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.

http://dmc.tamu-commerce.edu/u?/HCHC,149

This is a link to a thesis written in 1928 for the author’s Master of Arts degree.  It was presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of  Texas.  I am doing a research project focusing on my husband’s grandmother, Emogene Rabb Mize, who was a teacher in the 1920s and 1930s.  The reason for this research is to analyze what  a white teacher’s education consisted of in the 1920s and I am also researching what a black teacher’s education would have been at the same time.  This is proving to be a very valuable document for my research.

Richard Wright, author of 12 Million Black Voices, also wrote the acclaimed Native Son.  In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright chronicles the journey of his race, from the shores of Africa to the cotton fields and “big houses” of the South to the tenements of the North.  This chronicle, though, is anything but a dry accounting of a people’s history.  He writes it in first person and it is written in a lyrical poetic voice.  The beauty of his words sometimes makes the horror of the circumstances he is describing seem surreal.  Unfortunately, those circumstances were all too real.

Reading this was difficult because it brings home the reality that the slaves faced when they were brought to this country – this land of dreams.  To say that much of what was achieved in this country during its nascent years was built upon the backs of the black people is true.   Wright examines a world in which the “captors were hard men, brutal men; yet they held locked somewhere within their heart s the fertile seeds that were to sprout into a new world culture, that were to blossom into a higher human consciousness… these men leaped upon the road of progress; and their leap was the windfall of our tragedy” (12).  It was these men “whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with the light of the future,” yet these men “denied our human personalities, tore us from our native soil, weighted our legs with chains, stacked us like cord-wood in the foul holes of clipper ships, dragged us across thousands of miles of ocean, and hurled us into another land, strange and hostile, where for the second time we felt the slow, painful process of a new birth amid conditions harsh and raw” (12).  It is the harshest of ironies that these men who dreamed such noble dreams were the same men who saw the black race as less than human.  These men, who said God created all men equally, saw the black man as no man.

As I read Wright’s chronicle, which is accompanied by photographs taken during the Depression as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, I was at times taken with Wright’s lyrical prose, at times horrified by the circumstances he wrote about, and at times drawn and repulsed by some of the photographs.  Some of the photographs are charming – pictures of children going to church, people dancing.  Some of the photographs are horrifying – tenement kitchens in Chicago, and the hardest to see – a lynching in Georgia.  One repetitive theme throughout, though, is hope.  It was this hope that allowed these people to continually try to live, to maintain families when possible, to form communities based on family and common purpose.  It was this hope that gave some the desire to learn to read – to walk miles for an education, when they were finally allowed to attend schools.

It is for this reason, to learn about how and why people learn to read and write that I am taking this class; to learn about how people use literacy in their everyday lives.  While Wright chronicles the substandard schools that the government gave them, he also chronicles the desire many people had to learn to read books.  He says “in a vague, sentimental sort of way we love books inordinately, even though we do not know how to read them, for we know that books are the gateway to a forbidden world [emphasis mine]” (64).  He claims, “we are joyful when we hear a black man speak like a book.  The people who say how the world is to be run, who have fires in winter, who wear warm clothes, who get enough to eat, are the people who make books speak to them.”   Wright recognized that the way to power was through the portal of education, following the road of literacy.  Considering that this book was written just sixty years ago and today this country has a black president, has had other black leaders and captains of industry, is a testament to this country’s resilience as well as the resilience of the African-American people.  Reading 12 Million Black Voices was an emotional experience.  I felt sadness, admiration, and hope for the people whose journey Wright chronicled as well as this country we live in.

Wright, Richard.  12 Million Black Voices.  1941.  New York:  Basic Books,

2008.  Print.

Deborah  Mutnick writes about a project involving her graduate students and a local school celebrating its 100^th anniversary.  Claiming that “[P]laces are sensuous, laden with the repetition of daily life” (626), she talks in detail about the way the project was implemented and its results. Mutnick uses the concept of the geography of writing and what Bachelard called “the poetics of space . .. the human value of the ‘space we love’” (628).  In this project, Mutnick and her students met with people who had either attended the school at some point or those whose children attended the school.  They wanted these people’s stories to be told, stories which “have always been told; we were simply rendering them more public, more legible” (632).

As I read Mutnick’s piece, I was reminded of the concept of place as character in literature.  In reading literature or watching film and television, often the location of the story is as important as the characters who people the story.  For instance, what would a story like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist be without the bleak inner city of Victorian London or a television show like “Sex in the City” be if the city was Podunk, Anywhere?  Mutnick says that their intent was to “engage students and other participants in research and writing that, as Christian Weisser puts it, “’highlight the ways in which material forces shape what gets said, who gets heard, and how these forces have structured public discourse throughout history’” (642).

Recognizing that each place is changed with each person who occupies it, either temporarily or long-term, she says that the “driving force behind the project [was] inquiry into the meaningfulness of place, infused always with the identities of those who pass through, traveling elsewhere, coming and leaving, and the mysteries for us as we take our turn.  Tracing a place’s history to its transformative moments and the global origins of past and present members is a means of reading ‘the inscription of time in the world’ that Lefebvre says produces space” (64 3).

Reading this article, knowing that we will be “inscribing the world” through our work with the Norris Community, makes it even more meaningful.  Helping people tell their stories—stories of the time they spent in their community, how it shaped their lives, how they helped shape the community itself – and to have those stories included in the written history of the Norris Community is exciting and it is an honor. I can’t wait!

Street and Lefstein claim “[U]nderstanding and defining literacy lies at the heart of ‘doing’ literacy” (47).  Prior to my starting the studies for my BA in English, I would likely have answered the question, “what is literacy?” with a surface response such as, “the ability to read and write.”  I now have been exposed to other definitions of  literacy and theoretical ways of looking at literacy and literacies, what they mean in today’s world, what we can do as educators to facilitate the acquisition of literacies, etc.  In addition to my newfound knowledge I bring to this academic conundrum my own ideas about literacy gleaned from personal experience and observations.  This conversation about literacy and literacy practices is, while necessary and intriguing, also frustrating. It is frustrating because, ultimately, while the conversation goes on, children and adults need to be taught. As Street and Lefstein put it, “in the light of this academic challenge, what are literacy policy makers and practitioners to do?” (41).

I know that this part of the book is an introduction and “mapping of the field” of literacy studies so the main objective is to give an overview of the conflicting schools on these studies.  One of the things I am hoping to see addressed is the difference in literacy for children and literacy for adults. That is, the difference in introducing or teaching each group.  As someone who took Spanish for the first time as a 40-something year old, I can attest to the fact that language acquisition for an adult is much different and, I would argue, much more difficult than that for a child.  How closely linked are literacy acquisition and language acquisition?  I can’t wait to dig deeper into these questions.

Street, Brian V. and Adam Lefstein.  Literacy: An Advanced Resource Book. New York:  Routledge, 2007. Print.