Storytelling Ethnography

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This graduate seminar examines the practice, politics, and poetics of storytelling and ethnography. We will learn how to critically use ethnography as a theoretical and methodological approach to observe, document, understand, and write about what the anthropologist and storyteller Michael Jackson calls people’s lifeworlds such as social fields or force fields shaped by vitality and existential struggles and made of ideas and passions, and moral norms and ethical dilemmas. Stories and storytelling are vital components of people’s lifeworlds. Telling stories is a way to act, exist and resist in the face of forces that isolated us and render us inactive and silent such as suffering, loss, violence, or death. But how and where do we find these stories? How do we understand, analyze and connect these stories to our theoretical thought and research questions? How do we tell the stories of our presence as ethnographers in the lifeworlds of the people we study? The seminar will provide the skills to collect ethnographic interviews, stories, life histories and conduct participant observation, such as the ethnographic immersion in people's lifeworlds. By closely reading journal-length ethnographies and contemporary ethnographic monographs, we will particularly examine storytelling, ethnographies and stories of religious rituals, illness and healing, death, and structural and institutional violence.