Ethnographic Alternatives – serie

Writing the New Ethnography provides a foundational understanding of the writing processes associated with composing new forms of qualitative writing in the social sciences. Goodall's distinctive style will engage and energize students, offering them provocative advice and exercises for turning qualitative data and field notes into compelling representations of social life.

Karaoke. The word conjures all kinds of visions—possible stardom, abject performance terror, or just head-shaking bewilderment. Ten years ago when the Japanese craze had only recently arrived in the U.S., Rob Drew was drawn to the phenomenon as subject of research. What he discovered will fascinate and surprise you, whether you're a student of popular culture or just curious what's going to happen next Saturday when you get up to sing your first song at the corner bar. Karaoke Nights is both a keen observation on the external behavior of deejays, performers, and audience and an intimate portrait of the emotional roller coaster that is the internal life of a karaoke singer. Drew lets you feel just what it’s like to be the performer—agonizing over the song, feeling the nervous anticipation, analyzing your performance. At the same time he provides a probing analysis of the varied roles karaoke plays in popular culture and how it can guide an understanding of “local music” and the relationship of ordinary people to stardom.

A personal, revealing, and sometimes humorous exploration of female experience, Performing Femininity challenges traditional and feminist perspectives on gender roles. Using ethnographic method, Lesa Lockford transforms herself into an image-obsessed weight watcher, an exotic dancer, and a theatrical performer. In several evocative narratives, Lockford uses this experimental methodology to rupture the conventional dichotomy of patriarchal versus feminist points of view, goading and challenging her audience as she breaches the borders of these typically opposed ideologies. She explores how both paradigms constrain women, but also how they are simultaneously enacted and subverted in the 'performances' women play in their daily lives. Performing Femininity will be a provocative read for the student of feminist thought and for those researchers looking at innovative ways to produce and present their research.

It started as a class project—a young, married, small-town white woman interviewing a gay acquaintance and his circle of friends. From this developed a three-year exploration of the complexities of carrying on gay-straight friendships. This reflexive, thoughtful, and compellingly written study moves from gay bars to softball leagues to visits with families and friends, both gay and straight. During its course, the author develops a growing understanding of the differences between the two communities, the difficulties of developing bonds across groups, and the inherent rewards of seeking (and being) the Other in contemporary society. She explores sexuality, marriage, lifestyles, and the meanings of friendship, culminating in a boisterous dissertation defense attended by her new community of friends. As a study of a gay community, a narrative of personal development and change, and an exploration of the use of friendship in conducting research that transforms both participants and researcher, Tillmann-Healy's work will be compelling reading for scholars, students, and the broader community.

Elsie Martinez Trujillo Alcaraz, 'Naunny' to her grandson and communication scholar Nick Trujillo, was a working class woman, daughter of New Mexico Hispanos, and eventually the resident of a Los Angeles nursing home. She becomes the focal point for Trujillo's experimental ethnography of family relations, aging, and ethnic identity throughout the twentieth century. Collecting narratives of his grandmother's life, Trujillo learns how family members use stories to define the family's sense of itself and create collective views on intergenerational relations, social history, gender, class, and ethnicity. Through these stories, family photos, and his own recollections, supplemented with Elsie's letters and journal entries, the author is able to explore topics often ignored in life histories of the elderly—sexuality, body image, eating disorders, marital discord, mobility patterns, racial prejudice, and interactions with the health care system. Trujillo's presentation brings Naunny's humor, liveliness, and generosity alive for scholars and students alike and provides a vivid portrait of being Hispanic and female in the 20th century American west.

Education without ethics, without sentiments, without heart, is simply soulless, factual academics and nothing more. In his array of authentic essays, Ronald J. Pelias poetically evokes the spiritual aspects of life in a seemingly dispassionate field—the academy. A Methodology of the Heart presents a procession of situational compositions confronting matters such as family relationships, student/teacher communications, and general life at the university. In his comical yet candid book, Pelias depicts the emotional battle for understanding and honesty within the conventional boundaries of higher education. It introduces such subjects as autoethnography, autobiography, personal narratives, memoir, creative non-fiction, and performative writing. It is absolutely a crucial addition to all book collectors with autoethnographic or communication interests as well as to the general reader attracted to daily life and higher education.

Education without ethics, without sentiments, without heart, is simply soulless, factual academics and nothing more. In his array of authentic essays, Ronald J. Pelias poetically evokes the spiritual aspects of life in a seemingly dispassionate field—the academy. A Methodology of the Heart presents a procession of situational compositions confronting matters such as family relationships, student/teacher communications, and general life at the university. In his comical yet candid book, Pelias depicts the emotional battle for understanding and honesty within the conventional boundaries of higher education. It introduces such subjects as autoethnography, autobiography, personal narratives, memoir, creative non-fiction, and performative writing. It is absolutely a crucial addition to all book collectors with autoethnographic or communication interests as well as to the general reader attracted to daily life and higher education.

In Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide, Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge_accomplished sociologist and published novelist_explore the fascinating interplay between literary and ethnographic writing. The exciting result is an intriguing experimental text that simultaneously delves into, reveals, simplifies, and complicates methodologies of writing and conveying experience. Refusing to force their unique voices into one integrated account, the authors_also spouses_explicate their stories in separate narratives and then discuss in transcribed 'free-wheeling' conversations their different constructions of their travels together, travels simultaneously experienced, but recalled and related differently through the filters of distinct professional perceptions, life histories, and interiors. This boundary-crossing text will provide an ideal platform for students and professors interested in understanding and exploring the absorbing complexities and possibilities of ethnographic writing and creative nonfiction.

In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they sing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power. Instead of interpreting the expression of love as a woman's violent mistake—as willing deception and passive fate—Holman Jones allows us to hear an active search for hope.

In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they sing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power. Instead of interpreting the expression of love as a woman's violent mistake—as willing deception and passive fate—Holman Jones allows us to hear an active search for hope.

Calling on a decade of participant observation at a residence for mentally retarded adults, anthropologist Michael V. Angrosino's riveting and de-mystifying account offers an insider's picture of the lives of the inhabitants of Opportunity House. Using the narrative device of a dozen fictional short stories told in the voices of various community members as well as that of the researcher, Angrosino weaves a life-histories approach to ethnography together with an innovative culture concept to tackle the complexities of representing marginalized subgroups. As opposed to traditional clinical or statistical studies, which have insufficiently conveyed the subjective and experiential perspectives of retarded people themselves, Angrosino presents an intimate and complex picture of a highly functioning community with its cast of entrepreneurs, bullies, victims, and do-gooders. This wonderfully readable and captivating account is therefore an important resource for those interested in mental illness and disability, as well as a model for those experimenting with forms of ethnographic writing.

Fiction and Social Research brings together writers from a variety of disciplines to explore and illustrate the possibilities of new narrative forms in social research. At the intersections of fiction, ethnography, and cultural studies, these essays demonstrate narratives that simultaneously enrich fieldwork and enliven research reporting. By arranging this volume into four areas of concern, this volume demonstrates how fiction can express issues of representation, subjectivity, critique and postmodern discourse. This volume is unique in its accessibility and will prove a valuable tool to the veteran scholar and beginning ethnographer alike.

What is it like to have lived with bulimia for most of your life? To have a mother who is retarded? To fight a health insurance company in order to survive breast cancer? Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner have assembled innovative pieces which tackle these and other difficult questions, enlarging the space to practice ethnographic writing as the stories are told through memoirs, poetry, photography, and other creative forms usually associated with the arts. The authors demonstrate how ethnographic data can be converted into memorable experiences that readers can use in the classroom and everyday life.

'My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did not feel.' _From the Foreword Most of us learn of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through the writings of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Remarkable as their stories are, they leave many voices of Auschwitz unheard. Mary Lagerwey seeks to complicate our memory of Auschwitz by reading less canonical survivors: Jean Amery, Charlotte Delbo, Fania Fenelon, Szymon Laks, Primo Levi, and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She reads for how gender, social class, and ethnicity color their tellings. She asks whether we can_whether we should_make sense of Auschwitz. And throughout, Lagerwey reveals her own role in her research; tells of her own fears and anxieties presenting what she, a non-Jew born after the fall of Nazism, can only know second-hand. For any student of the Holocaust, for anyone trying to make sense of the final solution, Reading Auschwitz represents a powerful struggle with what it means to read and tell stories after Auschwitz.

'My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did not feel.' _From the Foreword Most of us learn of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through the writings of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Remarkable as their stories are, they leave many voices of Auschwitz unheard. Mary Lagerwey seeks to complicate our memory of Auschwitz by reading less canonical survivors: Jean Amery, Charlotte Delbo, Fania Fenelon, Szymon Laks, Primo Levi, and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She reads for how gender, social class, and ethnicity color their tellings. She asks whether we can_whether we should_make sense of Auschwitz. And throughout, Lagerwey reveals her own role in her research; tells of her own fears and anxieties presenting what she, a non-Jew born after the fall of Nazism, can only know second-hand. For any student of the Holocaust, for anyone trying to make sense of the final solution, Reading Auschwitz represents a powerful struggle with what it means to read and tell stories after Auschwitz.

This volume presents the latest explorations of the literary turn in ethnographic work by many of the leading people in the area. Centering on autoethnography, personal narrative, ethnographic performance, and the blending of social science and the arts, the articles collected here emphasize embodiment, experiential understanding, participatory ways of knowing, sensuous engagement, and intimate encounter. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as sociology, philosophy, performance studies, communication, family therapy, and English, the authors here demonstrate the many ways in which ethnography can be effectively conducted and expressed. The editors weave narrative and conversations surrounding the conference from which these pieces emerged into a reflexive volume which includes poetry, stories, theatre, and visual media as well as critical pieces. Accessible and jargon free, this book should excite scholars and students as to the expanding possibilities for ethnographic presentation.

This volume presents the latest explorations of the literary turn in ethnographic work by many of the leading people in the area. Centering on autoethnography, personal narrative, ethnographic performance, and the blending of social science and the arts, the articles collected here emphasize embodiment, experiential understanding, participatory ways of knowing, sensuous engagement, and intimate encounter. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as sociology, philosophy, performance studies, communication, family therapy, and English, the authors here demonstrate the many ways in which ethnography can be effectively conducted and expressed. The editors weave narrative and conversations surrounding the conference from which these pieces emerged into a reflexive volume which includes poetry, stories, theatre, and visual media as well as critical pieces. Accessible and jargon free, this book should excite scholars and students as to the expanding possibilities for ethnographic presentation.

Is theatrical performance an effective way to communicate the results of social science research to health practitioners and the public? Ross Gray and Christina Sinding describe how their studies about metastatic breast cancer and prostate cancer were transformed into Handle with Care? and No Big Deal?, plays conveying the cancer experience to physicians and community audiences. People with cancer were among the actors, and the words they spoke were taken from individual and group interviews and from the dialogue between cancer survivors, researchers and dramatists that informed the script. The book tells the story of these two productions, outlining the theoretical basis of research as performance art, the process and problems of turning field notes into scripts, the delights and traumas of performance, and the results of research-based theatre experiments on audiences and participants alike. With the book is an 80-minute VHS videotape showing a performance of each drama.

The Time at Darwin's Reef is primarily a book of storytelling through mixed genres—verse, prose, and painting. Brady's work is designed to draw out key dimensions of the poetics of anthropology and history embedded in creative writing—in the mix and on the margins of verse and prose, painting and writing, fiction and fact—to revisit the sometimes academically resistant idea that there is more than one way to say (and therefore to see) things. This is a poetic exploration of themes encountered in the academy's attempts to explicate reality, including travel through various cultures, times, and circumstances. The goal of this unique book is both analytic and aesthetic. It is also humanistic: a commentary on the human condition, of being and not being in a cross-cultural world. It will be of immediate interest to poets and writers who wish to explore anthropological poetics, to ethnographers and teachers of ethnographic method, and to instructors and students in creative and experimental writing.

Elsie Martinez Trujillo Alcaraz, 'Naunny' to her grandson and communication scholar Nick Trujillo, was a working class woman, daughter of New Mexico Hispanos, and eventually the resident of a Los Angeles nursing home. She becomes the focal point for Trujillo's experimental ethnography of family relations, aging, and ethnic identity throughout the twentieth century. Collecting narratives of his grandmother's life, Trujillo learns how family members use stories to define the family's sense of itself and create collective views on intergenerational relations, social history, gender, class, and ethnicity. Through these stories, family photos, and his own recollections, supplemented with Elsie's letters and journal entries, the author is able to explore topics often ignored in life histories of the elderly—sexuality, body image, eating disorders, marital discord, mobility patterns, racial prejudice, and interactions with the health care system. Trujillo's presentation brings Naunny's humor, liveliness, and generosity alive for scholars and students alike and provides a vivid portrait of being Hispanic and female in the 20th century American west.

In Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide, Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge—accomplished sociologist and published novelist—explore the fascinating interplay between literary and ethnographic writing. The exciting result is an intriguing experimental text that simultaneously delves into, reveals, simplifies, and complicates methodologies of writing and conveying experience. Refusing to force their unique voices into one integrated account, the authors—also spouses—explicate their stories in separate narratives and then discuss in transcribed "free-wheeling" conversations their different constructions of their travels together, travels simultaneously experienced, but recalled and related differently through the filters of distinct professional perceptions, life histories, and interiors. This boundary-crossing text will provide an ideal platform for students and professors interested in understanding and exploring the absorbing complexities and possibilities of ethnographic writing and creative nonfiction.

Striving to express the lived experience of women's music at The Club, Stacy Holman Jones has created a text that is itself performative, and the reader cannot resist playing a starring role. Her evocative narrative slips in and out of prose, dialogue, and poetry. Fieldnotes and song lyrics are staged as inseparable parts of the events of social meaning occurring between ethnographer and field site, between reader and text. Jones is haunted by the specters of reliability and validity, motivated by the goals of multivocality and multiple truths, and driven by the music. She is also driven by the mystery and complexity of women's music; a category which is impossible to capture, tame, or pin down. Created and recreated from many points of view in each performance and evocation, it resists a stable definition. This innovative ethnography is an important move toward turning the postmodern critique into a lyrical and complex expression of social experience.

Striving to express the lived experience of women's music at The Club, Stacy Holman Jones has created a text that is itself performative, and the reader cannot resist playing a starring role. Her evocative narrative slips in and out of prose, dialogue, and poetry. Fieldnotes and song lyrics are staged as inseparable parts of the events of social meaning occurring between ethnographer and field site, between reader and text. Jones is haunted by the specters of reliability and validity, motivated by the goals of multivocality and multiple truths, and driven by the music. She is also driven by the mystery and complexity of women's music; a category which is impossible to capture, tame, or pin down. Created and recreated from many points of view in each performance and evocation, it resists a stable definition. This innovative ethnography is an important move toward turning the postmodern critique into a lyrical and complex expression of social experience.