Devant la littérature

How do we stand, as an anthropologist, to face literature? Without giving the whole of the debates which this important topic may have raised, this article would like to expose the two ways in which Daniel Fabre had seized it. Two ways of grasping literature through anthropology which gave rise to two projects of books, La Maison du Chat (The Cat’s House) and La Bibliothèque des Iles (The Islands’Library). None of them were finally published but we know some parts, published as articles or chapters. From the first, an ethnology of the manifestations of literature, before the final results (i.e. the books), emerged: the problem of the writer’s body, the question of the writing’s place, and the description of creative processes. From the second, that joined a program of historical epistemology, we could notice an approach which aimed at identifying the initial proximities and gradual discontinuities between literary and anthropological perspectives, between seers and observers