James D. Dyer

Dr. DeVries

Ethnography

Spring 2009

 

In ethnographies, memoirs, novels, and films anthropologists tell other people’s

stories. In so doing, as Adamu Jenitongo once reminded me, we also tell

our own stories. Many scholars may well object to this assertion. (Paul Stoller)

 

This is a good article to describe how I feel about ethnography and peoples stories. I just love stories I guess, true ones and invented ones and mythological ones, which are somewhere in between. I learn more about different ways of being human from stories than from facts. facts are useful in many ways, particularly to an academic, but they are really just supporting evidence. They don’t tell the story. In life, I am interested in people, what they do, why they do those things, and what life circumstances force on them. Who are they? what was it like to soldier for the John Company Raj in India in the seventeen hundreds? (Bernard Cromwell), or to live in Rome during the great days of the empire? (Colleen McCoulough), or in a world when all the power went out for good in April od 1998? (S.M Sitrling), and I think I have learned more from these novels than I ever have in school. Memoir falls somewhere between truth and fiction, but it is all fiction anyway, why can’t we just call it a novel, be honest as we can, and tell the truth about our time as we see it?

 

Well because we are academics, and that would fuck up the endless categorization, pigeonholing, and dissection of honest experiences that the humanities seem to be about.

 

And it would be terrible if someone thought we weren’t scholarly enough, so we churn ot dry prose, bur full of facts, and therefores, that tells the reader nothing worth knowing about the person, people or trend that we are talking about. On the other hand:

 

Adamu Jenitongo sat on a palm frond mat on the east

side of his grass spirit hut, a little dome with a diameter of no more than 15 feet.

My teacher had wrapped a black turban around his small head and wore

baggy pants and a tunic, both of which had once been white. Time, dirt, and

dust, however, had transformed the fabric into color that looked more like the

washed out beige of a dried millet stalk. With his back resting against the

thatch of the spirit hut, he rubbed a kola nut on a metal grater and took a handful

of the grated nut and put it under his lip. (Stoller)

 

Before we even get into the dialogue that Paul Stoller is creating, this tells me things that are interesting and relevant about that dialog. F or a start, this paragraph, though not this section, and twenty years or more ago this guy was in Africa, and doing social research. Then, he uses a description of this old man t hat places us more specifically, then he makes his point with a length of dialog. It is a good point, and it is why I changed majors from psychology to sociology…in my first year at school, phyche is too empirical and lab oriented, with ethnology, your life is your lab. This is how We do business.

 

Thank you.