What Am I Doing?: Part II

An ethnography seeks to describe all or part of the culture or life of a person, or a community, by identifying and describing the practices or beliefs of that person or community.

Anti-Defamation League

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Zora Neale Hurston, in Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942

Zora Neale Hurston (1/7/1891-1/28/1960) was an anthropologist, ethnographer, author and American folklorist. She published dozens upon dozens of essay, short stories and plays. She was a beautifully evocative, sharp, funny and lyrical writer. In the late 1920s she drove her car through the rural south as an anthropology student at Barnard, collecting African-American folklore. Mules and Men is the collection of the material and research about people and places she gathered in Florida. Her introduction talks about why she starts by going back to her old hometown to begin this work. I quote it generously below.

I am still figuring out who to answer the question everyone asks me about my work on Truth or Consequences. What are you doing here? Or there, depending on who is asking. I am still figuring this out honestly, despite the 20 page IRB application that I wrote up so the University would allow me to come to T or C to talk to people (see Part 1 of this post for more on my IRB). 

I want to talk to people mostly. This is basically what I am doing. I want to ask people what they think about the town, and what kinds of things they like about it, and what kinds of things they like to do. I want to know what people think that other people think about the town. I want to know about memories and activities and festivals. I want to know why people visit and why people stay. Really thinking about it on my drive home last week, after my second week of "fieldwork" and my first formal interview, I figured out that I want to know these things because I love the town. Truth or Consequences is not my hometown in some ways, but in other ways it is. I grew up in Albuquerque, but I also grew up in T or C. It is part of my "familiar ground."  The idea of familiar ground is something Hurston writes about as she sets off to do her fieldwork and research:  

Dr. Boas asked me where I wanted to work and I said, "Florida," and gave, as my big reason, that "Florida is a place that draws people, white people from all the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West." So I knew that it was possible for me to get cross section of the Negro South in the one state. And then I realized that I was new myself, so it looked sensible for me,choose familiar ground.

First place I aimed to stop to collect material was Eatonville, Florida.

And now, I'm going to tell you why I decided to go to my native village first. I didn't go back there so that the home could make admiration over me because I had been up North to college and come back with a diploma and a Chevrolet. I knew they were not going to pay either one of these I items too much mind. I was just Lucy Hurston's daughter, Zora and even if I had, to use one of our down home expressions,had a Kaiser baby, and that's something that hasn't been done in this Country yet, I'd still be just Zora to the neighbors. If I had exalted myself to impress the town, somebody would have sent me word in a matchbox that I had been up North there and had rubbed the hair off of my head against some college wall, and then come back there with a lot of form and fashion and outside show to the world. But they'd stand flatfooted and tell me that they didn't have me, neither my sham-polish, to study 'bout. And that would have been that.

I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger. As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke's store, I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more.

Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually underprivileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, "Get out of here!" We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather bed resistance, that is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.

The theory behind our tactics: "The white man is always trying to know into somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho' can't read my mind. I'll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song."

I knew that I was going to have some hindrance among strangers. But here in Eatonville I knew everybody was going to help me. So below Palatka I began to feel eager to be there and I kicked the little Chevrolet right along...

  

I know I will have some hindrances too, many of my own making. There will probably be a good number of people who won’t feel much need to talk to me. Trying to know someone else’s business is a treacherous thing. I have year to convince people of my good intentions. Good intentions can be treacherous too, so I will watch this. But I know I am in the right place, a familiar pace. Already there are a lot of people who are helping me. I am eager to be here in Truth or Consequences. I will, if I do this thing well, convince people that my business here is good business, and what I am doing, poking and prying with a purpose, is worth doing.