assignment sheet | student responses

 


Interviewing with an Artifact
(adapted from Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research, Second Edition, Box 27)
Bonnie Sunstein, University of Iowa

The fieldworker must choose, shape, prune, discard this and collect finer detail on that, much as a novelist works who finds some minor character is threatening to swallow the major theme, or that the hero is fast talking himself out of his depth. But unlike the novelist...the fieldworker is wholly and helplessly dependent on what happens....One must be continually prepared for anything, everything--and perhaps most devastating--for nothing.

Margaret Mead, Letters from the Field: 1925-1975

Researching people means "stepping in" to the world views of others and "stepping out" of your own. As they share their own artifacts and learn to interview others about theirs, students learn the value of honoring difference as well as the skills to write and read about it. When they can confront "difference" as it appears in one anothers' possessions, they enter others' perspectives by "stepping out" of their own. Insider and outsider stances support one another. Teachers and students can use artifacts as research tools in their study of the cultures and subcultures of others, in their quest for family stories. In short, they can ask the ethnographic question, "What's it like for that person in this place?" This exercise emphasizes the everyday skills of listening, questioning, and researching people.

Try an Artifact Exchange: To investigate the story behind an object from another person's point of view, choose partners, and act as both interviewer and informant. Select an interesting artifact that the partner is either wearing or carrying (a key chain, a piece of jewelry, an item of clothing)‹or, better yet, have the partner do the selecting. Try these background research strategies of observational and personal notetaking:

 

1. O.N. (Observation Notes): Take quiet time to inspect, describe, and take notes on the artifact your informant has given you. Pay attention to its form and speculate about its function. Where do you think it comes from? What is it used for?

2. P.N. (Personal Notes): What does it remind you of? What do you already know about things similar to it? How does it connect to your own experiences? What are your hunches about the artifact? In other words, what assumptions do you have about it? (For example, you may be taking notes on someone's ring and find yourself speculating about how much it costs and whether the owner of the artifact is wealthy). It is important here to identify your assumptions and not mask them.

And then, after the above preliminary solitary research:

3. Interview the informant: Ask questions and take notes on the story behind the artifact. What people are involved in it? Why is it important to him or her? How does the owner use it? Value it? What's the cultural background behind it? After recording your informant's responses, read your observational notes to each other to verify or clarify the information.

After the interview, begin to analyze and write up research on the "other's" chosen artifact:

4. Theorize: Think of a metaphor that describes the object. How does the artifact reflect something you know about the informant? Could you find background material about the artifact? Where would you look? How does the artifact relate to a larger history or culture?

5. Write: In several paragraphs about the observations, the interview, and your theories, create a written account of the artifact and its relationship to your informant. Give a draft to your informant for her response.

6. Exchange: Write a response to your interviewer's written account, detailing what was interesting and surprising. At this point, the informant can point out what the interviewer didn't notice, say, or ask that might be important to a further understanding of the artifact. You will want to exchange your responses again, the interviewer explaining what she learned from the first exchange.

7. Reflect: Write about what you learned about yourself as an interviewer. What are your strengths? Your weaknesses? What assumptions or preconceptions did you find that you had which interfered with your interviewing skills? How might you change this?

 

As learners, then, when we conduct an interview, we "get" a story and write a short cultural portrait. We also learn about ourselves--and our own stories--in the process. We learn a system for field study, the basis for a single assignment, a fascinating piece of portrait writing, or the foundation for an entire research project.

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Student responses:

* by Vicky Grube:

My partner handed me a golden bracelet. I looked at my trade. Parading around my palm like minute circus elephants were some twenty small, smooth wooden balls held together by a cinnamon colored piece of thin elastic. This bracelet soughed about a world of timelessness, simplicity and meaning. There were small markings on these pea sized balls. The imprint was unfamiliar, so I figured the bracelet was very old– when was elastic invented?– or from someplace distant. Elastic seemed a fairly recent invention so I deduced that the bracelet must be from a place far away, where meaning is expressed in simple forms.

What were these little balls made of? Living smack in an oak forest during a bumper year for acorns, I couldn’t help but connect the small brown bracelet balls with what has been cracking on my roof. Twice daily I sweep heaps of acorns off my porch imagining if I ever skipped a day of whisking how these nuts would bury my ankles. So, I have acorns on the brain.

My informant revealed to me the story of the bracelet. From Korea, made from seeds, this was a Buddist prayer bracelet and the little spheres were Korean characters representing the basic lessons of Buddah. Having traveled to Korea, my informant adored these aesthetically simple bracelets and kept buying and giving them away. Other bracelets are made from wood or jade. The scarcity of trees makes the manufacturing of even wooden chopsticks illegal. Because wood has been quite scarce since the Korean War, wooden beads are worn only by the elderly.

“My grandmother’s cedar chest and peaceful temples on mountains remind me of the cedar smell of these seeds,” croons my informant. She continues, “ It’s a lost world there.” Her face lights up as she demonstrates the rolling of the balls back and forth between her palms. With the motion of a child turning clay over and over to make a snake, or a Catholic furling a rosary, I saw these rolling beads travel up and over her palms- swiftly moving, keeping her warm.


* by Kerry Reilly:

The Thing She Carries

The brown leather backpack is slightly worn. Not an everyday pack, but it hasn’t been coddled. It has carried books, lunches, bottles of water. It’s an art object, a one-of-a-kind, this pack with dashes hammered into the leather by a craftsman or craftswoman. “The fabric is called manta,” Amy Leach, the owner, tells me. The patches of manta are bright. Initially, the weave reminds me of Guatemalan worry dolls but Amy tells me the pack was given to her as a gift when she lived for a year in Peru.

The thing she carries. Sometimes. “It’s not a particularly comfortable pack,“ Amy tells me and I imagine the leather straps digging into her collarbones as she treks along the Inca Trail on the way to Macchu Pichu. Which she did.

When I had come back from Africa, I remember saying to my friend Colin, Do you realize that these boots have seen the top of Mount Kilimanjaro? He looked at me, smiled, shook his head and put his hands on my shoulders. Do you realize that this person has seen the top of Mount Kilimanjaro? But the objects are charged. Perhaps because more than people, they seem to stay the same. The pack may carry books, a Chap Stick, pencils, a rubber band for Amy’s hair. But it is also full of memories, which are a type of food. The word knap, as in knapsack, actually means food in Danish. A bag full of memories of a year in Peru where Amy taught eleven-year-old Erin to play the violin. Memories of Erin’s father, the head of the Peruvian Potato Council. Memories of sitting down for the vegetarian meals Erin’s mother cooked every week.

The first knapsacks were worn by soldiers. They were for carrying necessities. How did Amy’s decision to go to Peru--and all that she experienced there-- alter her destiny ? And what about her decision to come back? “I think about Erin all the time,” Amy tells me. “She’d be fourteen or fifteen right now. That’s a lot of change. She was really a natural at the violin.” Her words make me think of Milan Kundera’s words: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. After soldiers, travelers began to carry knapsacks. They used them to carry light articles. Even with nothing in it, Amy’s backpack is heavy. The leather, the manta, the silver buckles. The Inca Trail. Erin. Her parents. A year of riding the bus through Lima, backpack on the floor beneath her…

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