(Re)telling a dog story from Newfoundland: Voice, alterity and the art of ethnographic description
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2014, Vol 5, Issue 2
Abstract
This paper addresses the question of how and why we (anthropologists and sociologists) tell stories of real people doing real stuff. It will consider this question by reflecting on three versions of a story that I have carried with me and told in variety of contexts over a couple of decades. The story is not mine but was originally told to me by a man while I was visiting a village on the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In (re)telling three versions of this story I will be focusing on the problem of “voice” and how the voice of the other is constituted. In answering the question of how and why we tell tales of the field, I will suggest that we do so in part so other people, other voices, come to inhabit our accounts thereby rendering them “ethnographic.” The paper will conclude by arguing that our finely detailed accounts play a crucial role in both constituting the authoritative voice of the anthropologist and troubling this voice with the ghostly whispers of other voices which inhabit our narratives even if, as is the way with ghosts, they can never be wholly conjured into full presence and complete intelligibility.
Authors and Affiliations
John Harries
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP100591
- DOI -
- Views 119
- Downloads 0
Social closure and discriminatory practices related to the Roma minority in the Czech Republic through the perspective of national and European institutions
While differentiating among notions of social exclusion, social closure and bridging social capital, the article analyses the evolution of cultural and social borders between the Czech majority on the one hand and the Ro...
Making the family. Actors, networks and the state
This article tries to identify the connection between the family and the state. It does so by engaging with Foucault’s notion of governmentality thus pointing out the practice-oriented constituency of state power. The fa...
An exploration of life experiences of left behind wives in Edo State, Nigeria
Research emphasising effects of migration on left behind families often focus on implications of absent fathers, particularly in Africa and areas with historic male migration. Yet, information on the experiences of left...
Saleem Sinai – Number one of the 1001 Midnight’s Children. The display of inner and outer dimensions of understanding and not understanding within one of Salman Rushdie’s most read books
Written as a statement against the tremble that wry modernization has brought to the Indian people’s lives, Salman Rushdie’s novel, “Midnight Children” (1981), depicts the inner conflicts and the outside-bounded fight of...
Practicing vaginistic femininity: Doing bodies, enacting normative heterosexuality
Vaginismus is a female sexual pain disorder, characterized by contractions of the pubococcygeus (PC) muscle that surrounds the outer third of the vagina, which makes penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse (coitus), inser...