SOURCE: Ramazani, Jahan. “The Poet as ‘Native Anthropologist’: Ethnography and Antiethnography in Okot p'Bitek's Songs.” In The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, pp. 141-78. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Ramazani examines the complex relationship between anthropology and postcolonial literatures using p'Bitek's Songs.

The vexed relation between postcolonial literatures and anthropology has sometimes been condensed in one of two conflicting propositions: that postcolonial literatures are ethnographic or that they are nonethnographic. According to the first formulation, advanced primarily by Western critics, postcolonial literatures are saturated with ethnographic information, conveying for a foreign readership the customs and beliefs of native cultures. Reviewing Achebe's Things Fall Apart and other African novels, Charles Larson finds “anthropological passages,” “anthropological overview,” and “ethnological background” woven into their narrative fabric: “The anthropological is indeed important. Without it there would be no story.”¹ More recently, Christopher Miller has argued that...