Stories as Ethnographic Dilemma in Longitudinal Research (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
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...
‘Based on a true story’: Ethnography’s impact as a narrative form.
Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology
“To what extent is a sense of beauty stimulated through rich description and capturing the imagination? Insights are lost through an author's inability to captivate their audience. Movements gain momentum through leaders' ability to inspire action. Religions gain power through orators' depiction of glorious enlightenment. The sensuous frisson that accompanies a good tale has a resonant and mobilizing force. Working with creativity as a strategic response to "dealing with the unknown, the uncertain in our lives" (Borofsky 2001:69) allows for everyday creativity but also for significant moments. "Yet there is a sense in which artistic creation, rooted as it may be in the negotiated and partial practices of "flow" in everyday life, also achieves itself by standing out from that background of fluid improvisation of forms and becoming a foreground that crystallises into a new shape" (Strathern and Stewart 2009:xii). Stories provide shape to the flow of life and ethnography is perfectly situated to throw forms of many kinds. We are interested in what happens when the story takes hold and emerges as an independent crystallization of ethnographic experience. What happens when anthropologists engage in rich description of character and context? Who are the audiences of such an account? We invite contributions that explore the capacity of storytelling to convey anthropological insights. We hope for ethnographically rich descriptions, stories inspired by ethnographic research or playful interventions. All submissions should seek to engage and captivate the audience.”
Re-use of Life Stories in an Ethnomethodological Research
Historical Social Research, 2000
In der Tschechischen Republik und in der Slowakei ist die Ara lebensgeschichtlicher Archive, die einen breiteren Zugang fur Sozialwissenschaftler bieten, erst im Kommen. Das Gleiche gilt fur Diskussionen uber ethische und methodologische Probleme bezuglich der Wiederverwendung von Forschungsdaten. Dennoch haben die Autoren – wie viele andere Kollegen – die Sammlungen ihrer lebensgeschichtlichen Interviews immer wieder verwendet, um neue Themen zu untersuchen, die oft sehr weit von den ursprunglichen Forschungsfragen und -zielen entfernt liegen. In diesem Beitrag diskutieren wir methodologische Probleme, die bei einer solchen Praxis auftreten. Wir zeigen, dass die ethnomethodologische Perspektive auf der einen Seite eine besondere Qualitat und Exaktheit der Interviews erfordert sowie eine Beschreibung der Interviewsituation (ggf. kann die Unzulanglichkeit eines Transkripts mit Hilfe der archivierten Tonbander korrigiert werden). Auf der anderen Seite mussen die Wissenschaftler jedoch...
Old Fieldwork, New Ethnography: Taking the Stories Out of the Bag
During fieldwork for my PhD in Oaxaca, Mexico, a serendipitous encounter with a group of displaced Zapotec families triggered an emotional journey against the rules of the academy and an unwitting entrée into ethnographic writing. Via a multilayered text moving between memoir, poetry, and conversations, this retrospective telling of fieldwork reveals what the academic thesis kept hidden. Written a decade ago and stored in a bag, these stories have existed separately from the completed doctoral research, thus highlighting the apparent separateness between the heartfelt experiences of "doing fieldwork" and the academic requirements of "gathering data."
Stories about Getting Stories: Interactional Dimensions in Folk and Personal Narrative Research
The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft
There is a thirst among the Paxtun women for autobiography. There is also a correct way to "seek the person out" with questions. One day, when my daughter's nanny had observed me eliciting a life story from someone, she later tried to correct me on the grounds that I did not know how to interrogate properly. "You foreigners don't know how to search [latawel] one another," she reproached me. "When we Pakistanis ask a person's story, we don't let a single detail go by. We dig in all the corners, high and low. We seek the person out. That's how we do things. We are storytellers and story seekers. We know how to draw out a person's heart."
American Ethnologist, 2017
To further enhance the vitality of an ethnographic text, Ghodsee recommends including maps and other images that complement or illustrate ethnographic data and support the analytic argument. Ghodsee's strategies for writing compelling ethnographies are as useful as her conceptual guidelines are valuable. She tells us that authors should opt for endnotes instead of placing author-date citations in the text, that prose must be invigorating but lean, that simple words may communicate complex emotions and ideas, and that subjects and verbs must be kept together. Through illuminating examples and her own terse prose, she instructs us to master good grammar and syntax, privilege the active voice, avoid filler phrases, choose strong verbs, and limit adverbs and adjectives. Ghodsee's practical tips on stages of revision and line editing remind us that writing is a craft to be relished. In her discussion of writing rituals, she reiterates that ethnographic writing is and ought to be a personal enterprise. Her simple but ingenious 10-step process for writing a book-from beginning with an imaginary table of contents to collating draft chapters into a manuscript to submitting it for review-is likely to inspire even the most ambivalent or insecure of us to overcome writer's block. The value of From Notes to Narrative is as aesthetic as it is instrumental. Each chapter stirs in the reader the aspiration to write and to write well. Ghodsee's artful integration of excerpts from and examples of model ethnographies reinforces the power and beauty of her own message. Her plea for social scientists to write clearly and accessibly is prudent and timely. Graduate and undergraduate students, novice ethnographers, and even senior scholars in the social and behavioral sciences ought to read this book before they begin writing their next essay or their next book. Priceless!