Fictionalizing Anthropology This page intentionally left blank Fictionalizing Anthropology Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human Stuart McLean University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Permission to quote from Transfer Fat by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), is granted by the publisher. Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McLean, Stuart, author. Title: Fictionalizing anthropology : encounters and fabulations at the edges of the human / Stuart McLean. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017005481 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0271-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0272-8 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology—Philosophy. | Ethnology—Philosophy. | Literature and anthropology. | Art and anthropology. Classification: LCC GN33 .M35 2017 (print) | DDC 301.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005481 Contents Prologue vii Part I. Anthropology: A Fabulatory Art 1 An Encounter in the Mist 3 2 Talabot 21 3 Fake 34 4 Anthropologies and Fictions 45 5 Knud Rasmussen 49 6 The Voice of the Thunder 67 7 Metaphor and/or Metamorphosis 73 8 “They Aren’t Symbols— They’re Real” 88 Part II. In Between 9 Liminality: An Old Story? 99 10 The Dead Have Never Been Modern 114 11 The God Who Comes 127 12 Between the Times 132 13 Anthropology ≠ Ethnography 147 14 Fabulatory Comparativism 156 Part III. Gyro Nights: Inhuman Culture / Inhuman Nature 15 Islands before and after History 165 16 Papay Gyro Nights 169 17 The Time of the Ancestors? 187 18 In the Beginning Were the Giants 202 19 Tiamaterialism 218 20 Blubberbomb 224 21 A Globe of Fire 241 22 Nighttime 248 Afterword: Anthropology Is Art Is Frog 259 Acknowledgments 265 Notes 269 Bibliography 305 Index 327 Prologue Once Upon a Time . Not in the time of calendars, chronicles, or clocks, not in the time of history . No land, or sea, or sky. Darkness. Fire and ice, condensing into a giant body. His name is Ymir. Or is he a he? The name means something like “two- fold being.”1 One leg copulates with the other, and a boy-child is the result. A giant and giantess spring from his armpits. Then it’s over. A new race of beings emerges from the ice— the race of humanly propor- tioned, bilaterally sexed and gendered gods led by Odin. The fecund, hermaphroditic giant is cut down to size. Odin and his brothers, Vili and Vé, kill Ymir and partition his body to fashion the earth, sea, and sky: From Ymir’s flesh the earth was made, And from his blood, the sea, Mountains from his bones, trees from his hair, And from his skull, the sky. And from his eyelashes the cheerful gods Made earth in the middle for men; And from his brain were the hard- tempered clouds All made.2 Although the verses comprising the surviving corpus of Eddic poetry, along with the prose summary composed by historian Snorri Sturluson, vii viii Prologue were first written down in Iceland sometime in the thirteenth century, more than two centuries after the settlement’s official adoption of Chris- tianity, they have often been cited as evidence of an older, pre- Christian vision of the cosmos that the earliest Norse settlers brought with them from pagan Scandinavia.3 The world these stanzas invoke, however, is older still— older than humans and the gods they worship. Indeed, the familiar deities of the Norse pantheon appear here as latecomers, usurp- ers of another, earlier dispensation. And what about the giants? On the one hand, their overthrow and displacement is the precondition for the establishment of a new order of gods and humans, the polymorphous bisexuality of Ymir’s originary body being subdued and partitioned to provide the foundation for the more fixed and clearly delineated forms of the presently existing world. On the other hand, the giants are acknowl- edged to be older than the gods who vanquish and replace them, and as such they retain powerful associations with magic, poetry, and wisdom. It is to them that even Odin is obliged to turn to acquire knowledge of past and future events.4 In the Eddic poems, for example, the descrip- tion of the chaos and darkness that precede creation is uttered by the Voluspa, a seeress, herself the descendant of giants, who can remember before recorded time and who is able also to see far ahead, beyond Rag- narok, the doom of the gods, when “the sun turns black, earth sinks into the sea/The bright stars vanish from the sky,” only for a new earth to rise up from the ocean, home (eventually) to a new generation of gods and humans.5 What is one to make of these verses and their protagonists, who vari- ously inhabit and remember a world prior to both gods and humans—a world fashioned, moreover, from the bodily substance of a being who was himself solidified out of the contending elements of a primordial chaos? Such origin stories, in Northern Europe and perhaps everywhere, are among the earliest subject matters of poetry. But who—or what— is speaking here? Should we trust the words of the seeress, or is she herself just another latecomer? What If . ? Fire and ice? How about melting ice caps, rising temperatures, seas, and CO2 levels, nuclear accidents, oil spills, e- waste, floating plastic garbage patches, along with climate change deniers vociferously ensconced at the Prologue ix highest levels of politics? Add to that burgeoning economic inequality, ethnic, religious, and free-mar ket fundamentalisms, wars, genocides, more than 65 million refugees, the prospect of border walls, immigration bans and mass deportations, and the world of the early twenty-first cen- tury starts to look no less precarious (or potentially transitory) than that of the Eddic creation narrative. As the latter reminds us, myths tell not only of origins but also of endings. Recent proclamations of the advent of the Anthropocene as a distinct geological epoch call attention both to the ever- increasing impact of human populations (some conspicuously more than others) on planetary ecosystems and to the now all too think- able possibility of a world that is no longer habitable by humans. Jour- nalist Alan Weisman has written of “the world without us” in a work of speculative nonfiction that imagines the future of the earth in the aftermath of the sudden disappearance of the human species. Weisman pictures, among other things, the flooding of cities like New York, the gradual reoccupation of onetime human dwellings by plants and animals, and the combustion of abandoned petrochemical refineries, expelling quantities of hydrogen cyanide and other toxins into the atmosphere, creating a chemical nuclear winter and potentially causing surviving species to mutate in ways that might decisively alter the course of evo- lution.6 Yet he suggests too that such thought experiments, disconcerting as they are, may be a necessary part of crafting livable human futures.7 Could the capacity to imagine not only our connectedness to other kinds of beings but also the possibility of our radical absence from the scene be a prerequisite of thought and creativity, not least in our pres- ent and much discussed state of ecological emergency? As the biological and physical sciences continue to remind us, humans, like the seeress, and like Odin and his followers, are late arrivals, recently emerged into a universe that existed long before them and that will continue to exist long after their disappearance.8 At the same time, science studies and the various “new materialisms” current across humanities disciplines alert us to the fact that even the social and cultural worlds that humans often pride themselves on creating have never been exclusively human. Rather, they are dependent on and inflected by a multitude of other than human presences, including animals, plants, geological formations, weather systems, and a range of humanly manufactured artifacts fashioned from a variety of materials— materials possessed of their own density and x Prologue dynamism, and as such irreducible to the uses to which humans attempt to put them.9 What becomes of the human in a universe that is always more than human? What becomes of anthropology? For one thing, the encounters across difference that anthropology deals with can no longer be under- stood only as encounters between differently constituted human worlds. Also implicated in such encounters are the other than human material- ities out of which human worlds are constructed and by which they are inevitably carried beyond themselves. No longer confined to the regis- ters of the social, cultural, or linguistic, difference inheres in the very fabric of reality. How, then, might anthropology engage the immanence of human imagining, thought, and practice to a world that preexists and surpasses them? Might this involve suspending anthropology’s some- time claims to be a social science, whether of a geisteswissenschaftlich or a positivist variety, and instead turning to the exploration of its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Perhaps anthropology stands to learn from art and litera- ture not as evidence to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but rather as distinct modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media— including language— that always retain the capacity to exceed and destabilize human intentions.