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Poiesis of Possibility: The Ethnographic Sensibilities

of Ursula K. Le Guin
anhu_1105

15..26

BETH BAKER-CRISTALES
Department of Anthropology
College of Natural and Social Sciences
King Hall B3006, California State University
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90032
SUMMARY This article explores some of the ways Ursula Le Guin (daughter of
famed anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber) uses ethnographic modes of writing and
anthropological insights in her works of social science fiction. It is based on a close
reading of her fiction and an e-interview with the author. While science fiction may
seem a far cry from ethnography, careful attention to the critical functions of Le Guins
fiction can shed light on some of the underlying assumptions and implications of the
ethnographic imagination and writing. As Le Guin herself has observed, anthropologists and novelists share common traits and often find themselves writing about similar
things. [fiction, ethnographic imagination, Le Guin, utopia]
Ethnography has always been a literary endeavor. For most ethnographers,
however, this enterprise has typically been without any formal training in
creative writing and often a struggle to craft both serious and engaging texts.
Part of the difficulty resides in ethnographic writing being neither fiction nor
science, but something-in-between. Most ethnographies remain conventionally
realistin that they seek to represent realities existing outside of their text
but as Geertz argues, ethnographies are ultimately fictions (1973), that is,
invented and inventive texts that can never perfectly capture the worlds they
are supposed to describe. Ethnographers often face the dilemma of excess;
reality will always surpass the ability to capture it. Our attempts to develop a
coherent narrative out of multifarious and often indeterminate experiences,
aligns the ethnographic endeavor with real fiction or storytelling. Because so
many ways exist for ethnographic stories to be told and, indeed, there are so
many stories to be told, ethnographers have to find and develop effective
storylines. In contrast, fiction writers completely control the worlds about
which they write, and although those worlds mean to say something about the
world outside the book, the realities they invent begin and end within the story.
I think here of the sadness that I have felt as a reader on finishing a beloved
book, the sadness of knowing that the world in the book has come to an end and
I can no longer inhabit it. I hardly feel this sense of loss at the end of reading an
ethnographythat world (outside the book) continues and the ethnography
remains simply a partial and imperfect sketch of it.
Despite several decades of scholarship on the rhetoric and epistemology
of ethnography, anthropologists continue rather unselfconsciously to spin
Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 37, Issue 1, pp 1526, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.
2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2012.01105.x.

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ethnographic stories following roughly set conventions. Ethnographers continue to write works that seek coherence and closure, whether this is in the form
of a humanistic or personal storyline or, more commonly, a tight theoretical
resolution of what are presented as vexing or confusing data, or perhaps both.
Internal consistency, beginnings and endings, and grounded conclusions all
seem to link the fiction of ethnographic storytelling to external realities and the
rigors of scientific analysis. While there are some ethnographies that highlight
the disjunctures and chaos of social life, or the inability of the ethnographer
really to capture the world as it is, most depend on coherence, logic, and closure
to hold the work together.1
The crisis of representation (Marcus and Fischer 1986) that developed in
the 1970s and 1980s led to a brief interval of textual experimentation in ethnographic writing, but the more traditional and realist conventions of the genre
endured, though perhaps informed by a critical understanding of the politics of
ethnographic rhetoric. Further, while some anthropologists may experiment
with poetry, fiction, and playwriting, these works usually clearly distinguish
themselves from ethnographic writing and are not accepted as having the same
disciplinary importance as traditional realist ethnography. (Like many anthropologists of her time, Zora Neale Hurstons fiction was not accorded the same
respect as her work in folklore [Schmidt 1984], and the reaction among anthropologists to the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968 [Castaneda
1978] exemplify the strong commitment that most professional anthropologists
have to maintaining a clear and impermeable boundary between social science
and fiction writing.) At the same time, as anthropology has become more
specialized and theoretically informed, ethnographies have become progressively more jargon laden and inaccessible to the general reader. Ethnographies
continue to be shaped by literary intuition, but they fail to entice many readers
outside of academia and they rarely have any impact on narrative forms and
prose outside of anthropology. It is in this context that the work of fiction writer
and poet Ursula K. Le Guin is so interesting and, perhaps, important for
ethnography.
Le Guin is the daughter of American anthropologists Alfred and Theodora
Kroeber and was exposed to anthropology at an early age. While she has written
historical novels, childrens books, and essays, she writes mostly science fiction.
In many of her books, Le Guin uses ethnography as a narrative form, complete
with ethnographer, field notes, data, and the rich descriptions of people and
places so important to ethnographic writing. More than simply stylistic, Le
Guins works mark an anthropological sensibility, a concern for understanding
why societies and culture take the forms they do and why beings behave as they
do. Le Guins works score this similarity between fiction and ethnography,
which perhaps is not altogether so rare.
An Anthropology of the Possible
It makes sense that science fiction writers would draw on anthropology in
their work; science fiction and social science writing have much in common
despite the fact that the former is fiction while the latter is framed as realist and
objective reporting. Frederick Jameson suggests that the impulse to disassociate

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myth and fiction from realist and objectivist modes of describing reality and the
dissociation of the private and the public, the subject and the object, the
personal and the political are all characteristics of the social life of capitalism
(2005:282). In other words, the belief that storytelling and imagination are
entirely distinct projects from science and truth-telling is a product of a particular, very circumscribed, socialhistorical systemmodernist capitalism.
Anthropology emerged historically around the same time as science fiction, and
they arise from a common impulsethe need to imagine difference, which
serves as a powerful means of both constructing and critiquing the self.
Science fiction scholar Patrick Sharp traces the discursive linkages between
Darwinian models of difference, racial ideologies, U.S. imperialism, and the
emergent future war stories of early science fiction (2007). In the early to
mid-1900s, these narratives, scientific and fictive, reflected white fears of apocalyptic cataclysm if racial others were to gain too much power or access to
technology. But by the second half of the 20th century, both science fiction
writers and anthropologists had begun to plumb the more subversive potential
of their respective genres. Instead of constructing the savage other to reaffirm a
triumphant narrative of the white Western self, they used a vision of the other
to critique conventional understandings of their own societies and of western
imperialism. As Jameson notes, science fiction aims not to predict accurately the
future, but to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present,
and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization
(2005:286). Anthropology, too, strategically defamiliarizes by juxtaposing the
familiar and the unfamiliara project aimed to inspire the readers social
imagination through the construction of difference. Beginning with Franz Boas
and his students, anthropologists in the United States very self-consciously held
up the other as a mirror for Americans, expecting that the experience of seeing
alternate models of humanity might change them. The concept of cultural
relativismof contrasting radically different societies but insisting that they are
equally valid possibilities for human socialitywas a radical departure from the
19th-century anthropological models inspired by the work of Darwin. Despite
their radical relativism, Boass students held to the notion that their descriptions
of the other were scientific and objective, failing to see how their own need for
otherness generated the other they sought. Le Guin, daughter of a student of
Franz Boas, points out just how constructed our depictions of the other are; she
literally creates the Other to hold up a mirror to the self.
The Anthropologist as Protagonist in Le Guins Work
In comparing Le Guins work with ethnography, it is important to look at the
anthropological themes that run through her work and how she uses these to
literary ends. The protagonists of several of her books are essentially anthropologists, though she does not often use this term; they are individuals
immersed in an unfamiliar society learning its history, social and political
organization, expressive culture, and beliefswhat it feels like from the inside.
In her first published novel, Rocannons World (1966), Le Guin follows
Gaverel Rocannon, the Director of the First Ethnographic Survey, on an
expedition to study the humanoid species on the planet Fomalhaut 2. Enemy

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aliens hiding on the planet attack the research team. Rocannon, the teams sole
survivor, works with the planets inhabitants to get a message to the League of
All Worlds about the enemys rebellious attack. By the end of the book, his
message gets through and the enemy is destroyed by the league. Rocannon is,
however, left on the planet another eight yearsthe time it takes for a rescue
ship to arrive. He dies before the ship arrives. Before his death, while contemplating his unintended exile, Rocannon says, Who are my people? I am not
what I was. I have changed (1996:111). Thus, Le Guin uses the odyssey of her
protagonist to mirror the experiences of ethnographers: cultural immersion and
positive self-transformation. And, in so doing, as in many of her novels, she
explores this emotional side of ethnographic fieldwork.
In The Dispossessed, originally published in 1974, Le Guin provides another
opportunity to explore cultural differences, as well as the experiences of the
outsider immersed in a strange society. Though not an ethnographer (like
Rocannon), Shevek, the protagonist in The Dispossessed, becomes a cultural
interpreter exposing the limits and conceits of two different worlds. The main
differences he has to attend to arise from sociopolitical distinctions. Both
planets appear flawed, but in different ways. Only by comparison with one
another, can the flaws be perceived. Here cultural comparison through literary
juxtaposition functions to critique some of the social forms we find in our own
lived worlds, but without being overly pedantic or driven by political ideology.
An interesting and compelling story and a sort of anthropological thought
experiment, The Dispossessed points to the kinds of differences that might arise
as societies organize themselves along culturally different economic and political lines.
In The Word for the World is Forest, first published in 1976, Captain Raj Lyubov
is the anthropologist serving as head of a team of research specialists on World
41: a planet colonized for the harvest of wood to be sent back to earth, now long
deforested. The native humanoids (the Athsheans: small and covered in green
hair, whom most of the colonists have trouble seeing as human) revolt against
their exploitation and loss of their forest home. Captain Lyubov learns their
language and comes to understand them as being fully human. He is the only
character in the book able to cross the cultural boundaries and to interpret
cultural differences sympathetically. His empathy becomes a tool of political
liberation when his studies are used to press for an end to earths colonization
of the planet; the scientist becomes a liberator, even though he dies in the
process.2 One of the Athsheans takes the remains of Lyubovs work to the
retreating colonizers, remarking, Inside this there is Lyubovs work. . . . He
knew more about us than the others do. He learned my language and the Mens
Tongue; we wrote all that down. He understood somewhat how we live and
dream. The others do not (Le Guin 1980:124). In the end, however, cultural
differences remain irresolvable, except in the person of the reluctant hero, the
anthropologist.
In perhaps one of Le Guins most famous works, The Left Hand of Darkness,
the inhabitants of the planet Gethen have no gender, at least not in the way
humans on earth do. People on Gethen are usually ungendered (what the
author calls bisexual), except during their recurrent mating periods (or
Kemmerer) when individuals take on the biological characteristics of either

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males or females, possibly experiencing both roles at different moments in their

lifetimes. Genly Ai, originally from earth, is the First Mobile to the planet, the
first person formally to represent the planetary coalition attempting to recruit
the inhabitants of Gethen. Ascribed male, Genly Ai has to transcend not only
cultural difference but also biological and gender differences. An emissary from
another culture confronting profound misunderstandings and violence, he
pursues cross-cultural understanding and reconciliation. Even though the cultural and biological differences he struggles to understand can never really be
transcended, by the end of the book, our cultural interlocutor triumphs.
Here, perhaps for the first time, Le Guin uses ethnography as an obvious
literary modality, interspersing chapters narrated by the main characters in the
book with chapters recounting popular stories, myths, sayings, as well as
anonymous ethnographic reports written by investigators preceding Genly Ai,
replete with footnotes explaining the origins of these texts or the meanings of
native terms difficult to translate. These breaks in the narrative allow Le Guin to
construct rich portraits of cultural complexity and cultural difference, portraits
very anthropological in feel. Interestingly, they do not add up to a holistic
description or analysis of Gethen culturethey are fragmentary sketches that
complement the main story. Such descriptions could emerge organically within
the narrative rather than appear as reports or transcriptions, but these fictional
ethnographic reports point to some recurring motifs in Le Guins writing. For
example, through the interpenetration of narrative and realist reports a cultural
richness emerges, suggesting that these invented cultures exist outside of and
before the narrative, but more so that culture in general defies the literary
conceit of containment, of narrative logic, of beginning and of end. In other
words, by using ethnography as a textual model for fiction, Le Guin aims to
transcend some of the limitations of fictionthe end of the story. By creating a
reality for Gethen, one transcending the stories at the heart of the novela
reality based on tight ethnographic description and documentationLe Guin
hints that this cultural world existed before the novel and will continue to exist
after it. As with many ethnographers, the main characters are driven, either for
personal or professional reasons, to try and transcend cultural difference, and
even though they can never do so completely, their struggles are inevitably
heroic and self-transformative.
In Always Coming Home (2000), a postapocalyptic coming-of-age tale set in a
northern California of the future, Le Guin again makes use of fictional ethnographic texts. The communities that provide the setting for this story vaguely
seem to replicate some Native American cultural practices, or at least what
readers might recognize as preindustrial ways of life, now translated to a
postindustrial place and time. Much of the story unfolds in the first-person
narrative of a girl, first named Owl (later her name changes), whose mother is
from the Kesh people and whose father is from the Condor peopletwo very
different cultures. Like the anthropologist, Owl goes back and forth between
these two cultures, struggling to understand them and convey this understanding to a reader situated as not belonging to either. Some of her narrative she
punctuates with footnotes explaining Kesh words or ideas used in her story,
notes written by an invisible ethnographereditor. In fact, most of the book is
not Owls narrative but, rather, fictional ethnographic texts about the Kesh

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people and culture, including chapters constituted by Kesh stories and poems,
with detailed information about the teller of the tale and the context of its
recording or telling. There are maps, illustrations, kinship charts, musical
scores, explanations of Kesh writing and naming practices, sketches and
descriptions of Kesh dances and musical instruments, and discussions of Kesh
metaphors and healing practicesa stunningly inventive catalogue of cultural
traits and practices reminiscent of a Boasian ethnography. While these fictional
ethnographic texts enhance the main story of Owls life, they stand outside of
that story as ethnographic ephemera: like the notes and documents anthropologists collect that cannot be made to fit neatly into the main storyline of an
ethnography.
At several intervals in the book, there are commentaries by Pandora, the
otherwise anonymous ethnographer; these comments break the fourth wall,
revealing the thoughts and self-doubts of the author of both Owls narrative
and the ethnographic texts. Perhaps fretting over the seemingly fragmented
nature of the book, Pandora worries, Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl
is broken), from the clay and the making and the firing of the pattern, even if the
pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its
energy. Let the heart complete the pattern (2001:53). Like a good ethnography,
the story can never be complete and the reader is called on to fill in the cracks
and make the bowl whole, to draw the connections between language, kinship,
dance, and story, to finish the work the ethnographer started. This insistence on
fictional realism and open-ended description creates a strong sense of place in
Le Guins work, another characteristic of ethnography. As in The Left Hand of
Darkness, the ethnographic interludes in the text function to give the reader the
impression of a rich culture that precedes and survives the particular story in
the book, lending it the impression of existing outside the story, of being real.
The story itself could not contain all of the significant data, which spills out into
chapters that seem to interrupt the flow of the plot, but these ethnographic
details emerge as important to our understanding of the story, even though they
remain outside of it.
The Telling (2000) follows Sutty, a young earth woman who works as an
Observer for the Ekumen, an interplanetary governing body. They send her to
the planet Aka to document the language and literature of the people there. On
arriving, Sutty finds that the planets government, the Corporation, has
banned most written documents and religion, effectively destroying literature
and traditional verbal arts. The Corporation refers to its citizens as producerconsumers and has rationalized almost every aspect of daily life, particularly
in the cities. At first, Sutty worries that she will not be able to complete her
work, but when she travels to the countryside, she engages with the Akans
more deeply, sharing their everyday lives and studying their culture as an
anthropologist would. Le Guin writes:
Day after day she recorded her notes, observations that stumbled over each other,
contradicted, amplified, backtracked, speculated, a wild profusion of information on
all sorts of subjects, a jumbled and jigsawed map that for all its complexity represented only a rough sketch of one corner of the vastness she had to explore: a way of
thinking and living developed and elaborated over thousands of years by the vast
majority of human beings on this world, an enormous interlocking system of

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symbols, metaphors, correspondences, theories, cosmology, cooking, calisthenics,

physics, metaphysics, metallurgy, medicine, physiology, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, calligraphy, numerology, herbalism, diet, legend, parable, poetry, history, and
story. [2001:91]

Sutty experiences the confusion of culture shock and the initial feelings of
isolation that many anthropologists encounter on their first and perhaps even
subsequent field trips. She follows these with a growing understanding of and
identification with the beings studied.
Immersing herself in the minutiae of everyday life eventually leads Sutty to
her hidden subjecttraditional verbal and written literature. Some of the
Akans secreted away the texts and created repositories in very isolated places
where the Corporation would not find them. Sutty is an ethnographer, and
large sections of the book read as ethnographycareful and detailed descriptions of the everyday lives, beliefs, and behaviors of a society foreign to the
observer. As the above quote illustrates, these descriptions utilize categories
and concepts central to anthropological analysiscosmology, symbol, legend,
etc. In The Telling, anthropology serves as a model for the encounter between
different kinds of societies, but ethnography also serves as a literary device for
describing those differences in a modality that appears scientific yet compelling
precisely because it is in the form of a personal narrative.
Le Guin offers a much more whimsical and ironic exploration of the encounter with cultural others in Changing Planes (2003), where a present-day traveler,
Sita Dulip, discovers a way of journeying to alternate planes of existence while
delayed at an airport enduring a mind-numbing wait for her mechanical plane.
Other bored travelers learn of Sita Dulips methods and take them up, even
writing-up reviews of the accommodations and sights in these planes for other
plane-changing explorers. The narrator travels frequently to these alternative
planes of existence and, in each, encounters some cultural mystery or biological
difference she struggles to understanda complex language, different mating
practices, a culture obsessed with genealogy, a society marked by overwhelming anger. Each planes residents have their own customs, economy, mythology,
literature, food, art, and so forth; they are cultural worlds described in the
categories and language anthropologists normally employ. The sheer number of
different planes visited (15), their description in anthropological terms, and the
fact that each is experienced as absolutely normal to its inhabitants, have the
effect of demonstrating one of the primary insights of cultural anthropology
cultural relativism. And they do so in a fictional setting that does not cause the
discomfort some readers may feel in acknowledging cultural relativism in
real-life situations. Here the plot unburdens its work of cultural juxtaposition,
as the book takes snapshots of cultural differences.
In so much of Le Guins work, the protagonists are anthropologists-byanother-name. These characters inevitably face the question of how to conceptualize and react to cultural difference and, in the process, exemplify some
of the field experiences and model some of the ways anthropologists tend to
look at cultural others. In The Telling, Sutty struggles with her reactions to a
foreign culture, but then thinks to herself, Judgmentalism. Wrong to let frustration cloud her thinking and perceptions. Wrong to admit prejudice. Look,
listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasnt her world (2001:9). In The

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Dispossessed, Shevek fails to find what he seeks on any world, Indeed the
longer he lived on Urras, the less real if became to him. It seemed to be slipping
out of his graspall that vital, magnificent, inexhaustible world that he had
seen from the windows of his room, his first day on the world. It slipped out of
his awkward, foreign hands, eluded him, and when he looked again he was
holding something quite different, something he had not wanted at all, a kind
of waste paper, wrappings, rubbish (2003:130). Despite the difficulties, these
encounters transform the traveler or ethnographer, as Genly Ai in The Left Hand
of Darkness explains to his Gethenian friend:
I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that
I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere
messenger-boy. But theres more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world.
But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is
individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not
I and It; but I and Thou. [1969:259]

Le Guin suggests that the ultimate product of the cross-cultural encounter is not
to change the other, or to fulfill some political promise, or even for the sake of
scientific discovery, but the more modest, if more profound, goal of selftransformationto change one-self. In other words, the elusive utopia in Le
Guins work is not a particular kind of society or world, but self-transcendence
and the ability to understanding the other.
My Interview with Ursula Le Guin
In July of 2008, I conducted an interview via e-mail with Ursula Le Guin. In
this interview, Le Guin addressed the question of science fiction and the ethnographic imagination:
Baker-Cristales: Some of your books and stories have what I would call anthropologists in them, such as Rocannon in Rocannons World and Sutty in The Telling. Others
have characters that, like anthropologists, become immersed in worlds very different
from their own, such as in The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Always
Coming Home. Why did you choose to feature anthropologist-like figures in your
work?
Le Guin: Well, my childhood world was so full of anthropologists that I took them for
grantedthey were no odder than other grown-ups, and I was used to them. And
when I began to have any understanding of what they actually did, the ethnologists
particularly, it sounded definitely cool. Go off to Brazil and live two or three years in
the jungle with people whod never seen a flashlight, go off to Baffin Bay and get your
toes frozen off, etc. . . . And go, not to conquer, but just to find out.
So I had these people on store in my head, as it were, when I started writing novels.
And they are a useful kind of person for a novelist to have on store. An ethnologist in
a society new to her is in somewhat the same position as we all are as adolescents.
Were foreigners, exiled from childhood. We have to learn the rules of adult society,
we have to learn the language, we have to learn whats going to kill us and whos
going to help us . . . The stranger in a strange land is recognizable to most of us as
Me, at least to some extent. And so the story of how they get on in the strange land
is a story we tend to be immediately interested in. Anyhow, thats my theory.
B-C: In much of your work, you describe the cultural worlds you create much as an
anthropologist mightthrough the philosophy, religion, art, myth, and literature,

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language, gender roles, social organization and economic systems of the beings that
inhabit them. Your treatment of gender hierarchies and sexuality as well as the power
of language to define our realities is very consistent with the work of contemporary
cultural anthropologists. To what degree are these rich social worlds you create
influenced by anthropology? What else besides anthropology has contributed to your
understanding of cultural difference and social life? Dodid you ever read ethnographies? Do you have any favorites? If so, what are they?
LG: This answer will cover both questions 2 and 3. My reading in ethnology and
cultural anthropology was always so erratic, and really so insignificantI probably
learned useful things from every anthropological study I read, but exactly what I read
or what I learned, over all the decades, would be hard to say. The writers who most
influenced me would be (unsurprisingly!) A. L. Kroeber, particularly the Handbook of
the Indians of California; Edward Sapir, whose Language I loved as a teen-ager; LviStrauss, with whom I had fierce and fruitful silent arguments; and finally Clifford
Geertz, with whom again I wrangled in my mind, but who gave me such invaluable
concepts as thick description and local knowledge.
I said that ethnologists and adolescents are rather alike, now I will say that cultural
anthropologists and novelists also have a good deal in common. They are fascinated
by and want to understand relationships, and artifacts, and the oddities of religious
practice and the uses of language to reveal and conceal. . . . They write about very
much the same things.
B-C: In Always Coming Home, there are sections of the book that read like straightforward narrative, and there are sections of the book that are descriptive and read
more like ethnography. Why did you choose this unique format? What does the
ethnographic narrative allow you to do in your work that other forms of prose would
not?
LG: Realistic fiction doesnt usually have to provide a lot of description to the reader.
You can say It was the Sixties, in San Francisco, and your reader will already have
some more or less accurate and vivid information about hippies, the Haight, etc. in
mind. You dont have to tell them everything. Imaginative fiction cant do that (unless
it uses a stock venuethe Space Ship, the Vaguely Medieval Kingdom, etc.). It has to
describe everything. You are creating a secondary world for your reader, as Tolkien
put it. But you cant just do an infodump (as it is impolitely described in sciencefiction writing workshops)the information the reader needs has to be part of the
story, imparted without the reader being clearly aware of it. Good fantasists and SF
writers are masters of this sneaky technique. With the utopia, the problem is at its
most intense. The utopian writer really wants the reader to know, see, understand the
societycant leave vast areas vague, enlisting the readers own imagination to fill
them in, as most fantasists and SF writers can do. The description of the society is the
main point of the utopian novel. So, one way or another, you are going to end up with
infodumps. Given my ancestral familiarity, as it were, with anthropology, it came
natural to me to present these passages of information in Always Coming Home somewhat as an anthropologist might do. Actually, I call Pandora, the authorial voice in
that book, my alter ego, an archaeologist, because she is digging up the future (i.e.,
an imagined society) as archaeologists dig up the past. She is getting to know,
learning about, conversing with people who do not existas archaeologists do.
B-C: Your father passed before the publication of your first novel, Rocannons World.
What do you think he would have thought of how your writing engages with
anthropology?
LG: I have no idea! But I like to think it would have amused him. He had a real
appetite for literary fantasy. He read Dunsany and Eddison and other fantasists, and
liked H. G. Wellss Scientific Romances. (Therefore of course I grew up with those
books.)
B-C: Do you have any other observations on the relationship between fiction (and/or
science fiction) and ethnography?
LG: I think what I got from living in my fathers household and intellectual milieu
wasI dont know how to put itthe sense that nothing and no one is irremediably

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foreignalienOther. We do things this way, but next door they do things this other
way, and in the next street they do them in a completely different wayand all this is
entertaining, interesting, instructive, and not in the least frightening. I was spared the
huge burden of xenophobia, and the curse of cultural parochialism.
And paradoxically, I believe thats what freed me to be a regional writer, which in
many ways I am. I may pretend to be writing about other worlds, but my roots are
obviously and profoundly in the West Coast. If you dont have to rush around
spraying the boundaries of your territory all the time, you can live in peace in the
center of the world. You can have local knowledge.
This is a very roundabout answer to your question, but my point is, I think the
strongest fiction comes from people who truly inhabit their world and know where
its moral center is.

Ethnographic Fictions and Fictional Ethnographies

It is clear from her interview and from her own work that Le Guin employs
fictional ethnographic narratives and juxtaposition as first a tactic of othering
and finally as a sort of anthropological thought experimentwhat sorts of
possibilities are there for human existence, thought, and social ordering? These
textual strategies in her fiction highlight some of the more hidden functions of
ethnographycultural critique and the utopian imagination.
Cultural critique, in both the case of ethnography and in Le Guins fiction, is
a critical assessment of the world as it is thought to be, a rejection of what is. The
other side of this cultural critique is utopia, a dreaming for what could or
should be. With the critique, utopia is implied, though it may not be consciously
or systematically developed. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, utopian
writing began to diverge from realist accounts of the world early in the 16th
century, but the two are necessarily linkedwhat he calls the savage-utopia
correspondence (2003:19). The fate of utopian thought declined in anthropology with the end of the modernist grand theories that encompassed both
critique and remedy (Marxism, cultural evolutionism, cultural materialism,
etc.). But the cultural critique that still drives so much of ethnography constitutes a sort of truncated utopian thought, even if the utopia implied is only a
more profound recognition of cultural multiplicity. The tenacious ethnocentrism of the West drives the ethnographic enterpriseethnography insists that
we look about us to discover that difference really does exist.3 This ethnocentrism also inspires Le Guins fictional ethnographic imagination.
In anthropology, there is a deep discomfort with utopia; it is too close to
social engineering and grand theory for the post-modern anthropologist and
not quite scientific enough for the more positivists among us. Utopian thought
is therefore sublimated in contemporary ethnographywhile it is suggested
by the persistence of cultural critique, for most anthropologists it is far too
conjectural and political for a more explicit role in ethnography. Like most
anthropologists, Le Guin does not seem altogether comfortable with utopia;
she presents us with the dream of utopia, but utopia itself is never quite
achieved. She creates places where things are better because they are different,
but these utopias are never perfect because they are always marked by violence
and misunderstanding that need to be transcended by the cultural hero, the
anthropologist or his/her equivalent. In that sense, they may be antiutopias, or
what Trouillot calls the specificity of otherness (2003:27)a construction of

Baker-Cristales

Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin

25

otherness that resists universalismThere is no Other, but multitudes of

others who are all others for different reasons, in spite of totalizing narratives,
including that of capital (2003:27). In the end, the real utopia in Le Guins work
is not a people, place, or social system, but the act of self-transcendence and
cross-cultural understanding, a process that is never complete nor perhaps fully
possible.
Perhaps a truly utopian anthropology is not possible, but I suggest that an
anthropology that recognizes the unspoken role of utopian thought in ethnography would not be afraid to dream and to imagine forms of sociality that
realize the full potential of human possibility, nor would it be timid about
pointing out how most of the real world fails to do this.
Notes
1. An interesting example of an ethnography that resists this temptation is Susan
Bibler Coutins Nations of Emigrants (2007), which highlights the complex social fictions
that give the feeling of coherence to social worlds that are conflicted and shifting, and
where participants, like the ethnographer, are sometimes unable to make sense of what
happens around them.
2. In her own estimation, the book is more clearly polemical than most of Le Guins
work (see the authors introduction to the book) and was inspired, in part, by her disgust
with the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.
3. For contemporary evidence of this deep-seated ethnocentrism, one only has to
look at the current vilification of Islam, the xenophobia and scapegoating of immigrants,
or the rise of Christian fundamentalism. Ethnocentrism created anthropology (the first
musings of the cultural evolutionists) and continues to drive it, if only in the form of
resistance to ethnocentrism.

References Cited
Castaneda, Carlos
1978 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. NY: Penguin Books.
Coutin, Susan Bibler
2007 Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the
United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic.
Jameson, Fredric
2005 Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions. New York: Verso.
Le Guin, Ursula K.
1966 Rocannons World. New York: Ace.
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace.
1980[1976] The Word for World is Forest. London: Panther.
1996 Worlds of Exile and Illusion. New York: Orb.
2000 Always Coming Home. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2001[2000] The Telling. New York: Ace.
2003[1974] The Dispossessed. New York: Perennial Classics.
2003 Changing Planes. New York: Ace.
Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer
1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human
Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmidt, Nancy
1984 Ethnographic Fiction: Anthropologys Hidden Literary Style. Anthropology
and Humanism Quarterly 9(4):1114.

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Volume 37, Number 1

Sharp, Patrick
2007 Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
2003 Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In
Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Pp. 728. New York:
Palgrave.

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