Contaminations and Ethnographic Fictions

Southern Crossings

Oscar Hemer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030349240
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030349257
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In an unusual merging of academic and literary practices, this volume attempts to identify a form (or forms) that is congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point. Approaching anthropology from the position of the literary writer, Oscar Hemer here takes the reader through a kaleidoscope of  perspectives—a stream-of-consciousness understanding of "writing the city" of Johannesburg, embedding ethnography in subjectivity; a challenge to binaries both temporal and gendered in examining the growth of the IT metropolis Bangalore to a combusting mega-city; an auto-ethnographic interweaving of fictional reportage with a close-reading of anthropological and philosophical treatises, including Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, among others—to interrogate themes of transition, identity, purity and variation in the Western Cape. As the form transcends boundaries to create a methodological hybrid, creolization comes to the fore as a theoretical concept and as cultural practice.

© The Author(s) 2020

O. HemerContaminations and Ethnographic FictionsPalgrave Studies in Literary Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34925-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Contaminations, Ethnographic Fictions and What-What

On the Convergence of Literary and Academic Writing

Oscar Hemer¹

(1)

School of Arts and Communication, K3, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

Oscar Hemer

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The texts that constitute this book intend to explore the possible merging of academic and literary practices . The aim is not experimentation for its own sake, but the search for a form—forms—that is/are congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point.

What I least want is to “explain” my transgressive attempt by means of a conventional academic introduction. I regard this as a literary work as much as an academic one, and it is a golden rule that literary writers not attempt to analyse their own work, as such self-reflection runs the imminent risk of appearing as primitive or even irrelevant in comparison with the meta-level inscribed in the structure of the work itself.¹ The latter is never fully apprehended by the author (if it were, it would not be literature). Yet, my interrogation also aspires to stand the test of academic scrutiny, and for the sake of transparency, I will in the following make some preliminary reflections in order to provide a background and rationale for the opacity.²

*

The sudden outburst of xenophobic violence in South Africa in March 2015, which was even more virulent than the similar incidents in 2008, formed the backdrop of my three-month stay at STIAS, as did the parallel student revolt and symbolic battle about public memory—starting at the University of Cape Town and culminating with the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue from its campus on 9 April. Both these seemingly disconnected events informed my emerging interrogation, which had also been motivated by the rise of right-wing populism and neo-nationalism in Europe—manifest long before the refugee migration of 2015/16—and the ticking bomb of communal violence on the Indian subcontinent, which I had touched upon in a previous study.³

I claimed, as a hypothesis, that the underlying structure in the regularly resurging nationalism, xenophobia and identity politics , in Europe, South Africa and, possibly, everywhere, can be framed by the discourse of Purity/Impurity, as outlined and analysed by British anthropologist Mary Douglas 1966. Douglas theorized purity and impurity in terms of instantiation and disruption of a shared symbolic order. Simply put, purity conceals the preservation of that order, whereas all that threatens the social equilibrium is encoded as impurity. Influential, and disputed, as Douglas has been,⁴ the purity/impurity discourse arguably holds an as yet unrealised potential for both social theory and social action. By way of the cross-genre and transdisciplinary methodology—finding a form that is probing in and by itself—my aim was hence to explore the phenomenology of impurity, and specifically the notion of creolisation, for which South Africa (counter-intuitively) is a very apposite case.

*

The project I first formulated at STIAS can be regarded as a sequel to two preceding projects that were partly carried out in parallel. In my artistic research project Fiction and Truth in Transition,⁵ I used South Africa and Argentina as comparative cases to explore the relationship between literary fiction and society’s dramatic transformation in the two countries over the past three decades. That interrogation brought me, to my own surprise, to the crossroads of literature and anthropology (fiction and ethnography), where this project starts.

After completing the artistic research project , which I defended as a dissertation in Social Anthropology,⁶ I returned to fiction and wrote the concluding novel in a trilogy that I had begun working on in the late 1990s.⁷ These two major long-term projects (academic and literary) definitely informed each other, and in retrospect I can clearly see how they were really two complementary forms of interrogating some common themes. Complementary, yet distinctly different. And, contrary to my preconception, the difference seemed to be emphasised rather than blurred as I moved between them—from the academic straitjacket to the freedom of fiction. Even though I had retained the perspective of the literary writer, and incorporated elements of essay, reportage and memoir, there was a limit as to how far I could challenge the format of the dissertation. (For me, the principal challenge was to write an academic dissertation, not another novel.) And it was indeed a great relief to return to writing fiction.

The title of the concluding part of the Argentina trilogy , Misiones, had been in the back of my mind ever since I wrote the second part, and I would certainly have written it some five years earlier if the dissertation had not come in-between. But then, it would as certainly have become a quite different novel. On the one hand, the systematic research into the ethnographic and historical material that I was beginning to explore in the second novel (Santiago) provided my writing with a more solid ground. On the other, and more importantly, the subsequent greater confidence in my own authority enhanced my ability and motivation to invent more freely. For example, Misiones is a province in North-Eastern Argentina with a fairly large and largely unknown community of Swedish immigrants, who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I had been there twice, very briefly, and I was all the time planning to go back and do some proper ethnographic research for my novel. But that journey was always postponed and in the end I decided to write the novel anyway, almost completely based on imagination and hardly making use of any of the “real” history, let alone current ethnographic empirics. Hence, in the end, the literariness of my literary approach was actually accentuated.

So, what about transgression? To what extent do the academic and literary practices actually converge? Is it even desirable that they fuse into new genres? It would appear that the somewhat discouraging answer is “No”. Moreover it may be, as Norwegian writer and anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen suggested already in the early ’90s, that literature and anthropology are relevant to each other only as long and in-so-far as they remain aware of their fundamental difference.⁸ And given the current fictionalisation of journalism and politics, with proliferation of “fake news” and fact resistance, it may no longer even be a discouraging conclusion. But the question of convergence has continued to intrigue me. This project is my second take on it, my impleme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Contaminations, Ethnographic Fictions and What-What
• 2. Hillbrow Blues
• 3. Bengaluru Boogie
• 4. Cape Calypso I
• 5. Cape Calypso
• 6. Cape Calypso II
• 7. Melville Medley
• Correction to: Bengaluru Boogie
• Back Matter