Introduction

Fortes’ definition could easily characterize many of the works of literature written by men and women who use society and culture as a backdrop for their writing. Bringing together two bodies of knowledge, one scientific and the other literary, they, too, enjoy “breaking up the … reality of human action, thought, and emotion” with utmost accuracy to depict the characters in the society about which they are writing. The problem, however, as Nathan Tarn notes, is not in documenting the obvious links between the two disciplines but rather in “trying to house, and perhaps mate, ‘recording’ and ‘creative angels’ in the same physical body” (1991, p. x). Social scientists and anthropologists “borrow” from the analogies and imagery often used in literary analysis; literary people cull ideas from anthropologists (the fashionable ones like Geertz and Turner, both of whom have backgrounds in literature) and transmogrify models, methods, and terminology in the social sciences. That anthropological writing should be subjected to literary analysis and that the relationship works just as well in the other direction not only underscores the linkage between the two disciplines that culminates in interpretive essays uncovering and saying something new, but also recognizes an intimate relationship worth examining more closely. This penchant for “crossing over” by practitioners in both disciplines and the ongoing desire to redefine literature as a cultural “artifact” or social “discourse” continue to fuel the debate on the merits of interdisciplinarity. Therefore, it is not surprising that there be a lasting relationship between literature and anthropology and a proliferation of books and journals exploring the situating of literature within a social and cultural milieu.