Publisher's Synopsis
What kind of a resource - ethnographic, theoretic and methodological - does literature represent to anthropology?;In "The Prose and the Passion", Nigel Rapport suggests an answer by "reading" his own social research in a small English village through the writings of E.M. Forster. He zigzags between the voices of local inhabitants and the voices of fictional characters, between Forster's narrative voice and the author's own autobiographical one. Here is a polemical review of the recent "literary turn" in anthropology; and also a humanistic riposte to the reputed death of the author. Rapport describes how anthropology and literature share the same ethos. Both are self-conscious practices which derive, in Forster's own words, from "connecting prose and passion". Both demand that their individual authors make sense of their experiences in order to intuit those of others, and so to rewrite (and right) social reality. Rapport redefines the relationship between anthropology and writing and argues for a new understanding of "writing" as a universal cognitive reflection upon, and ordering of, individual experience.
