C A ANTHROPOLOGY AND FICTION: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh DAMIEN STANKIEWICZ Temple University Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford (where he received a Ph.D. in social anthropology), and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, and The Hungry Tide. Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011) are his most recent novels, the first two in his Ibis trilogy. Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He has taught at Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College, and Harvard. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri Award for Arts and Literature, one of India’s highest honors. In 2010, Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College in New York and the Sorbonne. Q. Let me begin by telling you that the first piece I read of yours was In an Antique Land (Antique Land)—it was assigned to me in a class on the anthropology of the nation-state. Does that surprise you? A. Yes, it does. I know Antique Land is taught in many different courses, but I’d have thought that it would be an unlikely candidate for this one. Q. The first half of Antique Land is based on your ethnographic research in Egypt and is a narrative account of what (and really, how) you learned during your fieldwork, while the second half is often referred to as a historical but somewhat fictionalized narrative telling the story of two characters whose CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 3, pp. 535–541. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C  2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01159.x