Serendipitous Wanderer's Blog



This week we read Shane, The Lone Ethnographer: A Beginner’s Guide to Ethnography by Sally Campbell Galman.  I have mixed feelings about this book.  It is a graphic novel and the artist in me – I have a minor in Art and I used to own a (successful) graphic design and screenprinting business – reacted quite strongly and negatively to the graphic illustrations within this book.

First, though, I will address the content of the graphic novel.  The information in the book was very informative and instructive.  It covers “the most important historical roots, theoretical foundations, and conceptual issues in ethnography and anthropology” according to Donna Dehyle of the University of Utah in a blurb on the back cover of the book.  Since I have never studied nor conducted an official ethnographic research project and have never taken an anthropology course, this was a good introduction to the history of ethnographic studies.  I appreciated the step-by-step introduction to the undergirding concepts of this type of study.  Additionally, I appreciated the A-Zs of the field’s terminology.  This book gave me good foundational understanding of this field as it applies to ethnography and I appreciate that.

On the other hand, the graphics of this graphic novel, in my opinion, leave something to be desired.  My primary complaint is that the font used is extremely difficult to read.  The font is handwritten, not computer generated, and while the letters themselves are easy to read, the spacing between the letters and the spacing between the sentences is uneven.  This results in words that run together, letters that run together, and sentences that touch one another vertically.  While this might seem to be a petty thing to criticize, it is actually quite important.  This graphic novel is very text heavy.  Unlike many graphic novels where the drawings are often the main element of the story, the drawings in Shane, The Lone Ethnographer are really just an embellishment to the text, therefore the text is all.  The “prescriptivist” in me also will not let me fail to point out that there are several misspellings in the book.  Because of its textual heaviness, perhaps the book should have been given more pages.  It really strains the eye.