The ethnographer as a storyteller
Eino Heikkilä
Faculty of Humanities, University of Helsinki, Finland
MEMORIAMEDIA Review 5. Art.7. 2020
photo: Eino Heikkilä / Memória Imaterial edition
Ethnography is not just a literary description of a social group or culture, it’s also writing about the researcher him/herself. In this article an ethnographer as a storyteller refers to a point of view, where the researcher as the narrator of an ethnography tells an informative, evocative story of his/her fieldwork and the dialogue between him/her and research subjects. Analysing ethnography as a written narrative indicates that researcher’s roles as the author and narrator of the text should be taken into account when evaluating ethnographic knowledge in our time.
Keywords: ethnography, narrative, researcher, ethnographic knowledge