Paper short abstract:

To experiment with genre is to disturb canons of truth. Drawing on the experience of writing two narrative ethnographies for non-specialist as well as academic audiences, I explore what this hybrid genre entails, its claim to enhanced realism, and its peculiar demands on readers and writers alike.

Paper long abstract:

In a throwaway remark near the end of his life, Edmund Leach dubbed ethnographers failed novelists. What might that mean? Ethnographies and novels are alike in size, scope, and ambition, each a failed version of the other. In their aspiration to totality (Thornton’s ‘rhetoric of holism’) ethnographies are fictions. In their real-world reference, their placing of persons in situations, novels are ethnographic. Questions of credibility and verisimilitude haunt both genres - a complicated relation to truth that doesn’t trouble the exact sciences. Fiction and fieldwork are entries into other worlds; but their products are also verbal microcosms, simulacra, self-contained worlds made of words. As reports on experience, they make different demands of readers. A hybrid genre of narrative ethnography, as pursued in my After the ancestors (2015) and A shadow falls (2009), draws on techniques of fiction - plot, characterisation, time-depth, manipulation of point of view; above all, a different weighting of foreground and background - to deliver an account of fieldwork arguably closer to the ethnographer’s experience and with greater fidelity to the lives of others. Storytelling as enhanced realism.But who is it for? How can it be done? With what gains and losses? In this paper I reflect on the literary and ethnographic challenges of narrative ethnography, the problems of writing for non-specialist audiences, and the truth claims of rival approaches. I suggest that narrativity is inherent to human experience, permeating the emotional life (cf. Emotional Worlds 2019). Narrativity should be at the heart of ethnographic writing.