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PARTISAN REVIEW
poets trace their intellectual genealogy to phenomenology and to the
free-form interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz. In principle,
they aim to make available to their readers some moment of genuine
contact with people who hold radically different cultural assumptions.
That contact, however, has to be mediated by someone, so much of
what the anthropo-poets write about is themselves. The anthropo-poet
movement ostensibly puts us in the worlds of strangers-Mayans,
Aztecs, Kuranko-but in fact plants us in the consciousness of very self–
centered anthropologists. The real progenitor of this movement may
well be Carlos Castenada, whose fake narratives (once taken as nonfic–
tion) of his psychedelic encounters with the shaman Don Juan were a
counterculture favorite in the sixties.
So far, none of the anthropo-poets or novelists have broken through
to the level of first-rate literature.
If
one wishes to get one's anthropol–
ogy through fiction, Herman Melville's
Typee
is probably still the place
to begin. But the acceptance of the anthropological expressivists within
the field of anthropology and beyond is an excellent gauge of changes
in the human sciences. Their work may be charmlessly didactic and
filled with confessional banality, but it is
celebrated
in multicultural
studies programs on campuses across the country. To many readers, the
anthropo-poets show us our liberation from stultifying Western ways of
seeing things, and they promise a magical entry into unknown worlds.
Unfortunately, that view is mistaken. These poems and novels are no
shortcut to transcending cultural boundaries. What the anthropo-poets
provide is typically little more than a tour of their own psyches, dressed
in native costume. Instead of Keats's "magic casements, opening on the
foam / of perilous seas," we encounter the brick wall of impenetrable
local detail and exotic imagery, giving us just another coded version of
the self-conceits and discontents of the alienated Western intellectual.
In that regard, Professor Fox deserves some credit. He is more
straightforwardly didactic than the anthropo-poets and, though his
poems are plenty self-indulgent, they are not the typical anthropo-poetic
exercises of attempting to describe the world by staring into a mirror.
Unfortunately, the anthropo-poets have opened the way for anthropol–
ogists of all stripes to publish their amateur verse. And much of that is
material, like Fox's, that has been better said in traditional nonfiction
forms of prose.
Peter W. Wood
