Worsley, Peter. The trumpet shall sound: a study of “cargo” cults in Melanesia, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957.

Harry G. West- Ethnographic Sorcery. It reads like a novel. A good short description in my eyes can be found here.
http://www.buy.com/prod/ethnographic-sorcery/q/loc/106/204174647.html

it is a short book, one reason why students can be expected to like it, and what I particularly like about the work is that it presents its informants in a way that makes sorcery much less something alien and much more something like a postmodern understanding of knowledge construction. On an abstract level, it explores how knowledge shapes lives, regardless of cultural context.

I also have a kind of request to readers of this page. In the context of the PhD project I’m working on, I’d be very interested in relevant experimental (preferably recent) works that alter the ‘accepted’ rules of representation in order to present something which is very difficult to capture in the sense that it does not fit ‘our’ way of categorizing experience. Various works on the list above already fit those search requirements. I would prefer to stay within the limits of what is still considered ’scientific’ rather than fictional. What is central with ref to this post is that I am looking for works that have the power to affect in a way that a good novel can, as L.L. Wynn puts it. I consider this to be a very important aspect of anthropological writing and aim to study it further, argueing that it is relevant far beyond anthropology…thanks in advance

Carlos Castaneda?

While it certainly qualifies as fiction……the ethnographic aspect of his work was (in my opinion) more of a practice in Psychoanalytical Anthropology in which Castaneda uses fictional characters and scenarios in order to prove some basic points about human consciousness and identity.

The work is a bit “dated” for contemporary students but it is reflective of a sector of the Anthro community from the 1970’s that was an extension of the subculture that sought to break the constraints of the socio-complexity levels of the modern Nation State and return to some proverbial and utopian “Eden”. Unfortunately most of the work falls into the “what were you smoking Category” and thus was deemed fringe Anthropology.

Nonetheless, some of these texts I feel can be engaging reading and informative, perhaps causing us to evaluate things from alternative perspectives.

A few of my favorites are:

The Wizard of the Upper Amazon- by Bruce Lamb

Cosmic Serpent- by Jeremy Narby

Tales of Power
The Art of Dreaming- both by Castaneda

These are the 2 most cohesive of his books, with the second mirroring nicely the work by Stephan LaBerge on lucid dreaming.

I heard a reading from it on the CBC years ago and, of course, was driving and couldn’t write the title down. I called the CBC and they had no idea what book I had heard discussed.

No amount of Googleing has hel;ped me locate this book.

It was a novel about an anthropologist studying a “primitive” community, I believe in South or Central America. He was invited to participate in a ceremony. What he doesn’t realize is that he IS the ceremony.

He is taken out into the jungle and tied down to the ground and slits cut in his flesh. Seedlings and earth are placed into the slits. At first he is in pain and delirious but as the days pass and the roots and insects begin working into his flesh he begins to become one with the process and with the earth… When he is finally “rescued” he fights against his rescuers.

What particularly intrigued me by the story was something I saw later in London, UK. They had an exhibit on The Day of the Dead. At the entrance, they had an almost life-sized “calaca” (papier mache skeleton) by Philipe Linares, which had plants and animal life growing in and on it.

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&view=js&name=js&ver=zpuf6AhpH1w&am=T_k4pdTib5Lz

If anyone has any idea what this book is, I would be eternally grateful…