. . . . Bohemia and anthropology are two of the main cultural projects through which Western culture has encountered its “Others.” Though normally treated separately—one as artistic or social movement, the other as social science or academic study—both share an attempt to transcend the restrictions of Western society through travel and adventure. Bohemia, as used here, refers to cultural rebellion against mainstream society. Often that rebellion has entailed seeking experience through extended living with non-western peoples and writing about them in quasi-ethnographic literary texts. Thus I propose to compare bohemia and anthropology. What are the common elements of anthropology and bohemia? Are bohemian hanging out and fieldwork a common enterprise? To what extent do bohemian and anthropological texts represent non-western cultures in the same ways? In what ways do they differ? What are the limitations to treating bohemian writings as ethnographic representations? I will examine these issues through a discussion of the writings and lives of American Beat Generation authors in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, focusing especially on Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Hal Chase.

. . . . Once a minor, offbeat, if not outlaw genre, the Beat Generation is now considered an important period in American literary history. The Beats are also in vogue in United States popular culture and have appeared in Hollywood movies, Gap Jean advertisements, punk rock lyrics, and MTV. The burgeoning interest in the Beat Generation, however, has often tended toward hagiography or superficial dismissal (although recently Beat scholarship has expanded and matured). Scholarly interest in Beatniks has led to a greater knowledge of the lives of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others, and the social conditions that produced a homegrown American bohemian movement, but it has seldom analyzed the cross-cultural dimensions of Beatnik life and writing.

. . . . Travel to foreign, exotic, or “primitive” locales—and their literary representation-- played a key role in the Beat Generation. Mexico, Paris and North Africa were key sites and staging areas for Beat experience and creation. Paul Bowles (who interacted with many of the Beat writers, and in a sense can be considered part of the Beat movement) spent most of his life traveling or living abroad in various countries, most importantly Morocco but also Mexico, which inspired some of his finest short stories. Burroughs wrote parts of Junky and Queer in Mexico, and Kerouac penned much of Mexico City Blues, Dr. Sax, and Tristessa while living in a rooftop apartment in Mexico City. Lawrence Ferlinghetti scrawled the poems and drawings that became The Mexican Night in notebooks while traveling by bus along the bumpy roads of the Mexican hinterlands. Ginsberg camped out on the Maya pyramids of Yucatan and lived for a time on a finca in Chiapas where he composed “Siesta in Xibalba” (Miles 1989). Hal Chase studied anthropology at Columbia University, met Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg in New York then reunited with the Beat scene in Mexico City before proceeding to Oaxaca to build boats with local Zapotec peasants. Neal Cassady died while walking along railroad tracks near San Miguel de Allende.

. . . . At Mexico City College, Burroughs studied Mesoamerican archaeology and, like Chase and Gary Snyder, was well versed in anthropological concepts and lore. Other individuals who were involved in the Beat scene and had anthropological expertise include William Garver, Karena Shields, Al Hinkle, and Ginsberg. Burroughs’ books are filled with ethnological detail and imagined cultural worlds. Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s notebooks are a kind of impromptu, artistic. Kerouac’s streetwalking lover “Tristessa”, Burrough’s drug connection Dave “Tercerero” and other Mexican acquaintances could be considered key informants about Mexican society. How did the Beats portray Mexico and to what extent is that portrayal different from or similar to naive tourist depictions of Mexico (i.e., ethnocentric, romanticized, at times racist)? To what extent is the bohemian Beat representation of Mexico similar to or different from that of anthropology, which for many of its practitioners is a kind of institutionalized, academic bohemia (the anthropologist as bohemian with a research grant)? Did the Beats do good fieldwork and “thick description?”......

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