“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”

This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-headed households, gay and lesbian relationships, and networks of female friendship and civic engagement. Pym’s novels of the 1950s implicitly criticize the synchronic, functionalist anthropology of kinship tables that dominated the discipline in Britain, substituting an interest in a new anthropology that could investigate social change. Specific anthropological work on West African social changes underpins Pym’s English fiction, including several journal articles that Pym was editing while she worked on her novels

Ethnography · Friendship · Kinship · Lesbian · Normative · Political science · Social science · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Sex work and related issues · 20th century · Anthropologists' writings · Anthropology in literature · Biography & Autobiography · Culture in literature · Ethnology in literature · History and criticism · Literary · Literature and anthropology · Literature, Modern · Literature, modern, history and criticism · Modern Literature