‘Based on a true story’: Ethnography’s impact as a narrative form. (original) (raw)
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Writing the Ethnographic Story: Constructing Narrative out of Narratives
Fabula, 2018
In this article, I analyse the ways in which ethnographers are sampling and constructing stories, how they listen, what they are hearing, and how they do stories. In short, it is asking how the fieldwork process of listening is turned into read ethnography. It retraces the various steps that are taken to transform fieldwork-infused narratives into refined ethnographic storytelling for academic audiences. I argue that, by neglecting continuously to review this space, anthropology and its related disciplines will continue to struggle to define their place in the canon of the social sciences and humanities. The ethnographer as author and as storyteller is very much at the heart of crafting the act of storytelling. The ever-evolving refinement of our methods towards narrative ethnography is in constant tension with our need and desire to be taken seriously as a social science; hence the production of ethnography is still overshadowed by the demand – imagined or real – to adhere to appro...
Duke University Press eBooks, 2014
We issued a call for articles on the question of "Why ethnography?" based on our belief that everyone associated with ethnography's various forms ought to have something to say. This could include the communication scholar in the thick of fieldwork, the sociologist who chose ethnography as a method for her thesis, the philosopher investigating the relationship between ethnography and aesthetics, the artist who, using digital techniques, is searching for a novel ethnographic narrative, or an anthropology preparing to give a lecture on ethnography. We now present the Moment Journal under the theme of "ethnography", with range of voices as wide as we predicted in our call for papers.
Cambridge Scholars, 2018
The volume invites the reader to join in the debate regarding subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging through story telling with the social and historical changes that currently take place in the world. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction. On the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two field co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology lost its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, because of this, the ethnographic scope has opened up, towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnographic writing. In addition to this, the volume returns to authorship, discussed in direct relation to readership and spectatorship, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the authors of the volume contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled "Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world" (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled "Symbiotic Anthropologies" (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introductory Note ...................................................................................................1 Towards an Anthropology of Fiction Michelangelo Paganopoulos Part I: Literature Chapter One...........................................................................................................20 Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Rise of World Society Michelangelo Paganopoulos Chapter Two ..........................................................................................................47 A Bottle of Manchester United Chardonnay Keith Hart Chapter Three........................................................................................................73 Parallel Perspectives in Ethnography and Literature: Reflections from Assamese Literature Prarthana Saikia Chapter Four..........................................................................................................73 Beyond Ethnographic Surealism: Hauntology and Ethnography Carrie B. Clanton Chapter Five ..........................................................................................................97 The Working Day John Hutnyk Chapter Six ..........................................................................................................120 Multinational Banking Culture in India: Facts in Fiction Geetika Ranjan Chapter Seven .....................................................................................................130 Mario Lodi’s Educational Approach: Is this Relevant for Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century? Melania Calestani Part II: Film Chapter Eight.......................................................................................................146 Forest of Bliss: Un poème réaliste—On the Aesthetic Structure of a Poetical Documentarism Norbert M. Schmitz Chapter Nine........................................................................................................161 Notes from a Film: The Places from which We are Absent Marta Kucza Chapter Ten .........................................................................................................176 Sensorial Resonance as a Key Reading Tool into Migrants’ Experiences Monica Heintz Chapter Eleven....................................................................................................187 The Post-Socialist Aesthetics of Jia Zhang-ke and the DV Revolution Ishita Tiwary Chapter Twelve...................................................................................................196 Mapping the Rrise of Subversive Slave Consciousness in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper Ira Sahasrabudhe Chapter Thirteen .................................................................................................210 The “Other” Within: Constructions of Disability in Popular Hindi Cinema Shubhangi Vaidya
Narrative Culture, 2022
“Let me tell you a story,” interlocutors repeatedly said to anthropologist Monika Kolodziej (in this issue) when she inquired about interethnic relations in a province in northwest China. Kolodziej tried to understand the people she engaged with: she wanted to know how they lived and what mattered to them. She did not ask for stories but found conversations in the field to be punctuated by them. She is not alone in this observation. Ethnographic fieldwork is often full of stories; it thrives on them. Practices of storytelling are foundational to sociality and sociability in a social group. They facilitate social understanding and represent sites of identity negotiation. This special issue centers on this phenomenon and zooms in on storied encounters in ethnography and anthropology. Ethnographers come to understand the lifeworlds of their interlocutors by engaging with them physically and, more recently, also virtually. They spend this time listening, conversing, observing, and participating. In this process, they encounter narratives in different situations and of different kinds, be they polished accounts with clear beginnings and endings—life histories, political narratives, gossip, jokes, folktales, legends, and myths—or narratives that emerge in situational co-telling, where participants contribute different story elements and meaning is subject to negotiation.
The ethnographer as a storyteller
Memoriamedia, 2020
Figure 1: Ethnographic narratives are based on personal experiences [book in the photo: Malinowski, 1922] © Eino Heikkilä Ethnography is not just a literary description of a social group or culture, it's also writing about the researcher him/herself. In this article an ethnographer as a storyteller refers to a point of view, where the researcher as the narrator of an ethnography tells an informative, evocative story of his/her fieldwork and the dialogue between him/her and research subjects. Analysing ethnography as a written narrative indicates that researcher's roles as the author and narrator of the text should be taken into account when evaluating ethnographic knowledge in our time.
In-Between Fiction and Non-Fiction: Reflections on the Poetics of Ethnography in Literature and Film
2018
This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictiona...
A Genre of Failed Novelists and Poets: Exploring Ethnography through a Narrative Lens
Anthropology & Humanism, 2021
Guided by Ruth Behar's provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of novelists and poets and building on a special issue of Anthropology and Humanism on the art of ethnography published in 2007, I explore the histories, potentials, and boundaries of ethnography as a genre and craft. Relying on narrative theory as a resource that can enrich ethnography, I provide a close reading of several ethnographies, focusing on issues of character, time, and plot. I argue that a focus on narrative helps ethnographers put in conversation multiple selves' shifting roles in ethnography. Narrative provides tools to put in dynamic dialogue these different selves, animate our texts, and write more accessible and enjoyable ethnographies. On another level, consulting with narrative theory is a reminder to claim all our ancestors and take pride in ethnography as a queer genre whose strength lies in its openings and porous boundaries.
True life, real lives: Revisiting the boundaries between ethnography and fiction
American Ethnologist, 2014
Ethnography and fiction have long been in dialogue in their common endeavor to understand human life and through their shared foundation on writing. Recently, anthropologists and sociologists have expressed concern that the worlds they study might be depicted more compellingly, accurately, and profoundly by novelists or filmmakers than by social scientists. Discussing my work on the embodiment of history in South Africa and on urban policing in France in light of, respectively, J. M. Coetzee's novel The Life & Times of Michael K and David Simon's television series The Wire, I analyze their commonalities and singularities. Using Marcel Proust's meditation on life and suggesting the heuristic value of distinguishing true life from real lives, I propose, first, to differentiate horizontal and vertical approaches to lives and, second, to complicate the dichotomy associating ethnography with the former and fiction with the latter. This reflection, which borrows from Georges Perec's rumination on the puzzle-maker, can be read as a defense of ethnography against a certain prevailing pessimism. [ethnography, fiction, writing, life, imagination]
The (Strange) Life of Ethnographers. Fiction and Incorporation in Anthropological Knowledge
Þjóðarspegillin XIV Conference Publication, 2013
Ethnographic fieldwork consists of, roughly speaking, moving to an unfamiliar environment and experiencing what other people experience. By sharing everyday life with their interlocutors, ethnographers try to understand how people live and make sense of the world around them. In this paper I explain in which sense anthropological accounts may be conceived as metaphorical descriptions of the world, by the means of which anthropologists try making sense of the metaphorical descriptions of the world produced by their so-called informants. As well, I discuss the relational character of qualitative research and the role non-verbal information, time and processes of incorporation play in the acquisition of knowledge in fieldwork activity. Finally, I reflect on fiction as key-category in the production of knowledge in social sciences – where fiction is not deliberate invention but rather an act of giving shape to reality.