Storytelling

Upon initial examination, analysis—something anthropologists strive to achieve—may appear distinct from storytelling. For example, the latter is geared towards eliciting emotions, while the former exudes an aura of detachment and indifference–or as Geertz (1988, 2) describes the common understanding of ethnography, “Good anthropological texts are plain texts, unpretending”.

Yet, upon closer inspection, an affinity between stories and analyses becomes apparent. Drawing on her insights from a course led by Renato Rosaldo at Stanford, Kirin Narayan (2012, 8) contends that stories possess inherent analytical qualities, and within the sequence of reasoning, analysis takes on a narrative structure. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that ethnographers, despite the deeply analytical nature of their accounts, employ narrative forms and methods that storytellers have long embraced in their craft. 

  Tap essay is a unique form of digital storytelling introduced by fiction writer Robin Sloan in his 2012 essay Fish which exploresthe distinction between “liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet” (Sloan, 2022). This narrative…

Classic ethnographic accounts are usually long. Built upon the idea of flash fiction, Stone and McGranahan (2020) describe flash Ethnography as a form of narrative that is intended to be brief and intense, stripped of excess. The genre has a…

I have discussed sketches and drawings in a separate module that you can find here. We may think of graphic novels as the combination of drawings and text, but Stacy Leigh Pigg (2015) argues that graphic novels occupy a distinctive…

Although the 1970s marks the turn towards experimenting with ethnographic forms, the practice of writing ethnographic fiction has a long history within the discipline. In her concise historical survey of ethnographic fiction, Narayan (1999, 136) identifies Adolph Bandelier’s 1890 novel,…