{"id":4214,"date":"2020-09-04T13:55:46","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T17:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/?p=4214"},"modified":"2020-09-04T13:58:26","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T17:58:26","slug":"fictional-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/fictional-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"“Fictional” Accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In class, I expressed that this is the first anthropology course I\u2019ve taken and that I\u2019m interpreting a lot of the things I\u2019m learning by putting it in context alongside my own discipline in English. This was a particularly interesting exercise when thinking about Geertz\u2019s essay and our discussion around it. Geertz talks about how anthropological writings are fictions in the sense that they are \u201csomething made\u201d. He goes on to claim that the important difference between representing events that have happened vs. representing events that have not happened doesn\u2019t lie in that fact that one story is noted and the other created but rather in \u201cthe condition of their creation, and the point of it\u201d (16). Verification is called into question–and whether there are correct and incorrect interpretive accounts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It might be superfluous, but I want to expand a bit about the differences I see between Geertz\u2019s descriptions of the fictive interpretive anthropology and my own understanding of fictional stories in order to examine the differences between \u201cthe condition of their creation\u201d, which I interpreted as <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>a thing is made. In class, we discussed the thick description of the twitch-wink distinction in Geertz\u2019s essay. Lauren brought up the suggestion that a good anthropological account relies on the anthropologist\u2019s due diligence in providing their thought process for reaching a particular interpretation or conclusion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a work of fiction, an author is most likely not providing this reasoning process for their characters\u2019 actions. This might seem obvious, but there is no written description of the data point \u201ccontraction of the eyelids\u201d that the reader must interpret; there is only \u201chis eye twitched involuntarily\u201d, \u201che winked\u201d, and \u201che winked mockingly\u201d. This difference in how a work of fiction is made is also indicative of Geertz\u2019s note on the second difference between anthropological accounts and fiction: \u201cthe point of it\u201d. The author who pens such a line skips communicating an observation and instead directly communicates its meaning, an interpretation that the reader must assume is accurate because the author wrote it. (A reader will not question the veracity of \u201chis eye twitched involuntarily\u201d unless it appears that they are supposed to do so.) But part of the reader\u2019s suspension of disbelief relies on the notion that the author is not acting as an interpreter-figure, but rather that a created character is–the narrator of the text. And although this fictional figure acts as the first fictional interpreter, there is another external interpreter that exists–the reader of the text. And although it\u2019s unlikely for the narrator\u2019s interpretation of \u201chis eye twitched involuntarily\u201d to be incorrect, it is very possible for the reader\u2019s interpretation of the circumstances around \u201chis eye twitched involuntarily\u201d to be incorrect, including the why<\/em>, how<\/em>, or what it means<\/em>. In his essay, Geertz draws parallels between interpretive anthropology and fiction by proposing that the relationship that anthropologists and authors share is an equivalent role. I think his comparison would be more accurate by drawing parallels between anthropologists who interpret real accounts and the literary analysts who interpret fictional accounts, both of whom must engage with unique data and information and draw conclusions based on evidence in order to provide more accurate and thus more valuable interpretations, even if they might not be exactly \u201ccorrect\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In class, I expressed that this is the first anthropology course I\u2019ve taken and that I\u2019m interpreting a lot of the things I\u2019m learning by putting it in context alongside my own discipline in English. This was a particularly interesting exercise when thinking about Geertz\u2019s essay and our discussion around it. Geertz talks about how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2978,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2978"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4214"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4219,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4214\/revisions\/4219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}