Introduction
The introduction summarizes the process of decolonization in the British and French Empires and the role of the United States. Anthropology became a more professionalized discipline, raising the barriers to interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and other intellectuals and making it less desirable for colonial intellectuals to choose anthropology, as a significant number had done earlier in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, exchanges continued between literature and anthropology. I argue that the literary-anthropological dynamics of the 1950s and 1960s were prefigured by three examples in the 1930s and 1940s: Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork among African Americans in the US South, Michel Leiris’s account of Marcel Griaule’s 1930s anthropological expedition from Dakar to Djibouti, and the establishment of the Mass-Observation program to document British everyday life. The introduction analyzes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques as a key text in the flourishing of a new literary anthropology in the 1950s.