Ghost Maps, Bookstores, Souls, and Yeast

Reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext ... every new book I read becomes part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of all my readings.” —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Reading is everywhere in this issue. The special section, “Anthropologies of World Literatures,” guest edited by Helena Wulff, sets this focus clearly. Here you will find articles that explore how literature unfolds in our transnational era. But reading and books are at the center of many of the other pieces in this issue. Four of the five articles in our special section come from work supported by a symposium, “World Literature: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics (2016–2020),” sponsored by the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. These articles offer varied analyses of the roles of literature in shaping society: from literary festivals in India (Ståhlberg); to writings by Swedish-Tunisian writer Jonas Khemiri who has made his art in the diasporic contexts of transnational life (Wulff); to texts of early twentieth century Siberian exile written in Swedish (Viktorin); to how contemporary Tanzanian and Nigerian writers navigate digital spaces to create and promote their work (Uimonen). We added an article that came through our usual submission process. Rosen’s article resonates thematically by exploring a bookstore in Albania where thinkers eager for new ideas in a post-socialist country feed cultural imaginations by discussing and translating Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. This special section underscores work on literary anthropology by Helena Wulff, whose advocacy for drawing on literature for anthropological understanding shines through her work in recent volumes (for example, as editor of The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn 2016); as author of her monograph, Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (Bloomsbury 2017); and as series co-editor—with Deborah Reed-Danahay—of Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology). We are lucky to have Dr. Wulff as president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA). Reading infuses many other pieces here. Magee’s exploration of graphic novels as sites for analyzing kinship, personhood, and relationships between generations in the United States builds on growing interest in graphic novels and visual forms in anthropology (for example, Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution). In his article, Peterson reflects on impacts that books such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, works by James Michener and Joseph Conrad, and others had on his imagination and decades of research in Micronesia, fed by his soul’s effort to atone for service in Vietnam on a military flight crew. Durrenberger’s article on Paul Corey, who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s about Iowa farm communities wrenched by transformations in industrial agriculture, draws on close readings of Corey’s realist novels. Even two of our creative nonfiction winners lean on the idea of reading, albeit in a more metaphorical sense. Bolin, in her essay (which received first place in the SHA’s 2018 Creative Nonfiction Awards) offers an evocative reading of the “ghost maps” of Kigali, where invisible cities of the dead underlie the frenetic pace of urban change that has enveloped the city since the Rwandan genocide. Cheng provides a different form of reading—a legal memo arguing against a death penalty decision in a capital murder case. Reading this memo chillingly reminds us that unequal social structures can contribute to soul destruction, even in modern US cities where “soul loss” has not been a subject of ethnographic study. Second place Creative Nonfiction awardee Bundgaard tells of fieldwork in a village in India, masterfully using a story of the fate of a bicycle to evoke complicated negotiations of local power dynamics, privilege, and gender. Each of our poetry prize awardees explores cross border complications in the contemporary world. Poetry first place awardees (tied), Alexandra and Kavedžija, respectively offer careful readings of the Mexico–US borderland and the experience of keeping in touch with a partner via satellite phone while doing fieldwork in Japan. Second place awardee Cotter’s poems explore the tensions in two places (an Arizona immigration court and in Gaza) that are challenged by questions about borders and belonging. Farsiu’s evocative nonfiction narrative continues this thematic as she describes her experience of being interrogated while traveling from the US to Iran to visit family during an academic break—further evidence of the unevenness of privileges, freedoms, and fear in our increasingly paranoiac global system. Not only is this issue focused on literature and reading, I urge readers to consider a parallel reading to the collection as well. A subterranean meditation in these pieces involves exploring how humans try to make sense and meaning of the urban lives that have become our primary evolutionary gambit. If you read everything in this issue, you will visit Tirana, Kigali, Jaipur, Gaza City, Dar es Salaam, Abuja, Osaka, New York, and Stockholm. Anthropology no longer lives only in remote places; like humans in general, our discipline has come to focus on life in cities, and so many of us have been pulled into the orbit of urban realities. According to widely cited United Nations estimates, somewhere around 2007 or so, humans for the first time in our evolutionary history crossed the 50 percent mark for urban life—that is, more humans now live in cities than in non-city places. We have bet our collective future on the proposition that we can live in similar levels of social proximity as colony bees, ants, termites, rats, and yeast. Many of the pieces in this issue seek to understand how humans make sense of urban life. We are in a profound period of human questioning, and perhaps what we seek to answer—using all the power of thinking and literary imagination—is an important question: Can we figure out how to live in intense proximity with our fellow human beings without the buildup of social, environmental, and spiritual toxins that could lead to our own self-destruction? In other words: Are we smarter than yeast

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