Bir Etnografi Alegorisi Olarak Karanlığın Sol Eli Romanı
The Left Hand of Darkness as an Allegory of Ethnography

Summary/Abstract: This paper aimed to discuss ethnography as a text within the context of a literary narrative and interpreted a science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, with a focus on the textual strategies of ethnography. Based on the argument that the ethnographic text is a narrative that includes the experience of encountering the researcher with the researched in the field, the experience of a “male” messenger traveling interplanetary throughout the novel was interpreted in the context of ethnographic textualization. I focused on the similar structural arrangements of ethnographic and literary textualization, moving from the argument of “the death of the author” of structuralism, and reread The Left Hand of Darkness as an allegory based on the textualization strategies of ethnography. Ethnographic textualization strategies such as capturing the ethos, describing everyday life, thick depiction, and storytelling of ethnographic experience were also included in the novel. Within this context, the study proceeded through the following discussions. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist questions whose story he is going to talk about. I interpreted this rhetoric as a projection of a dialogical ethnographic textualization. Second, he painted a sharp picture of the living world of the Gethen people, intensely depicting their daily lives and rituals, and pursuing their ethos like an ethnographer. The last topic emphasized was Genly Ai’s field experiences within the context of the feeling of loneliness and the transformations in the subject-object relationship.

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