at times is visibly irritated by) the motives of Catalan nationalism, and it could be argued that his treatment of Catalan politics is rather shallow, scarcely acknowledging the complexities and the history of the relationship between Spain and its linguistic and cultural minorities. However, neither do the inhabitants of Banyoles acknowledge the legitimacy of Arcelin’s grievances, allowing Catalan nationalism to simply swallow up the space of discussion for colonial history and racism. Westerman describes a community that is unable—or unwilling—to find the words and the space to discuss colonialism and racism, and rather prefers to project a familiar political framework on such discussion. Both these aspects—along the explicit reference to Dutch neocolonialism in the other half of the book—pave the way for a ‘homecoming’ of Westerman’s reflections. In the last chapter of the book, in which the double-helix converges into a single thread, he follows El Negro’s trail first to South Africa and then to Botswana, to visit his grave—it is not a chance that this is a territory that has suffered Dutch colonisation, making Westerman’s

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presence more politically meaningful. After participating to a debate with South African students, and barely managing to speak due to their strong emotional reaction to the story, Westerman, travelling towards El Negro’s grave, reflects on the legitimacy of his research and fieldwork. He wonders whether he—a Dutch, white man—can or should intervene in the debates and discussions that El Negro provokes, especially in Africa, or whether he should reject that role in the same way he had discarded the possibility of intervening in non-European economies as a European aid worker. One passage is particularly significant and opens the way for a more humble alternative: I’d rather keep my opinions for the society where I belong: what do I think, for instance, about the fact that the Netherlands is leading the way in Europe in terms of forcing the foreigners within its borders to adapt to the dominant (white) culture? While I think about it, I realize that the process of adaptation that the “white” Netherlands demands from the “black” Netherlands rests on the same misconception of development aid: the greater the force of the “become like us” is, the greater the resistance is and therefore the divide. Did I have to travel eight-thousand kilometres for that? (222)

Westerman seems to be rejecting the possibility of acting as a political subject except within the society he belongs to. The book seems here to be self-defeating, its journey pointless. This is a paradoxical realisation for a reporter, reminiscent of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ warning, at the beginning of his anthropological travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955), that journeying transmutes “platitudes and commonplaces […] into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles” (2011, 17). This looming sense of failure towards travelling and its heuristic possibilities is visually enhanced by the fact that, when he looks outside a train window as he finally enters in the region where El Negro supposedly came from, he sees “only the reflection of the train compartment where he is sitting” (Westerman 2004, 222). With the final image of El Negro’s ancestral land returning only Westerman’s mirrored image, the text reminds the reader that the encounter with El Negro has been, right from the beginning, a false ethnographic encounter. El Negro’s eyes, after all, are made of glass, they do not really cast glances, they reflect the image of the observer—like Fokir’s “opaque,

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unreadable eyes” in The Hungry Tide, which can only return an image of the self rather than providing an insight into a cultural other. Westerman here is articulating the risks of patchy narratives in the way they invite the mirroring of diverse experiences: such an operation risks using the other as a mere occasion for reflection—in both senses—on/of the self. Westerman’s self-reflexivity, in other words, comes full circle and understands both the importance and the limits of a focus on the self in social research: he remarks his desire to turn his ethnographic gaze towards “the society where I belong”, but also hints at the kind of criticism that has been moved towards self-reflective postmodern ethnography—specifically, as Charlotte Davies puts it, that self-reflection can ultimately turn into self-­ absorption, and ultimately “[deny] the possibility for social research” (2008, 5)⁠. Not all is lost, however, like in Tristes Tropiques, which gestures at the pointlessness of travelling but then proceeds to narrate its results: the question “did I have to travel eight-thousand kilometres for that?”, after all, can also be answered positively. Perhaps it was indeed necessary to travel through geography and time to realise a truth about the self— whether the self is “Frank Westerman” or “the Netherlands”—because the truth echoes now with insights and experiences from other histories and contexts. It is the clarity that derives from comparison that allows Westerman to put into focus, for instance, the assimilationist approach to immigration that characterised the Netherlands since the 1990s, just as, in the previous chapter, he had put into focus the Dutch participation in neocolonial development projects.17 The journey—fieldwork—produces, in short, a “critical estrangement of the lived world” (Comaroff 2010, 530)⁠: a de-naturalisation of lived sociocultural arrangements that reveals their fault lines. 4.3.3   Choke Valley: Disasters and the Mythologies of Science and Religion Differently from El Negro, Choke Valley tells a story that is rooted in a specific locale—a valley in Western Cameroon. The book, like The Hungry Tide, is primarily characterised by an epistemological patchiness: within this locale, it stages the comparison between a variety of different systems of knowledge, employing their clash to reach insights about modernity at large. It is worth noting that Westerman’s work has often tackled the clash between different epistemological perspectives, for instance, by discussing

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his strict Protestant education and his move towards a fundamentally secular perspective over the years. In Ararat—a reportage focused on the relationship between faith and science—Westerman points out that: I realized that I had not prayed in more than twenty years; I couldn’t do it any more. Actually, there had been no drastic break, no explicit rejection. I simply came to regard religion, in all its manifestations, as a form of theatre, a perpetual stage play that human beings had conceived and enacted by themselves. (Westerman 2009, 33)⁠

Such transition from religion to secularism is consistent with the thorough secularisation of Dutch society started in the 1960s–1970s, when the country “launched into a rapid process of secularization” and became, in a matter of decades, “overwhelmingly secular”⁠ (Oostindie 2011, 9). Westerman’s works echo this transformation by being familiar with, relying on and exploring the lexicon and imagery of Christianity/Protestantism while simultaneously committing to a staunch secular worldview. The passage above hints at an interest for the narrative aspect of religion, although the reference to theatre is misleading: Westerman is not so much interested in the ritual/performative dimension of faith that the reference to “stage-play” implies, but rather with an encounter with a text. In another passage of Ararat, he frames his transition from a religious to a secular perspective precisely a way of seeking shelter not in the Word of God, in upper case, but in the profane word, in lower case (Westerman 2009, 229)⁠. This is the dimension in which he is most willing to engage with religious discourse: as a form of storytelling—intriguing, familiar, and yet contestable. But, most crucially, also science, the system of knowledge that Westerman most often contrasts religion with, is put under scrutiny in his writings, precisely because science too, for Westerman, is (also) storytelling. This is particularly clear when it takes the form of a pseudo-­ science, but even when he deals with more legitimate scientific enterprises, Westerman never portrays science as a “pure” source of objective knowledge, but as  a system of knowledge that is inevitably intertwined with narrative, ideology, politics and history. In Choke Valley, Westerman’s interest for science and religion and the mythologies they produce is explored through the history of a particular disaster. This exploration, crucially, is further complicated by contrasting both science and religion with other, less hegemonic, alternative epistemologies, whose marginalisation is variously connected to dynamics of

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cultural imperialism and of (post-disaster) neoliberal/neocolonial governance. To do so, Westerman juxtaposes the different reactions and stories, connected to various epistemological approaches, surrounding the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster, which took place in North-Western Cameroon, in the middle of the Grassfields region. On 21 August 1986, a toxic cloud emerged from Lake Nyos and spread through the eponymous valley, suffocating 1746 people and more than 8000 livestock. The gas wiped out all human and animal life in the Nyos valley, as well as displacing 4430 people. If disasters have a “very sexy media appeal” whenever they are framed as unique and unprecedented (Schuller quoted in Zhang 2016, 89)⁠, this particular event was an extremely ‘sexy’ disaster, its inexplicability attracting great media attention. Westerman himself, as he tells in the first pages of the book, had done a television reportage on Lake Nyos in 1992. The premise of Choke Valley is Westerman deciding to go back to Cameroon years later and to write a book that, while describing his own trip towards Lake Nyos—his fieldwork, as it were—also retraces all the narrations originated from that catastrophic event through interviews and historical research. These include: the scientific debate about the origins of the disaster; the ways of framing the disaster by various Christian missionaries and other religious figures; and the speculations and stories by Cameroonian victims, writers and anthropologists. Investigating the narratives emerged out of a disaster acquires a particular relevance to address the workings of modernity and the world-system as they play out in a relatively small territory. According to Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susan Hoffman, “disasters are totalizing phenomena, subsuming culture, society and environment together” (2002, 6)⁠. Moreover, they also “display and articulate the linkages between the local community and larger structures” (10)⁠. Because disasters connect with virtually every aspect of the environment and communities they affect, juxtaposing different ways to make sense of disasters implies precisely an investigation in the different forms of “systems-thinking”—“ecological models, nonsecular cosmologies, and political economies”—that according to Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt anthropological research can juxtapose to explore what they call a patchy Anthropocene—the place-specific-but-planetary unfolding of modernity, Choke Valley foregrounds its objective of exploring a single phenomenon from a variety of epistemological perspectives through its tripartite structure, with each of its main sections focusing on a different system of knowledge. The first part is entitled “myth-killers” (mythedoders) and

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focuses on the work of the scientists researching the Lake Nyos disaster from a strictly geophysical point of view. Scientists are called myth-killers as they supposedly cut through the deceptions of myths and legends to look at nature with objectivity and disenchantment—although, as the book shows, in doing so they ironically produce myths of their own. The first chapter, therefore, finds its dramatic tension in the clash between two coalitions of volcanologists. One is led by Haroun Tazieff, a French scientist who supports the idea that a volcanic explosion released the toxic cloud; the other is led by the Icelandic Haraldur Sigurðsson, who instead supports the idea that the cloud emerged from the lake due to an excess of carbon dioxide in the water. Westerman combines genuine admiration for scientific work with an exploration of its limitations. Like the volcanologists, Westerman is hungry for facts and is not initially interested in myths and legends. But in spite of the supposedly objective nature of scientific discourse, he foregrounds how pride, passion, opportunism or political expediency ultimately play a part in the survival and defeat of scientific explanations—of scientific narratives, as it were—even within a field that is supposedly regulated by criteria of objectivity. As Haraldur Sigurðsson himself sums it up when Westerman interviews him, “science’s only imperfection […] is that its practitioners are human beings. […] There is nothing wrong with the method. A better way to acquire knowledge and understanding doesn’t exist. But the scientist is the weak link” (Westerman 2013b, 84–85)⁠. The consequences of this “only imperfection” include, for instance, the partisan nature of the scientific debate, or the fact that support by various international and national actors is granted according to a political and economic rationale. Westerman, through Sigurðsson, alerts the reader to the fact that—paraphrasing Bruno Latour and Steve Wooglar—“the inner logic of systematic scientific procedure [is] disrupted by the intrusion of social factors” (1986, 21). One of the strongest limitations that Westerman detects in his reconstruction of the scientific communities that worked on the Nyos disaster is their indifference to the local context. Westerman insists that “for the foreign experts […] Africa is just an incidental scenery and the tale of the survivors: local colour” (Westerman 2013b, 22)⁠. This is largely connected with the fact these experts approach disasters within a technocratic paradigm. In Kenneth Hewitt’s definition (1983)⁠, the technocratic vision of disasters is characterised by seeing them as natural occurrences that are the result of exceptional circumstances, disconnected from ordinary life. Such

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a perspective focuses its attention exclusively on the geophysical monitoring of said catastrophes. Disasters are seen as events that disrupt the social order and that technology and scientific knowledge should be able to predict and neutralise. The only parameter that a technocratic paradigm acknowledges, hence, is an abstract idea of ‘order’. Consistently, the area hit by a disaster is no longer considered a “vernacular landscape”—a landscape that is “shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations” (Nixon 2011, 17)⁠. Instead, it is transformed in a mere “region of risk” (Bankoff 2007)⁠, defined by its dangerousness and that can only hope to be rescued through various forms of intervention by an external force. The construction of a “region of risk” is in most cases an Orientalist move, projecting abstract, generic anxieties onto vast territories. More sinisterly, it dovetails with an imperialist imagination and praxis, understanding communities as passive victims due to an inherent “environmental” danger that defines their existence, and hence to be subjected to proper governance. The first chapter of Choke Valley is structured to mimic this perspective. Consistently, in this first part, the survivors are semi-invisible: they are barely mentioned, they have no voice and are framed only as passive, at times inconvenient, recipients of technological expertise and foreign aid. A particularly revealing moment is when one of the scientists, Sam Freeth, notices that the local witnesses have not been questioned in their native language and this has created a number of ambiguities in the reports. Yet, what is clearly a lack of ethnolinguistic skills from the researchers’ side ends up affecting the imaginative constructions of the natives: “Sam Freeth requests that all African ocular witnesses are disqualified as unreliable. The fact that they are not able to provide a coherent vision of reality has, in his opinion, several causes” (Westerman 2013b, 83, emphasis mine). While Freeth is correct in pointing out the flaws of the reports, he frames his arguments in a way that simultaneously erases the perspectives of the victims. It is not the rationality of scientific method itself that is inherently problematic, nor a legitimate anxiety for cross-cultural misunderstanding, but constructing ‘Africans’ as non-rational and incoherent due to what is, after all, a lack of preparation of the researchers themselves. Ultimately Sigurðsson’s hypothesis triumphs, and it is established that Lake Nyos released the toxic cloud because of an excess of carbon dioxide in the water. The valley is deemed unfit for human residence until the lake is fully degasified through special equipment. Cameroonian soldiers take

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charge of the valley, with the survivors settled for the time being in a number of refugee camps. Also on this point, Westerman cannot help but commenting that the great selling point of Sigurðsson’s hypothesis is that “you can do something with it” (97), namely investing and researching on the process of degasification. While he does not take a final stance on its correctness, Westerman suggests that Sigurðsson’s hypothesis may have resulted in a “stronger” narrative because it is politically and economically more appealing. It is now the turn of religion, with Westerman investigating the perspective of Christian missionaries and converts of the area. Religion allows Westerman to introduce the issue of searching for a meaning of disasters— something that goes beyond the physical explanation and the rationality of science, and that aims at making sense, from an existential point of view, of catastrophic events and the suffering they engender. This mode of approaching disasters predates the technocratic paradigm and in particular the Christian modes of framing disasters that Westerman explores represent, from a European perspective, the traditional rival of the scientific paradigm (see Grell 2007; Weber 2007)⁠. Westerman calls the missionaries myth-bringers (mythebrengers), in the sense that they are the promoters of an “imported” myth, which aims at reading the disaster through a number of pre-existing narrative patterns. Some of these include seeing the disaster as “Satan’s work”; as divine retribution; or as a redemptive moment for the survivors and as an occasion to reinforce their faith. The disaster, read through the resources of Christian religion, does not assume a relevance in itself, but is subsumed within a pre-existing discourse to reinforce a theological, universalising narrative. Westerman, for this section, chooses a Dutch missionary, Jaap Nielen, as main point of reference. While he admires his relief efforts for the post-disaster refugees, Westerman is sceptical of the totalising narrative that Nielen promotes. He comments: “That’s how [preachers] see the world: they read reality allegorically. They are masters in thinking about parables to suggest links that do not necessarily exist. The spiritual guide […] elevates the small stories towards the great one” (Westerman 2013b, 155). Westerman sees the missionaries as a deeply ambivalent force in the context of postcolonial disasters—in line with the ambivalent role of missionaries in colonial contexts in general. Their presence represents a continuity with colonial forms of (cultural) imperialism—for instance, the mass conversions of the colonial era. At the same time, the missionaries are effectively a part of the local environment. They are integrated into

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Cameroonian society and are among the most active agents in the initial wave of support to the victims. It is by telling of the massive relief efforts undertaken by the religious men that the mass of displaced people in the aftermath of the disaster finally make an appearance in the book. So the refugees, in this part, at least appear as suffering bodies that the missionaries can help. They do not, however, feature as active agents in shaping the meaning of the disaster, nor are the biblical narratives able to shed much light on the Cameroonian context, its history and its local and geopolitical implications. What bothers Westerman in Jaap Nielen’s approach to the disaster echoes the kind of criticism he makes to the scientific debate, namely that it attempts to detach itself from the local context to follow a universalising narrative—with the difference that this narrative is theological and not techno-scientific. Westerman, who interviews Nielen within the section, wonders how a person with a Ph.D. in philosophy and who is able to concede that experiences and perceptions are subjective can “[make] an exception for a certain metaphysics that he experienced as objective, whose universal value he had to convince others of” (179–180). Westerman significantly comments: “on that point, our ways parted” (180), establishing unbridgeable chasm between their ways of understanding the world. Westerman is particularly harsh with Nielen, perhaps because he is familiar with his practice of reading reality through an “unshakeable grid […], an authoritative pattern of biblical tales” (167). Jaap Nielen, in this sense, is a mirror for Westerman’s self, displaced in time: he represents a way of thinking and feeling that Westerman knows very well, but that, here, he unequivocally rejects. But if neither religion nor science offers a satisfying narrative of the Nyos disaster, what is the alternative? 4.3.4   State-Sorcery in a Landscape of Uncertainty In the last section, Westerman gives voice to a number of local readings of the disaster—the section, more precisely, is entitled myth-makers/creators of myths (mythemakers). The myth-makers are all those people—native Cameroonians—that have to elaborate the disaster with autochthonous, place-based materials in order to make sense of it, and, more importantly, use the disaster as a starting point to make sense of the local reality. The last part of the book does not represent a homogeneous epistemological paradigm, but its different sources are unified—in contrast with the previous two paradigms—by an adherence to the local context. Westerman

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gathers a number of different sources in this last section, most of them encountered during his trip to Cameroon to research the Nyos disaster, and all coming from the area of Cameroon, the Grassfields, that was hit by the disaster: an anthropologist, Paul Nkwi; a playwright, Bole Butake; a Fulani survivor, Umaru Sule, that later migrated to America; the local, traditional elite; and various displaced refugees of the disaster that still, after more than 20 years, cannot move back to the Nyos valley. This section of the book shifts the focus to the social and cultural implications of the disaster itself. The disaster, framed in this way, unearths and registers (neo)colonial history in a global perspective, revealing the dynamics of the society in which it took place, and their place in the world-system. If anything, this section, as a whole, can be legitimately called an anthropological perspective, in the sense that it looks at the Nyos disaster as a social and cultural phenomenon. According to the anthropological definition of disasters provided by Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, a disaster is: a process/event combining a potentially destructive agent/force from the natural, modified, or built environment and a population in a socially and economically produced condition of vulnerability, resulting in a perceived disruption of the customary relative satisfactions of individual and social needs for physical survival, social order, and meaning. (2002, 4)⁠ ⁠

One of the key insights of this framework is that the vulnerability of a population is not ‘natural’ but socially and economically produced. Moreover, a disaster is not exclusively identifiable with the manifestation of a hazard—an event—but is instead a process. This is particularly important for the Nyos disaster, because at first this event presents itself as the handbook definition of a ‘natural’ disaster. Since the emergence of the gas cloud was mostly unpredictable and unprecedented, it would seem reasonable to think that no one is to blame for the Nyos disaster, at least according to a technocratic perspective focused on geophysical monitoring. But if one adopts a vision of the disaster that takes into consideration the social production of vulnerability before and after the hazardous event (i.e., as a process), it becomes perfectly possible to articulate a coherent narrative that connects the Lake Nyos disaster with the political situation of Cameroon. One of the possibilities that Westerman explores is the idea that the Nyos disaster was the result of a bomb that the Cameroonian government allowed foreign powers to test in the Grassfields. This idea is variously

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mentioned throughout the first two sections of the book and mostly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. In this chapter, however, Westerman shows that the idea is not particularly absurd from the perspective of a lot of Cameroonians, due to the particular geopolitical predicament of the area where the disaster took place. The Nyos valley, in fact, is located in one of the two Anglophone areas of the country. Anglophone Cameroon, since the country’s independence, has historically asked for a greater degree of autonomy. This desire has got even stronger throughout the years, with many political forces aiming at complete independence, because Anglophone Cameroon was gradually subjected to considerable cultural marginalisation and economic exploitation on the part of the francophone central government. In particular, Paul Biya, the second president of Cameroon—in charge since 1982—has brutally repressed dissent from Anglophone Cameroon, both violent and pacific. Anglophone Cameroon is also the stronghold of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Front, the main adversary of the party in power, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement. The so-called Anglophone problem is still an open issue in Cameroon—a new phase of protests and repression has been going on in the North-West since the end of 2016 (International Crisis Group 2017)⁠. In exploring and giving space to the ‘bomb-hypothesis’, Westerman is not necessarily validating its factual accuracy, but shows that this narrative is able to powerfully articulate the marginalisation of Anglophone Cameroon—and of the Nyos refugees in particular. After all, the Biya government did opportunistically profit from the disaster while treating the refugees unfairly, with several sources, for instance, maintaining that the vast majority of the aid for the refugees was embezzled (Bang 2013, 497)⁠. The survivors, meanwhile, have been forced to live out of the Nyos valley in inadequate refugee camps for over 30 years. In the camps, they had to face the hostility of host communities, perpetual stress, precarious health conditions, and cultural and economic impoverishment. Several refugees have also been pressed into voting for the government party as the only possibility to improve their situation speedily (Bang and Few 2012, 1154)⁠. As part of the Anglophone minority and as political enemies, the Lake Nyos refugees are treated as “bad victims”—a category that is commonly employed whenever people in need of aid are considered ungrateful, or politically dangerous (Zhang 2016, 91)⁠. The bomb-theory, moreover, is particularly powerful because it is constructed over the traditional narrative pattern of sorcery. As Ivo Quaranta

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argues in his book on the perception of AIDS epidemic in the Grassfields— another disaster that generates conspiracy theories based on this pattern— the modus operandi of the sorcerer, in Grassfields culture, is to betray his friends or relatives and sell them to cannibalistic sorcerers of the night in exchange for magic power. Similarly, the government is said to be selling out the population that it is supposed to protect in order to curry favour with foreign powers. This parallel between politics and sorcery is a framework that can encompass a bomb plot at the expense of a minority and the general neglect of the refugees, but is also a fair and general assessment of Biya’s policies: his government has historically carried out a programme of neoliberal structural adjustment—including privatisation, destruction of welfare, and opening up the markets to foreign corporations—which has drastically increased the social vulnerability of the Cameroonians. Cameroonian neoliberal policies, in this sense, can be legitimately defined as a form of state-sorcery (Quaranta 2006)⁠. Therefore, framing the Nyos disaster as a plot organised by the state and multinational corporations cannot be simply equated as falling prey to collective paranoia, but it involves acknowledging the connections between natural disasters and neoliberal, authoritarian and predatory forms of governance. One of the local voices that Westerman gathers within the reportage explicitly articulates that the government is, in many ways, responsible for the social production of the vulnerability of the refugees. The playwright Bole Butake, when asked by Westerman whether there will be any commemoration for the 25th anniversary, of the disaster, comments: Do you think president Biya has any desire for a commemoration? What is supposed to be commemorated, anyway? The fact that the victims were abandoned to their fate and that they still can’t go back after twenty-five years? The pilfering of the aid money? (Westerman 2013b, 248)⁠

This is why Butake claims that he can at least consider the plausibility of the bomb-hypothesis: the political and economic advantage that Biya has gained after the disaster simply cannot be ignored. Yet Butake’s most interesting insights derive from his play Lake God (1999 [1986]), which Westerman partly incorporates within his own narrative. The play, set during the colonial period, focuses on the decision of the fon of Nyos (a local title for chief or king) to abandon traditional customs, under the influence of Christian missionaries, provoking the wrath of the lake and sealing the fate of the village. Butake’s use of a colonial narrative to represent the fate

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of modern victims of the Nyos disaster allows him to place the disaster into the long history of modern Cameroon, articulating how the vulnerability of the Grassfields people has been long in the making, involving the connivance of colonial and religious forces, and local elites. As Westerman sums it up, the play uses dramatic and poetic means to voice the perspective of the victims and highlight how they had been deprived of social cohesion, asking “who or what has disrupted society to the point that it collapsed?” (228). The answer is: not (only) the gas cloud but the political choices that came before and after that event, which are also part of the Nyos disaster. Westerman weaves together all these perspectives in a patchy narrative, an ethnographic exploration of a landscape characterised by utter undecidability—a geography haunted by both natural and unnatural events.18 But how does he position himself with respect to these different stories and systems of knowledge? The answer is somewhat elusive, because Westerman refrains from making extended comparisons between the different epistemological paradigms. Ultimately, it is a narratological reflection on the relationship between myths, stories and facts that provides a link between the various perspectives. Scientists, missionaries and Cameroonians are unified in their shared humanity as “animals that tell stories to each other” (27), as Westerman puts it at the beginning of the book. Westerman needs this narratological investigation, the focus of stories and words, to compensate for the fact that, differently from The Hungry Tide, where all the different systems of knowledge the reader has become familiar with, once “grounded” in the local context, are ultimately able to reach a humanist form of understanding, such harmony does not seem possible in Choke Valley, be it for geopolitical factors or insurmountable epistemological divides. The different perspectives remain isolated, with little possibility of communication and fundamentally hostile to each other. The secular dimension of storytelling offers a tenuous connective tissue. But an alternative way to interpret the book is to look at the very structure of the reportage, which offers a clue on Westerman’s positioning in the midst of the three perspectives. The structure forces readers to cross different patterns of visibility and invisibility regarding the survivors, setting up a journey that in its very ordering—from the most visible to the most invisible forms of narration—mimics the structures of global power that regulate the various disaster discourses. The book asks the reader to look back at the gap between the highly visible, highly glamorous “sexy disaster” that is introduced at the beginning and the invisible

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plight of the survivors that becomes apparent by the time the book is finished. If it is true, as Rob Nixon argues, that “any interest in form must be bound to questions of affiliation” (Nixon 2011, 32)⁠, Westerman’s narrative structure is meant as an open examination of various discursive possibilities that ultimately lead him to side with the position of the “myth-makers”. Westerman, at the culmination of his fieldwork, reaches the Nyos valley. In the eerie atmosphere of the deserted valley, he finally sees Lake Nyos. While he is contemplating the waters, his attention is diverted by a number of birds flying about, coming and going from their nests, which are built on the branch of a tree that hovers on the water: Hanging from that branch, there is an entire collection of possibly the most beautiful structures an animal can build: fragile balls of interwoven grass blades, swaying in the wind. They look like Chinese lanterns, fresh green and busting with life—dangling less than two meters above the water of the Nyos. (Westerman 2013b, 307–308)⁠

The birds are a clear stand-in for the people of the Nyos valley—both the victims and the displaced survivors: inherently precarious subjects whose life has been either swept away by the disaster or is still uprooted from their home. The book ends on a close-up of living beings instead of the sublime mystery of the Killer Lake: the vision Westerman is granted by visiting the lake is about the people, their home, the life that they want to and was (or still is) denied to them. It is about (in)justice. It is also, however, a somehow hopeful image of resilience, of living beings building something out of the ruins of a disaster: new homes, if one is to take the symbolism quite literally, but possibly also new stories—like those created by another symbolical bird, the magpie-storyteller on which this chapter has opened. The paragraph that follows—and that ends the book—puts these ideas into focus. Westerman receives an e-mail from Butake that confirms that the anniversary of the Nyos disaster has been completely ignored by the authorities. It is at this point that Westerman comments: “after reading the message twice, I shut down my e-mail programme and open a new document. I start writing this story” (308)⁠. In this final statement, Choke Valley present itself not merely as the juxtaposition of three perspectives on a disaster, but rather as an exploration of the reasons why and how this

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silence was created and maintained, and as a logical step to fight that silence. While it gradually reveals the systems that are complicit in the predicament of the Nyos victims, the project registers its own path towards an increased level of moral clarity—and towards a narrative form.

Notes 1. All translations from Dutch in this chapter are mine, unless specified otherwise. As regards the work of Frank Westerman, which is not always translated into English (that is the case of the two reportages I focus on, for example), I have used the English translations of the titles of his books to be found on Westerman’s website: https://www.frankwesterman.nl/en/ books/overview 2. For a discussion on the problems and limits of multisited ethnography, see (Van Duijn 2020). 3. For a critical discussion on the Anthropocene concept, including its several proposed alternatives, see (Moore 2016; Haraway 2016; Bould 2021). 4. It is worth noting the significant differences between Ghosh and Mahasweta Devi in their attitude towards their shared bhadralok milieu and the Bengali Renaissance emerged from it. Whereas Mahasweta takes an explicitly oppositional stance against the values and culture of the Bengali middle classes, branded as hypocritical and oppressive, and turns, in a militant move, towards the adivasis, Ghosh has ultimately a less conflictual sense of filiation with the culture of the Bengali Renaissance and its twentieth-century legacy. He discusses extensively his influences from Bengali high culture, including Bakimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. 5. Leela Gandhi rightfully notes that “the elusiveness of the Ben Yiju-Bomma story progressively transforms the Ghosh story into a quest narrative”, which is both “the scholarly pursuit of an archive/folklore trail” and “a profoundly elegiac longing to recuperate, in the modem world, parallel ­conditions of accommodation and compromise” (Gandhi 2003, 26). In other words, the archive trail shapes the quest at the heart of the fieldwork memoir. 6. On this point, see also (Ghosh and Aldama 2002, 86–87). 7. More precisely, Ghosh specifies, early in the narrative, that “[he] was born a Hindu”, but that “if I had a religious identity at all it was largely by default” (Ghosh 1992, 47). 8. The book is now part of a series which includes the recent climate novel Gun Island (2019) and the illustrated poem Jungle Nama (2021a), both reprising characters and settings from The Hungry Tide.

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9. While the insider/outsider dichotomy is useful to frame Ghosh’s broad narratological strategy—that is, focalising through an outsider’s perspective—it is worth noting that Ghosh also complicates this dichotomy in the novel. Firstly, the insider/outsider dichotomy is destabilised because “virtually every character operates under the sign of migration and displacement” (Mukherjee 2010, 115), with the important difference that they are “differentiated along the axes of class and capital” (Mukherjee 2010, 116). Secondly, the diverse forms of place-based knowledge that the characters possess can be shaped into a form of belonging—case in point, Piya, who ends the novel by proudly declaring that “home is where the Orcaella are” (Ghosh 2004, 400). 10. For an excellent response to Ghosh’s argument, which acknowledges a crisis of the imagination within the specific medium of the realist novel, but rejects Ghosh’s thesis that modern culture (and literature) is entirely blind to climate change and the nonhuman, or that only a straightforward representation of climate change may count as climate fiction, see Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021). 11. Conservation was the official excuse to justify the repression in Morichjhãpi, but the political reasons for the massacre are more complex, and the fact that the leadership of the Left Front government, still “dominated by high-caste and upper-class Bengali bhadraloks” (Mukherjee 2010, 110), may have seen the claiming of land in Morichjhãpi at the hands of refugees as a form of dangerously radical politics may have played a relevant role in steering their course of action (see Mukherjee 2010, 110–111). 12. Ghosh here is somehow simplifying the internal tension between the various subalterns of the Sundarbans as he—through Moyna/Nilima—frames prawn seed catching exclusively as the result of the interference of a specific lobby in league with a corrupt government. As Jalais points out, the activity is often practised by women that can benefit from a lucrative source of income to challenge traditional rural hierarchies, and are labelled as violent and greedy by more traditional forest workers (see Jalais 2010, 32 and 124–143)⁠. 13. Interestingly, Tutul, in Gun Island, set several years after The Hungry Tide, is reimagined as an irregular and queer migrant that escapes the Sundarbans to attempt to cross the boundaries of Fortress Europe, in a way giving again the lie to the plausibility of a liberal self-improvement ideology at the peripheries of the world-system. 14. For a reading in this sense of Ghosh’s political imagination, see (De Capitani 2020). 15. This, of course, is not exclusive to literary journalism or reportage, as other forms of autobiographical non-fiction (life-writing, travel writing) can combine personal and general-cultural insights.

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16. Once the remains of El Negro were returned, he was buried in Botswana, which is where Westerman concludes his narrative. Westerman’s more recent research, however, points out that his body must have been stolen from what is now South African territory. Therefore, El Negro is now buried in the wrong country (Doward 2019). 17. For an account of Dutch migration politics, see (Yoffe 2014). 18. I am borrowing this description from Niels Bubandt’s analysis of another disaster, the flood caused by the mud volcano ‘Lusi’ in East Java in 2006. As with the Nyos case, there is no agreement on whether the disaster should be considered primarily ‘natural’ or anthropogenic—that is, in this case, if it was caused by an earthquake or oil drilling (2017, 124).

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CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Throughout this book, I have explored a variety of ethnographic narratives from European and South Asian writers, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. I have argued that the experiences of fieldwork at the core of these narratives provide a point of observation to explore different facets of modernity, whether they take place in the context of imperial/capitalist expansion in colonial contexts (Stevenson and Kipling); in a framework of internal colonialism within totalitarian (Levi) or postcolonial nation-states (Devi); or across various territories under the effects of neocolonial relations, developmentalist agendas or neoliberal policies (Ghosh and Westerman). Specifically, I have argued that each of these (paring of) narrative fieldworks, read through lenses of anthropological and ethnographic theories and debate, provides insights into specific dynamics of modernity such as the paradoxical intimacies and inherent unevenness of colonial relationships explored in Chap. 2; the predicament of activists who desire to approach oppressed communities as allies in Chap. 3; and the interlinking of seemingly disconnected locales and communities in an age of global neoliberalism and uneven neoliberal development, discussed in Chap. 4. The range of writers and contexts that I have explored does not simply follow a logic of diversity. It aims at showing how a world-literary, comparative approach that focuses on modernity as its principle of analysis can

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help us rethink our critical frameworks in terms of both geographical boundaries and periodisation. In terms of space, the systematic juxtaposition of European and South Asian literature highlights how both areas, often monolithically represented as a core and a periphery of the world-­ system, manifest a wide range of core-periphery relations within their own boundaries. As mentioned in the first chapter, Wallerstein conceives the idea of core-periphery as a relational concept (Wallerstein 2004, 17). Hence cores, peripheries and semi-peripheries exist on multiple scales— something that literary texts can both register in terms of content and in terms of their position in the literary world-system. This understanding of the multi-scalar nature of core-periphery relations emerges from many of the fieldsites explored throughout the book. In Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, for instance, it is metropolitan Kolkata and its elite, first and foremost, that weaves colonial (i.e., core-periphery) relationships with the neighbouring Sundarbans, but Ghosh also highlights the responsibilities of global elites in terms of ecological devastation and socio-economic exploitation of the region. Similarly, the Cameroonian Grassfields of Choke Valley are marginalised and exploited in different ways by the international scientific community, by neocolonial powers and by the Cameroonian central government. The predicament of Levi’s peasants and Devi’s adivasis, embedded in a network of power relationships and oppression that begins with the local rural elite, shows how a nation-state that occupies a certain position within the world-system replicates relations of inequality within its own borders. This book, in this respect, has aimed to complicate various geographies of power at a macroscopic and microscopic level: the various fieldworks that it explores function as sites of witnessing for these multi-scalar, uneven dynamics. But, on the other hand, it has also shown how comparing seemingly disconnected geographic realities—the Sundarbans and the Grassfields—allows us to envision the shared predicaments that different communities and locales experience in the context of the modern world-system. Alongside this synchronic, geographically expanded perspective, the six authors I have discussed also trace recurring patterns across time. I have explored the various forms that ethnographic fieldwork takes in various historical circumstances, looking at both their departures and continuities from previous modes of encounter. This is particularly relevant if the specific historical and political context of an individual encounter can be connected to the longue durée of capitalist and imperial expansion, such as

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when literary works from different historical periods are compared. For instance, confronting Kipling and Devi allow us to see how the postcolonial state, in many respects, inherits both the politics, the governance, the social relations and the epistemology of its colonial predecessor. The ‘civilising’ power of District Commissioner Orde in Kipling’s “The Head of the District” functions according to the same imperatives of the counterinsurgency specialist Senanayak in Devi’s “Draupadi”, and consistently there are remarkable similarities in the way they stage their encounters with the ‘unruly’ people they are supposed to ‘pacify’. Without assuming that any difference between the colonial and postcolonial eras should simply be discarded, such comparisons nevertheless force our analysis to abandon more ‘neat’ periodisations in literary history. More broadly, the narratives of fieldwork discussed throughout the book highlight how similar patterns of inequality and unevenness, intertwined with moments of genuine solidarity and discovery, appear at different times in different places. The contentious intimacies of Stevenson’s Wiltshire in Falesá or of Kipling’s Kim, for instance, can be usefully juxtaposed to the experiences of different fieldworker-figures such as Devi’s Puran and his dilemmas, or to Levi’s, Westerman’s and Ghosh’s ethnographic selves in their fieldwork memoirs. These characters stumble upon different but comparable difficulties and missteps when attempting to weave relations with communities and people they encounter in their journeys, also because they carry with them a history of uneven relationships that affect the way they can move and act on the field. Connecting these reiterations of similar patterns throughout texts written or set in various epochs allows us to carry out, in Stephen Shapiro’s words “an exploration of analogous similarities across time” (2016, 246)⁠. It is in this sense that ethnographic narratives work as a point of departure for world literature: they enable to connect stories across space and time, across different locales and periods of modernity, and to juxtapose the historically different but comparable predicaments of their protagonists, mapping a modernity that is conceived as a unitary phenomenon but is everywhere specific. I want to conclude by advancing two further explorations that the concept of ethnographic narratives as I have employed it in this book could enable. The first one focuses on the issue of authorship. As discussed in the first chapter, the idea of shared authorship of ethnographies has become increasingly prominent since the rise of critical ethnographies and the increased emphasis on the collective nature of ethnographic fieldwork.

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While not always easy to achieve or enact, the ideal and practices of shared authorship, I would argue, are not relevant for academic ethnographies only, but also for the broader category of ethnographic narrative presented in this book. A possible model for a collective ethnographic narrative may be found in the Refugee Tales project, an activist initiative based in the United Kingdom that aims to register the experiences of asylum seekers in Britain. The project initially focused on the practice of indefinite immigration detention, through which the British authorities incarcerate asylum seekers for a potentially unlimited amount of time without a trial, as they wait to be deported or their cases are being revised. The project, however, has gradually evolved into a call to stop immigrant detention altogether, in a more systemic understanding of the exploitative role that the immigration system plays within capitalist and colonial modernity. Variously inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Refugee Tales pivots around a yearly, large-­ scale walk through the British countryside, which becomes the occasion to share tales about asylum-seeking and detention. The tales, written by established authors from a variety of backgrounds in collaboration with refugees and read by the authors themselves at various stopping points of the walk, are subsequently published in a series of anthologies. They are, moreover, presented as “told to” a given writer (as opposed to “told by”), to stress their shared authorship. At the time of writing—in 2023—Refugee Tales has published four anthologies.1 This project is a compelling experiment in collective ethnographic narration—a collective fieldwork memoir, in fact, considering that the stories are non-fictional—, highlighting both the potential and the difficulties of this approach. On the one hand, its dozens of stories are the product of a real collaboration between asylum-seekers, refugees and detainees, and professional writers. Together, they create a narrative ethnography of the British immigrant detention system, built upon the experience of asylum seekers, whose backgrounds may be different but are necessarily united by having to face the ‘hostile environment’ systematically constructed by British immigration authorities. The sheer number of stories presented in the anthologies is vital for the effectiveness of the collection. It highlights, most notably, the striking reoccurrence of specific details of the asylum seeker experience, through which the tales collectively corroborate each other’s ethnographic authority—in stark contrast with a certain monologic tendency within fieldwork memoirs. This is in spite of the rather different stylistic choices that each individual author has made to relate the

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tale assigned to them. Together, the stories create a cohesive portrayal of the immigrant detention system and its role in maintaining the status of refugees, within the modern world-system, as disposable people. The collection is also remarkably self-reflective about the nature of collaborative work, often dramatising, as part of the narrative, the moment of encounter between the writer that ultimately will write down the story and the refugee whose story is being registered. This, however, compensates only in part what is arguably the main fault line of this particular project: in order to guarantee the safety of the refugees involved, who are often in danger of deportation, Refugee Tales has to keep their identities anonymous. In doing so, however, the shared authorship of the tales is somehow deflated as the professional writers and not the refugees are going to be primarily identified as the authors of the stories. The question is then how to replicate the model of Refugee Tales—a large-scale collaboration between professional writers and members of a marginalised group that produce a collective ethnographic narrative about a central aspect of modernity—that nevertheless manages to provide all its participants with the full dignity of authorship. The second exploration I am interested in is deploying the category of ethnographic narratives to confront irrealist and speculative fiction. It is worth noting that almost all the texts I have tackled in this book are fundamentally realist, sharing with mainstream ethnographies a claim to ultimately represent a world that actually exists, as it really is. The exception is perhaps Devi’s “Pterodactyl”, which heavily relies on irrealist devices, presenting the reader with the numinous apparition of the titular pterodactyl. However, the text still presents itself as a fundamentally accurate ethnographic registration of the adivasi (and, more generally, indigenous) condition. Its irrealist and fictional elements, in short, do not dilute its claim to ethnographic authority. With Devi’s “Pterodactyl” as a point of reference, I would argue that ethnographic fiction that incorporates, at various degrees, an irrealist aesthetics—“founded on a logic of the imagination, of the marvelous, of the mystery or the dream” (Löwy 2007, 194)—can be considered an extreme expansion of what I defined as the ‘narrative pact’ of the ethnographic fiction: the coexistence of fictional and non-fictional aspects that the reader is supposed to disentangle. Perhaps further elaborating on Stevenson’s reflections on the ‘queer realism’—his attempts to find a stylistic common ground between “The Beach of Falesá” and his fairy tales The Bottle-Imp and the Isle of Voices—might be a starting point for a broader exploration

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of irrealist ethnographic narratives: a form of fieldwork narratives that is interspersed with marvellous features but nevertheless remains true to the explicit aim of registering a social reality, as well as the fieldwork relations within a specific fieldsite. But what about, finally, fantasy and science fiction? Is it possible to discuss ethnographic narratives—specifically, ethnographic fictions—within the wholly imaginary setting of various forms of speculative fiction? I would contend that it is possible; and that a prominent model for such an operation could be the fiction and theoretical work of Ursula K. Le Guin. The daughter of American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, Le Guin incorporates anthropology and ethnography in a variety of ways in her fantasy and science fiction works. On the one hand, the protagonists of her fiction are often anthropologists in all but name, “individuals immersed in an unfamiliar society learning its history, social and political organization, expressive culture, and beliefs—what it feels like from the inside” (Baker-Cristales 2012, 17). On the other hand, she often incorporates the formal features of ethnography in her works, such as breaking the narrative flow for long descriptions of (invented) cultures, ethnographic reports, or ethnographic footnotes (Baker-Cristales 2012, 19). This makes her work replete with fictional ethnographic texts, fictional ethnographic encounters and fictional fieldwork that nevertheless highlight the same tensions and dynamics of ‘real’ fieldwork. Le Guin’s gusto for anthropological speculation is perhaps nowhere stronger than in Always Coming Home, a voluminous collection of essays, poems and tales that posits itself as a recovery of the lost lore of the Kesh, a population that “might be going to have lived a long time from now in Northern California” (1985, xiii). But, if the entanglement between ethnography and world-literature as registration of uneven modernity is to remain our focus, it might be useful to look at The Word for World Is Forest (Le Guin 2014b [1976]), a short novel focused on the colonisation of a forest planet, which can be easily read as an ethnographic narrative of first encounter and colonial conquest. It offers a description of the (imaginary) culture of the Athsheans, the native inhabitants of the planet, under siege by a colonist invader force. It features, as a co-protagonist, an ethnographer that attempts, in spite of his allegiance to the colonising invaders, to study and understand that culture. And, finally, it imagines a tale of uprising against the coloniser oppressors, conjoined with a reflection on how resistance, while necessary, can subvert and change the very culture of the oppressed. While set on an imaginary planet, the novel, explicitly inspired

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by the war in Vietnam (2014a, 7, 5–10) includes reflections on imperialism, culture change, the ethics of resistance, and the practice of ethnography and political solidarity among the oppressed while one is entangled in a process of capitalist and colonial exploitation. In this sense, The Word for World Is Forest would not look out of place alongside Devi’s “Draupadi”, Chotti Munda and “Pterodactyl”, or Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Le Guin has notoriously insisted that science fiction can be a reflection of the real world, not (just) escapist fantasy or reflection about the future: in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, she argues that “science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story” (1989, 170). (Science) fiction, in other words, is yet another tool to describe our world, what she calls, in the same text, “a strange reality” that warrants a “strange realism” (170). These words provide a good argument to embrace science fiction—alongside other forms of speculative fiction—as a new terrain to find ethnographic narratives that ultimately register our reality through an ethnographic speculative realism. But, most importantly, in their bold envisioning of the scope of fiction in general, they gesture precisely towards what I have attempted to explore by looking at the difficulties, contradictions, predicaments and uneven entanglements of fieldwork: that is, stories that can shed a light on the strange reality of modernity and its inhabitants, to imagine how people that live in this reality have, get, or choose to relate to one another.

Note 1. The four anthologies were published in 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2021 (Herd and Pincus, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021).

Works Cited Baker-Cristales, Beth. 2012. Poiesis of Possibility: The Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin. Anthropology and Humanism 37 (1): 15–26. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1409.2012.01105.x. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, eds. 2016. Refugee Tales. Great Britain: Comma Press. ———. 2017. Refugee Tales II. Great Britain: Comma Press.

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———. 2019. Refugee Tales III. Great Britain: Comma Press. ———. 2021. Refugee Tales IV. Great Britain: Comma Press. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1985. Always Coming Home. London: Gollancz. ———. 1989. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 165–170. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2014a [1976]. Author’s Introduction. In The Word for World Is Forest, 5–10. London: Gollancz. ———. 2014b [1976]. The Word for World is Forest. London: Gollancz. Löwy, Michael. 2007. The Current of Critical Irrealism: ‘A Moonlit Enchanted Night’. In Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont, 148–162. Malden: Blackwell. Shapiro, Stephen. 2016. The Weird’s World-System: The Long Spiral and Literary-­ Cultural Studies. Paradoxa 28: 240–261. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. Word-systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Index1

A Activist anthropology, 19, 20 Activist research, 130, 131 Activists, 1, 19, 20, 23, 24, 42, 44, 128–131, 149, 154–156, 160, 167, 173–176, 186n7, 195, 201, 261, 264 Adivasis, 41, 124–127, 131, 159–163, 165–167, 170, 172–185, 253n4, 262 Afghanistan, 21, 95 Aid work, 192, 195, 235 Aliano, see Gagliano Allahabad, 59, 94 American Anthropological Association (AAA), 21 Anglo-Indian community, 94 Anglophone Cameroon, 249

Anglo-Sikh Wars, 94 Anthropocene, 197, 198, 217, 243, 253n3 Anthropology, 2, 3, 12–28, 32, 38, 43, 44, 47n11, 47n12, 47n13, 58, 60–65, 67, 71, 76, 98, 112, 127–129, 131, 133, 137, 154, 161, 165, 185n2, 192, 193, 196, 198, 206, 207, 217, 218, 237, 266 Anthropology of antifascism, 127, 144–148 Anti-colonialism, 76, 145 Antifascism, 124, 126, 134, 145, 147 Anti-hero care, 63, 89 Appadurai, Arjun, 68, 198 Applied anthropology, 20, 23 Armchair anthropology, 13–15 Arrival scene, 71

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. De Capitani, Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38704-3

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INDEX

Asad, Talal, 16 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 16 Assemblage, 196, 197, 216, 219 Auerbach, Erich, 4, 11, 47n9 Authorship, 36, 46, 263–265 Autobiography of the nation (Gobetti), 134 Autonomy, 74, 142, 143, 147, 148, 152, 185, 249 B Banerjee, Prathama, 167 Banyoles, 233–235, 238, 239 Basilicata, 124, 185n3 See also Lucania Beachcombers, 82, 83, 118n8 Being there, 44, 60, 64, 160 Bengal, 98, 193, 195, 213 Bengali Renaissance, 158, 159, 200, 253n4 Bhadralok, 100, 128, 158–160, 192, 253n4, 254n11 Biya, Paul, 249, 250 Boas, Franz, 15, 16 Boehmer, Elleke, 232 Bon Bibi, 224, 225, 230 Bon Bibi Johuranamas, 224, 229 Bonded labour, 125, 165, 166, 179 Braudel, Fernand, 47n6 Brigandage, 133, 141–143, 147 Britain, 1, 65, 94, 264 Bronzini, Giovan Battista, 135, 137 Bubandt, Nils, 196, 197, 243, 255n18 Burns, Lorna, 6 Büscher, Ada, 221, 223 Butake, Bole, 248, 250, 252 Lake God, 250 Butirari, 77, 78

C Calvino, Italo, 143 Cameroon, 194, 243, 248, 249, 251 Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, 249 Cannibalism, 74, 75, 77 Capitalism, 1, 7, 11, 43, 47n8, 48n16, 70, 82, 84 Capitalist modernity, 2, 8, 31, 46, 209 Casanova, Pascale, 4 Catalonia, 194, 233 Census-fantasy, 101, 215 Census of India, 97 Chambers, Claire, 207, 211 Chaudhuri, Amit, 159 Chicago school of sociology, 15 Chorality, 19, 36 Christians (Levi), 135, 137, 138, 145, 153, 157 Ciocca, Rossella, 5, 6 Civil and Military Gazette, 94 Class, 10, 11, 23, 25, 32, 76, 79, 100, 104, 106, 123, 124, 127, 131, 133, 144, 152, 154, 157, 159, 162, 171, 185n5, 195, 202, 204, 220–223, 225, 253n4, 254n9 Clifford, James, 14, 15, 18, 28, 29, 35–37, 41, 206 Climate change, 193, 200, 201, 217, 254n10 Coevalness, 13, 73, 154 Coexistence of the temporalities (Levi), 153, 154, 185n4 Colley, Ann, 64, 76 Colonialism, 3, 8–11, 16, 18, 20, 23, 25, 26, 43, 44, 58, 59, 64, 70, 76, 77, 82, 116, 123–185, 233, 235, 239, 261 Colonised females, 91 Colvin, Sidney, 65, 68, 69, 84 Comaroff, John, 28, 241

 INDEX 

271

Combined and uneven development, 7, 8, 10, 44, 136 Commodity frontiers, 11 Common denominator person/ people, 33, 136 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 160 Companions (fieldwork), 88 Confino, 124 Congress Party, 157, 174 Core (world-systems theory), 44 Counterinsurgency, 2, 16, 21, 23, 98, 99, 103, 128, 161, 163, 186n6, 263 Counterinsurgent anthropology, 158–165 Crapanzano, Vincent, 34 Tuhami, 34 Criminal anthropologists, 133 Criminal tribes, 101 Cultural critique, 130–132, 159 Cultural imperialism, 45, 243, 246 Cultural knowledge, 21, 24, 40, 72 Cultural mediators, 23 Cultural relativism, 14, 15, 17, 74, 79 Culture of compromise (Ghosh), 199–207, 209, 210 Cushman, Dick, 3, 26, 33, 34

Derobertis, Roberto, 150 Desai, Gaurav, 204, 205 Development, 1, 2, 4–8, 10, 20, 22, 23, 25, 45, 46, 64–67, 77, 98, 126, 129, 133, 134, 154, 157, 168, 171, 174, 176, 178, 192, 194, 195, 208, 209, 234–237, 240, 241, 261 Development work, 46, 193, 234, 235, 237, 238 Devi, Mahasweta, 3, 10, 23, 35, 41, 42, 44, 45, 100, 123–185, 186n7, 253n4, 261–263, 265, 267 Chotti Munda and his Arrow, 45, 128, 165–175, 267 “Draupadi,” 45, 128, 158–165, 171, 173, 179, 263, 267 Mother of 1084, 126 “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” 35, 45, 128, 175–185 The Queen of Jhansi, 125 Right to the Forest, 126 Dickens, Charles, 41 Dickensian, 41 Dirks, Nicholas, 97, 98 Disasters, 178, 191, 194–196, 241–252, 255n18 Dolphins, 214, 217, 218, 223, 224

D Dalit, 170, 172 Damrosch, David, 4 David, Jérôme, 46n1 Davies, Charlotte, 18, 241 De Donato, Gigliola, 150 De Loughry, Treasa, 9 De Martino, Ernesto, 155, 185n2, 185n5 De, Debasree, 157 Deckard, Sharae, 10, 47n4 Della Valle, Paola, 74

E East India Company, 93 Ecofascists, 201 Ecology, 10, 11, 25, 193, 196, 197 Egalitarianism, 104–106, 116 Egypt, 1, 40, 192, 193, 203, 205–208, 212 Einaudi, Giulio, 156 Elementary sense of justice, 142, 144, 147, 171 Emergency (India), 165, 166, 170 Engels, Friedrich, 4

272 

INDEX

Environment, 45, 116, 196, 199, 211, 213–220, 222, 224, 236, 243, 246, 248, 264 Environmental conservation convivial conservation, 217–225 mainstream environmental conservation, 195, 217 Environmental justice, 19 Ethiopia, 30, 139, 140 Ethnographic authority dialogic ethnographic authority, 35, 206 dispersal of, 35, 179 experiential ethnographic authority, 35, 39, 44, 59, 71, 96–99 interpretative ethnographic authority, 35, 150 monologic ethnographic authority, 35, 152, 215 polyphonic ethnographic authority, 35 Ethnographic fictions, 3, 27, 28, 37, 38, 40–42, 44–46, 84, 106, 128, 175, 193, 195, 265, 266 Ethnographic narratives, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 23, 25–45, 58, 61, 106, 126, 127, 132, 135, 154, 192, 194–196, 198, 199, 202, 203, 232, 261, 263–266 epistemological status of, 27–31 Ethnographic poems, 42 Ethnographic realism, 33–37, 60, 64–70, 76, 79, 80, 85, 90, 136, 137, 207, 215 Ethnographic state, 97, 98 Ethnography, 2–4, 12–29, 31–35, 37–39, 43, 57–116, 123–185, 191–253, 263–267 Everyday resistance, 140, 172 Evolutionism, 13, 14, 65, 72, 74, 79, 138 Evolutionist anthropology, 43, 137

Exoticism, 60, 66, 68, 97 Experimental ethnographies, 34 Extractivist anthropology, 20, 237 F Fabre, Daniel, 29 Fascism, 123, 124, 127, 134, 138, 139, 143, 144, 147, 153, 154 Fassin, Didier, 29 Fieldwork, 1–46, 58, 60–64, 68–70, 73, 79–93, 97, 103, 106, 124, 126–130, 132, 134, 135, 138, 147–149, 160, 176, 185n2, 192–195, 198, 203, 205–207, 216–219, 225, 232, 233, 235, 236, 240, 241, 243, 252, 261–263, 266, 267 Fieldwork memoirs, 3, 27, 37–42, 44–46, 60, 65, 71, 95, 127, 128, 135, 137, 193–195, 203, 205, 253n5, 263, 264 Fieldwork relations, 3, 4, 10–12, 22, 25, 26, 32, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 61, 64, 70, 95, 98, 103, 137, 192, 198, 206, 266 First Opium War, 193, 202 Fletcher, Robert, 221, 223 Following (multisited ethnography), 197, 234 Forster, E. M., 114, 116 A Passage to India, 114 Freemasonry, 104 Fuller, C. J., 98, 101 G Gagliano, 45, 123, 124 Geertz, Clifford, 18, 27, 28, 32, 41 Works and Lives, 32 Gender, 10, 11, 25, 32, 78, 89, 101, 104, 150, 152

 INDEX 

Genres, 4, 27, 28, 33, 36–42, 46, 66 Gezari, Vanessa, 22 Ghosh, Amitav, 3, 10, 11, 23, 33, 35, 40, 42, 45, 46, 100, 191–253, 261–263, 267 In An Antique Land, 35, 40, 46, 193, 195, 199–207, 209, 212, 215–217, 233, 234, 238 The Calcutta Chromosome, 193 The Circle of Reason, 192 Flood of Fire, 193 “The Fundamentalist Challenge,” 201 The Great Derangement, 217 Gun Island, 217, 253n8, 254n13 The Hungry Tide, 11, 46, 191, 193, 195, 202, 213–217, 221, 227, 230, 232, 241, 251, 253n8, 254n13, 262, 267 Jungle Nama, 224, 253n8 “The March of the Novel through History,” 199 The Nutmeg’s Curse, 193, 200, 217 River of Smoke, 193 Sea of Poppies, 193 The Shadow Lines, 193 Gilberts, the, 65, 77 Globalisation, 4, 6, 8, 198, 199, 225 Global South, 9, 156, 193 Gobetti, Piero, 134, 147, 148 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 7, 46n1 Going native, 83 Gouda, Frances, 232 Gough, Kathleen, 16, 24 Gramsci, Antonio, 133, 134, 142, 168 Grassfields, 243, 248, 250, 251, 262 Great Game, the, 107–109, 112–114, 116 Green Revolution, 176, 178, 181 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 10

273

H Hale, Charles, 19, 130, 131 Hewitt, Kenneth, 244 Highland comparison (Stevenson), 72, 74 Hindu Right, 173 See also Hindutva Hindutva, 174, 201, 204 Hirakud megadam, 157 Hobsbawm, Eric, 142 Hoffman, Susan, 243, 248 Huggan, Graham, 5, 6, 26, 46n2, 68 Interdisciplinary Measures, 26 Human Terrains System (HTS), 20–22 I Imperialism, 10, 11, 16, 17, 21, 25, 45, 76, 77, 84, 108, 192, 234, 235, 237, 243, 246, 267 Indefinite immigration detention, 264 Independence (India), 165, 173 India, 1, 43–45, 57–60, 78, 93–99, 102, 108–110, 114, 115, 125–128, 156–158, 160, 165–167, 171, 173, 175–177, 203, 204, 208, 209 Indigenous people, 2, 20, 45, 124, 128, 173, 176, 181 See also Adivasis Indigenous rights, 126, 130 Inequality, 3, 7, 8, 25, 36, 37, 60, 63, 64, 70, 80, 114, 116, 124, 126, 127, 137, 158, 176, 217, 262, 263 Informal colonialism, 43 Informers, 15, 19, 30, 63, 64, 94, 207 Insider, 24, 35, 40, 62, 93–97, 99, 215, 254n9 Insurgency, 2, 78, 160, 161, 166, 169, 172

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INDEX

Internal colonialism, 3, 9, 23, 44, 123–185, 261 Intersectional perspective, 10 Intimacy, 3, 23, 24, 42, 44, 57–116, 128, 184, 261, 263 Iraq, 21, 210–212 Irrealism, 8, 181 Italy, 1, 124, 126–128, 134, 135, 141, 145, 148, 152, 156 J Jalais, Annu, 221, 224, 254n12 James, Henry, 57, 58, 67, 116–117n1 James, Wendy, 16, 17 Jameson, Frederic, 8, 10, 47n5 Jamin, Jean, 29 Jobson, Ryan, 19, 196 Jolly, Roslyn, 64, 66, 67, 82, 85, 86, 89 Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, 67 Journalists/journalism, 1, 23, 29, 59, 60, 94, 117n1, 125, 145, 171, 180, 193, 194, 234–237, 254n15 See also Reportages Juris, Jeffrey, 19, 129–131 K Kapuściński, Ryszard, 30 The Emperor, 30 Kharisiri anthropology, see Extractivist anthropology Kharisiri (folklore), 20, 237 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 141 Kipling, Rudyard, 3, 10, 23, 42–44, 57–116, 163, 261, 263 “The Ballad of East and West,” 104, 112 “The Head of the District,” 44, 60, 97–106, 110, 112, 163, 263

The Jungle Books, 102 Kim, 44, 59–61, 93, 106–116, 215, 263 Letters of Marque, 44, 60 “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw,” 110 Soldiers Three, 57 Something of Myself, 57 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 89 Kroeber, Alfred, 266 Kulick, Don, 62, 63, 90 L Lahore, 59, 95, 107 Lake Nyos disaster, 191, 243, 244, 248 Lamphere, Louise, 19 Landscapes, 2, 39, 43, 45, 48n16, 114, 191–253 Largeaud-Ortéga, Sylvie, 84 Latour, Bruno, 244 Lawrence, John, 94 Lawrence, Nicholas, 47n4 Lazarus, Neil, 5, 6, 47n4, 179, 182, 230, 231 Le Guin, Ursula K., 46, 266, 267 Always Coming Home, 266 “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” 267 The Word for World is Forest, 266, 267 Leonard, Zak, 98, 101 Levi, Carlo, 3, 10, 23, 34, 42, 44, 45, 123–185, 261–263 All the Honey is Finished, 153 Christ Stopped at Eboli, 34, 36, 45, 123, 124, 127, 132, 177, 185n1 Fear of Freedom, 143, 144, 146, 148 The Watch, 124 Words are Stones, 45, 128, 147, 154, 156, 167

 INDEX 

Levine, Caroline, 4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 240 Tristes Tropiques, 240, 241 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 137, 138 Liberation (Italy), 123, 153 Lombroso, Cesare, 134 Longue durée, 9, 11, 47n6, 262 Love, 61, 68, 81, 87, 91, 92, 106–116, 117n1, 117n4, 138, 183, 184, 214, 222, 230 Löwy, Michael, 8, 265 Lucania, 132, 135, 157, 185n2, 185n3 See also Basilicata M Macdonald, Graeme, 47n4 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 14, 15, 33 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 14 Mani, Venkat, 4 Marcus, George, 3, 13, 18, 24, 26, 33, 34, 197, 234 Marquesas, the, 65, 71, 74 Marx, Karl, 4, 7 Materialist approaches, 9, 26, 126 Mathews, Andrew, 196, 197, 243 McBratney, John, 104 McClure, S. S., 58, 65 McFate, Montgomery, 20–22 Melville, Herman, 65, 117n5 Omoo, 65 Typee, 65, 117n5 Menikoff, Barry, 74 Men on the spot, 13, 14, 33, 58 Menozzi, Filippo, 167, 225 Militant anthropology, 127, 129, 131 See also Militant ethnography Militant ethnography, 123–186 Minute on Indian Education, 100 Missionaries, 13, 14, 23, 64, 81–84, 88, 243, 246, 247, 250, 251

275

Modernisation, 2, 10, 12, 15, 22, 136 Modernity, 2–13, 22, 23, 25, 26, 31, 36–38, 40, 42–46, 58, 61, 70, 93, 124, 127, 132, 135, 153, 156–159, 167, 171, 192, 195, 198, 201, 203, 205, 208, 209, 213, 217, 233, 235, 241, 243, 261, 263–267 Mondal, Anshuman, 201, 210 Monologism, 36, 103, 137, 148–152 Montaigne, Michel de, 74, 118n7 Moore, Jason W., 11, 47n8, 47n16 Moretti, Franco, 4, 7 “Conjectures on World Literature,” 7 Morichjhãpi, 214, 222, 231, 254n11 Mufti, Aamir, 2, 5, 6 Mukherjee, Pablo, 47n4, 171, 216, 254n9, 254n11 Multisited ethnography, 24, 195, 197, 232–238, 253n2 Mutiny, see Rebellion of 1857 Mythology, 142, 143, 168, 224, 241–247 N Nabeel, 208, 210–213 Narration-description duality, 38, 39 Natural capital, 221, 222 Naxalites, 126, 128, 160, 161, 174, 175 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 157 Neocolonialism, 22, 45, 195, 239 Netherlands, 1, 232, 233, 237, 240, 241 New Delhi, 157 New Journalism, 236 Nixon, Rob, 245, 252 Nonhuman agency, 193, 217 Non-regulation style of government, 94 Nyman, Jopi, 102

276 

INDEX

O Oliver-Smith, Anthony, 243, 248 Orcaella brevirostris, 214 See also Dolphins Osterweil, Michal, 130, 131 Outsider, 15, 24, 35, 40, 96, 129, 181, 184, 214, 237, 254n9 P Pacific Islands, 58, 64, 65, 67, 76, 84, 90, 93, 94 See also Polynesia; South Seas, the Pacific Ocean, see Pacific Islands Pacific writings (Stevenson), 43, 58, 65, 67, 69, 78 Palamu, 125 Parry, Benita, 17, 47n4 Participant observation, 15, 24, 61 Passivity, 140, 141, 144, 148–152 Patch, 196, 197, 202, 204, 205 Patchiness, 194–198, 203, 213, 216, 224, 230, 241 Patel, Raj, 11, 47n8 Peasant civilization, 135–137, 142, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154, 156, 185n5 Peasant movement, 147, 152–155 Peasants, 1, 44, 45, 123, 124, 126–128, 132–150, 152–158, 160, 167, 168, 171, 172, 177, 180, 185n5, 203, 235, 262 Pels, Peter, 23, 109 Periodisation, 9, 10, 46, 262, 263 Periphery, 7–9, 42, 58, 136, 143, 209, 236, 254n13, 262 Pioneer, the, 94 Polynesia, 40, 58, 59, 64–66, 93 Polyphony, 103, 179 Ponzanesi, Sandra, 9, 232 Positivist anthropology, 133 Postcolonial custodianship, 225

Postcolonial Europe, 9 Postcolonialism, 6, 11, 48n16 Postcolonial studies, 2, 5, 6, 9, 46n2 Post-colony, 192, 196 Postmodern anthropology, 18, 28, 128, 206, 207 Postsecularism, 200 Pratt, Mary Louise, 38, 39, 71 Prelogism, 137, 138 Price, David H., 21 Primitive mentality, 137 Professional ethnographers, 14, 27, 32, 33, 109 Project Agile, 16 Project Camelot, 16 Punjab, 94, 95, 98 Q Queer realism, 69, 80–93, 265 Quest, 3, 39–41, 71, 85, 107, 135, 194, 203–206, 235, 238, 253n5 Quijano, Aníbal, 79 Quit India, 173 R Rabinow, Paul, 34 Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, 34 Race, 10, 25, 32, 61, 66, 76, 78, 79, 100, 104, 106, 109, 134, 232, 238 Rebellion of 1857, 77, 97 Reflexivity, 18, 19, 45 Refugee Tales, 46, 264, 265 Registration, 2, 3, 8, 11, 12, 22, 23, 26, 36–38, 42, 70, 124, 127, 167, 198, 265, 266 Regulation system of governance, 94 Religion, 61, 98, 138, 143, 196, 200, 204, 241–247

 INDEX 

Reportages, 30, 39, 45, 46, 128, 156, 191, 193–195, 232, 236, 242, 243, 250, 251, 253n1, 254n15 Resistance, 12, 19, 22, 68, 124, 127, 132, 140, 144–146, 148, 153, 166, 170–172, 240, 266, 267 Resistance (Italy), 148 Resistant reading, 37, 47n15, 116 Rilke, Reiner Maria, 215, 216 Duino Elegies, 215 Romance (Stevenson), 58, 64–70, 78, 89, 91, 117n2, 117n3 Rubenstein, Steven, 62 S Said, Edward, 108, 115 Culture and Imperialism, 108 Salemink, Oscar, 23, 109 Salgado, Minoli, 176 Samoa, 57–59, 76, 77 Samoan civil war, 59, 69 Sankaran, Citra, 201, 202 Santiniketan, 159 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 129, 133 Science, 13, 14, 17, 25, 27, 191, 193, 194, 196, 208, 218, 219, 241–247, 266, 267 Scientificity, 14, 59, 71, 76 Scientific tourist, 60, 69–80, 86, 92, 97 Scotellaro, Rocco, 154 Scott, James, 140, 172, 174, 178 Secularization, 242 Sedgwick, Eve, 89 Seitel, Peter, 37 Semiperiphery, 7, 9, 262 Sergeant, David, 97, 99, 100, 108, 113, 117n2 Shachi, Arya, 165, 166 Shapiro, Stephen, 10, 47n4, 263 Sigurðsson, Haraldur, 244–246 Simon, David, 29, 30 The Wire, 29

277

Social banditry, 142, 155 Social Democratic Front, 249 Solidarity, 73, 77, 92, 131, 138, 142, 144, 145, 147–150, 154, 156, 161, 167, 170, 174, 184, 237, 263, 267 South Asia, 192 See also India Southern Question, 133, 134, 147 South Moluccan terrorism, 233 South Seas, the, 65, 66, 68, 71, 84, 117n5 See also Pacific Islands Speculative fiction, 265–267 Spies, 1, 16, 107–109, 113 Spivak, Gayatri, 125, 164–166, 169, 172, 175, 176, 186n6 Srivastava, Neelam, 5, 6, 129, 156, 206 State, 8, 28, 36, 44, 73, 78, 79, 83, 95, 97, 98, 107, 114, 123, 124, 127, 128, 132–148, 152, 153, 156–158, 162, 165, 167, 171, 174, 177, 178, 201, 212, 250, 263 Stevenson, Fanny, 65, 66, 69 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 3, 10, 11, 23, 34, 40, 42–44, 57–116, 137, 261, 263, 265 The Amateur Emigrant, 79, 117n6 “The Beach of Falesá,” 11, 44, 60, 66, 69, 78–93, 106, 116, 265 “The Bottle Imp,” 80, 265 A Footnote to History, 76 “A Gossip on Romance,” 66 “A Humble Remonstrance,” 67 “The Isle of Voices,” 80, 265 Kidnapped, 57 In the South Seas, 34, 40, 44, 60, 64–71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86, 92, 97, 137 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 58 Treasure Island, 58

278 

INDEX

Subaltern history, 142–143, 168 See also Mythology Subject-object relation, 79, 139 Sundarbans, 193, 195, 213–215, 217–224, 254n12, 254n13, 262 Supremacism, 201, 235, 237 Syncretic humanism, 195, 199–205, 217, 231 Systems of knowledge, 3, 45, 192, 193, 196, 198, 203, 205, 215, 231, 232, 241, 251 T Taboo, 74, 81, 86, 87, 92 See also Tapu Taboo (book), 62 Tagore, Rabindranath, 159, 199, 200, 253n4 Tallman, Janet, 40 Tanoukhi, Nirvana, 195 Tapu, 74, 77, 88 See also Taboo Taylor, Jesse, 115 Tazieff, Haroun, 244 Technocratic paradigm, 244–246 Third World, 8, 16, 156, 164, 234, 235 Third-Worldism, 128, 152–158 Tigers (Sundarbans), 102, 217, 220–224, 228 Traders, 1, 2, 14, 23, 60, 64, 77, 81, 82, 84, 86, 90, 91, 169, 173, 225 Transhistorical doubles, 205–213 Travelogues, 34, 39, 45, 79, 117n6, 124, 128, 147, 153, 154, 156, 240 Travel writing, 38, 39, 41, 65, 71, 117n6, 135, 254n15 Trotsky, Leon, 7 Tsing, Anna, 194, 196, 197, 202, 243 The Mushroom at the End of the World, 196

Tylor, Edward, 13, 47n10, 65, 72 Typologies, 35, 37, 41, 43, 46, 61, 97–106, 110, 112 U Underdevelopment, 178 Undesignated relationality, 24 Uneven entanglements, 13, 22, 25, 45, 58, 60, 160, 199, 267 See also Fieldwork Unreliable narrator, 85 V Vescovi, Alessandro, 112, 203, 206, 209, 214, 215 Violence, 78–80, 84, 95, 104, 144, 151, 152, 162, 164, 170–172, 180–182, 194, 205, 208, 209, 232, 237 Vitalism (Ghosh), 200 W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 7–9, 47n6, 262 War in Vietnam, 15, 267 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 4, 7, 8, 10, 25, 26, 36, 43, 47n7, 198 Combined and uneven development, 7, 8, 10 Watson, C. W., 30, 31, 37, 47n14 Weiss, Margot, 62, 63 Wekker, Gloria, 232 Westerman, Frank, 3, 10, 23, 42, 45, 46, 191–253, 261, 263 Ararat, 194, 242 Brother Mendel's Perfect Horse, 194 Choke Valley, 46, 191, 194, 195, 241–247, 251, 252, 262

 INDEX 

El Negro and me, 46, 193–195, 232–238 We, Hominids, 194 Willis, William S., 17, 25 “Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet,” 17 Wiltshire, John, 60, 81–92, 116, 263 Wolfe, Tom, 37, 236 Wooglar, Steve, 244 World-ecology, 11, 47n7 World-literary criticism, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 47n7, 132, 195

279

World literature, 1–46, 198, 199, 263 World-systems analysis, 7 World-systems theory, 2, 7, 10, 44, 47n5, 47n16 Writing culture, 132 Y Yates-Doerr, Emily, 63, 89 Youngs, Tim, 39