BOOKS
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or Tarascan with their silver tongues
caressing, flickering like Hindu sunsets over a temple pool
the carved knee-crooking gods and goddesses in their thousand
cubicles
near the station in Madurai-
The reader who is not exceptionally well-traveled has to be prepared
to take a lot on trust about Mexican gruel-vendors and Hindu temples,
which, contrary to Friedrich, don't really illuminate each other. But
Friedrich, like many other anthropo-poets, is at pains to demonstrate
his ease with a kaleidoscopic variety of detail from other cultures. The
English romantics, of course, often evoked faraway places, usually
in
wonder at what mighty Cortez saw or what Kubla Khan decreed.
Anthropo-poets, by contrast, evoke the exotic mainly to display their
familiarity with it.
In
a talk that Rothenberg gave at the Modern Language Association
in
1994,
he claims to have invented the word
ethnopoetics
around
L969,
a year after publishing his first volume of ethnopoetry,
Techni–
cians of the Sacred.
In
J98
5, Dennis Tedlock published his well-received
translation of the Mayan classic
Popol Yuh.
That same year, the Smith–
sonian Institution Press brought out New Zealand anthropologist
Michael jackson's
Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky: An Ethno–
graphic Novel .
Jackson, who had already published more orthodox
ethnography on the West African Kuranko, now presented his observa–
tions in a fictional story involving a New Zea land anthropologist
named"Michael Jackson."
Although it is easy to find precedents of anthropologists now and
then writing verse or novels, jackson's novel and Tedlock's poetry trans–
lations heralded a significant shift. A genre of creative writing was
emerging which explicitly draws on the expert ethnographer's luminous
understanding of cultural
others.
Fifteen years after the Tedlocks
injected Rothenberg's ethnopoetics into the
American Anthropologist,
anthropo-poets (and novelists) are now everywhere. A fair number of
anthropologists seem to have decided that ordinary nonfiction exposi–
tion is inadequate to convey what they have discovered about the
human condition, and that imaginative literature is the way to go. But
why?
Anthropo-poetry is largely the outgrowth of a shift in the field
toward emphasizing the "lived experience" of individuals in other cul–
tures, in contrast to the sorts of things that can be counted or measured,
and in contrast to more abstract aspects of social life. The anthropo-
