A systemic and phenomenological theory of reading and of fiction which spans the mimetic and the fantastic is offered as the main contribution of an anthropology which, on the one hand, works with texts, as literary artefacts, together with the reader’s response and, on the other, employs literary fiction as a tool for understanding the development of culturally specific ways of thinking and of social institutions: an ‘anthropology of literature’ which has a double focus: (1) on the role of the reader in literary reading and (2) on literary fiction as an ethnographic document. While acknowledging the significance of the latter, this essay focuses on literary reading.