For my M.A. thesis, I investigated patterns of narrative in Barbados and how they contribute to national identity. These may be political, social, fictional, gendered, ... in nature. My fieldwork stretched over a period of two years. This is the introduction to that piece of research. (which can be obtained fully by sending an email to kenyan_star@hotmail.com).
Telling Stories : Ethno-poetic (re)construction of identities
Methodology and Interdisciplinary Implications
Storytelling has always taken prominence in both western and non-western cultures when constructing one’s own and others’ identities. In a largely metropolitanized, yet rural context the written and the spoken construction of narratives gain equal importance. Barbados, exemplary of such a condition, in that it has opened its doors to the world, yet struggles with the Atlantic echoes of a distant African shore, finds itself fairly at ease with its past. Often, linguistic and literary registers are closely intertwined to place the Barbadian individual in the middle of a British-African dichotomy, skilfully integrating both traits in identity construction work by means of narrative. One such example of this close intertwining of African yet British cultural frames is the language situation on the island. Bajan Creole is just one of those cultural forms that hovers between those different cultural/social perspectives, and Barbadian society is severely marked by the constant tension between rural and coastal, Bajan Creole and Standard English, verbal and non-verbal, indeed recursive mappings of ‘British’ and ‘African’.
As Hymes argues that “understanding narratives will lead to a fuller understanding of the language itself and those fields informed by storytelling, including ethnopoetics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatics, narrative inquiry and literary criticism”, I’ve covered storytelling in Barbados from a range of perspectives(Hymes 2003: viii). In his volume on the dialogue between anthropology and philosophy Clifford Geertz asserts the (w)holistic aspects of anthropology as the study of culture and the fact that ethnography as a binding method relates all the bits and pieces to one another (Geertz 2000: x). The quality of connecting studies from different points of view; binding them together and then integrating them in the big puzzle of a studied culture, is exactly the surplus any ethnography has to offer. I write ‘any’, because even within ethnographic practice (and that is what it indeed is, a practice) many different approaches can be valid (using any method ranging from participant observation, videotaping, taking field notes, carrying out surveys, etc.). However, what all have in common is the fact that the researcher goes to the studied field physically and develops his own approach, in accordance to the given circumstances (which yet requires a whole set of different skills), and is able to say without shame or pressure from ‘scientific poachers, parvenus or hangers-on’ that “I am an ethnographer, and a writer about ethnography, from beginning to end.” (Geertz 2000: x).
In this volume, I group two types of ethnographies, the first series more traditional, in the sense that they follow more established codes of analysis; the second series more experimental, creative and personal. By deploying these different techniques for the analysis of a Creole speech community in the Anglophone Caribbean, I wish to reflect the kaleidoscope of approaches my teachers (of which some are mentors) have blessed me with. A broad range of linguistic, anthropological and literary techniques, let’s say an ‘assemblage’ of cultural analytical tools, are applied to the study of narratives in Barbadian society, the main stream flowing straight from the Atlantic into the island.
In the first part, which is given the name ‘Narrative Ethnographies’ I look at narratives as ‘a seemingly contradictory genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities’ (Ochs and Capps 1995, Introduction). By studying narrative from an anthropological point of view, what I do in this part, one can distinguish several points of entry for narratives in daily conversations that contribute to identity making. Newspapers (chapter 2) and television programs (chapter 3) are just a few examples of daily happening ‘events’ or ‘performances’ that largely allow narrative invocations. By investigating uses of Bajan colloquialisms in local newspapers and ways of portraying Bajan, British and African culture in transcriptions of a television program, I show how narratives co-construct identity and recursively map these constructs onto local ‘moral stances’ on identity and nationhood and global dichotomies of (in)equality. I plead that these moral stances are inconsistent and subject to dispute, flux and discovery, narratives often being dichotomies themselves (Ochs and Capps 1995, Introduction).
In the second part, which is largely a methodological overview to reconcile literature with anthropology, I view narratives as a possibility to communicate to the reader through literary texts. Curiously, and rather creatively, I keep the same contours for narrative as outlined in the first part, instead of finding refuge in a more traditional stance of narrative in literature, worked out in theories of narratology and mimetism. Hence my warning this part of the volume might be more experimental, more reflexive, more personal. As narratives are highly interactive and collaborative, one can read local or global texts (about local issues) as a communication from writer to reader, in close tune with the ethnographic framework one is in, Barbadian society in my case. In this respect, literature can often function as a sort of literary meta-pragmatic framework in which the multiplicity and polyphony of voices can be captured. Entitled ‘Literary Ethnographies’, this part deals with the schematic knowledge of the reader (or the researcher as reader of cultural ‘texts-in-the-field) and how literature and fieldwork are both complementary in ‘filling the gaps’. Expanding Iser’s framework with physical work in the field (as this has been most vividly laid out and explored in Iser 1989: 262-284), I have read Brathwaite’s poem, Condé’s novel and Kwei-Armah’s play alongside (before, while and after) my fieldwork visits to Barbados. (Iser 1978,1989,1993). In the chapter on Brathwaite, I explore new methodologies for bringing ethnographic practice and local literature together. These same techniques are then applied to a poem by this Barbadian author. In the chapter on Tituba: Black Witch of Salem, part travelogue, part post-modern painting of island life, I apply the same techniques a bit more loosely, as to demonstrate the limits and boundaries of such an approach. In the final chapter on Kwei-Armah’s play, I look at how the use of Creole language befits a writer that at the same time wants to portray a diverse Caribbean yet homogenizes the Barbadian character.
Interdisciplinary perspectives will gain insight in the complexities of a Creole society under anthropological scope. Sometimes, as we want to grasp a culture totally, as ethnographers, we find ourselves ‘pitfalled’ by the limits of being the ‘writer’ of a culture (in ethnologic postscript) that has already been so eloquently written by its own subjects. Here is an attempt to read a culture and write about it instead of claiming authorship over it. Here is a volume that gently explores the contours of a culture that itself is largely post-scripted, written ‘after’ those terrible crimes against humanity.
Methodology and Interdisciplinary Implications
Storytelling has always taken prominence in both western and non-western cultures when constructing one’s own and others’ identities. In a largely metropolitanized, yet rural context the written and the spoken construction of narratives gain equal importance. Barbados, exemplary of such a condition, in that it has opened its doors to the world, yet struggles with the Atlantic echoes of a distant African shore, finds itself fairly at ease with its past. Often, linguistic and literary registers are closely intertwined to place the Barbadian individual in the middle of a British-African dichotomy, skilfully integrating both traits in identity construction work by means of narrative. One such example of this close intertwining of African yet British cultural frames is the language situation on the island. Bajan Creole is just one of those cultural forms that hovers between those different cultural/social perspectives, and Barbadian society is severely marked by the constant tension between rural and coastal, Bajan Creole and Standard English, verbal and non-verbal, indeed recursive mappings of ‘British’ and ‘African’.
As Hymes argues that “understanding narratives will lead to a fuller understanding of the language itself and those fields informed by storytelling, including ethnopoetics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatics, narrative inquiry and literary criticism”, I’ve covered storytelling in Barbados from a range of perspectives(Hymes 2003: viii). In his volume on the dialogue between anthropology and philosophy Clifford Geertz asserts the (w)holistic aspects of anthropology as the study of culture and the fact that ethnography as a binding method relates all the bits and pieces to one another (Geertz 2000: x). The quality of connecting studies from different points of view; binding them together and then integrating them in the big puzzle of a studied culture, is exactly the surplus any ethnography has to offer. I write ‘any’, because even within ethnographic practice (and that is what it indeed is, a practice) many different approaches can be valid (using any method ranging from participant observation, videotaping, taking field notes, carrying out surveys, etc.). However, what all have in common is the fact that the researcher goes to the studied field physically and develops his own approach, in accordance to the given circumstances (which yet requires a whole set of different skills), and is able to say without shame or pressure from ‘scientific poachers, parvenus or hangers-on’ that “I am an ethnographer, and a writer about ethnography, from beginning to end.” (Geertz 2000: x).
In this volume, I group two types of ethnographies, the first series more traditional, in the sense that they follow more established codes of analysis; the second series more experimental, creative and personal. By deploying these different techniques for the analysis of a Creole speech community in the Anglophone Caribbean, I wish to reflect the kaleidoscope of approaches my teachers (of which some are mentors) have blessed me with. A broad range of linguistic, anthropological and literary techniques, let’s say an ‘assemblage’ of cultural analytical tools, are applied to the study of narratives in Barbadian society, the main stream flowing straight from the Atlantic into the island.
In the first part, which is given the name ‘Narrative Ethnographies’ I look at narratives as ‘a seemingly contradictory genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities’ (Ochs and Capps 1995, Introduction). By studying narrative from an anthropological point of view, what I do in this part, one can distinguish several points of entry for narratives in daily conversations that contribute to identity making. Newspapers (chapter 2) and television programs (chapter 3) are just a few examples of daily happening ‘events’ or ‘performances’ that largely allow narrative invocations. By investigating uses of Bajan colloquialisms in local newspapers and ways of portraying Bajan, British and African culture in transcriptions of a television program, I show how narratives co-construct identity and recursively map these constructs onto local ‘moral stances’ on identity and nationhood and global dichotomies of (in)equality. I plead that these moral stances are inconsistent and subject to dispute, flux and discovery, narratives often being dichotomies themselves (Ochs and Capps 1995, Introduction).
In the second part, which is largely a methodological overview to reconcile literature with anthropology, I view narratives as a possibility to communicate to the reader through literary texts. Curiously, and rather creatively, I keep the same contours for narrative as outlined in the first part, instead of finding refuge in a more traditional stance of narrative in literature, worked out in theories of narratology and mimetism. Hence my warning this part of the volume might be more experimental, more reflexive, more personal. As narratives are highly interactive and collaborative, one can read local or global texts (about local issues) as a communication from writer to reader, in close tune with the ethnographic framework one is in, Barbadian society in my case. In this respect, literature can often function as a sort of literary meta-pragmatic framework in which the multiplicity and polyphony of voices can be captured. Entitled ‘Literary Ethnographies’, this part deals with the schematic knowledge of the reader (or the researcher as reader of cultural ‘texts-in-the-field) and how literature and fieldwork are both complementary in ‘filling the gaps’. Expanding Iser’s framework with physical work in the field (as this has been most vividly laid out and explored in Iser 1989: 262-284), I have read Brathwaite’s poem, Condé’s novel and Kwei-Armah’s play alongside (before, while and after) my fieldwork visits to Barbados. (Iser 1978,1989,1993). In the chapter on Brathwaite, I explore new methodologies for bringing ethnographic practice and local literature together. These same techniques are then applied to a poem by this Barbadian author. In the chapter on Tituba: Black Witch of Salem, part travelogue, part post-modern painting of island life, I apply the same techniques a bit more loosely, as to demonstrate the limits and boundaries of such an approach. In the final chapter on Kwei-Armah’s play, I look at how the use of Creole language befits a writer that at the same time wants to portray a diverse Caribbean yet homogenizes the Barbadian character.
Interdisciplinary perspectives will gain insight in the complexities of a Creole society under anthropological scope. Sometimes, as we want to grasp a culture totally, as ethnographers, we find ourselves ‘pitfalled’ by the limits of being the ‘writer’ of a culture (in ethnologic postscript) that has already been so eloquently written by its own subjects. Here is an attempt to read a culture and write about it instead of claiming authorship over it. Here is a volume that gently explores the contours of a culture that itself is largely post-scripted, written ‘after’ those terrible crimes against humanity.
References
Geertz, C. (1973). ‘Thick Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture.’ In: The Interpretation of Culture. NY: Basic Books.
Hymes, D. (2003). Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Iser, W. (1989). Prospecting: From reader response to literary anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Iser, W. (1993). The fictive and the imaginary: Charting literary anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ochs, E. and L. Capps. (1995). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
2 comments:
Greetings Jef,
I left a response to your comment on my blog...though of course it might have made more sense to have left it here!
Check it out.
Blessings,
Alexis
great. feel free to email me at alexispauline at gmail dot com!
Post a Comment