Nigel Barley: "Fiction gives better answers than anthropology"

(LINKS UPDATED 18.2.2021) “Fiction’s more fun. It lets you look inside people’s heads in a way you wouldn’t dare to do if you stuck to anthropology", anthropologist Nigel Barley says in an interview with the Telegraph:

“As an anthropologist you’re always asking questions such as: How different can different peoples be? Are we all reducible to a common humanity? And if so: what is it? Nobody can answer these questions. But I like to use fiction to try to answer anthropological questions. And fiction, I find, gives better answers.”

His book The Duke of Puddledock records Nigel’s travels, literal and figurative. It is part biography, part autobiography, part natural history, part anthropology, and part travelogue.

>> read the whole story in the Telegraph

Nigel Barley, most known for his funny book The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut is not the only anthropologist who explores the possibilities of fiction.

A few weeks ago, I read about Tahmima Anam, the first Bangladeshi writer to win the Overall First Book Award at The Commonwealth Writers Prize 2008. She has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College.

“I wrote A Golden Age because I wanted the story of the Bangladesh war to reach an international audience", she says. She travelled throughout Bangladesh, interviewing ex-freedom fighters, military officers, students, and survivors of the 1971 war. The novel is a fictionalised account of these war stories, combined with her own family history.

In an interview with the Boston Globe she explains why she wrote a novel, rather than a nonfiction book:

I felt that this was a human story that needed character and plot. I wanted it to touch people’s hearts, as the stories I had heard had touched my heart. I wanted people to have a visceral sense of what it was like to be there at that time, and I didn’t think that nonfiction, for all its beauties and virtues, could do that.

And in an interview with the Guardian she says:

After graduating from university I started a PhD in social anthropology, but really I was dreaming of writing a novel. I would sit in my lectures and scribble in the margins of my notebooks. But for a long time, I didn’t tell anyone I wanted to be a writer; it was my undercover identity. It was when I started doing the research that it became more real. I travelled back to Bangladesh and met survivors of the Bangladesh war. After hearing their stories, I felt that I really ought to take the project more seriously, and that’s when I began writing the novel in earnest.

See also her articles in the Guardian and in New Statesman

SEE ALSO:

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The Secret of Good Ethnographies - Engaging Anthropology Part III

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