Elaine Lawless - Reciprocal Ethnography and the Power of Womens Narratives

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ISBN 978-0-253-04296-5 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04297-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04298-9 (ebook)

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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

E LAINE LAWLESS HAS BEEN A CHAMPION FOR THE ethnographic study of womens 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. Lawlesss 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 womens stories.

The suppression and emergence of womens 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 womens 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. Lawlesss book locates truth in dialogue, even when the dialogue produces uncomfortable differences in interpretation.

Undoubtedly, readers will pore over Lawlesss 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, Lawlesss work is foundational.

Lawlesss 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 womens 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 Lawlesss work remains central to our enterprise. She has taken on some of the most difficult questionstheoretically, 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 Peoples Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy and (with Carol Bohmer) of Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion.