ABSTRACT
The introduction starts out by giving a brief overview of the over one thousand poems Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead wrote before zooming in on the texts I call ‘ethnographic poems.’ Concerning these texts, I state the book’s key research question: What difference does it make when anthropologists decide to write about another culture in verse instead of ethnographic prose? This is the most general question this book asks—a question that is simultaneously aesthetic (since it inquires into the specific functions of specific genres), epistemological (since it asks about the different kinds of knowledge enabled by different generic choices), and ethical (since it invites us to think about what constitutes ‘good’ representations of ethnic others).
