The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations - Hardcover

Keating Ph.D., Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593420926 ISBN 13: 9780593420928

Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Uncover new sides of family members you’ve known your entire life with this indispensable guide that includes space for journaling.

Just as the oral histories of people around the world are disappearing amid rapid change, there is a risk that your family’s personal stories, too, will be lost forever. In The Essential Questions, anthropologist Elizabeth Keating helps you to uncover the unique memories of your parents and grandparents and to create lasting connection with them in the process.

As you seek to learn more about your family history, how do you get beyond familiar anecdotes and avoid the frustration of oppositional generational attitudes? By asking questions that make the familiar strange, anthropologists are able to see entirely different perspectives and understand new cultures. Drawing on her lifelong work in this field, Keating has developed a set of questions that treat your parents and grandparents not just as the people who raised you, but as individuals of a certain society and time, and as the children, teenagers, and young adults they once were. The Essential Questions helps you to learn about the history of your elders, to see the world through their eyes, and to honor the language they choose to describe their experiences.
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. A linguistic anthropologist who studies culture and communication, she has been a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland and a visiting scholar at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
The Anthropology of Family

You might think you already know your family's stories pretty well-between childhood memories and reunions and holiday gatherings, you may have spent countless hours with your parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, soaking up family anecdotes and lore. As a professor of anthropology, I have always been fascinated by the stories that families tell, and a few years ago, I started researching family stories that are passed down from generation to generation. I have been astonished to find that many people actually know little of the lives of their parents and grandparents, even though they lived through some pretty interesting decades. Even when I asked my students, some of whom majored in history and excelled at it, about the history of their own families, they were in the dark. Our elders may share some familiar anecdotes over and over again, but still, many of us have no broader sense of the world they lived in, especially what it was like before we came along. What kind of world did our grandparents and parents inhabit as children and young adults? And how can we get them to open up about it?

It wasn't until my mother died in 2014 that I realized how much I didn't know about her life. This was all the more poignant because I had recorded several interviews with her when she was seventy-nine. Back then, I was curious about aunts, uncles, and cousins, people she knew and I didn't, and about the knowledge of our family she had gathered over a lifetime that I worried would be lost. And I wanted a record of her voice (I knew I would miss her husky, glamorous voice). At the time, I thought that if she just started talking for the tape recorder, everything I was curious about would spill out in one coherent narrative. Yet that idea turned out to be a fantasy. Rather than bringing us closer together, the experience underscored how differently our respective generations looked at the world. So, in spite of my efforts to dutifully record what my mother knew about various family members, I never asked the questions that haunt me now. Questions about her. Only after she died and her aura of "mother" receded did I wonder, did I really know her? Before she died, I-like many children, I suspect-avoided any potential clashes, wanting to preserve harmony rather than ask sensitive questions. Now I wish I had asked what formed her different generational beliefs. I'm curious about what it was like to live in her time, in the places she did, what interactions she had. I wish I had a fuller sense of her as a person, especially how she was when she was young with a lust for life. How would I have structured such a conversation? What questions should I have asked?

I've since heard other people express, with an emotion I recognize, that there are things they wished they'd asked their late parents and grandparents. Like me, they wanted to know more about their elders as people. Why did their grandmother leave home to work as a housemaid so far away at a time when this was extraordinary? Why did their parents buy that house with the big garden they never seemed that interested in?

I started to research how knowledge isn't passed down in families and why family members don't know more about one another. I realized there were three flaws in my failed interviews with my mother (never mind that I hadn't even thought to interview my grandparents). First, I formulated my questions based on information I already knew, meaning that my questions were based on fragments my mother had previously shared with me. As a result, she didn't tell me things I had no clue about. Second, I asked her about people in the family, when now I wish I'd asked about my mother herself, and her relationship to the world. And third, I was trapped in our mother-daughter dynamic, with all my impatience and discomfort with oppositional generational attitudes, for example, concerning how women should dress and what my behavior signified to others. I didn't ask my mother the kinds of questions that would have enabled me to step out of my own frame of reference and to take her perspective in order to better understand how she came to see things the way she did, and something of the experiences that made her who she was. In other words, I couldn't leverage the difference between us into something that gave me a new understanding of the times, places, and people that shaped her and my family history. I didn't have a way to see her in any role other than mother. I missed out on learning what my mother saw through her eyes as a young person, before five children dominated her time and aspirations.

I thought about this problem of how to learn more about the history of a person, how to enter a parent's or grandparent's world from their perspective, how to honor the language they choose to describe their experiences. And I started to think about my work as an anthropologist. I'm trained to gather information about people who are different from myself. I've done research on a remote Pacific island, on the Deaf community's skillful use of technologies, and on design projects conducted by engineers collaborating from four countries. But when interviewing my mother, I didn't apply what I knew. Despite being trained in anthropology, I lost an opportunity to do what an anthropologist does-to enter a different world of experience and interpretation.

In developing this book over five years after my mother's death and thirty years after my last grandparent's death, I have used what I know about anthropology and about studying diverse people with diverse beliefs to develop a set of topics and questions that would have treated my mother not just as the person who raised me but as an individual of a certain society and time: as a girl, a teenager, a young adult, a member of a generation.

Even though my mother didn't grow up in a different country, the world she knew when she was young was so different from mine as to seem that way, due to cultural change. Culture is hard to define because it is so big in scope, encompassing large-scale societal practices as well as small material things. And its influence is subtle. Though people are irrevocably shaped by culture, they are typically unaware of its influence. Anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu famously described culture as a set of practices that train our bodies and provide us with "dispositions" that structure everything we perceive. By dispositions, he meant a sense of "how the game is played," how we make sense of and respond to what other people do. In researching this book, I've been surprised at the extent to which everyday aspects of culture have changed in just one or two generations. This rapid cultural change is what has given rise to the well-known phrase "generation gap." In fact, the phrase has only been a bellwether of people's experiences in America and Europe since the 1960s, when teenagers and their parents began to struggle with cultural differences. This struggle was recognized as something new or at least more common than ever before.

I started my research among families to find out more about this by interviewing people in the United States and other countries to find out how much they knew about their grandparents' or parents' early lives, such as how they were raised and what they experienced as young people. I soon realized that many of my interviewees, coming from a range of countries, knew hardly anything. Few could remember any personal stories about when their grandparents or parents were children, especially stories told from their point of view. Based on what people were telling me, it was clear that whole ways of life, and what made them unique within certain cultural and historical frameworks, were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia eats holes in family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TarcherPerigee
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593420926
• ISBN 13: 9780593420928
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Tarcher; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/search/tarcher?page=1&q=TARCHER; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar