Chp 4 (Ethnogrpahic Allegory)

I enjoyed reading this chapter on Ethnographic Allegory because it showed a previously lacking creative side of sociology through writing. Victor Turner was quoted in saying about ethnography, “social performances enact powerful stories-mythic and commonsensical - that provide the social process with rhetoric, a mode of employment, and a meaning.” This quote is helpful in understanding ethnography.

When dealing with Ethnographic writing it is important to recognize that these stories are fiction. These stories are not actual events, but the emotions in the story can directly relate to a person’s real feelings or can relate to a similar event in that person’s life. “Embodied in written reports, these stories simultaneously describe real cultural events and make additional, moral, ideological, and even cosmological statements.”

The book gives a great example of an ethnographic allegory writing called The Life and Works of a Kung Woman, by Marjorie Shostak. This excerpt is a story about childbirth done “the Kung way” in a village alone. The story is emotional journey that takes you through the experience that a women in her village goes through while giving child birth. The woman is all alone in her village and realizes she is giving birth. The woman is confused, she never gave birth before, and you can feel her emotional pain. Here is a couple of good quotes from the story, “I lay there and felt the pains as they came, over and over again,” “After she was born, I sat there, I didn’t know what to do,” “She started to cry. I just sat there looking at her.” When you read the whole excerpt you will be able to hear and feel the emotions through the woman’s voice.

The story requires the reader to imagine a different cultural norm but recognize a common human experience, and that’s what these ethnographic writings are all about. The story implies both local cultural meaning and a general story of birth. Any woman who has ever given birth might be able to relate to a portion of this story, and at the same time the emotions evoked in the story could relate to an experience someone had in a totally different context. For example the women giving birth in the story say’s she didn’t know what to do.

Not to over simplify this concept, but a relatable story could be if a student is totally lost on a very important test, that same emotion of feeling lost and confused can be related to the story of a women giving childbirth in a village. Crazy, yes, does it make sense, I think so. “Any story has a propensity to generate another story in the mind of its reader, to repeat and displace some prior story.” These writings are very metaphorical.

“We may then safely define allegorical writing as the employment of one set of agents and images with actions and accompaniments correspondent, so as to convey, while in disguise, either moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the senses, or other images, agents, fortunes, and circumstances so that the difference is everywhere presented to the eye or imagination, while the likeness is suggested to the mind; and this connectedly, so that the parts combine to form a consistent whole.”

This last quote was basically the books complicated definition of what I was trying to explain earlier. There are three stages that allegorical writing registers. The Kung women story has theses three and they include
1. The representation of a coherent cultural subject as source of scientific knowledge
2. The construction of a gendered subject
3. The story of a mode of ethnographic production and relationship.
This chapter was not hard to read and a nice break from the ever so complicated writing’s of Marx and those other psycho sociologists.