CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Literary Anthropology,

Migration, and Belonging

Cicilie Fagerlid and Michelle A. Tisdel

From the seasonal Kularing (Malinowski 1922) to world-altering global

expansion and conquest (Wolf 1982), anthropology has always taken an
interest in movement. This collection brings periodic, cyclic, or historic
migration to the fore of literary anthropology. We explore the generative
potentials of writing from margins related to migration and mobility. What
happens, we ask, when authors who thematize migration or their “minor-
ity” background articulate notions of belonging, self, and society in litera-
ture? How do they diversify or cosmopolitize communities “from within,”
as Helena Wulff (2018a, b) persuasively phrases it? Do we find particular
“revolutionary conditions,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim, in
“minor literature” (1986 [1975])?
This anthology aims to fuse the theoretical interest in the potentiality
of marginal, subaltern, hybrid, and créole descriptions of the world with
the anthropological prerogative of thick descriptions (Geertz 1973) of

C. Fagerlid (*)
Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway
M. A. Tisdel
National Library of Norway, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: michelle.tisdel@nb.no

© The Author(s) 2020 1

C. Fagerlid, M. A. Tisdel (eds.), A Literary Anthropology of Migration
and Belonging, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34796-3_1
2  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

micro-events and everyday life within sociopolitical contexts. Through in-­

depth explorations of migration and mobility in writing, we wish to con-
tribute to uprooting, “deterritorializing,” and, in this sense, perhaps even
“decolonizing” sedentary perspectives in literary anthropology.
Being “minor” or marginalized is, however, no essentialized state.
Rather, we acknowledge the situationally contingent and contested, pro-
cessual, and multivocal qualities of such positions. Our approaches to lit-
erature and narratives do not advocate simple binary relationships. We
seek to situate the literature firmly within a nuanced context in which
diaspora presupposes dwelling (see Procter 2003) and in which the world
reterritorializes what the book deterritorializes (Deleuze and Guattari
2004 [1980], p. 12).
Staying and moving—or roots and routes—are intertwined in human
history as well as in narrative practice. The two archaic types of storytell-
ers, the “trading seaman” and “the resident tiller of the soil,” recounted
by Walter Benjamin (1969, p.  84), are not opposites, as Wulff notes:
Movement and settlement interrelate in the course of a life (2017, p. 118).
When the storytellers combine “the lore of faraway places … with the lore
of the past … it best reveals itself to natives of a place” (Benjamin 1969,
p.  85). Tim Ingold goes further and dissolves the distinction between
local and wayfaring ways of knowing. All lives are essentially lived along
paths in a meshwork world of threads and knots (Ingold 2007, p. 100).1
It is through wayfaring that we inhabit the world. Wayfaring, like storytell-
ing, is place-making, and “it is in the movement from place to place – or
from topic to topic – that knowledge is integrated” (Ingold 2007, p. 91;
see also McLean 2009). In Letizia Bindi’s opening chapter in this volume,
the alternate states of transhumance (literally “across earth”) are not only
a metaphor but also a metamorphosis of knowing and being in the world:
Transhumance—as knowing and being—“works on the limits between
settlements and movements, between the sense of belonging and of
up-rooting.”

1
 Ingold’s (2007) perception of a meshwork world made up of wayfaring, paths, and knots
is similar to the relational epistemology underpinning Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People
Without History (however, while Ingold perceives the relations phenomenologically, Wolf
analyzes them from a political economy perspective). Wolf describes the world as constituting
“a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes.” In order not to reify this processual and
relational reality, Wolf asks us to understand concepts such as “‘nation,’ ‘society,’ and ‘cul-
ture’ […] as bundles of relationships” and place them “back into the field from which they
were abstracted” (1997 [1982], p. 3).
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  3

Moreover, even roots transplant and thrive with proper care. Michelle
A. Tisdel shows in her chapter that tending to roots in “new soil” is fun-
damental knowledge for the narrative of belonging of Loveleen Rihel
Brenna, the Norwegian daughter of Indian immigrants. Nadia Molek
illustrates that the self-proclaimed “roots searcher” of Slovenian immigra-
tion to Argentina is as much a creator, a chronicler of new roots, as he
narrates their spreading across the Atlantic. Máiréad Nic Craith analyzes
the oeuvre of poet, English literary scholar, and “new Scot,” Bashabi
Fraser, and argues that Fraser is “at once both local and rooted as well as
trans-local and transcendent.”
According to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), multiplicity characterizes
the rhizomatic assemblage (agencements). The assemblage changes in
nature when it expands through connections; perhaps like Scotland, it
changes through its colonial connections, according to Fraser in Nic
Craith’s chapter. Whereas rhizomatic rootstalks literally set forth into new
territory and produce new plants, Deleuze and Guattari (2004, p. 7) argue
that any point of a rhizome can connect to diverse fields in unexpected
ways. The heterogeneous reality of language can connect “to a whole mic-
ropolitics of the social field” (p.  8). In his chapter, Adrian Stoicescu
describes how Herta Müller’s “language of freedom” utters “the unutter-
able” and recomposes realities in the face of “totalitarian culture.” Cicilie
Fagerlid also explores how minorizing and hybridizing language and liter-
ary genre-blending recreate selves, belonging, and community. Nic Craith
describes how Fraser, like Kafka in Prague (Deleuze and Guattari 1986,
p. 20), took “a language that is global and has forced it into a new shape –
one that is neither British nor Bengali but Fraser.” In contrast, in her
chapter, Macarena García-González asks what is “a tellable story” for chil-
dren about immigration and finds the answer limiting.
In the first part of the introduction, we position this volume within the
field of literary anthropology. In the second part, we outline our under-
standing of the social role and potentiality of literature.

Literary Anthropology: Literature as Source

Material and Literary Production
Literary anthropology can be divided into two fields. One concerns the self-
reflective theoretical exploration of ethnographic writing, and the other
explores the relationship between literature and society (Rapport 2012;
4  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

Wiles 2018; Nic Craith and Fournier 2016). Experimental and fictional
ethnography and ethnographically inspired writing date back to the early
ethnographers (e.g., Malinowski, Hurston, Benedict, and Mead; see Byler
and Dugan-Iverson 2012).2 The writing culture critique of the 1980s mul-
tiplied experimental ethnographic writing and focused attention on a self-
reflective meta-perspective on ethnographic prose (see Clifford and Marcus
1986). This volume does not probe these discussions. Instead, we examine
what Rapport (2012) describes as “the role that literature plays in social life
and individual experience, in particular social, cultural, and historical
settings.”
All contributors seek to “discover philosophical” and anthropological
“insight about the human condition” in works of literature (Stoller 2015).
This does not mean that we reduce the artists—or their characters—to
“native informers” who confirm our expectations (Osborne 2016, p. 8).
Rather, we acknowledge and value the extent to which the particular “aes-
thetic experience of reading literary works of art activates the imagination
to visualize other worlds” (Cohen in Wiles 2018, p. 3). In this sense, the
writer’s imagination can achieve the thickest possible descriptions, with
the freedom to approach thoughts, feelings, and motivations (see Mantel
2017, in Wiles 2018; Fassin 2014).
Furthermore, literary anthropology interrogates the social life of liter-
ary practices through the study of reading and literary consumption, cre-
ativity, and literary production or Howard Becker’s (1982) notion of “art
worlds” (see Wiles 2018).3 While reception theory is beyond the scope of
this book, several of the chapters address processes of literary creation: the
mental and physical relationships between creativity, pastoralism, and
landscape (Bindi), identity processes in the self-publishing of biographies
(Molek), and Meet the Author events as dialogues, with ripple effects back
into the authorship (Fagerlid). The focus on the social life of literature
further foregrounds an unanticipated relationship between stories
and reality.
We seek to elucidate the ethnographic relevance of literary narratives by
exploring literature as a mode of cognition (see Iser 1996) and as h­ istorical

2
 This applies to different ethnographic traditions, for instance, the French (see Debaene
2010, in Nic Craith and Fournier 2016, p. 4).
3
 Prominent examples of the latter are Wiles’ own Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts:
Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Translation (2015) and Helena Wulff’s
Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (2017).
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  5

and sociocultural documents. A unifying epistemological concern of this

work addresses the function of literature as a generative knowledge form.
One assumption is that literature is part of knowledge production, with
the potentiality to transform individual lives and social reality. The contri-
butions herein explore the construction and reconstruction of self, society,
and belonging in a range of creative works (see also Archetti 1994)—fic-
tion, biography and autobiography, children’s literature, poetry, perfor-
mance, and visual documentaries—stemming from mobility, migration,
and an ascribed minority status. The chapters consider how literature and
narratives contribute new perspectives to the public and literary record
(see Trouillot 1995; Iser 1996). Tisdel’s chapter examines the ways in
which life-writing addresses and contributes to common knowledge and
public discourses about belonging. Nic Craith explores how “the per-
sonal” and “emotional nature of poetry” can participate in “recontextual-
izing and changing the national narrative,” with Fagerlid asserting that
genre-blending can enlarge the national literary canon. Stoicescu illus-
trates how Herta Müller’s language and literary techniques—
“ethnographies of fictionalized experience”—become a “clash between
different ways of understanding community and living” under “the bur-
den of the homestead” and the “dictatorship of majority.” García-­González
finds a single autobiography—among several hundred children’s books
written by non-migrants—that attempts to “present a foreign world from
an insider’s perspective.” Finally, Bindi’s chapter opens up a perspective on
how literary narratives partake in shaping the physical landscape (see also
McLean 2009).

Truth and Reality in Writing

An important epistemological concern in the study of the social roles of
literature is the interplay between truth claims and reality in various forms
of ethnographically inspired writing (Wiles 2018). Although fiction and
ethnography are both creative products, their source and social roles can
be different. Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1994) posits that fiction “cannot
be used as plain ethnography since they do not profess to represent the
truth and because their relationship to social reality is ultimately uncer-
tain.” He notes, nevertheless, that “some of the best anthropological writ-
ings extant on Trinidad are works of fiction” (Eriksen 1994, p.  190).
Didier Fassin ponders the same paradox (2014; see also Stoller 2015):
What challenges do we face as a profession when even anthropologists and
6  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

sociologists admit that fiction can convey “more compelling, more accu-
rate, and more profound accounts of the social worlds they explore than
in those proposed by the scholars who study them” (Fassin 2014, p. 52)?
To salvage knowledge produced by anthropologists in the face of com-
petition from artists, Fassin (2014) suggests a heuristic separation of “true
life” from “real lives.” Ethnography and fiction have the common aim of
understanding human life through writing. Creators of art aim to grasp
life “and to rescue it … from insignificance” (2014, p.  40). Instead of
“reproducing the real,” Fassin notes, art seeks to reveal “profound truths
about the state of the world” (2014, p. 52). Anthropologists emphasize
that their truths are never definitive or absolute.

Yet the fragments [anthropologists] gather in complement with the layers

they identify produce a specific approach to the truth of life and lives. Taking
the liberty to explore beyond what the subjects of their research know and
tell, they bring together biographies and history, storytelling and political
economy, the text of the narratives they collect and the context in which
they are inserted, the empirical facts they observe and the theoretical frames
with which they interpret them. (Fassin 2014, p. 47)

Above, Fassin sums up anthropology’s contextualizing and relational

approach to true life and real lives in a way that applies to our ambitions
for literary anthropology. In this anthology, we aim to bring together the
various levels and contexts of life, lives, stories, and reality. Perhaps a rel-
evant goal of literary anthropology can be to gain knowledge of storytell-
ing as a conduit for “true life” as well as for “real lives.” We explore this
aim in the next section and discuss an approach that highlights the genera-
tive force of literature, narratives, and storytelling.

Storytelling as Cosmogonic World-Making: Words into Worlds

Stuart McLean (2009, 2017) offers an innovative perspective on the
world-making and ontological capacities of storytelling. “There is a conti-
nuity between human creativity and the processes shaping the material
universe,” McLean writes. “[T]hese intuitions have found a variety of
expressions through mythology, folklore, literature, art, philosophy, and
science” (2009, p. 216). Anthropological history is rife with examples that
testify to widespread ideas of mystical participation (Lévy-Bruhl 1949;
Tambiah 1973; 1990) and magical (Malinowski 1948) and ritual (e.g.,
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  7

Handelman 2004; Kapferer 2004) intervention into reality. McLean

argues that an intuitive, direct apprehension of the processes of the world
has found its way into human creative expression throughout our history
(2009, p. 216). Creativity, thus, is to be understood as

a generative multiplicity that resists articulation in binary oppositional terms

and that demands therefore to be thought as ontologically prior to any pos-
sible differentiation between the domains of nature and culture, or between
reality and its cultural-linguistic representations. (McLean 2009, p. 216)

Stories, in this view, are not only creative responses to the transformations
of the world but manifest and actively participate in these transformations
(2009, pp. 231–2).

Both native and anthropological stories – and indeed all stories – could be
understood less as representing a world external to themselves than as par-
ticipating in and extending the self-making of a world of which such stories
are both a product and an integral part. (McLean 2009, p. 223)

Bindi’s chapter in this volume shows how artistic expressions produced in

close contact with transhumance practices continue to partake in shaping
the landscape. Her argument is in line with McLean’s analysis of artistic
expressions, storytelling, and literature as “distinct modes of knowing”
rather than “only” sources of data (Plato 2003, and Serres 1997, in
McLean 2009, p. 233).4 Likewise, Nic Craith’s retelling of Fraser’s epic
poem From the Ganga to the Tay (2009) reveals something fundamental
about human conceptualizations—of the two rivers as “mother goddess”
and a “masculine symbol of Scottish heritage”—and of human history and
civilization’s intimate ties with the natural environment. Notions of the
timeless nature of storytelling and narrative practice, as well as the idea
that they are modes of knowing and being, relate to what Wolfgang Iser
calls the “anthropological dimensions” of literature (Iser 1996, p. xi). The
broad range of cases and narratives assembled in this volume also reflect
the universality of how words make worlds.

4
 In this understanding, language does not simply represent, in a Saussurean arbitrary way,
but “is born with things and by the same process” (Serres 2000, in McLean 2009, p. 226).
Serres proposes a theory of knowledge based on a consubstantiality with the world, which
McLean contrasts to the experiential or sensory engagement underpinning a phenomeno-
logical understanding of knowledge (McLean 2009, p. 226).
8  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

The Social Role and Potentiality of Literature

The aim of the volume is to contribute to an understanding of the social
roles and potentiality of literature. We build on the idea that this creative
force may intersect with and disrupt social life and reality in intentional
and unintentional ways. The creativity at play in storytelling and literature
has a universal capacity to manifest and participate in transformations of
reality (McLean 2009). We assert, in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari
(1986, 2004), that the rhizomatic qualities of “minor literatures” have a
particular potential to deterritorialize and perhaps reterritorialize selves,
societies, and senses of belonging. In this part of the introduction, we
elaborate on the generative capacities, as we briefly present the empirical
and analytical foci of the chapters. We outline the concepts of dialogue,
hybridization, narratives, and historicity as means to explore the interplay
between literature and reality, and we specify the concepts of “minor lit-
erature” and “minority situation.”

The Dialogic Construction of Reality

Literature, as any utterance, is a dialectical synthesis of the individual
writer and the multilayered context of writing—syntheses that feature in
the following chapters. Like Bakhtin (1981), we conceptualize not only
literature but also selves and languages as dialogic processes. Living lan-
guages are continuous organic hybridizations of the social and linguistic
heteroglossia of the everyday world. Utterances constitute the self as an
event in response to this heteroglot world, inevitably addressing and
ordering the chaos of the surroundings (Holquist 1990, p.  48).
Consequently, all selves and languages, as utterances, are dialogic hybrid-
izations of the social environment.
Fredrik Barth (1987) has a comparable processual and dialogic, though
highly empirical, approach to cultural reproduction. He understands cos-
mologies as living traditions of knowledge embedded in social environ-
ments. Individual creativity and events that occur in knowledge traditions
shape, change, and diversify ideas and practices as they are transmitted
(1987, p. 84). Like McLean (2009), Barth (1987) concludes that creativ-
ity “is not inside the initiator, but springs from his[sic!] relations with his
surroundings” (p.  79). The perspectives of both Bakhtin and Barth
emphasize that the dialogic relationship originates in the embeddedness of
the creative mind in social languages (Bakhtin) or social surroundings
(Barth). In order to account for the transmission and transformation of
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  9

knowledge, Barth underscores “the social context, the events that unfold,
and the consequences they have” (Barth 1987, p. 79). Barth’s empirical
approach and Bakhtin’s theoretical insights complement each other. The
chapters in this volume illustrate this processual, dialogic relationship
between text and multiple contexts. Several chapters untangle small and
large events and their consequences for the reproduction and transforma-
tion of belonging, selves, and communities.
In the same vein, Homi Bhabha (1994) builds on Bakhtin’s under-
standing of all utterances as hybridizations of heteroglot social environ-
ments when he argues that “the third space of enunciation” continuously
hybridizes all “culture” (1994, p. 37). This constant unintentional hybrid-
ization challenges the relevance of notions of “multiculturalism” and
“diversity of cultures” (Bhabha 1994, p. 37):

It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are
constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that
we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or
‘purity’ of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical histori-
cal instances that demonstrate their hybridity. (Bhabha 1994, p. 37)

The contributing chapters address different examples of dialogic engage-

ment that literature can perform. Each contribution explores the role of
literature and narratives in “making sense” of and “doing work” in the
world. Tisdel and Molek investigate the public discourses concerning
power and representation, focusing on life-writing and self-historicizing as
forms of self-making and critical engagement with social processes and
change. Bindi’s chapter foregrounds how artistic production is connected
to the physical environment, as in an intimate dialogue. Fagerlid describes
multilayered dialogues between author and audience, author and review-
ers, and literature and readers. Several of the chapters elucidate the man-
ner in which literary narratives are in a dialogic or dialectic relation with
related traditions of knowledge, such as ethnography (Bindi, Stoicescu,
and Fagerlid), geography (Bindi and Nic Craith), social research reports
(Fagerlid), and historic research (Molek).
Finally, most of the contributions consider the role of narratives in rela-
tion to the cognitive processes of subjectivity, self-formation, and self-­
articulation. Molek’s, Tisdel’s, and Fagerlid’s chapters trace the articulation
of the self as a dialogue between past and present, which is made intelli-
gible by narrative (see Gullestad 1994, 1996).
10  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

Narratives and Life-Writing
The narrative structure of past, present, and future helps human beings
make sense of themselves and their world. Marianne Gullestad (1994,
1996) explores autobiography as a dialogue between the past and present
self. The “now of the writing, the then of the narrated past,” and the his-
torical contexts of both narrative practice and writing introduce a poten-
tial temporal reflexivity (Gullestad 1996, p. 5). Reflexivity as a function of
time passed is a feature in most of the presented literature, particularly
evident in Tisdel’s and García-González’s analyses of autobiographies.
Temporal reflexivity can, in this manner, help protagonists, authors, and
readers make sense of the self and reality, and it supports the rewriting of
social history, as the chapters affirm.
Another perspective on the transformative and dialogic aspects of litera-
ture points to the performative function of life-writing as a generative
practice. Personal narratives about self-identity and migration draw atten-
tion to the transformative processes of self-formation and social change. In
this way, life-writing, the individual life-story, and self-historicizing also
intersect processes of historical production (see Iser 1996; Trouillot 1995;
Gullestad 1996). In a similar manner as autoethnography, several of the
literary cases in this volume highlight how self-reflexive narrative practice
can interrogate relationships, portray authors as interlocutors, and reimag-
ine social formations and groups affiliated with the author (see Reed-­
Danahay 1997, 2017). Moreover, the author seeks to interact with a
reading public and mobilize readers’ social engagement around a set of
given themes, plots, moral dilemmas, or worldviews.
Gullestad (1996) also investigates narrative as a result of the cognitive
functions involved in self-formation and processes of discovery. This point
relates to Iser’s (1966, p. xiv) view of the text as reflecting “the urge of
human beings to become present to themselves.” In Everyday Life
Philosophers: Modernity, Morality and Autobiography in Norway, Gullestad
(1996) investigates autobiography, life history, and interrelated subsys-
tems of knowledge, namely, experts and laypeople, to better understand
social change. Through a focus on autobiography, Gullestad also addresses
the role of materiality and reflexive deliberation in self-formation and the
reconstruction of the past. In this volume, Molek and Tisdel illustrate that
the study of biography and autobiography is fertile ground for exploring
relations between facts and stories and their entanglement with history
and literature (Gullestad 1996, pp. 4–5). “Narratives are not only distilled
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  11

from life,” Gullestad observes, “they also flow back into life” (p. 8). Molek
shows that “narrativity and representation constitute a dialogic process of
identity formation.” Thus, this volume contributes comparative cases that
illustrate the crucial point that life history and history are interrelated
forms of knowledge (Gullestad 1996). In this sense, the perspectives of
Gullestad and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) make individual experience
a significant frame of reference for scrutinizing knowledge, history, and
historical production.

Historicity, Narratives, and Social Process

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Trouillot
is concerned with how power influences history and how it can create
historical “silences” that mute facts and individual experience. In his per-
spective, “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the
result of a unique process” (Trouillot 1995, p. 27). He argues that the
power inherent in social life and relations influence which actors and prac-
tices create, select, and deselect the facts, evidence, and stories that are
eventually authorized as “history.” Again, the assembled chapters testify to
how stories from the margins redress and reinscribe into social reality the
deselected “bundles of silences.” Trouillot’s (1995) perspective conceives
of a social actor as a set of “capacities specific to a time and space” (p. 23),
in which an individual’s historical particulars inform their being and com-
prehension. Such historical particulars and their material conditions
include “race,” national and ethnic background, religion, language, gen-
der, and sexuality. In this sense, as Trouillot notes, historical production
and social process incorporate the individual as an agent and subject
(p. 23). In Trouillot’s framework, the “subjective capacity” accounts for
an individual’s historical conditioning or potential to be “doubly histori-
cal” or “fully historical” (1995, p.  24). Furthermore, a person has the
capacity to mobilize the “subjective state” of history and become histori-
cal subjects, thus always making “dual historicity” a possibility of one’s
condition (Trouillot 1995, p.  24). The notion of “subjective capacity”
supports Gullestad’s perspective that life history and history are interre-
lated subsystems of knowledge, much like non-expert and expert knowl-
edge (1996).
Adopting these complementary notions, we explore literature as a space
for heightened dialogic entanglement and historical capacity and authors
as simultaneously engaged in the “sociohistorical process and in narrative
12  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

constructions about that process” (Trouillot 1995, p. 24). Furthermore,

we discuss literature as involving individual experiences of the historical
and material conditions that “define the very terms under which some
situations can be described” (p.  23). All the contributions here analyze
how literature engages historical conditioning, dual historicity, and dis-
courses on the past through the prism of different migration-related expe-
riences or “minority situations.”

Minor Literature and “Minority Situations”

The dialogic, hybridizing processes through which literature participates
in its surroundings becomes particularly potent when the literature com-
prises “minor” characteristics. By “minor literature,” Deleuze and Guattari
(1986, 2004) refer to a specific usage or function rather than a specific
kind of literature or language (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p. 115). The
three characteristics of “minor” literature are its capacity to deterritorialize
language, to connect the individual to “a political immediacy,” and to take
on “a collective value” that constitutes a “common action” (1986,
pp. 16–18). One way to better understand the notions of political imme-
diacy, collective value, and common action is through Fredrik Barth’s
interactional definition of a “minority situation” from his classic introduc-
tion to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969). In a minority situation,
interactions and activities between minority and majority members take
place “within the framework of the dominant, majority group’s statuses
and institutions, where identity as a minority member gives no basis for
action” (p. 31, see also Wirth 1945, in Laurie and Khan 2017, p. 4). Here,
minority status is both imposed and imperative.
The chapters in this volume present a host of “minority situations,”
whether as “new minorities”5 like the Bengalis in Scotland (Nic Craith),
African “immigrants” in Spain (García-González), and Muslims (Fagerlid)
and Norwegian-Africans and Norwegian-Indians (Tisdel) in Norway,
“older minorities” such as East European migrants to the “immigrant

5
 The extent to which they are “new” will always be debated, as global connections have
been tighter and existed longer (see Wolf 1982) than nation-building projects have wanted
to acknowledge (e.g., Kjeldstadli 2003). Today, many societies recognize international immi-
grants as “new minorities,” as opposed to “national minorities” with a historical presence.
The different categorizations of minorities, in particular indigenous groups and “new minor-
ities,” involve many legal definitions that determine access to rights and protections and
influence processes of inclusion, integration, and belonging.
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  13

nation” of Argentina (Molek), and the German-speaking Banat Swabians

in Romania (Stoicescu). In the latter case of Herta Müller’s literature,
Stoicescu highlights the situational character of her minority status, show-
ing how her literature discloses perpetual minority situations within mul-
tiple authoritarian communities.
The minority situation that limits the possible range of action in Barth’s
interactional perspective has, from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) view-
point, the capacity to deterritorialize language and literature.

[I]f the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile com-
munity, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express
another possible community and to forge the means for another conscious-
ness and another sensibility. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 17)

Helena Wulff’s conceptualization of diversifying the country from within

(Wulff 2018a, b) and Avtar Brah’s notion of “diasporic space” (1996) are
relevant to the processes connected to minor literature. “Novels of trans-
formation” is a similar concept, coined by literary scholar Mark Stein
(2004) in his analysis of British Black and Asian literature. Stein uses the
notion of transformation to describe both individual processes of change
inherent in the Bildungsroman and the performative functions of much
Black British literature in transforming subject positions and redefining
Britain and Britishness (2004). All chapters in this volume discuss similar,
more or less successful processes of transformation.

Migration and Belonging: Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes

The minor literature discussed in this volume relates variously to migra-
tion and belonging or roots, routes, and rhizomes. In the first chapter,
Bindi analyzes the seasonal migration of transhumance as a practice and a
metonym for heritagization processes, but also as a metaphor for the
human condition. In her perspective, migration is mobility that creates
both belonging and the landscape itself. Stoicescu depicts Herta Müller’s
literature as “ethnographies of fictionalized experience” that shape the
protagonist’s perpetual minority status yet also represent a “language of
freedom” in the face of totalitarian communities. In Molek’s chapter,
Slovenian descendants make sense of their parents’ or grandparents’
migration retrospectively through narratives, aiming to contribute to a
new sense of belonging among the contemporary generation. Tisdel and
14  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

Nic Craith show how the transnational routes and values that individuals
associate with a country of origin can be an asset in processes of self-­
identification and in framing society anew. Conversely, Fagerlid discusses
the so-called second generation and experiences of being trapped in a
minority situation (Barth 1969), which imposes on this “generation” an
identity with little basis for action and interaction. Similarly, García-­
González demonstrates how a limited and bounded subject position of
“immigrant,” with a guest status and a restricted and temporally limited
sense of belonging, applies to North and sub-Saharan African migrants in
Spanish children’s books.
In Fagerlid’s and García-González’s examples, any notion of “immi-
grant” or “migration literature” becomes a reductionist category, circum-
scribing the authors’ range of expressions and interpretations (see Osborne
2016, p. 8). Thus, the contributions below analyze the interaction of mul-
tivocal and rhizomatic narratives and their authors as part of broader
transformative social processes that shape articulations of self-formation
and society. If the migrant is the political figure of our time, as García-­
González asserts, we should let the “migrant” reconceptualize movement
and belonging. We should listen to the “rhizomatic strength of the ram-
bling pastures,” as Bindi shows us.

References
Archetti, E. (Ed.). (1994). Exploring the written: Anthropology and the multiplicity
of the written. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barth, F. (1969). Introduction. In F. Barth (Ed.), Ethnic groups and boundaries
(pp. 9–37). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Barth, F. (1987). Cosmologies in the making: A generative approach to cultural
variation in inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Becker, H. S. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Benjamin, W. (1969). The storyteller. Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov.
In W. Benjamin (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 83–107). New York: Schocken.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London/New
York: Routledge.
Byler, D., & Dugan-Iverson, S. (2012). Introduction to literature, writing &
anthropology: A curated collection of five cultural anthropology articles.
Cultural Anthropology. Available at https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/
ca/catalog/category/literature-writing-and. Accessed 13 June 2019.
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  15

Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of eth-
nography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1975). Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris:
Les éditions de Minuit. English edition: Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986).
Kafka. Toward a minor literature (trans: Polan, D., foreword: R. Bensmaïa).
Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille Plateau. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
English edition: Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans: Massumi, B). London: Continuum.
Eriksen, T. H. (1994). The author as anthropologist: Some west Indian lessons
about the relevance of fiction for anthropology. In E. Archetti (Ed.), Exploring
the written: Anthropology and the multiplicity of the written (pp.  167–196).
Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
Fassin, D. (2014). True life, real lives: Revisiting the boundaries between ethnog-
raphy and fiction. American Ethnologist, 41(1), 40–55. https://doi.
org/10.1111/amet.12059.
Fraser, B. (2009). From the Ganga to the Tay: An epic poem. Edinburgh: Luath Press.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New  York:
Basic Books.
Gullestad, M. (1994). Constructions of self and society in autobiographical
accounts: A Scandinavian life story. In E. Archetti (Ed.), Exploring the written:
Anthropology and the multiplicity of the written (pp.  123–163). Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press.
Gullestad, M. (1996). Everyday life philosophers: Modernity, morality, and autobi-
ography in Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
Handelman, D. (2004). Introduction. Why ritual in its own right? How so? In
D. Handelman, & G. Lindquist (Guest Eds., Special edition), Social analysis.
Ritual in its own right: Exploring the dynamics of transformation, 48 (2), 1–31.
https://doi.org/10.3167/015597704782352582.
Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. London/New York:
Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2007). Up, across and along. In T. Ingold (Ed.), Lines. A brief history
(pp. 74–107). London: Routledge.
Iser, W. (1996). The fictive and the imaginary: Charting literary anthropology.
Baltimore: The Johns Hoskins University Press.
Kapferer, B. (2004). Ritual dynamics and virtual practice: Beyond representation
and meaning. In D. Handelman, & G. Lindquist (Guest Eds., Special edition),
Social analysis. Ritual in its own right: Exploring the dynamics of transforma-
tion, 48 (2), 33–54. https://doi.org/10.3167/015597704782352591.
Kjeldstadli, K. (Ed.). (2003). Norsk innvandringshistorie 1–3. Oslo: Pax Forlag.
Laurie, T., & Khan, R. (2017). The concept of minority for the study of culture.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 31(1), 1–12. https://doi.
org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1264110.
16  C. FAGERLID AND M. A. TISDEL

Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1949). Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Paris: PUF.

Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.
Malinowski, B. (1948). Magic, science and religion and other essays. New  York:
Doubleday & Company.
McLean, S. (2009). Stories and cosmogonies: Imagining creativity beyond
“nature” and “culture”. Cultural Anthropology, 24(2), 213–243. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01130.x.
McLean, S. (2017). Fictionalizing anthropology. Encounters and fabulations at the
edges of the human. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Nic Craith, M., & Fournier, L. S. (2016). Literature and anthropology. In L. S.
Fournier, & M. Nic Craith (Guest Eds., special issue), Anthropological Journal
of European Cultures, 25(1), 1–8.
Osborne, D. (2016). Introduction. In D. Osborne (Ed.), The Cambridge compan-
ion to British black and Asian literature (1945–2010). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Procter, J. (2003). Dwelling places. Postwar black British writing. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Rapport, N. (2012). Literary anthropology. Oxford Bibliographies. https://doi.
org/10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0067.
Reed-Danahay, D. (Ed.) (1997). Introduction. In Auto/ethnography: Rewriting
the self and the social (pp. 1–17). Oxford: Berg.
Reed-Danahay, D. (2017). Autoethnography. Oxford Bibliographies. https://doi.
org/10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0162.
Stein, M. (2004). Black British literature. Novels of transformation. Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press.
Stoller, P. (2015). Review: What is literary anthropology? (Cohen’s novel approaches
to anthropology: Contributions to literary anthropology). Current Anthropology,
56(1), 144–145. https://doi.org/10.1086/679588.
Tambiah, S. (1985 [1973]). Form and meaning of magical acts. In Culture,
thought, and social action: An anthropological perspective (pp. 60–86). Harvard:
Harvard University Press.
Tambiah, S. (1990). Magic, science and religion and the scope of rationality (Lewis
Henry Morgan Lectures). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Wiles, E. (2015). Saffron shadows and salvaged scripts: Literary life in Myanmar
under censorship and in translation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wiles, E. (2018). Three branches of literary anthropology: Sources, styles, subject
matter. Ethnography, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138118762958.
Wolf, E. (1997 [1982]). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
 1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRATION…  17

Wulff, H. (2017). Rhythms of writing: An anthropology of Irish literature. London:

Bloomsbury.
Wulff, H. (2018a). Diversifying from within: Diaspora writings in Sweden. In
M. Nielsen & N. Rapport (Eds.), The composition of anthropology: How anthro-
pological texts are written (pp. 122–136). London: Routledge.
Wulff, H. (2018b). Introduction to part two. In S.  Helgesson, A.  M. Alling,
Y. Lindqvist, & H. Wulff (Eds.), World literatures. Exploring the cosmopolitan-­
vernacular exchange. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. https://doi.
org/10.16993/bat.