Reviewed by: Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World by Tim Watson Eric Aronoff Tim Watson. Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World. Oxford UP, 2018. xviii + 218 pp. Tim Watson's groundbreaking Culture Writing is a book that engaged me from the very first page—literally, starting with the Acknowledgements. Watson begins with an earnest and detailed acknowledgement of the extensive network of people on whom his work as a scholar depends, from librarians to adjunct faculty, graduate student teachers, custodians, and office administrators, all of whom keep the institution of the university going while Watson writes. This is not a pro-forma acknowledgement or virtue-signaling: it reads as a sincere recognition of the extraordinarily privileged, if somewhat paradoxical, position of tenured professors in a system that—like the global economy more broadly—rests on increasing income and power inequalities, even as humanities scholarship itself seems increasingly marginalized. I begin with this moment not just because of the importance of Watson's acknowledgement, but also because it turns out that the position he describes—the trained professional, working within the structures of a research institution, wrestling with the increasingly visible power differentials the profession and academic institutions are complicit in (re)producing, even as they ostensibly work to mitigate those disparities—is, in turn, precisely the position in which many of the anthropologists and literary writers discussed in Watson's valuable study find themselves. Focusing on the context of academic anthropology from roughly the end of WWII to the late 1960s, Watson argues that, in this period, anthropology's disciplinary identity in the Atlantic world—in particular, England, France, and the US—becomes increasingly institutionalized and professionalized and more deeply embedded within museums, universities, and institutes funded by states and state-supported foundations. These institutions, in turn, were often involved in research and projects in the "developing world" (13), funded as part of the larger Cold War strategies of the US. At the same time, however, anthropology's newfound institutional stability is shaken by geopolitical shifts and the process of "decolonization" (7) that characterize the period, as anticolonial movements in the Caribbean, north and west Africa, the Middle East, and southeast Asia forced European colonial governments to dismantle—or at least adjust—their administrative and military domination of these regions. These shifts, Watson argues, forced a number of anthropologists to begin to question the discipline's historical involvement and complicity with colonialism, as well as to question the adequacy of [End Page 563] dominant theoretical and representational modes of the discipline—in particular, the emphasis, especially in the British tradition, on "functionalist, synchronic models and methods" (6)—in order to capture the changes sweeping through these societies. It is the competing forces of the institutionalization and professionalization of anthropology on the one hand, and the challenges within anthropology as the context of decolonization made visible its ethical contradictions and methodological limits on the other, that Watson argues generates the particular "entanglement of literature and ethnography" (3) in this period. As he puts it, These internal disciplinary changes, combined with the questions raised about the funding and working conditions of anthropology in the decolonizing, early Cold War world, had the effect of spurring some anthropologists to turn toward literature at the same time, and for some of the same reasons, that some literary figures were turning to anthropology. Narrative form promised a way to address questions of time and social change, and the non-empiricist, aesthetic basis of literature offered to counteract the technical aspects of anthropology that made it potentially complicit with state and economic power. (6) Locating this dynamic in the 1950s and 1960s, Watson argues that the "literary turn" (2) in anthropology—which, since Clifford and Marcus's groundbreaking Writing Culture, has been marked at around 1968 with the publication of Bronisław Malinowski's fieldwork diaries, and by the Vietnam War—must be seen as having begun much earlier than conventionally imagined. To make this case, Watson draws on a fascinatingly eclectic array of ethnographers and writers, particularly women, each of whom have been relegated to one category of writing or another, and often on the margins of those...