Definition
The study of human societies from physical, cultural, and social perspectives. Anthropology and literary studies have increasingly overlapped in the 20th century. Anthropology and literature first united in the early years of the century when a group of classical scholars at Cambridge University (the Cambridge Ritualists) employed James Frazier's anthropological study The Golden Bough (1890–1915) to argue that classical myth, literature, and religion had their origins in primitive rituals. Frazier's study took on added significance when T. S. Eliot cited it as a source of The Waste Land (1922). The second great influence of anthropology on literary study has been structuralism, specifically the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss's study of primitive society, in which he noted the universal tendency to classify and order according to some principle—for example, the contrast between raw and cooked (The Raw and the Cooked, 1964)—provided one of the key elements of structuralism for literary critics, the notion of binary opposition as basic to human thought.
Central to the contemporary relation of literature and anthropology is the current view of ethnography, or anthropological description. In the world of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, ethnographers have become increasingly aware of the extent to which the conventions of narrative shape and alter their descriptions, or that their descriptions tell a story. Furthermore, some ethnographers, in striving for what Geertz terms "thick descriptions," have called for a greater reliance on literary techniques in order to convey the actual experiences of the societies they study. In turn, Geertz's own ethnographies have served as models for practitioners of New Historicism.
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