Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land

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Book Review: Amitav Ghosh In an Antique Land

“The only people for whom we can even begin to imagine properly human, individual, existences are the literate and the consequential, the wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers, and the priests—the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time” (Ghosh 17). History is written by the victorious, influential and powerful; however, history has forgotten the people whose voices were seized, those who were illiterate and ineloquent, and most importantly those who were oppressed by the institution of casted societies. Because history does not document those voices, it is the duty to the anthropologist, the historiographer, the philosopher as well as scholars in other fields of studies to dig for those lost people in the forgotten realm of time. In In An Antique Land, the footnotes of letters reveal critical information for the main character, which thematically expresses that under the surface of history is something more than the world can fathom.

Moreover, the main character of this arguably structural fictional novel, travelogue and biography, which encompasses both historical and biographical events, begins his journey through the truths of studying eleventh century Egypt. Amitav places himself in the story as a doctoral student who is given the opportunity to study social anthropology. As we learned and discussed throughout this course, there are a variety of methods in which to study religion. Social anthropology focuses on“the study of human beings and societies viewed primarily as both the creators and the creations of culture . . . sociology of religion . . . focuses its attention on social behavior and the way in which religion interacts with other dimension...

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...for granted the research that Ghosh conducted, but I realize through this course how important it is to study religion in a method that does not council any predetermined ideas. Sometimes it is beneficial to study a topic for the sake of knowing history, however, it then places a scholar in a category i.e if all muslims scholars studied Islam. It is beneficial to have a different perspective because it can reveal critical sources from a different perspective.

Bibliography

Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.

Livingston, James C. Anatomy of the Sacred: An Introduction to Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Print.

Stankiewicz, Damien. "Anthropology And Fiction: An Interview With Amitav Ghosh." Cultural

Anthropology 27.3 (2012): 535-541. OmniFile Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson). Web. 18

Apr. 2014.

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