Introduction to the Art of Ethnography

Abstract

The most human side of anthropology is its ethnography, that is, the significant facts an anthropologist gives about a culture, the living events that the researcher needs to relate to convey how that culture works. Where the researcher's participation in the culture has been vigorous and full, the style of ethnography is often magnificent. This article discusses two kinds of writing, the kind that our field friends would themselves appreciate and the kind that university examiners and grant givers would appreciate. I explain the storytelling method as a tool for conveying a picture nearer to the natural tenor of people's lives. [Keywords: ethnography, participation, academic writing, ontological inversion, storytelling]The purpose of anthropology is to supply humankind with information about itself. However, humanistic anthropology draws nearer to the living human being. It seeks to give humankind an understanding of the heart of the human being in relation to his or her fellows. Its goal is stated in the mission statement on the inner front cover of Anthropology and Humanism: [It] concerns the central question of the discipline: 'What is it to be human?' Humanistic anthropology seeks to bring out the intricate and contradictory processes of life in other cultures-including those of the anthropologist. Whether working with life histories or demographics, poetics or nutrition, artistic expression or scientific writing, this journal strives to maintain a focus on the human actors themselves. AH values writing that delights, writing that outrages, writing that evokes the human condition in all its messiness, glory, and misery-writing that reveals the blockages that are deleterious to our social and physical environment, and is thus able to promote cross-cultural understanding. 1

Trained Identities: Exploring Emergent Identities Aboard One Slow‐Moving Train

“…Our contributions could have hit on any number of points: clubs, music, work, places. What if we had found common ground (Turner 2008;Tanaka 2009)? What if we had not sat silent with folded arms?…”

Patriarchy, Privilege, and Power: Intimacies and Bargains in Ethnographic Production

“…Scholars who do interweave an evaluation of the researcher's “I” meaningfully into their ethnography have been “moral pioneers” (Rapp , 1999) themselves in acknowledging their intimate relations with the people and/or topic they study. They have tackled the special advantages, challenges, pain, and frustration presented by those entwinements and encouraged new generations of scholars to follow their model and answer Edith Turner's () call for inclusion and validation of ethnographers' own experiences in their roles as co‐producers of a humanistic anthropology (110).…”

Kukama Runa: Polyphonic Aesthetics in Cine Comunitario Among the Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador

“…As with other examples where indigenous peoples have appropriated video technologies for political ends, we present a detailed case study here that demonstrates how Napo Runa people unleashed their own ontological aesthetics—the aesthetics of dialogical perspectivism—through the methodology of community cinema. We go on to explain how this dialogical process of community cinema became a platform for storytelling (see Maynard and Cahnmann‐Taylor ; E. Turner ), as well as a means for reproducing the social relations of political struggle (Turner ). The process provided a means of positioning indigenous narratives, voices, and poetics in strategic positions to address authorities and institutions of power in Ecuador and beyond.…”