ASSIGNMENTS      EN101 WRITING I

Writing about Places (The Ethnographic Essay)

Much like the profile, essays of place attempt to understand one thing through the description of another—namely, essays of place offer writers an opportunity to understand how a particular place and time has shaped them, affected them, moved them, given them something to say. Your goal, in this essay, is to identify such a place in your life.  Of course, how do you get there?  Well, it is always useful in the essay to figure out what your question is:  what are you trying to understand by exploring this place and your connection to it? 

This is a place to start. Where do you go from there? The Essay of Place also has some components to it that, once understood, can help you construct your text.

Ethnography

I call Essays of Place “ethnographic” for a reason. Ethnography is the work of the anthropologist. Traditionally, ethnographers would go to a culture—often times a third world culture—and spend many, many years observing that culture, studying its ways, identifying patterns in behavior. They studied everything:  language, rituals, artifacts, relationships. The hallmark of this writing is something that Clifford Geertz, an ethnographer himself, called “thick description”—a particularly visual way to describe the layers of observation that went in to the work of the ethnographer. Of interest now is the idea of auto-ethnography. Auto-ethnography is where anthropologists or interested writers explore the complexity of belonging to the particular cultures that they find themselves a part of.  The idea is that you can discover a tremendous amount about the significance of a place in your life and, potentially, in the lives of others, by paying careful attention to the world around you. Thus, thinking of your essay of place as an ethnographic project (at least in part) can be helpful. Essays of place have several very ethnographic characteristics:

• They are the result of “thick description”—details of the people and artifacts that you find in this place.  Lots of details.
• They look at the place in its entirety—good and bad.
• They consider the time of this place as well as the space.
• They consider the position of the observer in the place—in other words, you are aware of the waves you are making in this place that you are a part of.

Metaphor

The layers of observation in ethnography make the important things about a culture apparent to readers. In an essay, though, the writer is more conscientiously reflective. Metaphor is the effort of a writer to make us understand one thing by explaining it in terms of something else. Trying to use people, artifacts, scents, smells, scenes, and images in your essay to help you explain what it is you really mean is not only useful, it is, in fact, what an essay is supposed to do.

            It is the balance between the ethnographic and the metaphorical that will make for good essays of place.

BRASS TACKS

·         Papers should be double spaced, in 12 point Times New Roman. Period. And about five pages of writing.

·         Name, Date, and “EN 101” should be appear single-spaced in the left hand corner at the top of the first page of your paper.

• No cover page.
• Number the rest of your pages with “Your Last Name #” in the top right corner (mine would read Torda 1, Torda 2, Torda 3, etc.).
• Always title your paper. I’m a stickler about this. Titles are important. If you can’t come up with an interesting title that means you don’t really know what your paper is all about. Note I said interesting.
• Drafts for workshopping have to be ready for your group to look at on Workshop day. No late drafts will be accepted on the day the paper is due.  Absence is not an excuse for late papers.