Alive in the Writing

Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov

Kirin Narayan

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226567921
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anton Chekhov is revered as a boldly innovative playwright and short story writer—but he wrote more than just plays and stories. In Alive in the Writing —an intriguing hybrid of writing guide, biography, and literary analysis—anthropologist and novelist Kirin Narayan introduces readers to some other sides of Chekhov: his pithy, witty observations on the writing process, his life as a writer through accounts by his friends, family, and lovers, and his venture into nonfiction through his book Sakhalin Island. By closely attending to the people who lived under the appalling conditions of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin, Chekhov showed how empirical details combined with a literary flair can bring readers face to face with distant, different lives, enlarging a sense of human responsibility.Highlighting this balance of the empirical and the literary, Narayan calls on Chekhov to bring new energy to the writing of ethnography and creative nonfiction alike. Weaving together selections from writing by and about him with examples from other talented ethnographers and memoirists, she offers practical exercises and advice on topics such as story, theory, place, person, voice, and self. A new and lively exploration of ethnography, Alive in the Writing shows how the genre's attentive, sustained connection with the lives of others can become a powerful tool for any writer.

ONE Story and Theory

In Anton Chekhov’s “My Life: A Provincial’s Story,” the narrator, Misail Poloznev, momentarily takes on the persona of an ethnographer. Idealistic Misail, who’s in his mid-twenties, is from a rich and selfconsciously respectable family in a provincial Russian town. After losing yet another office job and further infuriating his dour father, Misail moves out to live only off his own labor. He eventually finds a foothold with a team of housepainters. Town tradesmen and shopkeepers scorn him as a traitor to his class: when he walks the streets in shabby workmen’s clothes, he’s teased and abused, and people throw things at him. Those who’d once been his social equals mostly shun him, but Marya Viktorovna, the attractive blonde daughter of the local railway magnate, is intrigued. She invites Misail to her mansion and assures him that being rich and living off others is dull. Then she presses him to tell her more about housepainters: “What are they like? Funny?” Misail reports, “I began telling about housepainters but was abashed, being unaccustomed, and spoke like an ethnographer, gravely and ploddingly.”

An intellectual young doctor who has also joined the party likewise recounts stories about workingmen, but with such drama—reeling, weeping, kneeling, lying on the floor—that Marya laughs until she cries. Next the doctor sings; then Marya impersonates singers and sketches her visitors in her album. Over dinner, Marya joins the doctor in drinking toasts to high ideals—“friendship, reason, progress, freedom”—laughing hysterically, while Misail looks on, noting all.

I had been finding an unexpected source of energy in Chekhov’s writings for a few months when I met this passage. Encountering this characterization of an ethnographer, I laughed too: from the fun of disciplinary self-recognition, and from the extreme contrast embodied in the slapstick reenactments by the energetic doctor. The very question of whether housepainters are funny has an edge of parody: the young woman, bored silly in the provincial town, is looking above all for diversion, and she clearly isn’t that interested in housepainters beyond Misail. No wonder earnest Misail feels his account is not compelling.

The word “ethnography”—like “anthropology” itself—is a term that appeared with the developing social sciences in the nineteenth century. “Ethno” is from ethnos, a group of people who share a way of life; “graphy” is tied to inscription, or writing. Originally intended to offer detailed accounts of other, culturally distinct ways of life, ethnography has been famously termed “writing culture.” But travelers, missionaries, and colonial officers had also been writing about other cultures, and ethnography was from its very inception torn between contrary impulses: to present empirical observations gathered through specific methods and processed with theory, or to appeal to readers’ imaginations with colorful stories. While ethnography attempts to represent life in particular settings, the related practice of ethnology places lived particulars in a comparative framework, theorizing concepts across contexts. (In an earlier translation of the passage I quoted, Misail speaks “like an ethnologist, gravely and tediously.”)

Anton Chekhov knew ethnography at least partly through background research for his nonfiction book Sakhalin Island. He had himself gestured toward the two faces of ethnography before his departure for Sakhalin in 1890, when he described himself as having “scientific and literary purposes in mind.” I dwell more on the ethnographic aspects of Sakhalin Island in chapter 2, “Place,” but for the moment I want to pause at Misail Poloznev’s perception that when he spoke seriously and tediously about a form of life, he sounded like an ethnographer. Certainly, ethnography can be written in dry, dense, and convoluted ways. But from the nineteenth century onward, there have also been ethnographers who have written in lively, engaging styles. Even as different national and institutional settings have shaped the central goals and perceived borders of ethnography, every generation of ethnographers has produced—and continues to nurture—some brilliant stylists and storytellers.

Ethnographies with literary panache are not uniformly celebrated in anthropological histories—sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. But these have occasionally reached wide popular audiences and are regularly pulled out to hold the attention of undergraduates in introductory anthropology courses. In the pages ahead, I look for examples of ethnographic craft in these more literary, humanistic, and frequently feminist works. I also turn to books that aren’t strictly ethnographies, or explicitly related to anthropology at all, but that I consider to be deeply ethnographic in their ability to vividly represent people within shared situations. Pressing beyond the tight exclusivity of “ethnography,” then, I make room for what a writer might learn from the ethnographic aspects of other forms of writing.

Mostly I draw on nonfiction, though through Chekhov I touch on fiction too. So for example, while “My Life” is in no way a formal ethnography, the story is saturated with ethnographic insight about late nineteenth-century Russia. Even if Misail feels himself to have failed in offering a pretty woman an interesting account of his work, Chekhov’s story about Misail reveals the quotidian handling of linseed oil, paint, and turpentine; the interchanges among men as they work together to paint the railway line, town club, and atmospheric cemetery church; and the demeaning rituals and mutual dishonesty in relationships with clients. Throughout the story Misail brings a wide-eyed perplexity to social worlds that he sees afresh after having shifted social positions. Following his travails, readers learn about the nobility’s romantic fascination with the lives of peasants and laborers, about class structure, social inequality, gender relations, intellectual fads, small-town enthusiasms, and more. If Misail isn’t literally taking notes, he is always noting what other people are saying and doing, and trying to figure out what this could mean. He discovers, close-up, the textures and rhythms of life among town laborers and, later, peasants in the countryside; simultaneously, he is forced to revise his views of upper-class people he once thought he understood. This dual movement of trying to grasp the exotic or unfamiliar while also reevaluating the familiar is of course key to the practice of ethnography.

In this chapter I offer a few writing exercises directed toward shaping a larger outcome from the smaller pieces of writing I suggest through the chapters ahead. I also present some very basic tools for composition, forged from an alloy of ethnography and creative nonfiction. As my mother said, pencil in hand, looking up from an earlier version of these pages, “It’s not just a question of getting people going with their writing. A lot of people I know have no problem writing. The bigger thing I’d like to know is, do you have any thoughts on how to put all the different little bits together?”

Taking Stock

You might be working in the frame of a well-delineated research project that involves systematic methods for assembling data, presupposes particular questions, and participates in disciplinary conversations. For a formal ethnographic research project, one intended for publication, you will need to satisfy the human subject protocols required by universities and granting bodies, and become conversant with relevant literature. Alternately, you might be contemplating creative nonfiction that draws on your own memories and observations without an explicit scholarly apparatus, addressing an interested reader of no particular disciplinary affiliation. However you may be developing your materials, keep your intended audience or audiences in mind: you may need to defend your choices.

Before you begin writing in the company of this book, I suggest that you inventory the raw materials you hope to draw on. Bring out your older scribblings and writings, whether lodged in journals, letters, e-mails, blogs, finished pieces, drafts of grant proposals, or formal field notes. Also assemble nonwritten materials: photographs, videos, recordings, music. The very project of sorting and handling these raw or partly processed materials will reconnect you with them afresh. Organize these, so you know what’s where when you need it: “piles to files,” as a friend says. And if you have meticulously arranged your files, look through them to remind yourself of your full range of materials.

As you proceed through this book, freewriting from prompts or producing more polished two-page pieces from the exercises presented at the end of each chapter, continually ask yourself how you’d like all this to add up. What form do you envision? If you’re writing within an institutional setting, you may be bound to a very particular form: a term paper, a conference paper, a dissertation, a journal article, a scholarly book. Depending on the immediate audience, you may be able to enliven and subvert a given form, but be attentive to what’s expected of you; if necessary, protect your innovations by citing disciplinary precedents. You might allow the form to emerge from materials given to you by the people you seek to describe: their central metaphors and organizing principles. You might collaborate with those you are writing about to arrive at a form that will satisfy both your goals and theirs. Depending on your eventual goal, your work may be driven more by stories or by theories; larger contexts and ideas might remain tacit, or you might draw these into explicitly stated orientations and arguments, marked with citation and backed up by a bibliography. In his wonderful book that assembles fiction techniques to craft nonfiction, Theodore Rees Cheney observes that “creative nonfiction writers inform their readers by making the reading experience vivid, emotionally compelling, and enjoyable while sticking to the facts.” Ethnographies can also be vivid, emotionally compelling and enjoyable, but if written within a conventional disciplinary frame they are also expected to be clearly argued, intellectually persuasive, and theoretically insightful.

Here, then, is my first prompt for a bout of freewriting. The instructions I offer are intended to help you start off and set your words moving; after this, just write forward without worrying about polish. Later you can look back, clarify, and rearrange. For the particularly broad and open-ended freewrites in this chapter, I suggest approximate times; in subsequent chapters I leave the times to you. If you feel unsure as you meet these prompts, blurry statements like “I’m not exactly sure” or “something about x” are fine; just keep writing. See where the flow of your own words takes you. I usually learn something I wasn’t consciously aware of as I give form to diffuse ideas, feelings, and images through written words.

Beginning with the words “I most hope to write . . .” write forward for at least 5 minutes.

Now reflect on what you wrote. Most likely, this turned out to be something very general. Trying to describe my intentions to myself, at different times I started with “a book about writing ethnographically, livened up by inspiring examples and practical exercises,” “a book about writing that also introduces readers to Anton Chekhov,” and even just “a book that will be useful, even if it is incomplete.” Nothing too fancy, but each time the words became a compass offering a larger orientation and direction.

Now I ask you to move to particulars:

Quickly write down a few images that jump out at you as you think of the materials you’re drawing on for this undertaking. Continue for at least 5 minutes.

Here’s an unpolished image that emerged for me as I thought of the writing classes and workshops that inspired this book: “rapt faces as participants listen to each others’ comments, the sense of perfect attentiveness around tables laid out in a square, light falling through windows along one side of the room, my own listening, note taking, anxious tension over being properly present, and also thinking ahead on how to move the discussion forward . . .” Turning to images with concrete details can be a way of grounding yourself in the lived context of your undertaking. (Alternatively, if you started with specifics, move to the most general possible statement about what you hope to write.)

Also start imagining what a reader might make of your offering. I often think back to a letter written by J. D. Salinger’s character Seymour Glass to his younger brother, Buddy, who wanted to be a writer. Seymour reminded Buddy that he’d already been a reader for a long time, and advised him to sit still, ask himself what he’d most want to read, and write just that. Try this. Think about your finished product, then step away, trying to imagine how you’d most appreciate meeting it as a reader.

Beginning with the words “I’d most want to read . . .” write for at least 2 minutes.

Taking this perspective, I was immediately aware that I’d want “a book that was short, to the point, and energizing.” You’re likely to come up with different characterizations of your project at different times. Between very specific exercises, you may find it helpful to periodically revisit and refresh such statements of larger intent.

First Impressions

Looking back at the journey that led you to care about something can also be a way to get started. As I began working on this book, I thought again of what had inspired my orientation to ethnographic writing. I quickly list these as a way of offering tribute to mentors even as I reflect more on ethnography.

I first seriously settled into reading ethnographies as a freshman in college. I had glanced at popular anthropology paperbacks before that, but it was only when I signed up for a seminar taught by Irving Goldman that I closely read a sequence of ethnographies. In a quiet yet forceful way, Mr. Goldman (as we called him) taught us to read closely for cultural details. Rather than emphasizing a book’s argument, we learned how new patterns and connections could emerge from paying attention to observed details and indigenous exegeses of their meaning. At the time, I had no intention of becoming an anthropologist, but cultural anthropology spoke powerfully to the many cultural influences in my background. I grew up in Bombay as a child of an American mother and Indian father. I found myself exploring aspects of this background in creative writing workshops and was especially drawn to the colloquial, unadorned style of my writing teacher Grace Paley.

I first thought about ethnography in relation to writing during my senior year. This was my second anthropology class, this time with Bradd Shore, who proved so inspiring and charismatic that my nebulous plans for graduate school took shape around anthropology. At some point in the semester, Bradd Shore assigned two essays from The Interpretation of Cultures, by the influential anthropologist and cultural critic Clifford Geertz. I was intrigued by what Geertz had to say about ethnography, not just as a means of recording different ways of life, but also as a form of writing. In the introductory essay Geertz characterizes ethnography as a form of “thick description.” To use the example that he borrows from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, thick description would tell you not just that someone’s eye had contracted but whether the contraction was a twitch, a wink, a parody of a wink, a rehearsal for a parody of a wink, or a knowingly faked wink. Layering meaning into closely observed details, thick description helps make people’s behavior more comprehensible when we aren’t immediately familiar with their assumptions.

I first thought about ethnography in relation to strategies of storytelling as a graduate student. In the classes of my generous advisor, the folklorist Alan Dundes, I learned to think about how stories carry personal and cultural meaning,...