Post-Modern Etnography & a Story

The tale, the legend, the essay as well as other similar forms of writing are unrelated to traditional oral culture. The storyteller, who is part of oral culture, takes what he learns from listening and presents it back to his audience when he tells his stories, intertwining the experience and the knowledge into everyday life. Walter Benjamin defines storytelling as a history of somebody's experience.

In writing his essay, "The Storyteller," however, Benjamin has created something very close to what happens between the art of storytelling and the listener by explaining himself through stories and anecdotes. Benjamin also goes onto explain how the art of storytelling is disappearing. "Facts" may be related in a straightforward manner, but most people are not comfortable sharing their experiences and are embarrassed to tell stories. Additionally, more and more people are becoming isolated from one another due to their dependency on television, computers, or maybe even a preferred lifestyle. As Benjamin notes:

Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it (Benjamin 89

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f life" or the reality the novelist has used to communicate to the reader. The novel, however, shifts the locus of wisdom from experience to literature and contributes to the decline of storytelling by isolating the former active listener into the now passive reader. Benjamin explains that, "the mining of life is really the center about which the novel moves . . . here 'mining of life' -- there, 'moral story': with these slogans novel and story confront each other" (99). In the end, storytelling may be seen as being counter to today's lifestyles, despite the fact that the essential point of storytelling has been to bring people together. Post-Modern Ethnography S.A. Tyler Ethnography has become a fairly popular research method, and began in the late nineteenth century. As Tolson points out in "Social Surveillance and Subjectification," Mayhew's ideas and origins for interviewing people for social research purposes was the first step in establishing the field of ethnography. Ethnographic research centers on the life experiences of people and how they relate to their cultural roots. This provides researchers with the opportunity to more closely study cultures and their traditions through the everyday lives and experie

Category: Psychology - P