Ways of knowing small places

About this book

"Ways of Knowing Small Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in American ethnographic and literary representation that began roughly in the 1960s. Confronted by unprecedented social, economic, and epistemologi-cal change initiated by decolonization and the Civil Rights movement, American ethnographers and minority writers of fiction had to rethink their relation to the small places and cultures that had hitherto been central to their writing. Small, isolated places - particularly islands - had been key sites for studying non-western peoples through participant observation. In the 1960s, however, the natives of those small places usurped the right to represent themselves in social science and the literary marketplace. Meanwhile, many anthropologists resorted to more self-reflexive modes of writing, such as autobiography and fiction. Ways of Knowing Small Places brings to critical attention two bodies of writing: fiction conceived as a critique of/an alternative to ethnography and fiction by anthropologists. Underlying this project is a curiosity about what happens when literature acts like ethnography, or is mistaken for ethnography, or when ethnography acts like literature"--P. [4] of cover.