Adam Russell

Ethnographer as Storyteller

When I read Pryer’s article, I thought that she was making a case for fictionalization in the sense that events are fluid, and some things can be taken out all together while others are embellished.  After reading Stoller’s article, I realize that Pryer isn’t validating the use of falsification but rather, embracing the storytelling process.  In many ways, when we observe the classroom, we are telling a story.  However, unlike a novel, where the author can separate themselves from what they write, the ethnographer is a key component of the story.

At a certain point in the article, Stoller talks about the structure of cancer narratives as formulaic: within that formula they serve a cathartic purpose for the writer and reader.  By looking at ethnography as something organic, we can see it in the same lens where we feel and experience the research.  James explained in one post that when he does research, he wants to make the text bleed with the life of the people he writes about.  Whether our writing takes on a more academic cadence or something more personable, we are not only representing people’s lives, we are also representing ourselves as functionaries in the research process.  Stoller writes about this when he asks “how can an ethnographic work, based on long-term research, remain open to the world?” (180).  He goes onto write about the importance of letting the reader have a sense of presence when they read: they should be able to feel like they were part of what the researcher experienced.  Essentially, we are engineered to be attracted to stories, and when the ethnographer relays the story to the reader, they are much closer to the reality (or truth) of what the ethnographer experienced which, if done effectively, transmits the agency the author has over the experience onto the reader. 

If ethnography is a form of memoir writing, then Stoller gets to the heart of the subjectivity that must be embraced for it to be effective: “When you write a memoir, you attempt, however selectively, to open your being to an invisible audience of readers, and that is one of the great appeals of the genre” (182).  Stoller writes extensively about adding a sense of realism and story to the research in order for it to be believable on a human level so that the reader can identify with the author and his/her struggles.  In Pryer’s article, it was her notion of what Stoller mentions as “however selectively” that made me misinterpret the theme of her essay.  After reading Stoller, however, I now realize that the selectivity is not an embellishing or misrepresentation, it is a way to make the reader “feel like [they] were there” and that they could “feel the pulse of the sun and the itch of dust in [their] eyes” (180).  Selection not only adds realism through the use of prioritizing the events that happened, it prevents the author from being mired in a type of what Stoller calls egomaniacal “solipsism” where the author is occupied with the minutia of what they did, that the reader quickly looses interest (182).  I have to agree with what Tina about Stoller: this article reads differently from the other, more academic sounding articles.  Possibly this is because Stoller finally gets to the answer of the role of subjectivity in ethnography.  Is this the most effective way to conduct ethnographic research?  I believe it is, because the way to truly embrace one’s role in the process is to write their story and the stories of the lives that affected them.