Journal | Il Tolomeo
Journal issue | 18 | 2016
Research Article | Exploring the Ethnographic Encounter

Exploring the Ethnographic Encounter

An Anthropological Approach to World Literature in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract

Through a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide, the article proposes a preliminary attempt to combine anthropology with world literature, a concept that has recently attracted significant attention from the fields of postcolonial studies and comparative literature alike. Firstly, I argue that world literature is best seen as a number of overlapping and/or divergent projects, and that it thrives if tackled through a plurality of approaches. Secondly, I suggest one possible approach to world literature, employing John Comaroff’s definition of anthropology as a discipline characterised by a few closely interrelated epistemic operations that qualify ethnographic fieldwork. Lastly, I map Comaroff’s epistemic operations onto The Hungry Tide to unpack the levels of anthropological sophistication of this novel. I advocate the revised concept of ethnographic novel that results from this reading – the idea of a novel of the ethnographic encounter – as a useful point of departure for a project of world literature.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Sept. 1, 2016 | Accepted: Oct. 4, 2016 | Published Dec. 19, 2016 | Language: it

Keywords Amitav Ghosh • The Hungry Tide • World Literature • Anthropology

Copyright © 2016 Lucio De Capitani. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-18-16-6


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