Historical fiction as anthropological technique: in the mind of an enslaved Melanesian

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• Dr Anthony Pickles, Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge
• Tuesday 04 February 2020, 17:45-19:15
• Gatsby Room, Wolfson College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Anthony Pickles.

Colonisation in the Pacific encompassed peoples who were separated by thousands of miles of ocean and an even greater gulf of incomprehension. As an anthropologist I am committed to the micro-scale of human interaction and lived experience, which does not lend itself easily to describing this grand scale of events, so I experiment with using elements of fiction to sew together different Pacific experiences into a coherent story. An unexpected side-effect has been to force this anthropologist to go further than I ever would in my normal writing: I felt compelled to write as if I really know what an enslaved Melanesian on an Australian plantation in 1884 thought. I present some of that writing sandwiched by reflections on the process and its limitations.

This talk is part of the Wolfson College Humanities Society talks series.

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