Literature as ethnography
Towards new fields of research
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17561/rae.v20.28Keywords:
Literature, Culture, Writing, Ethnography, AnthropologyAbstract
Writers of literature are ethnographers and literature is per se ethnography. According to this conception, in the last decades ways of investigation were born that analyze literature explicitly from the ethnographic perspective. In reality, the idea of understanding literature as ethnography and the study of literature as the study of culture began already in the last century with Roland Barthes. This conception led to a change of paradigm in the last three decades. Apart from focuses that show an ethnological interest of literature, there are some forms of investigation that used to be limited to the literary field and that now seem to be important for the investigation of culture in general. The question arises: What kind of questions of the literary field can be translated to the cultural field? The following text tries to offer an overview of those investigations and focuses in order to conclude with answering the questions: What are the advantages of the literary writing over the classic ethnographic writing? What are the flaws of writers of ethnography that literature can compensate?
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