Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on a simple premise, which was to have several exceptional ethnographers write about their experiences in an evocative way in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited volume with dedicated chapters, this book thus offers a new format wherein authors write several, distinct dispatches, each short and compact, allowing each writer's perspectives and stories to grow, in tandem with the pandemic itself, over the course of the book. Leaving behind the trope of the lonely anthropologist, these authors come together to form a collective of ethnographers to ask important questions, such as: What does it mean to live and write amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and economic crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe? Such first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many, such as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal injustices, loss and separation, displacement, phantasmal imaginings and possibilities, the uncertain arts of calculating risk and protection, limits on movement and travel, and the biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The various writings¿spun from diverse situations and global locations¿proceed within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with the first alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to various currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings then move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the global distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the promise and hope these immunizations bring. The written record of these multiform dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as the authors of those lives tried to make do, and write, in trying times. A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our lives, this book is critical reading for students and researchers of medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary anthropological theory, and ethnographic writing.

This book focuses on the example of surrogate motherhood to explore the interplay between new reproductive technologies and new ethnographic writing technologies. It seeks to interrogate the potential of fictional multimodality in ethnography and to illuminate the generative possibilities of digital artefacts in anthropological research. It also makes a case for the tailor-made character of ethnographic writing in the digital era, arguing that research quests and representational modalities can be paired together to develop unique narrative forms, corresponding to each particular topic¿s traits and analytical affordances. Focusing on the intersections of assisted reproduction technologies and digitally mediated writing, this study casts light upon the value of the affective, the fictional and the ¿real¿ in the anthropological research and writing of relatedness. Analyzing the situated knowledge of ethnographers and research interlocutors, it experiments with multimodalstorytelling and revisits the century-long debate on the affinity between an object of study and the possibilities for its representation. As the first attempt to bring together digital anthropology, fiction writing and the ethnography of surrogacy, this book fuses the genealogy of feminist critique on the orthodox, phallocentric, and heteronormative aspects of academic discourse with the input of digital humanities vis-à-vis troubling the conventional formal properties of scholarly writing.

Bringing together a unique collection of narrative accounts based on the lived experience of queer Chicano/Mexicano sons, this book explores fathers, fathering, and fatherhood. In many ways, the contributors reveal the significance of fathering and representations of fatherhood in the context of queer male sexuality and identity across generations, cultures, class, and Mexican immigrant and Mexican American families. They further reveal how father figures-godfathers, grandfathers, and others-may nurture and express love and hope for the queer young men in their extended family. Divided into six sections, the book addresses the complexity of father-queer son relationships; family dynamics; the impact of neurodiverse mental health issues; the erotic, unsafe, and taboo qualities of desire; encounters with absent, estranged or emotionally distant fathers; and a critical analysis of father and queer son relationships in Chicano/Latino literature and film.

A narrative ethnography about a Ugandan woman and her relatives, this novelistic, fine-grained volume shows how global questions of responsibility and inequity travel in family networks and confront people with decisions about life and death.

In an unusual merging of academic and literary practices, this volume attempts to identify a form (or forms) that is congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point.

This book offers a new mythic perspective on the secret of the allure and survival of a current-archaic institution-the Western theatre-in an era of diverse technological media.

This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernandez, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist.

This is a book about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This ethnography focuses on Caribbean Rastafari who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia over several decades particularly, though not exclusively, from Jamaica. Shelene Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the multicultural Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane following a twentieth century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I. In presenting narratives of spiritual repatriation, everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of cosmopolitanism from the Global South.Shifting the centre of worldviews from Europe to Africa, Rastafari both challenge global disparities as well as reproduce hierarchies in the local space of the Jamaica Safar. In positioning Ethiopia as the spiritual birthplace of humanity, Rastafari also engage in ontological and epistemological reinvention. This spiritual repatriation, in its emic sense, foregrounds the Caribbeanist contribution to anthropology. Ethnographies of the Caribbean have been at the forefront of anthropological enquiries into global interconnections. This discussion of spiritual repatriation is both specific to the diasporic Caribbean and relevant to wider world-making processes and representations.

Bringing together a unique collection of narrative accounts based on the lived experience of queer Chicano/Mexicano sons, this book explores fathers, fathering, and fatherhood.

This collection pushes migration and "the minor" to the fore of literary anthropology. This anthology examines the generative and transformative potentials of storytelling, while illustrating that literary anthropology is well equipped to examine the multiple contexts that literature engages.

This book describes the remarkable culture of jeliya, a musical and verbal art from the Manding region of West Africa. Using an embodied practice as her methodology, the author reveals how she and her music teachers live "in between" local and global cultures.

This book provides new insights into an intense and long-standing debate on women, gender, and masculinity with an explicit focus on ethnographic writing.

Wiles asks why literary events appeal and matter to people, and how they can transform the ways in which fiction is received and valued. Wiles's experiential literary ethnography represents an innovative and vital contribution, not just to literary research, but to research into the value of cultural experience across art forms.

This book presents a systematic approach to the literary analysis of cultural practices. Razia Parveen explores various diverse themes, including the female voice, genealogy, space, time, and diaspora, and applies them to the analysis of community identity.

A number of these key concepts-'the end of history,' 'the clash of civilizations,' 'the coming anarchy,' 'the world is flat,' 'soft power,' 'the post-American century'-suggest what could become characteristic of this new, interconnected world.

This ethnographic novel follows the life of Omar Dia, the oldest son of a West African sorcerer. When his father falls ill and dies, the great sorcerer vomits a small metal chain onto his chest. Following the path of his ancestors, Omar swallows the chain, becoming his father's successor, which means that he takes on the sorcerer's burden.

This book tells the incredible true story of Ranulfo Juarez, a Mexican immigrant. Readers won't know until the end whether Ranulfo became another innocent victim of the Financial Crisis of 2008, but, throughout, they will see Ranulfo and Peter confront naysayers and cheats, as well as their own differences and fears.

This collection pushes migration and "the minor" to the fore of literary anthropology. This anthology examines the generative and transformative potentials of storytelling, while illustrating that literary anthropology is well equipped to examine the multiple contexts that literature engages.

Taylor brings an ethnographer's eye, ear, and many years of experience to this fictional portrait of life along the US/Mexico desert border.

Exploring An t-Oileanach (anglicised as The Islandman), an indigenous Irish-language memoir written by Tomas O Criomhthain (Tomas O'Crohan), Mairead Nic Craith charts the development of O Criomhthain as an author;

This book brings together several important essays examining the interface between identity, culture, and literature within the issue of cultural identity in South Asian literature.

This book brings together several important essays examining the interface between identity, culture, and literature within the issue of cultural identity in South Asian literature.