Lest I be counted first and foremost among the frauds of my title, let me make it clear from the outset that this chapter does not presume to destroy the credibility of a respected, if currently beleaguered, discipline (anthropology) by submitting it to the frequently imagined rigours of another (literary criticism). What interests me here is rather the metaphor of ‘anthropological fraudulence’ in postcolonial writing: that vast and heterogeneous body of literatures from formerly colonized countries which often bear the recent imprint, as well as some of the older scars, of Western interference. It is perhaps not surprising that postcolonial writers should look askance at Western anthropology; after all, the universalizing rhetoric of humanist anthropology – presently under fire from within the discipline – thinly disguises the authority that Western institutions and institutionalized forms of knowledge continue to exert over ‘other’, non-Western cultures. To call anthropology an agent of, or handmaiden to, the colonial system would no doubt be too simplistic; but the discipline is certainly marked, some might say marred, by a history of paternalism which suggests that its capacity for self-critique has not always rescued it from self-deception. Creative writers from Africa and other parts of the postcolonial world have understandably been eager to capitalize on the contradictions inherent in Western (humanist) anthropology. For several of these writers, anthropology serves a dual function: first, it permits them to effect a critique of the ethnocentric attitudes underlying Western studies of ‘foreign cultures’; and second, it provides them with the conceptual basis for a fictionalized ethnography of their own cultures.