I am teaching a new course on ethnography and community engagement in Goucher College’s Masters in Historic Preservation program. This post is adapted from a discussion item I recently added to the course website.
A 2016 public meeting in Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood where gentrification and historic preservation were discussed.
Ethnography is the art of converting dynamic events into [mostly] static accounts, or some such thing, according to the late cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Over the past 30 years, ethnography and ethnographers have looked inward to better understand how we practice our craft. This “reflexive turn” has propelled ethnographic writing and analysis into literary territory and it has created many opportunities to write about people and stuff (artifacts, buildings, stories, etc.) in more creative ways.
As I told my students the first day of class, my objective isn’t to turn all of them into professional ethnographers like Franz Boas or Hortense Powdermaker or Zora Neal Hurston. I want to expose my students to ways of thinking, seeing, hearing, and reporting that will improve their work as historic preservation professionals and make them more marketable in a very competitive world. The problems and solutions that we have been discussing in class offer them ways to think outside the rote routine boxes that Tom King says confine the folks who do our work.
It’s no accident that I combined “ethnography” with “community engagement” for this class. As they’re most frequently practiced in historic preservation, ethnography and community engagement are done in silos — segregated, separate, and in linear form — if they’re done at all. The approach I have tried to follow with this course is to pair them in ways that make their utility evident, practical, and integrated.
We began class in a [sort of] circle and we collaborated to learn about each other and about the material. This collaboration extends to the assignments I gave. Except for the readings, I gave everyone choices for their major projects — choices that gave each of the students an opportunity to pick things meaningful to them on which to work. Though out in the real world, they will rarely get to do everything that they want in the ways they want, there are some takeaways here that will benefit my students.
Take for example, the roles you play in identifying people, objects, and sources for your work. Your personal experiences, preferences, and biases (we all have them) will influence how you approach every project. Don’t run away from these; interrogate them and understand how they can influence your work, for good and for bad. We spoke a lot during the first Zoom conference about belief and how it may be manifest in the historic places we identify and designate. The two examples that we discussed were opportunities to explore how and why people construct knowledge about the things they sometimes call “historic.” Some of the information is verifiable truth, some of it is belief. Taken in context, it’s not up to us to make value judgements about the information. Instead, we need to look for the deeper meanings and search for how those meanings connect to the built environment and to the people who created it and who use it.
Harry Crews, Florida Frenzy book jacket photo.
Harry Crews (1935-2012) was my favorite fiction author. He wrote wonderful, frightening stories about the American South. He also wrote an autobiography (A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, 1978) that should be on every Americanist’s bookshelf. Crews, along with the folklorists Henry Glassie, John Burrison, Robert Blair St. George taught me how to be an ethnographer of things and places. There’s a shelf with books he wrote and books about him on a shelf right behind my desk as I am writing this. I’m not suggesting that everyone click on over to Amazon and buy up every Harry Crews book they can get, but I will leave you with a quotation from an interview he gave in the 1990s:
If you’re gonna write, for god in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told. Sometimes the lies were to you by people who meant well, and who meant the very best for you. Your mama might have. I know my mama told me some of them great lies. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t think they were lies. She didn’t think they were lies then, don’t think they’re lies now. I know in fact they’re lies. Don’t make her bad, it’s just the way we are. But if you’re gonna write fiction, you have to get right on down to it — Lytal, Tammy, and Richard B. Russell. “Some of Us Do It Anyway: An Interview with Harry Crews.” In Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews, 273–90. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999, p. 288.
The 1997 interview with Crews is the most-quoted instance of the author describing what he called “getting naked.” The first time that he used it in an interview was in 1977:
I think precisely what people mistake in me as being macho … that thing in me that wants to get as far on the edge as I can of anything that I can, the thing that I like to call getting naked … is my need to keep myself going as a writer. You can’t find out about a thing … well, you can find out but can can’t find out as well as you can when you’re naked and vulnerable to the experiences of the world — Oney, Steve. “Harry Crews Is a Stomp-Down Hard-Core Mentalist.” In Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews, 91–98. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999, p. 95.
Crews wrote a lot about places and the people who inhabited them, especially his native South. Crews scholar Erik Bledsoe wrote in the introduction to a volume of interviews with the author, “In Crews’s world it is often those who appear most normal who are, in actuality, the most abnormal” (Getting Naked with Harry Crews, p. 3).
Crews documented the South from the bottom up, not from the top down. His people were the poor and the marginalized Southerners not found in more mainstream and accessible Southern literature that celebrated elites, et al. Crews’s people were vernacular; they were the “folk.” Compare Bledsoe’s observation about normal and abnormal with something that Henry Glassie said at last year’s American Folklore Society meeting. Commenting on a panel of papers about historic preservation, Glassie veered into a criticism of how historic preservationists are locked into using fixed categories (e.g., building styles). If something doesn’t fit a known category and there’s no checkbox in the form being completed, then the system says it’s not “historic,” not important. Glassie continued:
It was a particularly absurd view that entailed let us say about ten percent of the domestic architecture of the United States in the past could actually be classified accurately within these categories that people used. So the problem was the buildings had to be in that category. Number two, they couldn’t have been changed. Think about the absurdity of that. If a building has been changed, it’s got more history not less history. It’s more historical, more significant, more powerful, and yet if it hasn’t been preserved accidentally over time, from pretty much the original state of affairs. (Henry Glassie, discussant, Connecting Public Folklore and Historic Preservation: Policy, Practice, and the Politics of Culture, October 20, 2018).
Historic preservation, then, tends to focus on the atypical, the widely-accepted “normal” that in fact is anything but “normal.” Based on our readings and discussions so far, does Harry Crews’s advice for writers and Glassie’s thoughts on what we also call “integrity” have any applicability in how we might approach historic preservation?
My small Harry Crews bookshelf.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein
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