Writing the Ethnographic Story: Constructing Narrative out of Narratives

Abstract

"Storytelling transforms our lives by enabling us to reshape diffuse, diverse and difficult personal experiences in ways that can be shared" (Jackson 2002, 267) Assembling, telling and listening to stories are some of the oldest and most durable ways we have of understanding our lives and our worlds and of preserving those understandings; in this article I want to concentrate on the ways in which ethnographers sample and construct stories, how we listen, what we are hearing, and how we do stories. In short, it is asking how listening is turned into reading material. It tries to retrace the various steps that are taken to transfer 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. As Geertz pointed out, the ethnographer as author and storyteller is very much at the heart of the act of storytelling (1988, 4, 6). 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 approved methods of production defined by methodologies of accountability.

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