Reciprocal Ethnography and the Power of Women's Narratives

Elaine J. Lawless

Description

Folklorist Elaine J. Lawless has devoted her career to ethnographic research with underserved groups in the American Midwest, including charismatic Pentecostals, clergywomen, victims of domestic violence, and displaced African Americans. She has consistently focused her research on women's speech in these contexts and has developed a new approach to ethnographic research which she calls "reciprocal ethnography," while growing a detailed corpus of work on women's narrative style and expressive speech. Reciprocal ethnography is a feminist and collaborative ethnographic approach that Lawless developed as a challenge to the reflexive turn in anthropological fieldwork and research in the 1970s, which was often male-centric, ignoring the contributions by and study of women's culture. Collected here for the first time are Lawless's key articles on the topics of reciprocal ethnography and women's narrative which influenced not only folklore, but also the allied fields of anthropology, sociology, performance studies, and women's and gender studies. Lawless's methods and research continue to be critically relevant in today's global struggle for gender equality.

Foreword / Amy Shuman

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Learning to Listen, Hear, and Include Women's Voices: The Genesis of Reciprocal Ethnography

1. Shouting for the Lord: The Power of Women's Speech in the Pentecostal Religious Service

2. Rescripting Their Lives and Narratives: Spiritual Life Stories of Pentecostal Women Preachers

3. Access to the Pulpit: Reproductive Images and Maternal Strategies of the Pentecostal Female Pastor

4. "I was afraid someone like you . . . an outsider . . . would misunderstand": Negotiating Interpretive Differences Between Ethnographers and Subjects

5. Women's Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography as Feminist and Emergent

6. Writing the Body in the Pulpit: Female-sexed Texts

7. Woman as Abject: Resisting Cultural and Religious Myths that Condone Violence Against Women

Appendix: Selected Publications by Elaine J. Lawless

Index

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Feminist
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Religión
• Pentecostalismo
• Folclore
• Narrative
• Ethnography
• Pentecostalism
• Mythology
• Feminism
• Anthropology
• Religion
• Abuse
• Preacher
• Pentecôtisme
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253042996
• Langue: English

Extrait

RECIPROCAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE POWER OF WOMEN S NARRATIVES
RECIPROCAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE POWER OF WOMEN S NARRATIVES
Elaine J. Lawless Foreword by Amy Shuman
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
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2019 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences. Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04296-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04297-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04298-9 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
First Printing 2019
For Madison, Luke, Olivia, and Chlo ,
who bless my life every day, make me proud,
and give me hope for the future
CONTENTS
Foreword / Amy Shuman
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Learning to Listen, Hear, and Include Women s Voices: The Genesis of Reciprocal Ethnography
1 Shouting for the Lord: The Power of Women s Speech in the Pentecostal Religious Service
2 Rescripting Their Lives and Narratives: Spiritual Life Stories of Pentecostal Women Preachers
3 Access to the Pulpit: Reproductive Images and Maternal Strategies of the Pentecostal Female Pastor
4 I Was Afraid Someone Like You . . . an Outsider . . . Would Misunderstand : Negotiating Interpretive Differences between Ethnographers and Subjects
5 Women s Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography as Feminist and Emergent
6 Writing the Body in the Pulpit: Female-Sexed Texts
7 Woman as Abject: Resisting Cultural and Religious Myths That Condone Violence against Women

Appendix: Selected Publications by Elaine J. Lawless
Index
FOREWORD
E LAINE L AWLESS HAS BEEN A CHAMPION FOR THE ethnographic study of women s narratives and cultural practices for her entire career. This book represents the range of her work, from her classic study of rural, white Pentecostal women to her study of women preachers and her more recent research on the narratives told by abused women who have sought refuge in shelters. Throughout her work, Lawless has listened to stories told by women whose stories are not known and not valued. She pays close attention to how they describe themselves and explores the complexity of the cultural categories they use. For example, in her study of the Pentecostal women, she turns to the term they use to describe themselves, handmaidens of the Lord, to understand how they regard themselves as subservient to men in religious service and in daily life. Lawless s work explores how these women nonetheless sustain their own voices and sometimes defy social restrictions.
All of the women Lawless studied described an absence of stories about their lives. When they did tell their stories to Lawless, they did not see them as part of a collective narrative. Lawless was able to identify patterns in their stories about themselves; for example, she found similar ways of recounting the awareness of the calling to become a preacher. However, as Lawless notes, the stories were not only not told but often suppressed, and an important part of the shared dialogue was about the emergence of women s stories.
The suppression and emergence of women s accounts of their own experiences have been significant topics in feminist research, and much has been written about both the conditions in which narratives are told or not told and about whether telling the stories changes the larger social conditions of subjugation. As collectors of women s narrative, folklorists have been central in this enterprise. Lawless advances the project significantly by addressing the problems of the intertwined claims to truth and interpretation and by outlining the methods of reciprocal ethnography, which includes the dialogic coproduction of interpretation.
Using the methods of reciprocal ethnography, Lawless conducted extensive discussions with a group of women preachers who told her their life stories and engaged in a dialogue with her about their and her interpretations. Her work confronts one of the central issues facing folklorists, oral historians, and others who collect and study narratives about experience. The women objected to the idea that their narratives were constructed and instead insisted that they were true. Lawless explained that our narratives are based on expectations and previously existing ways of describing experience that can serve as scripts that we confirm, reject, and renegotiate. This is part of the dialogic dimension of narrative; we incorporate other voices and integrate them with our own. Not only our actual listeners but also earlier voices become part of the dialogic creation of narrative. In an age of fake news, recognizing the validity of personal experience narratives has become even more important. Lawless s book locates truth in dialogue, even when the dialogue produces uncomfortable differences in interpretation.
Undoubtedly, readers will pore over Lawless s book for its honest discussion of the difficult problems of contested cultural interpretation when, as fieldworkers, we attempt to understand people as they understand themselves and when, inevitably, if we listen as carefully as Lawless does, we recognize the gaps and gulfs that emerge out of sustained dialogue. Lawless proposes the methods of reciprocal ethnography to address these limits. Far from suggesting that scholarly and cultural interpretations are at odds with each other, Lawless instead interrogates how her preconceptions and assumptions as a scholar are also shaped by her own personal history. She pauses to interrogate her own biases and to create and sustain an ongoing dialogue with the people she studies. This has become a central concern of feminist research, and in the field of folklore feminist studies, Lawless s work is foundational.
Lawless s book also provides important conversations among folklorists, feminists, religion scholars, sociologists, literary scholars, and others. Articulating the contribution of folklore, she demonstrates how attention to both observations of everyday experience and the aesthetics of narrative performance challenges some of the central claims in other disciplines. For example, in her discussion of essentialist claims about women s experience as relational, Lawless provides an important counternarrative. The women preachers Lawless studied contextualize claims to the relational; complicating the essentialist claims, they describe how being seen as a mother can interfere with their authority as a preacher. Attending to these situational complexities requires ethnographic observation not usually available through other modes of research.
As we move into the next generation of research on feminism and folklore, Elaine Lawless s work remains central to our enterprise. She has taken on some of the most difficult questions-theoretically, methodologically, and ethically. Reading this book, which intertwines the personal and the scholarly on so many levels, will be, for some readers, a life-changing experience.
Amy Shuman
The Ohio State University
AMY SHUMAN is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She is author of Other People s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy and (with Carol Bohmer) of Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
E VEN THOUGH I AM DELIGHTED TO SEE THIS collection of my essays dealing with the birth and evolution of what I have called reciprocal ethnography appear in print, my true legacy as a folklorist is, and will continue to be, the brilliant graduate students I have had the pleasure of working with at the University of Missouri. Over the years, they have read my work and engaged with it, much as I have advocated that we do the same with those we study in the field. Their own field research and written ethnographies, their dedication to teaching folklore as it lives and breathes in life, literature, theater, and creative endeavors, their innovative work in the public sector arts and humanities world, and their continued influence on me and the field we love push us all to question and continue to grow as activist folklorists. I am cautious about listing the names of all of my folklore graduate students only because I might omit one person. You know who you are, and you know how much I admire each of you and what you do.
Within the American Folklore Society, I have also been blessed to have longstanding friends and colleagues who have inspired me every single day to be a good folklorist, providing a dedicated community in which to flourish and evolve. You know who you are too.
At the University of Missouri, I have been most fortunate to have Anand Prahlad as a folklore colleague devoted to the work of folklore and creative writing. I thank him for his steady support of me and my work, as well as for his dedication to our joint teaching and mentoring of our folklore students. My survival in the academic world was made possible largely by his warm friendship and his ability to help me see beyond the petty department politics and keep my eye on what really matters.
At Indiana University Press, I thank Gary Dunham and Janice Frisch for their continued confidence in my