The ethnographer as a storyteller (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.”
Stories as Ethnographic Dilemma in Longitudinal Research
Agricultural History, 2004
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.
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 (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.
Journal of Education and Educational Development, 2024
Ethnography is one of the richest research approaches within the qualitative research paradigm for studying the cultural life worlds of others and/or oneself at a deeper level of consciousness. Additionally, it is a genre of writing that uses multi-epistemic lenses to go deeper into the phenomenon in order to inform, reform, and transform lives. The term ‘ethno’(graphy) is a compound word made up of the words ethno and graphy, which stand for culture and writing, respectively. In order to conduct ethnographic research, a researcher must possess a thorough understanding of a specific cultural context, be able to communicate in the language used by the informants, and be able to bracket one’s biases, while understanding how to "recover meaning" from their complex lifeworld. In doing so, it gives the researcher—the ethnographer in the role of an outsider the chance to chronicle the ‘noodle moments’ of the insiders as informants, within their cultural context, by witnessing their way of life and recording what truly takes place there. To this purpose, through their involvement over an extended length of time, ethnographers must generate detailed accounts of the discussions, observations of the events, symbols, artifacts, festivals, and everyday activities of the researched, among other things. Through critically analyzing behaviors, it offers a window into the meaning that people attribute to their cultural sensibility and a source of insights to inform, reform, and transform communities. Thus, it is a more comprehensive way of examining through the perspective of an insider, which sets it apart from other inquiry techniques.