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Ethnographic Memoir

An ethnographic memoir is a nonfiction text that recounts past individual experience as representative of a particular sociocultural group. These narrative constructions convey history through a personal lens and are subject to interpretation of viewpoint by the audience and sometimes by a self-conscious author. Ethnographic memoirs are a subgenre of life-writing.

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Ethnographic memoir usually represents dramatic or life-changing events as part of an individual's life story. This narrative accounting lends itself particularly well to case study research. The reader arrives at the text prepared to learn the wider significance of particular historical events through an eyewitness account. In this way the ethnographic memoir is a form of testimony. Such testimony has a truth value similar to sworn statements in a law court. This dimension of reportage of what someone has experienced or witnessed makes the memoir compelling literature for case study research. At the same time, this feature of observation necessarily has limits. As Primo Levi explains in his memoir of Auschwitz internment between 1944 and 1945, The Drowned and the Saved, he is capable of sharing only what he lived, which is a partial experience of the Death Camp. His insight accordingly is specific to his work as a chemist and existence in the men's section of the camp. Levi's example is telling for another reason: Levi's recollections are told after much time's passing, when he has assumed a postwar position as a Jewish Holocaust survivor, scientist, and author of his experiences. Also, as he reckons, events that may have been misconstrued at the time of their occurrence have been synthesized in part on the basis of other survivor stories and are revisited on the basis of subsequent life experiences.

Commentary by Gary Weissman about Elie Wiesel's Night, his chronicle about being a teenager in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945, speaks to the revisionary process of memoir. In Wiesel's case, several versions of his experience exist (ranging in length from around 100 to 800 pages), and there are different translations of the shorter French version La nuit (starting in 1960, the most recent in 2006). Purporting his view as shared by other critics of Wiesel's memoir, Weissman interprets the various editions of Night according to Wiesel's implied audience: the Yiddish text of 800 pages for Yiddish-speaking Jews and the slim French text of about 100 pages for Christian readers. Accordingly, the case study researcher gleans that rhetorical aims affect even how much information—or data—is given to different presumed audiences.

Application

Not all ethnographic memoirs are so tragic as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's, which reflect wartime trauma. More mundane memoirs bear on case study research into ethnography while sharing important narrative characteristics with remembrances of more extreme events. Take Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Memoir, for instance. Choy's memoir is spurred by his finding out from a radio talk show that his “mother,” the woman who raised him, was not his biological mother. This call to Choy, then in 1995 a successful novelist aged 57, led him to research his life growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown. His memoir has become a source of “knowledge” cultivated through ethnographic research and searching his memory and corroborating previously neglected glimpses of insight through discussion with other members of Vancouver's Chinatown community.

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