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Fictional Displacements: Stewart Culin's Heaven and Earth
Author(s) -
OPPENHEIM ROBERT
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2011.01090.x
Subject(s) - ethnography , premise , heaven , newspaper , tone (literature) , displacement (psychology) , perspective (graphical) , sociology , history , anthropology , literature , art , philosophy , media studies , psychoanalysis , epistemology , visual arts , psychology
SUMMARY “My Friend Herman” is an exoticist fiction of Chinese America that appeared anonymously in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1889. My premise is that its author is the late‐19th‐century anthropologist Stewart Culin, whose ethnography of Philadelphia and New York Chinese is dissimilar in tone and content. By examining this disjuncture, this article aims to suggest a new focus for the ongoing discussion of anthropological fiction: fiction not as “ethnography by other means” but as a site of displacement in anthropological lives and careers.