The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature

315 Pages·1996·0.87 MB·English

by  Amy Fass Emery

The Anthropological Imagination in Latin
title:
American Literature
author: Emery, Amy Fass.
publisher: University of Missouri Press
isbn10 | asin: 0826210805
print isbn13: 9780826210807
ebook isbn13: 9780826260406
language: English
Latin American literature--20th century--
subject History and criticism, Literature and
anthropology--Latin America.
publication date: 1996
lcc: PQ7081.E64 1996eb
ddc: 860.9/98
Latin American literature--20th century--
History and criticism, Literature and
subject:
anthropology--Latin America.
Page iii
The Anthropological Imagination in Latin
American Literature
Amy Fass Emery
Page iv
Copyright © 1996 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 00 99 98 97 96
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emery, Amy Fass, 1957-
The anthropological imagination in Latin American literature / Amy
Fass Emery.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1080-5 (alk. paper)
1. Latin American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism.
2. Literature and anthropologyLatin America. I. Title.
PG7081.E64 1996
860.9'98dc20 96-27401
CIP
This paper meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
Z39.48, 1984.
Designer: Mindy Shouse
Typesetter: BOOKCOMP
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Garamond & Arial
Page v
TO MY PARENTS,
ELI NORMAN AND
CONSTANCE CONVERSE FASS
Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. The Anthropological Imagination 1
2. The "Anthropological Flâneur" in Paris: Documents, 24
Bifur, and Collage Culture in Carpentier's ¡Ecué-Yamba-
O!
3. The Eye of the Anthropologist: Vision and Mastery in 43
José María Arguedas
4. The Voice of the Other: Anthropological Discourse and 70
the Testimonio in Biografía de un Cimarrón and Canto de
Sirena
5. The "I" of the Anthropologist: Allegories of Fieldwork 93
in Darcy Ribeiro's Maíra
6. Sa(1)vage Ethnography: The Cannibalistic Imagination 109
in Juan José Saer's El Entenado
Afterword: The Anthropological Imagination and the 126
Question of a Latin American Postmodernism
Bibliography 139
Index 153
Page ix
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jean Franco for being an incisive and always
interested reader of this work when it was becoming a dissertation,
and for valuable suggestions that aided its metamorphosis into a book.
I am grateful to Diane Marting for bringing Clarice Lispector's short
story "A menor mulher do mundo" to my attention, and for useful
comments.
Ted Emery has been supportive of this project and its author in
countless ways, and I would like to thank him with all my heart.
An early, shorter version of chapter 2 was published in Hispanic
Journal and is reprinted here with the editor's permission. All
unattributed translations are my own.
Page 1
1
The Anthropological Imagination
The conjunction of anthropology and literature in twentieth-century
Latin American literary textswhat I am calling the "anthropological
imagination"is a wide-ranging phenomenon that encompasses the
surrealist primitivism, negrismo, and indigenismo of the first half of
the century, the prolific testimonial genre that began in the 1960s, and
the "popular culture modernism" of the transcultural novel as
theorized by Angel Rama. Major Latin American writers who can be
said to share a specifically anthropological focus are many, and
include Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, José María
Arguedas, Carlos Fuentes, and Augusto Roa Bastos.
Interest in anthropology's relation to literature and vice versa has
emerged in recent years, following the poststructuralist challenge to
science that has made both anthropologists and literary critics
conscious of the rhetorical strategies they share. Historians and
discourse analysts have pointed out that supposedly objective
scientific discourses such as history and anthropology deploy plot
structures and narrative devices that are subject to analysis in the same
way as those of any literary text. At the same time, the postmodern
critique of master narratives and universalizing systems finds in
anthropology, whose focus is on the marginal, the local, the Other of
totalizing Western paradigms, a discipline at the heart of postmodern
sensibility.
The anthropological imagination has been fundamental in the ongoing
process of defining Latin America's identity since Columbus arrived
in the

Page 2
New World and found it already inhabited. But while the first writings
about an Other in Latin America begin simultaneously with the
Conquest itself, interrelations between literature and the formalized
discipline of anthropology emerge in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, when anthropology acquired institutional status as
a science.
Roberto González Echevarría has recently signaled the importance of
anthropology for twentieth-century Latin American writers as "a set of
given discursive possibilities . . . within and against which much of
Latin American narrative is written."1 However, González
Echevarría's discussion of the development of the novel in relation to
nonliterary discourses (in the colonial period to the discourse of law,
in the nineteenth century to that of science, in the twentieth to that of
anthropology) avoids any mention of specific schools of thought or
paradigms of anthropology.
In this study I will look at how the exposure of twentieth-century
Latin American writers to the discipline of anthropology and the
various rhetorical styles and strategies specific to its various schools
(cultural anthropology, functionalism, ethnography, etc.) is inscribed
and recoded in their texts. An important consideration will be the
extent to which Latin American writers conform to, and diverge from,
metropolitan paradigms. I will also examine how changing images of
the Other are reflected in anthropology and literature, and finally, I
will discuss how the current disciplinary crisis in anthropology
reverberates or is prefigured in Latin American writing, as well as
anthropology's relevance to the vexed question of a Latin American
postmodernism.
In general, my focus for this study has been the novel, for it is in the
open-ended space of the twentieth-century experimental novel where
inherited anthropological and literary conventions have been explored,