Stories as Ethnographic Dilemma in Longitudinal Research (original) (raw)

In this article, the author examines the ways her informants' stories have taken on lives of their own over a 37-year engagement in fieldwork. Taking a practical approach, the author draws on personal experiences to ask: What is the ethnographer to do with stories that shrink, metamorphose, or disappear over time? The author suggests that these transformations run along lines of indigenous logic, and concludes by calling for the elevation of "the study of the lives of stories" to a topic of ethnographic inquiry in itself.