The Stigmatized Vernacular

Where Reflexivity Meets Untellability

Diane E. Goldstein, Amy Shuman, Diane E. Goldstein, Amy Shuman, DIANE E GOLDSTEIN

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780253024404
• eBook ISBN: 9780253024435
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reflections on the challenge of studying and discussing subjects society rejects, reviles, or considers unspeakable. As part of this multilayered conversation about stigma, this volume discusses the relationship between the stigmatized individual and our role as researchers. Here we address our own perspectives as researchers struggling with stigma issues and tellability, as well as scholarly reflexive concerns dealing with what can't be said when working with stigmatized groups or topics. The disciplinary focus of folklore positions us well to concentrate on the vernacular experience of the stigmatized, but it also propels us toward analysis of the performance of stigma, the process of stigmatization, and the political representation of stigmatized populations. These perspectives come to the fore in this book, as does the multilayered nature of stigma—its ability to reproduce, overlap, and spread, not just in terms of replication but also in terms of the ethnographer's ability to apprehend it and her ability to research and write about it.

Ann K. Ferrell

1“It’s Really Hard to Tell the True Story of Tobacco”: Stigma, Tellability, and Reflexive Scholarship

DURING MY TIME as an American Association of University Women (AAUW) fellow in 2008–2009, I was asked to speak to a Vermont AAUW chapter about my research on Kentucky burley tobacco farming.¹ I began my talk this way:

Imagine that you are a fifth-generation farmer of a farm product that is now in less demand. Much of it is being imported from overseas, and the product is associated with illness and death. . . . Now imagine that product is milk. What would that mean in Vermont?²

I thought for a long time about how to open my talk to this Vermont audience. Based on the responses and reactions that I had previously experienced when I talked about my research, I knew that their ideas about tobacco were probably based in particular stories that have contributed to the construction of a dominant and publicly acceptable way of speaking about tobacco. I wanted to acknowledge these ‘tellable’ narratives—and couch tobacco farming in other, more locally (and publicly) resonant discourses—so that my audience would be willing to hear about my research.

In this chapter, I describe how I came to examine assumptions about tobacco production and tobacco producers—both my own assumptions and those of others that I encountered—in order to discover what was deemed tellable in public discourses. A number of scholars have explored the idea of tellability, most often with regard to personal narratives and small-scale interactions. For instance, in their classic 1967 study William Labov and Joshua Waletzky describe “evaluation” as necessary to successful personal narratives: the narrator’s evaluative moves work to explain why he or she finds the story reportable in a particular context. That is, they establish tellability. And within the context of conversation analysis, Harvey Sacks argues that listeners monitor whether a narrative has value—whether it is “ ‘tellable’ in the sense of ‘worth telling’ ” (1967, 776). Amy Shuman (2005) and Diane Goldstein (2009) build on these concepts in their work on personal experience narratives and legend, and both suggest that the reverse situation, untellability, is important as well.³ Though much work on tellability and untellability centers on stories told by individual narrators, in this chapter I suggest that these concepts can be applied as productively to public discourses—talk (oral and written, vernacular and institutional) about the topic in the public sphere that reflects common, but often unquestioned, ideas and assumptions. As I will describe, the shifting public discourses about tobacco products and the tobacco industry influence talk about tobacco farming, and this interaction helps to determine what is and is not tellable. Although tobacco farmers themselves often rely on the tellable narratives I will describe, they made it clear to me that other, less familiar narratives are central to understanding the changing contexts of this traditional cultural practice—a practice that is first and foremost an occupation.

In describing how I came to locate both tellable and untellable narratives, I also suggest that increased reflexivity in our scholarship means expanding our ideas about what counts as data. For instance, I have found it useful to take note of my own personal and disciplinary assumptions and to draw on a range of informal and publicly mediated conversations about tobacco. As my interest grew to include the emerging and evolving discourses surrounding tobacco farming in the context of other public discourses on tobacco, I moved beyond the ethnographic data I had expected to collect and began to also examine data from oral, print, and internet sources, both past and present. This data is certainly not unconventional; the data that brought me to it, however, is. As I describe, it was data that I gathered beyond the field—from outsiders to the tradition I was researching—that led me to expand my research in order to understand what has become tellable.

Fieldwork Beyond the Field

The transitional circumstances facing contemporary tobacco farmers call out for documentation and interpretation, and so I began my fieldwork with a fairly conventional folklore project in mind. In 2005, Kentucky tobacco farmers were facing the end of the federal tobacco program that had been in place since the 1930s: for the first time in seventy years, they would have to raise tobacco without quotas and price supports.⁴ In addition, demand for their crop has continued to decline, not only because of what seems most obvious—declining tobacco use—but also because of the changing purchasing habits of tobacco manufacturers. For instance, between 1970 and 2002, burley tobacco imported into the United States for domestic use grew from .6 percent to 48.1 percent (Capehart 2007). Like other farmers, tobacco producers also face changing technologies, rising input costs, stagnant or falling sale prices, labor shortages, and pressures to expand and/or diversify their operations. For these and other reasons, many farmers have stopped raising tobacco altogether.

As I set out into the field, my research trajectory seemed fairly straightforward. After all, tobacco farming is a centuries-old family and occupational tradition, and the current decline has major implications for individual farmers, as well as for tobacco communities and regions.⁵ But fieldwork is a process of recognizing and responding to assumptions, particularly when they are challenged. My experience was no different: over the course of my fieldwork most of my assumptions were called into question. One of my central assumptions—the idea that there were very few tobacco farmers left in Kentucky—had itself been shaped by public discourses. Another key assumption that I had not recognized was challenged both in the field and out of it—namely, the idea that I could study tobacco farming as a cultural practice without considering the use of tobacco products, the health effects of tobacco use, and the actions of tobacco product manufacturers. I came to learn that tobacco farmers must adapt to more than marketing- and production-centered changes; they also face changes in the social and political status of the crop they grow.

In casual conversations with family, friends, and even mere acquaintances, my attempts to answer the inevitable question “What’s your research about?” generated a range of responses that required evolving negotiations on my part; gradually, I began to realize that these conversations were important.⁶ For instance, a good friend who knew that I had once been a smoker asked me, “Is it hard to not smoke, doing your fieldwork with tobacco farmers?” At the time, the question confused me, since my fieldwork was about tobacco farming, not smoking.

Frequently I am asked, “Do they smoke?” Implied is the question, “Do tobacco farmers know/admit that tobacco use is unhealthy?” On a number of occasions I’ve also been asked how farmers “feel” about raising tobacco—with the suggestion that they should feel guilty. These questions suggest a belief that tobacco farmers must be in some sort of collective denial about the health effects of tobacco use; otherwise they surely wouldn’t grow it. More than once—and I remember this most vividly in a conversation with two complete strangers at a baby shower—individuals overtly expressed the implications of these more subtle questions: “How can they grow something that kills people?”

Other questions that I encountered expressed surprise that tobacco farming remains viable in contemporary American agriculture. “Do people still grow tobacco?” I was often asked. Sometimes people would remark, “I used to see tobacco growing on my drive from [place A] to [place B]. It’s so sad that it’s gone now.” Often, people shared stories that they had heard in the news about farmers abandoning tobacco for organic vegetables, or about tobacco barns either collapsing in disrepair or being converted to other uses because they were no longer needed.

Responses to my research in academic contexts were important to attend to as well. For instance, in the spring of 2009, I had the opportunity to design and teach a course titled “Tobacco in American Culture” at a small private college in Vermont. As a first-day activity, I asked students to list their associations with the word tobacco, and within a short time I had filled an entire board with words and phrases such as the Marlboro man, Joe Camel, and Skoal; plantations and slaves; lung cancer and emphysema; and so on. We then discussed the fact that not a single student had referenced present-day tobacco farmers. The students had never envisioned this group. On another occasion, an article manuscript that I submitted to an American Studies journal was rejected; the editor noted that “the historical study of tobacco and identity raises far-reaching questions about the political economy of tobacco and its relationship to slavery that the essay does not address.” The fact that I had not discussed slavery seemed to me a peculiar basis for rejecting an article in which I examined how present-day discourses about agricultural diversification and tobacco-as-heritage serve to erase the idea of tobacco farming as a contemporary practice from public awareness. This editor had a particular narrative about tobacco in mind and was unable or unwilling to see beyond that narrative in order to consider other dimensions of the story of tobacco in the United States.

Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby argue that the ethnographer “must acknowledge that his or her own behavior and persona in the field are data” (1982, 26); I contend that our behavior and encounters out of the field are relevant as well. As informal interactions of the kind I describe above began to add up, I noticed that I was continually reshaping my ‘sound bite’ description in an attempt to make my research topic more palatable. Eventually, I realized that I needed to pay attention to these conversations rather than try to shut them down. Informal conversations about our research might be brushed off as inconsequential and unrelated to our ‘actual’ data gathering and analysis. This is not the case; moreover, valuing casual responses as data makes particular sense in the discipline of folklore, a field in which the study of the vernacular and the everyday is a hallmark. While the examples I have given from casual conversations are anecdotal, they nevertheless help to illuminate what is tellable and untellable about tobacco farming and farmers in the contemporary United States.

Thus, my data came to include not only what I learned through participant observation and interviews, but also my own initial assumptions about tobacco farming, along with the assumptions that emerged in conversations about the topic of my research. Reflection on this expanded data set led me to realize that these assumptions represented those narratives about tobacco farming that are tellable in public. Such narratives serve as “terministic screens” through which tobacco is differently understood. Kenneth Burke writes,

When I speak of “terministic screens,” I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were made with different color filters. Here something so “factual” as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, and even in form, depending on which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded. (1966, 45; italics original)

Understandings of tobacco farming—and, perhaps more importantly, the tobacco farmer—take on differing, often competing, textures and symbolic meanings when filtered through different discursive screens. The tellable narratives become the screens through which tobacco farming is viewed.

Tellable Narratives

In Other People’s Stories, Amy Shuman describes tellability this way:

Some stories are tellable but only if the teller is willing to live with existing categories for interpreting experience. Narratives impose categories on experience, but people sometimes report that their experiences don’t fit the imposed category because the category unfairly judges them or insists on motivations of deserved consequences. (2005, 7–8)

Shuman goes on to describe the relationship between tellable narratives and moral positions. She argues, “How one narrates an experience can make all the difference in determining whether an event is accepted as normal or criticized as immoral or in characterizing people as victims or willing participants” (15). Shuman is most interested in tellability and untellability in regard to stories told (or not told) by individuals about particular experiences. I contend, however, that the concept of tellability can also help us to understand the interaction between public discourses and individual narratives.

The most obvious tellable narratives about tobacco—implied in questions about whether farmers smoke and how they feel about tobacco—are intertwined: 1) tobacco causes cancer and other illnesses and 2) the industry is built on exploitation. Although tobacco has had its critics since Europ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Stigmatized Vernacular: Where Reflexivity Meets Untellability
• 1 “It’s Really Hard to Tell the True Story of Tobacco”: Stigma, Tellability, and Reflexive Scholarship
• 2 Contextualization, Reflexivity, and the Study of Diabetes-Related Stigma
• 3 Rethinking Ventriloquism: Untellability, Chaotic Narratives, Social Justice, and the Choice to Speak For, About, and Without
• 4 The Stigmatized Vernacular: Political Asylum and the Politics of Visibility/Recognition
• Index