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

Dr Anthony Pickles British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, and Bye-Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge

Date 04/02/2020 at 17.45 - 04/02/2020 at 19.00 Where Gatsby Room, Chancellor’s Centre, Wolfson College

The Humanities Society arranges weekly talks (during term time) from various disciplines across the Humanities. The talks are open to anyone and free to attend.

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.

Refreshments from 17.45, talk begins at 18.00 and ends in time for Formal Hall reception.