Fiction as a public anthropology of intimacy: from dissertation to novel in a diary of ethnographic fabulation

Authors

• Beatriz Brandão Unigranrio https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1481-8634

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17058/signo.v51i102.21471

Keywords:

Creative writing. Ethnography. Fiction. Public anthropology, Creative writing, Ethnography, Fiction, Public anthropology

Abstract

This essay examines the process of transforming an ethnographic dissertation on a Pentecostal recovery center into a novel in progress. Drawing on the dissertation, field diaries, fictional drafts, and discarded versions, I discuss two complementary moments of the creative process: the initial attempt to transpose into fiction the scenes, characters, and outcomes retained by the research; and the later invention of Ismael Ventura, a narrator born from what ethnographic selection left out. The analysis focuses on four writing operations: the shift from description to scene, the creation of composite characters, changes in focalization, and the reorganization of fieldwork time into plot. I argue that ethical and aesthetic decisions are not separate stages, since the protection of interlocutors changes literary form and fictional invention redefines responsibility toward empirical referents. Finally, I propose the notion of a public anthropology of intimacy to name a form of writing that does not merely popularize academic findings, but produces, through literary means, other forms of intelligibility, presence, and public dialogue. Comparing what the dissertation narrated with what it silenced reveals that every ethnography simultaneously produces a narrative and a remainder, and that fiction can inhabit both.

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