Crazy February: Death and Life in the Mayan Highlands of Mexico

Products of the "imagination," such as novels, can be especially useful tools for understanding how things work in societies far removed from our own experience. Through the telling of a story, a sound ethnographic novel conveys more than information. It involves the reader in the dynamics of life in places where the rules for action are very different from the rules the reader makes his own decisions by.

Some people believe ethnographic novels are comparable to fieldnotes- the data themsel...