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title: Anthropology and the Novel
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This post forms part of my '[aspects of the novel](/2022/01/04/aspects-of-the-novel/)' collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting.

Anthropology or ethnography is the study of human cultures. Its development has, unsurprisingly, had a substantial impact on the development of the novel. One such example is the way in which fieldwork and travelling overseas to see a distant culture is reflected in novelistic journeys to strange lands (e.g. Aphra Behn's _Oroonoko_ from 1688).

The _bildungsroman_, coming of age narratives, mirrors the rise of the evolutionary paradigm in anthropology. For example, Stendhal's _Le rouge et le noir_ (1830, _Scarlet and Black_), Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ (1847), and Charles Dickens's _David Copperfield_ (1849-50). Frazer's _The Golden Bough_ (1890-1922) shows human thought as moving through distinct phases of magical, religious, and scientific, reflecting evolutionary concerns.

With the rise of psychoanalysis via Freud, the idea emerged that despite the rise of scientific rationality and evolutionary progress, there might remain a more primitive underside to human cultures. Several well-known novels explore this idea, such as Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ (1900) and D. H. Lawrencce's _Women in Love_ (1920).

Structuralist anthropology, as developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss finds itself bound up in the literary-critical school known as Russian Formalism and figures such as Vladimir Propp, who sought to uncover universal storytelling logic. This field eventually became "narratology" which had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

James Buzard (p. 55) suggests that there might be parallels between the descriptive function of the novel and the field of anthropology (which describes human cultures).

Of course, anthropology has not been viewed as a neutral activity. Instead, it is a mode critiqued by Edward Saïd (in _Orientalism_, for instance) for providing inadequate and coercive portraits of non-Western peoples. Some types of [novels of adaptation](/2022/01/04/adaptation-and-appropriation/), such as Chinua Achebe's _Things Fall Apart_, aim to re-work anthropological-esque novels from the opposing angle (in this case, _Heart of Darkness_).

Further reading: 

* Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill & Wang Pub, 1973)
* Buzard, James, ‘Anthropology’, in _The Encyclopedia of the Novel_, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 52–57
* Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968)
* Saïd, Edward W, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)