Where do anthropologists find themselves reflected in fiction? Perhaps every good ethnography evokes the convention of a novel, and Kirin Narayan builds Alive in the Writing on the premise that Anton Chekhov’s ethnographic work informed his storytelling. Ursula Le Guin’s work shows how attention to the possibilities of radical experiential difference, cultural diversity, and intersecting morality are foundational to the entire genre of science fiction.

But fewer novels directly center on anthropological themes or anthropologists themselves.Here, in rough chronological order of their underlying anthropological referents, is a reading list for solitary summers or an escapist counterpoint to a required readings during the academic year.

1. Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019) — Experimental archeology, the effort to re-create a piece of the distant past and live within it, forms the setting for this novel of a daughter challenging the power structure of her nuclear family. The ancient village is a co-construction of her father, a layman ancient history buff fascinated by burials in the Big and an out-of-town professor supervising the inevitably partial experiment. Questions of professional vs. popular knowledge, authenticity and invention, and the license offered by fantasies of ancient societies for present-day power plays are all explored, culminating in a disturbing finale.
2. Dana Schwartz, Anatomy: A Love Story (2022) — This YA novel combines a young woman’s empowerment and a young working-class man’s comeuppance, and retelling of the Burke & Hare murder-for-anatomical-body-snatching spree of 1820s Scotland. While technically only anthropology-adjacent, this scandalous killing spree spurred body-buyer Robert Knox to abandon his medical career and go on to write the influential (and obviously racist) The Races of Man (1850). So take Anatomy‘s ultimate antagonist’s fantasies of individual superiority as a Cypher for the collective fantasies of European colonialism. Or just enjoy the heroine’s masquerade as a male medical student in pursuit of her dreamed intellectual independence.
3. Nisi Shawl’s Everfair (2016) — In this work of Afrofuturist steampunk, a coalition of African traditional rulers, savvy modernizers, and sympathetic outsiders collaborate to build a political refuge east of the the Belgian Congo. This is a work that details personal sympathies, socialist politics, dirigible engineering, intercultural diplomacy, spycraft, and geopolitics, while also offering balm to the historical wounds of Europe’s late 19th century resurrection of slavery on the African continent.
4. Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January — Traces the role of secret societies of late nineteenth century collectors in bringing about disenchantment of the world through magical realist means of their own. The fraught relationship between January, the adopted young woman-of-color protagonist and her collector father probes questions of power, science, and coloniality.
5. Lily King’s Euphoria (2014) — A very thinly pseudonymized retelling of Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson in Papua New Guinea, Euphoria fleshes out these young Euro-Americans rethinking gender and community in the 1930s. Substantial attention is paid to Mead and Bateson’s ill-fated theory of the Squares among cultural personalities and individuals, and its entanglement with the love triangle of these three. // Pairs interestingly with Lise M. Dobrin and Ira Bashkow’s “The Truth in Anthropology Does Not Travel First Class,” which exposes the four-way correspondence behind Mead’s break with Fortune while defending the latter’s read of local mythology.
6. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest — A hard-driving military captain and a mournful, but sometimes complicit, anthropologist are the two points of view animating this story of timber colonialism on a planetary scale. Colonial tropes and masculinity (in its military and frontier guises) take center stage in a LeGuin’s depiction of an odious enterprise that enslaves the diminutive Athsheans. Arising out of this scenario, the Athsheans’ reverence for their dreams births a religion of resistance that disrupts their traditional pacifism and brings the power of numbers to challenge the ecocide that threatens their home. LeGuin’s intimate knowledge of the anthroplogical project, as the child of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, informs especially the regretful scientist’s narration. // Ben Passmore’s quick graphical synopsis. // If the colonialist rhetoric in The Word (1972) seems tinny and unreconstructed, consider reading it alongside Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a thoroughly documented history of the Vietnam War that Le Guin was writing against. Or try The Telling (2000), which reprises the project of religion-mediated anti-colonial resistance again through the eyes of an outside ethnographer.
7. Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) — If Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) explored Victorian social hierarchy alongside the mathematics of imagining spatial dimensions, the equally visual and textual VAS peers into how eugenics haunts both science and social practice on the threshold of a new century. The family at the heart of the book, Square and Oval, is taken straight from a kinship diagram, yet spends much of the book meditating on the medical manipulation of reproduction, amidst a sprawling canvas of historical and technological materials, from heredity charts to genetic code to scientific diagrams to a long series of quotes disturbing the reader with the broad influence of hierarchical visions of humanity.
8. Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (2022) — Within a kaleidoscopic novel that is also a story of how media and technology shape relationships, and the rise and fall of ways of making popular music, a late twentieth-century anthropologist sees her theory of personality become the core of first social networking, then the electronic harvesting of human memories. The Candy House ponders what might happen if something like the Theory of the Squares proved to be biological fact. And if its discoverer was partnered not to anthropologists, but to a dealmaker who created music’s stars. What then, of the pair’s children? And of her greatest intellectual triumph, which unexpectedly enables a techno-dystopia? Within each idea in this novel, there is another character, and none of them prove one-dimensional or without true moments of realization and change in their lives, rendered here in decades not years.

P.S. For science fiction of the proximal and distant future inflected with anthropological speculation, I recommend Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, if Fortunate (2019), on a tiny human community exploring radical biological difference and Annalee Newitz‘s story of deep interspecies communication and collaboration in The Terraformers (2023).

Photo above CC-BY-SA UNESCO / Dominique Roger