The Anthropology of Influence: Ethnography, Culture, and the Cold War American Novel

Francis X. Altomare argues that significant twentieth-century novelists Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Chad Oliver, and Joan Didion mark a seminal moment in the interdisciplinary tradition of anthropology and literature as authors who studied and practiced cultural anthropology before their transitions toward literary fiction.
Focusing on the dynamic period between World War II and the turn of last century, this book explores the interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural anthropology and literary studies through analyses of novels composed by authors with significant exposure to professional anthropology during its midcentury period. Not only do these authors stylistically adopt what Altomare coins as the "ethnographic voice," they also adopt similar frames of observation taken by real-world ethnographers, present readers with ethnographers as protagonists, and integrate anthropological theory into their texts to produce ethnografictions occupying a space between the anthropological and the literary. These convergences place these authors at a nexus between modernist/postmodernist literature and the evolving field of cultural anthropology, complicating and enriching our understanding of fictionality, realism, and narrative truth while shedding light on the inextricable development of these fields in midcentury America as sites of cultural critique, aesthetic value, and sources of human meaning.