Minor epic: Notes toward a different “Anthropoetry”

Abstract Anthropologists have often turned to poetry as a means of accessing emotional registers of which conventional academic prose is unable to avail. In doing so, they have tacitly conflated poetry with lyric poetry, today probably the most widely practiced poetic genre, associated in particular with the expression of inner feelings and subjectival states. Lyric, however, is not the only kind of poetry. Epic is arguably the most ancient form of poetry, extending back beyond the advent of writing and taking as its subject matter not just the actions of gods, rulers, and heroes, but also in some cases the origins of the cosmos. Epic poetry, British poet Alice Oswald has suggested, propels us “beyond the voice, beyond the mind, out in the pure, unsupervised space.” Since the nineteenth century, the epic form has sometimes been appropriated for nationalist political ends, to provide an immemorial ground for a political community often envisioned in narrowly exclusionary terms. Yet epic also provides a potential challenge to such narrowness. Part manifesto and part collage of my own and others' words and images, this essay proposes and enacts a mode that I call “minor epic” as an alternative to both ethnonationalist triumphalism and lyric introspection.