The present article aims to demonstrate how ethnography is present, discussed, and criticized in Stefano D’Arrigo’s novel Horcynus Orca (1975). Through a comparison with a passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955), the novel is shown to adopt and challenge central tenets of ethnography. D’Arrigo imagines the possibility of an ‘ethnographer from within,’ a member of a Sicilian fishermen community who, by virtue of his personal experience, possesses the necessary distance to report about his community of origin, yet cannot help but impact it significantly as he in turn brings along and into the community a different system of thought. The article exposes the multiple inversions and subversions that the novel operates with respect to the dichotomic pairs nature/culture, civilized/primitive, indigenous/foreign, as well as to ethnography itself by focussing on the occurrence of ethnographic documents in key passages of the novel. Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques and possibly to an even greater extent Horcynus Orca are concerned with the contradictions inherent in the study of humankind, its various manifestations, and its position in the world, without aspiring to resolve them in any univocal or definitive way.

中文翻译：

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来自内部的民族志学家：Stefano D'Arrigo 的 Horcynus Orca 中的狂野思想

本文旨在展示如何在 Stefano D'Arrigo 的小说 Horcynus Orca (1975) 中呈现、讨论和批评民族志。通过与克劳德·列维-施特劳斯 (Claude Lévi-Strauss) 的《热带风情》(Tristes Tropiques，1955) 中的一段进行比较，该小说被证明采用并挑战了民族志的核心原则。D'Arrigo 想象了一个“来自内部的民族志学家”的可能性，他是西西里渔民社区的成员，凭借他的个人经验，拥有必要的距离来报告他的起源社区，但不禁产生了重大影响，因为反过来，他又将一种不同的思想体系带入社区。文章揭露了小说对自然/文化、文明/原始、本土/外来的二分对立的多重倒置和颠覆，以及通过关注小说关键段落中民族志文献的出现来研究民族志本身。Lévi-Strauss 的 Tristes Tropiques 以及可能在更大程度上 Horcynus Orca 关注人类研究中固有的矛盾、人类的各种表现形式以及人类在世界上的地位，但并不希望以任何单一或明确的方式解决它们。