Introduction to Literature, Writing & Anthropology: A Curated Collection of Five Cultural Anthropology Articles

What is the work that stories do? “Literature, Writing, and Anthropology” seeks to address this question by creating a space in which fiction and anthropology converge, collide, and collapse into one another.  This collection, a collaboration between Cultural Anthropology and the literary journal American Short Fiction, features articles, interviews, short stories, and a lecture by eleven authors.  In assembling these pages, we have been surprised by the affiliations that form across the fiction, ethnography, and criticism.  Though we’ve separated the fiction from the anthropology, there is no way to easily demarcate where fiction ends and anthropology begins.