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<p>This dissertation examines French and Francophone texts, contexts and thematic
problems that comprise a genre I call "ethnographic fiction," whose development we
can trace throughout the twentieth century in several geographic locations and in
distinct historical moments. During the twentieth century in France, anthropology
as an institutionalized discipline and "literature" (writ large) were in constant
communication with one another. On the one hand, many French anthropologists produced
stylized works demonstrating aesthetic sensibilities that were increasingly difficult
to classify. On the other hand, though, poets, philosophers and other literary intellectuals
read, absorbed, commented on and attacked texts from anthropology. This century-long
conversation produced an interdisciplinary conceptual field allowing French anthropology
to borrow from and adapt models from literature at the same time as literature asserted
itself as more than just an artistic enterprise and, indeed, as one whose epistemological
prerogative was to contribute to and enrich the understanding of humankind and its
cultural processes. In this dissertation I argue that fiction can be seen to travel
in multiple directions within France's twentieth-century conversation between literature
and anthropology such that we can observe the formation of a new genre, one comprised
of texts that either explicitly or more implicitly fuse fictional forms and contents
together with the methodological and representational imperatives of anthropology
and ethnographic fieldwork. Additionally, I argue that fiction moves geographically
as well, notably from the metropole to Francophone West Africa which became an anthropological
hotspot in the twentieth century once extended field research was legitimated in France
and armchair anthropology was thoroughly discredited. By investigating ethnographies,
novels, memoirs and films produced both in metropolitan France, Francophone West Africa,
and the French Caribbean (including texts by Michel Leiris, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jean
Rouch, Jean-Claude Izzo and Raphaël Confiant), I aim to shed light on the kinds of
work that elements of fiction perform in ethnographic texts and, by contrast, on how
ethnographic concepts, strategies and fieldwork methods are implicitly or explicitly
adopted and reformulated in more literarily oriented works of fiction. Ethnographic
fiction as a genre, then, was born not only from the epistemological rapprochement
of anthropology and literature in metropolitan France, but from complex and often
fraught encounters with the very locations where anthropological praxis was carried
out.</p>
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