Return to Laughter is an anthropologic novel written by Elenore Smith Bowmen. Her novel was not intended to be an ethnography, but rather a fictional account of her interpretation of the bush tribe called Tiv of Northern Nigeria. Bowen was an American anthropologist who spent a year in Africa studying the people of the Tiv tribe learning their language and engaging herself in their culture for her first attempt at fieldwork. In her studies, Bowen found that kinship, marriage, death, and family are the most important things to the Tiv people. Bowen did an excellent job writing this novel. She uses modes of thought to interact with the natives. She wrote about very specific accounts that impacted the way in which she interacted with the native