'Autoethnography' By Mary Louise Pratt Summary
Two Authors with One Voice
When observing the people around me, I’ve noticed that individuals have a tendency to share their personal stories in many ways. Some are too shy and others think that they will be judged if the person they were talking to knew who the story was really about. It’s an easier way to share information, whether it is personal or something basic like what they did today, through other’s words. Some individuals are confident enough to write about themselves and talk freely to the public. In both cases, Mary Louise Pratt and John Wideman show these forms of speaking known as “ethnography” and “autoethnography” through their writings.
Mary Louise Pratt uses many ideas and terms in her work “Arts of the Contact Zone”. …show more content…
Some of these terms include contact zone, transculturation, and even autoethnography. She uses these terms and ideas to help show or explain different events that she wants to make clear and important. For instance when she was talking about the conflict between the Spanish and the Incas, she described it as a contact zone because there was a clash between the two cultures as they came together. In John Wideman’s work “Our Time” I noticed that he too used the same terms, but in a different context. By comparing the two pieces, it allowed me to get a better understanding of the terms as well as the views that they were expressed in. As Pratt talks about autoethnography, she defines it as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt 487).
Using autoethnography, she ties it into her little boy and baseball. It was a way that people could define and interpret who he is based on how he put himself out there with the sport by trading cards and participating in the games. The value of looking at autoethnography in a contact zone is to see the individual struggle, whether it be by their actions or their words. It also is important to see how that individual makes it out of that contact zone and to see how they initially survive. Not only does she define autoethnography but she talks about ethnography as she defines it as being “those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others)” (Pratt 487). I noticed ethnography more in Wideman’s terms as he would speak through other characters or talk about others. For example he wrote “I know that had something to do with it. Living in Shadyside with only white people around. You remember how it was. Except for us and them couple other families it was a all-white neighborhood” (Wideman 677). In this text it was Robby speaking as he told John about the life in
Shadyside. Transculturation is another term that Pratt uses in “Arts of the Contact Zone”. Here she defines it as “processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pratt 491). In simpler terms, transculturation basically means bringing in parts of different cultures and using them to create new ideas. She uses this when she goes on to talk about Guaman Poma selecting pieces of culture from invaders and adapting it along Andean lines. Wideman also uses it in his text when he talks about the differences in the Wideman brothers as one lived in the prison and the other lived in the outside “free” world. When you look at the work of Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” and Wideman’s “Our Time” you can see that they both use these terms throughout their text. I believe that Mary Louise Pratt would want us to see texts in this autoethnographic form because it allows people to relate to what the individual writer is saying or expressing in some ways. It lets the reader see the writer in the contact zone and to really connect with their struggles to obtain the goal of possibly making a connection between reader and writer. When looking at Wideman’s work “Our Time”, it becomes important to see the text as autoethnographic text because it allows the reader to connect with the characters and their feelings or emotions better in a sense. As Pratt uses it to describe her son, Guaman Poma, or the setting of a classroom, Wideman uses the terms in a deeper sense as he creates a connection to his brother, himself, and his family.
In “Our Time” autoethnography is shown in John’s representations of himself. This includes trying to figure out what went wrong with Robby and his family and even John struggling with his habits. With John growing up and taking the ‘good route’ as you could say, he went to school and did well. Leading up to Robby, his family had done pretty well but he didn’t want to meet those high standard expectations, so he chose to be a rebel. With being a solid individual, he made his own path. As I read about his life choices, I realized that based on my culture and what I have grown up around, that many would consider his lifestyle to be harmful and bad. It could be defined as more of a ‘criminal life’. John mentioned in his writing that as far as Robby’s life went he “Wasn’t around for all that and didn’t want to know how bad things were for him” (Wideman 664). In a way, John wanted to blame himself for all the things that had gone wrong with his family. He claimed that he didn’t take his responsibilities as a brother or a son and seeing his family in such a depressed, ‘putting-on-an-act’ state didn’t help this situation out for him. Through his writing, John is representing himself but describing how feels, what he was thinking, and how he dealt with some of the situations.
Robby also had a say when it came to showing autoethnography as he would tell John his stories and his situations from his life. This could also be considered as ethnography, because John is ultimately the one who is speaking so he is talking about Robby. He would talk about the struggles from childhood up until his moment in prison and by doing so John, as well as others, would perceive this and reflect on it to determine what kind of person he was. John and Robby’s mother also had a voice in this whole piece. When she spoke, she would talk about her perceptions of the boys and their lifestyles saying “I don’t know. I just don’t know how to reach to him. He won’t listen. He’s doing wrong and he knows it but nothing I say makes any difference. He’s not like the rest of youall. You’d misbehave but I could talk to you or smack you if I had to and you’d straighten up. With Robby it’s like talking to a wall” (Wideman 663). By Wideman adding in different voices, it allowed the reader to see more of the different sides and how each were affected. Here, ethnography is also shown because many voices are being heard, showing that John Wideman is talking about others to get his point across and to show different views.
In Pratt’s work, as well as Wideman’s, ethnography is also a term that is talked about but isn’t stressed. With Pratt, it could be when she was talking about her little boy and his “Grate Advenchin”. Here she was talking about him through his words. With John Wideman it could be when he is describing Garth’s death through all the different voices, including his mother and his brother Robby. Robby stated, “Garth looked bad. Real bad. Ichabod Crane anyways, but now he was a skeleton. Lying there in the bed with his bones poking through his skin, it made you want to cry” (Wideman 658) Not only through the process of trying to figure out what was all wrong in his family’s life was autoethnography shown, but also in John as he struggles with his habits. These habits include not listening when he should, especially to Robby, feeling guilty about his success or luck in life, and even going as far as John trying to make his writing sound not poetic or fictional. With not listening to Robby enough, John said “The hardest habit, since it was the habit of a lifetime, would be listening to myself listen to him. That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms” (Wideman 672). With this, he is saying that he only hears what he wants to hear and then he tunes the rest of it out. When he doesn’t listen though, he realizes that he doesn’t really get to hear or feel what his brother is telling him- to see the struggles of his brother as his own. With his writing, John didn’t want it to sound imaginary, or fictional, and he “wondered whether or not writing about people was a way of exploiting them” (Wideman 672). In his writing he stated, “Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life? If I can’t be trusted with the story of my own life, how could I ask my brother to trust me with his?” (Wideman 672). He sort of second guesses himself as he writes, but eventually, he finds a way to write it in a sense where you can feel what he’s trying to say. Looking forward to transculturation, I found it being in the situation of John trying to get us to care about Homewood. He started off with the background of his mother growing up in Homewood stating “Her relations with people in that close-knit, homogenous community were based on trust, mutual respect, common spiritual and material concerns. Face-to-face contact, shared language and values, a large fund of communal experience rendered individual lives extremely visible in Homewood. Both a person’s self-identity (“You know who you are”) and accountability (“Other people know who you are”) were firmly established” (Wideman 669). This shows transculturation very well as it draws in the attention of the reader to feel the atmosphere of Homewood. Wideman explains the values of the Homewood culture and what it means to him and his family, especially when he states that shared language was important. Transculturation involves the sharing of ideas through cultures and Homewood does just that. While reading “Our Time” and “Arts of the Contact Zone” it’s easy to see that there are a lot of arguments and disputes throughout the text. With Pratt’s work, contact zones can be found when talking about the Spanish and the Inca’s. The Spanish wanted power and wanted people to see their culture and their ways. “Eventually the Inca’s crumbled and fell beneath the Spanish, ultimately ending the culture itself”, as Pratt mentioned in her essay (Pratt 486). Looking back at that time period, it was not a friendly or peaceful place. With Wideman’s “Our Time” it can be seen when looking at the Homewood community and the prison where John and Robby meet. The Homewood community was where John’s mother had been raised. It was described as “the close-knit, homogeneous community where the relations of people were based on trust, mutual respects, and common spiritual and material concerns. Face-to-face contact, shared language and values, a large fund of communal experience rendered individual lives extremely visible in Homewood. Both a person’s self-identity and accountability were firmly established” (Wideman 669). The contact zone created here is shown when Homewood residents were to talk about ‘French girls’; you didn’t want to mess with them. Voices of the Homewood community talked about the time when an incident happened saying, “Brown had his double-barreled shotgun across his knees and a jug of Dago Red on the ground beside him and next thing you know, Boom! Off it goes and buckshot sprayed down Cassina Way. Nobody hit at all except the little French girl, Geraldine, playing out there in the alley and she got nicked in her knee. Thank Jesus she the only one hit and she ain’t hit bad” (Wideman 669). When Elias Brown found out what really happened, he started to panic until he ran off through the corn. He didn’t want to come back around that place until he found out that her dad, John French, wasn’t after him. The contact zone created by the prison, I believe, not only shows the cultural differences, but it also shows John as being more of a dominant figure. As much as Robby stands out as a character here when he tells John about all of his struggles, John ultimately stands out more. As hard as it was for Robby to deal with all of the bad things that he had done, John came to the realization of the things that went wrong on his part. He figured out how he was a bad listener, how he wasn’t really there for his brother or his mom, and now he realized that he had some guilt with all of that. He wanted to fix all of this, but at the time didn’t really know how to. Since John wasn’t struggling with the ‘crime life’, his struggles stood out more to me as I could relate to some. With the prison, it created a contact zone between the free world and being on the inside. Generally you go to prison for doing criminal acts and by that alone, you are already in a contact zone caught between the good, bad, and right versus wrong. In prison, you are surrounded by others who also fight to survive in this new founded contact zone. This can happen because if you are in prison for a while, you don’t have freedom. You have to follow those rules and regulations more so than you do with rules outside of prison. When I completed reading Wideman’s “Our Time” I felt like I had a better understanding of the people and the situations that he was trying to show. I was definitely persuaded to care more about the types of people and the places that he was talking about because I could tell that he really put some effort and heart into it. Hearing his struggles while trying to write what was really happening helped to make a connection to show that this wasn’t just another story that I was being forced to read. Even though he uses a lot of different voices throughout his text, I feel like it ultimately helped to give that connection because I wasn’t just seeing all of this through his point of view; it was coming from the people who actually experienced the real life struggles.
Works Cited
Pratt, Mary. “Arts of the Contact Zone”. Ways of Reading. 9th edition. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011. 483-498. Print.
Wideman, John. “Our Time”. Ways of Reading. 9th edition. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011. 655-694. Print.
When observing the people around me, I’ve noticed that individuals have a tendency to share their personal stories in many ways. Some are too shy and others think that they will be judged if the person they were talking to knew who the story was really about. It’s an easier way to share information, whether it is personal or something basic like what they did today, through other’s words. Some individuals are confident enough to write about themselves and talk freely to the public. In both cases, Mary Louise Pratt and John Wideman show these forms of speaking known as “ethnography” and “autoethnography” through their writings.
Mary Louise Pratt uses many ideas and terms in her work “Arts of the Contact Zone”. …show more content…
Some of these terms include contact zone, transculturation, and even autoethnography. She uses these terms and ideas to help show or explain different events that she wants to make clear and important. For instance when she was talking about the conflict between the Spanish and the Incas, she described it as a contact zone because there was a clash between the two cultures as they came together. In John Wideman’s work “Our Time” I noticed that he too used the same terms, but in a different context. By comparing the two pieces, it allowed me to get a better understanding of the terms as well as the views that they were expressed in. As Pratt talks about autoethnography, she defines it as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt 487).
Using autoethnography, she ties it into her little boy and baseball. It was a way that people could define and interpret who he is based on how he put himself out there with the sport by trading cards and participating in the games. The value of looking at autoethnography in a contact zone is to see the individual struggle, whether it be by their actions or their words. It also is important to see how that individual makes it out of that contact zone and to see how they initially survive. Not only does she define autoethnography but she talks about ethnography as she defines it as being “those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others)” (Pratt 487). I noticed ethnography more in Wideman’s terms as he would speak through other characters or talk about others. For example he wrote “I know that had something to do with it. Living in Shadyside with only white people around. You remember how it was. Except for us and them couple other families it was a all-white neighborhood” (Wideman 677). In this text it was Robby speaking as he told John about the life in
Shadyside. Transculturation is another term that Pratt uses in “Arts of the Contact Zone”. Here she defines it as “processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pratt 491). In simpler terms, transculturation basically means bringing in parts of different cultures and using them to create new ideas. She uses this when she goes on to talk about Guaman Poma selecting pieces of culture from invaders and adapting it along Andean lines. Wideman also uses it in his text when he talks about the differences in the Wideman brothers as one lived in the prison and the other lived in the outside “free” world. When you look at the work of Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” and Wideman’s “Our Time” you can see that they both use these terms throughout their text. I believe that Mary Louise Pratt would want us to see texts in this autoethnographic form because it allows people to relate to what the individual writer is saying or expressing in some ways. It lets the reader see the writer in the contact zone and to really connect with their struggles to obtain the goal of possibly making a connection between reader and writer. When looking at Wideman’s work “Our Time”, it becomes important to see the text as autoethnographic text because it allows the reader to connect with the characters and their feelings or emotions better in a sense. As Pratt uses it to describe her son, Guaman Poma, or the setting of a classroom, Wideman uses the terms in a deeper sense as he creates a connection to his brother, himself, and his family.
In “Our Time” autoethnography is shown in John’s representations of himself. This includes trying to figure out what went wrong with Robby and his family and even John struggling with his habits. With John growing up and taking the ‘good route’ as you could say, he went to school and did well. Leading up to Robby, his family had done pretty well but he didn’t want to meet those high standard expectations, so he chose to be a rebel. With being a solid individual, he made his own path. As I read about his life choices, I realized that based on my culture and what I have grown up around, that many would consider his lifestyle to be harmful and bad. It could be defined as more of a ‘criminal life’. John mentioned in his writing that as far as Robby’s life went he “Wasn’t around for all that and didn’t want to know how bad things were for him” (Wideman 664). In a way, John wanted to blame himself for all the things that had gone wrong with his family. He claimed that he didn’t take his responsibilities as a brother or a son and seeing his family in such a depressed, ‘putting-on-an-act’ state didn’t help this situation out for him. Through his writing, John is representing himself but describing how feels, what he was thinking, and how he dealt with some of the situations.
Robby also had a say when it came to showing autoethnography as he would tell John his stories and his situations from his life. This could also be considered as ethnography, because John is ultimately the one who is speaking so he is talking about Robby. He would talk about the struggles from childhood up until his moment in prison and by doing so John, as well as others, would perceive this and reflect on it to determine what kind of person he was. John and Robby’s mother also had a voice in this whole piece. When she spoke, she would talk about her perceptions of the boys and their lifestyles saying “I don’t know. I just don’t know how to reach to him. He won’t listen. He’s doing wrong and he knows it but nothing I say makes any difference. He’s not like the rest of youall. You’d misbehave but I could talk to you or smack you if I had to and you’d straighten up. With Robby it’s like talking to a wall” (Wideman 663). By Wideman adding in different voices, it allowed the reader to see more of the different sides and how each were affected. Here, ethnography is also shown because many voices are being heard, showing that John Wideman is talking about others to get his point across and to show different views.
In Pratt’s work, as well as Wideman’s, ethnography is also a term that is talked about but isn’t stressed. With Pratt, it could be when she was talking about her little boy and his “Grate Advenchin”. Here she was talking about him through his words. With John Wideman it could be when he is describing Garth’s death through all the different voices, including his mother and his brother Robby. Robby stated, “Garth looked bad. Real bad. Ichabod Crane anyways, but now he was a skeleton. Lying there in the bed with his bones poking through his skin, it made you want to cry” (Wideman 658) Not only through the process of trying to figure out what was all wrong in his family’s life was autoethnography shown, but also in John as he struggles with his habits. These habits include not listening when he should, especially to Robby, feeling guilty about his success or luck in life, and even going as far as John trying to make his writing sound not poetic or fictional. With not listening to Robby enough, John said “The hardest habit, since it was the habit of a lifetime, would be listening to myself listen to him. That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms” (Wideman 672). With this, he is saying that he only hears what he wants to hear and then he tunes the rest of it out. When he doesn’t listen though, he realizes that he doesn’t really get to hear or feel what his brother is telling him- to see the struggles of his brother as his own. With his writing, John didn’t want it to sound imaginary, or fictional, and he “wondered whether or not writing about people was a way of exploiting them” (Wideman 672). In his writing he stated, “Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life? If I can’t be trusted with the story of my own life, how could I ask my brother to trust me with his?” (Wideman 672). He sort of second guesses himself as he writes, but eventually, he finds a way to write it in a sense where you can feel what he’s trying to say. Looking forward to transculturation, I found it being in the situation of John trying to get us to care about Homewood. He started off with the background of his mother growing up in Homewood stating “Her relations with people in that close-knit, homogenous community were based on trust, mutual respect, common spiritual and material concerns. Face-to-face contact, shared language and values, a large fund of communal experience rendered individual lives extremely visible in Homewood. Both a person’s self-identity (“You know who you are”) and accountability (“Other people know who you are”) were firmly established” (Wideman 669). This shows transculturation very well as it draws in the attention of the reader to feel the atmosphere of Homewood. Wideman explains the values of the Homewood culture and what it means to him and his family, especially when he states that shared language was important. Transculturation involves the sharing of ideas through cultures and Homewood does just that. While reading “Our Time” and “Arts of the Contact Zone” it’s easy to see that there are a lot of arguments and disputes throughout the text. With Pratt’s work, contact zones can be found when talking about the Spanish and the Inca’s. The Spanish wanted power and wanted people to see their culture and their ways. “Eventually the Inca’s crumbled and fell beneath the Spanish, ultimately ending the culture itself”, as Pratt mentioned in her essay (Pratt 486). Looking back at that time period, it was not a friendly or peaceful place. With Wideman’s “Our Time” it can be seen when looking at the Homewood community and the prison where John and Robby meet. The Homewood community was where John’s mother had been raised. It was described as “the close-knit, homogeneous community where the relations of people were based on trust, mutual respects, and common spiritual and material concerns. Face-to-face contact, shared language and values, a large fund of communal experience rendered individual lives extremely visible in Homewood. Both a person’s self-identity and accountability were firmly established” (Wideman 669). The contact zone created here is shown when Homewood residents were to talk about ‘French girls’; you didn’t want to mess with them. Voices of the Homewood community talked about the time when an incident happened saying, “Brown had his double-barreled shotgun across his knees and a jug of Dago Red on the ground beside him and next thing you know, Boom! Off it goes and buckshot sprayed down Cassina Way. Nobody hit at all except the little French girl, Geraldine, playing out there in the alley and she got nicked in her knee. Thank Jesus she the only one hit and she ain’t hit bad” (Wideman 669). When Elias Brown found out what really happened, he started to panic until he ran off through the corn. He didn’t want to come back around that place until he found out that her dad, John French, wasn’t after him. The contact zone created by the prison, I believe, not only shows the cultural differences, but it also shows John as being more of a dominant figure. As much as Robby stands out as a character here when he tells John about all of his struggles, John ultimately stands out more. As hard as it was for Robby to deal with all of the bad things that he had done, John came to the realization of the things that went wrong on his part. He figured out how he was a bad listener, how he wasn’t really there for his brother or his mom, and now he realized that he had some guilt with all of that. He wanted to fix all of this, but at the time didn’t really know how to. Since John wasn’t struggling with the ‘crime life’, his struggles stood out more to me as I could relate to some. With the prison, it created a contact zone between the free world and being on the inside. Generally you go to prison for doing criminal acts and by that alone, you are already in a contact zone caught between the good, bad, and right versus wrong. In prison, you are surrounded by others who also fight to survive in this new founded contact zone. This can happen because if you are in prison for a while, you don’t have freedom. You have to follow those rules and regulations more so than you do with rules outside of prison. When I completed reading Wideman’s “Our Time” I felt like I had a better understanding of the people and the situations that he was trying to show. I was definitely persuaded to care more about the types of people and the places that he was talking about because I could tell that he really put some effort and heart into it. Hearing his struggles while trying to write what was really happening helped to make a connection to show that this wasn’t just another story that I was being forced to read. Even though he uses a lot of different voices throughout his text, I feel like it ultimately helped to give that connection because I wasn’t just seeing all of this through his point of view; it was coming from the people who actually experienced the real life struggles.
Works Cited
Pratt, Mary. “Arts of the Contact Zone”. Ways of Reading. 9th edition. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011. 483-498. Print.
Wideman, John. “Our Time”. Ways of Reading. 9th edition. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011. 655-694. Print.