UB scholar named co-editor of new anthropology series

The field of literary anthropology is not new, but for the first time, there is a new home for written works at the intersection of literature and anthropological studies.

Academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan launched its Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology series this fall and named Deborah Reed-Danahay, a professor of cultural anthropology in the UB Department of Anthropology, as the series’ co-editor with Helena Wulff, a professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University.

The publisher is accepting proposals and will publish the series’ first books in 2016.

From the earliest days of the discipline, anthropologists like Ruth Benedict explored frontiers that reached beyond their field work and into the domains of poetry and fiction. Benedict and others pointed an anthropological lens toward literary ethnographies, seeking what anthropologist Clifford Geertz later called a “thick description” of some social place and trying to make sense of an environment.

Works by earlier authors such as Jane Austin and Gustave Flaubert expressed the novelists’ interest in describing social milieus in a fashion similar to that of anthropologists.

Others have examined the role literature plays as a cultural manifestation, such as Northwestern faculty member Janice Radway’s ethnography of readers of romance novels.

Anthropologists Ruth Behar, Paul Stoller and Kirin Narayan, writers and scholars, have also at times traveled similar paths, all contributing to a body of work known as literary anthropology, a confluence of creative expression and humanistic understanding.

This notable output, however, has always lacked a targeted home, gaining respect despite its distant orbit from the field of anthropology’s center.

“In some ways, literary anthropology has waxed and waned over time,” says Reed-Danahay, who is one of only 40 university professors in the world in 2015 to receive a Jean Monnet Chair from the European Commission. “But there is now a growing momentum and interest in the field that is taking it from the margins to the center of anthropology.”

That Reed-Danahay has time to carry out her new charge is as interesting as the series’ arrival on the publishing scene.

In addition to her undergraduate and graduate teaching responsibilities, she is developing a website and writing a book, as her Jean Monnet Chair teaching post (2015-2018) requires. Reed-Danahay has a book in progress on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and is working on an ethnographic research project on French migration to London, England, while also serving on the executive committee of the Council for European Studies.

Now she’s co-editing a pioneering new series exploring the ethnography of fiction, narrative ethnography, creative non-fiction, memoir, autoethnography and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.

She clearly has too much time on her hands.

“This is something I enjoy,” she says. “It’s a pleasure to help encourage interesting projects and to help foster this field.”

Reed-Danahay’s editing role is, in fact, an extension of her classroom. She uses novels and memoirs in her teaching.

“I’ve studied and written an ethnographic work on the Vietnamese diaspora, but when I teach that subject I include memoirs written by Vietnamese-Americans, like Bich Minh Nguyen’s ‘Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,’” she says. “I think it’s important for students to get not only my perspective as an anthropologist and non-Vietnamese person, but to actually hear the voice of someone who has lived that experience.”

The memoir provides a first-person narrative of that person’s subjectivity that mirrors the anthropologists’ insider-outsider perspective as social scientists both observing and participating in the culture they’re studying, she says.

“This all speaks to the value of appreciating creativity in human culture,” says Reed-Danahay. “Literary anthropology can do that.”