An "Imagination of Order": The Suspicion of Structure in Anthropology and Poetry

Abstract

In writing ethnography, anthropologists generally assume they are describing a society and reaching some explanatory conclusions, however tentative. Poets, too, observe and offer explanations for what they see around them. This may include more references to their own internal imagination or to nature, however socially shaped these are, but poetry like anthropology looks at everyday experience. In this essay, I ask a question: to what degree does this shared gaze, ratcheted down on experience, draw poetry and ethnography, poetics and anthropology closer together? I focus on contemporary American anthropology and poetry. Observers like Marjorie Perloff in Poetic License note that British poetry, as one example, is more receptive to received forms, that rhyme and meter enjoy preeminence less typical of American poetry since Walt Whitman and especially since World War II. Romanticism and Puritanism retain their sway in American poetry, in part because of their shared emphasis on individualism. Likewise, it should not be surprising-though few social theorists comment on it-that American anthropology is more interested in the personal and more influenced by post-modernism than is British social anthropology. The degree to which British anthropologists focus on institutional analysis or the