Oscar Hemer is Professor Emeritus of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University, Sweden. His diverse body of work includes novels, translations, academic essays and experimental literary anthropology.

What is knowledge? It’s somewhere in that mystery of Otherness that contaminates its seekers, Hemer argues. Prowling for weakness on the imaginary fence line between anthropology and literature, Speculative Anthropology sniffs out the haunted ruins of colonial obsessions, scents that still entice and ensnare, even as we disavow them.Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa CruzThe purpose, the author says, is not to look back to his European base, but to permit connections in the global South to challenge disciplinary categories of thought and imagination. A unique study, Hemer’s Speculative Anthropology stages contamination as transgressive and progressive modernity.Michael Chapman, Emeritus Professor of English, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

• Points of departureChapter 1 – Return to lettersChapter 2 – From ethnography to poeticsInterlude – Going to the dogsChapter 3 – WonderlandChapter 4 – Idleness in the Western CapeChapter 5 – The heart of CountryChapter 6 –  Carrier bags and partitioningPostlude – I Love ChrisPoints of no returnReferencesIndex

Oscar Hemer is Professor Emeritus of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University, Sweden. His diverse body of work includes novels, translations, academic essays and experimental literary anthropology.

What is knowledge? It’s somewhere in that mystery of Otherness that contaminates its seekers, Hemer argues. Prowling for weakness on the imaginary fence line between anthropology and literature, Speculative Anthropology sniffs out the haunted ruins of colonial obsessions, scents that still entice and ensnare, even as we disavow them.Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa CruzThe purpose, the author says, is not to look back to his European base, but to permit connections in the global South to challenge disciplinary categories of thought and imagination. A unique study, Hemer’s Speculative Anthropology stages contamination as transgressive and progressive modernity.Michael Chapman, Emeritus Professor of English, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

• Points of departureChapter 1 – Return to lettersChapter 2 – From ethnography to poeticsInterlude – Going to the dogsChapter 3 – WonderlandChapter 4 – Idleness in the Western CapeChapter 5 – The heart of CountryChapter 6 –  Carrier bags and partitioningPostlude – I Love ChrisPoints of no returnReferencesIndex