Ethnography or fiction: An essay on confounding reader response in Barbara Myerhoff's Number Our Days
✍ Scribed by Terrence R. Whaley
- Book ID
- 104353932
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1993
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 729 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0898-5898
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A recent trend in social science is to view qualitative research as narrative. A number of researchers have, in fact, argued that many of the techniques and strategies employed in the development of their research programs have been borrowed from those of the writer of fiction (e.g.., Witherell & Noddings, 1991). In this article, I argue that this practice is not innocent and that it affects us as readers in ways unanticipated and probably unwelcome by the researchers themselves. It is a practice that, at times, can interfere with our ability or willingness to take the scientific side of the enterprise seriously. I attempt to expose these effects through a close reading of Barbara Myerhoff's Number Our Days (1978), an early instance of this kind of approach in the field of ethnography. Before taking up this text, however, I must clear some theoretical ground for the reading by rendering problematic what has become the received view for employing techniques of fiction within social science discourse. In this endeavor, I rely on the insights of Geertz (1988), who, as far as I can tell, was one of the first to see the difficulties inherent in such a joining of narrative and social science. Thus, the essay falls into three parts: (a) an exegesis of the received view, (b) Geertz' problematization of this view, and (c) a reading of Number Our Days to show how these problems manifest themselves within this ethnographic text.
It is commonplace in the social sciences now to allow and to value the presentation of qualitative research as narrative, virtually unadomed with the theoretical and conceptual trappings of the scientist. Theoretical intrusions inter-I wish to thank the Spencer Foundation for funding my time so that I could pursue this research. This article, in somewhat altered form and under the title, Narrative, Fiction, and Interpretation in the Social Sciences, was presented at the 1991 AERA convention in Chicago under the sponsorship of Division B. I would like, also, to thank the two anonymous readers and David Bloome for their helpful suggestions for revising this article.