Cicilie Fagerlid - A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging: Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes

This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.

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Diversity has been an inherent feature of many societies across the world. Yet with recent mass movement of migrants and refugees, ethnic diversity has increased dramatically, even in societies that used to be virtually homogeneous. This produces a new spectrum of subjectivities of belongingranging from a variety of ways of belonging to one place, to a sense of belonging to two (or even more) places.

The volumeA Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging. Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes, edited by Cicilie Fagerlid and Michelle Tisdel, is imperative for an understanding of contemporary society, as characterized by increasing diversity on a global scale. The volume is a pitch-perfect example of the social impact of literature. It features a substantial introduction by the editors, followed by a number of strong chapters discussing different literary cases of migrant narratives in cultural and social contexts. The take here is that hybrid encounters have the potential to release individual and social transformation. Without denying the existence of grim realities of outsiderness, the volume also identifies instances of integration through literature, not least in a younger generation that was born in the new country, or moved there as children. Once again, the anthropological approach reveals a major aspect of societyfrom a minor perspective. Key in this nuanced volume is that migrant narratives in literature convey a palette of diversity, rather than a binary situation.

After a brief account of the development of literary anthropology, also in relation to methodological strategies, I will, in what follows, consider the role of movement and autobiography in social life and literature. This leads over to the point that migrant narratives can facilitate emplacement.

Anthropologists have been inspired by literature, to varying extents, for almost as long as the discipline has existed. A more systematic attention to literature in anthropology emerged in the 1970s with Victor Turner (1976), who was trained in comparative literature. As new topics of anthropological study eventually were identified, ranging from transnational occupational cultures to policy documents and internet use, a wider array ofmethodological strategieswere required: multi-local fieldwork, ethnographic interviews, close readings of various textual genres, as well as media, press (features and reviews), and digital materials (including YouTube clips and other visual materials) were added to the traditional one-year participant observation. As participant observation was not always the most useful option anymore, the main method for many contemporary studies has been ethnographic interviews, close readings of various textual genres, or internet materials. The anthropological study of fellow intellectuals and writers can be captured by the notion of studying sideways as suggested by Ulf Hannerz (2004) in his study of foreign correspondents. This is thus also relevant for research focusing on literary production, such as my own on Irish literature (Wulff 2017). Now literary anthropology is established and flourishing.