Making borders between science and literature : ethnographic prose

The Fredrik Barth’s theory concerning social borders can also be applied to divisions between disciplines and discourses. During the classical period of the development of the discipline, the academic discourse binding in anthropology did not allow for ethnographers’ own experiences, as well as has not been leaving much room for their literary creativity. In order to express their experiences, doubts and fascinations and portray the background of their fieldwork, as well as to realise their literary ambitions, some of them wrote prose in addition to their regular monographs. By the term “ethnographic prose” I understand various forms of literary works written on the basis of researchers’ experience in the field. This category includes travel books, novels, memoirs, autobiographies and diaries. In other words, both fact and fiction. Characteristic was the interesting literary form (vivid, riveting and providing readers with aesthetic pleasure) as well as the wide readership to which these works are addressed. In contrast to ethnographic prose, formal field monographs are written for other anthropologists, often in a hermetic language, as a stage in the author’s academic career. The main difference here, then, is the virtual reader (wide audience or professional anthropologists) as well as the resultant form ("literary" or "academic"). Metaphorically speaking the border between science and literature run across the bodies of anthropologists: they wrote with two hands. The text explores the problem of disciplining function of anthropological writings, by presenting the list of works, authors and reception of the works in the anthropologi- cal milieu. The conclusion says that the majority of authors of the ethnographic prose functioned outside of academia. Both authors and readers knew that the ethnographic prose was not part of academic discourse, thus this was not a result of "blurring of genres", as Clifford Geertz put it. This was rather a result of anthropologists’ creativity and disagreement with the formatting character of academic discourse