ABSTRACT
Imaginative writers have always intuitively understood culture. Expatriate novelist Jean Rhys explicitly compared reading to immigration. T. S. Eliot addressed culture directly. Social science has long observed a lack of attention to the role of imaginative literature and its cognates, drama and screenplay, in the understanding of culture, and it is true that theory and the experimental attitude dominate. Searching for specific types of literature or film will lead to reservoirs of attractive material. Ethnographic films, for instance, are available and underutilized. From a historical perspective, many of the founding documents of psychology were written in languages other than English and persuasive cases can be made for their having been mistranslated or culturally misconstrued. The deep intertwining of culture and translation and the persistent idea that some texts and ideas are untranslatable should suggest caution to anyone venturing into literature as a way of understanding culture.
