ethnographic fiction

Book Reviews

• Björn Kurtén: Dance of the Tiger*
  A Novel of the Ice Age
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home*
  - fictional ethnography: stories and poetry from a far-future California
• Victor Segalen: A Lapse of Memory
  - a novel about the destruction of traditional religion in Tahiti
• Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: Reindeer Moon; The Animal Wife*
  - a Paleolithic coming of age novel
  - an abduction disrupts a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer band
• E.P. Thompson: The Sykaos Papers
  - an alien is studied by military anthropology
• Akira Yoshimura: Shipwrecks
  - a story of a poor coastal village in medieval Japan

See also: anthropology | ethnography | fiction | historical fiction | paleoanthropology | world literature

I include in this category fictional works set in paleolithic or pre-literate societies, or in which anthropological fieldwork plays a major role. Most fiction — and certainly most historical fiction — has some "ethnographic" component.