As part of their Encounters series, Indiana University Press has published in book form the 2012 Journal of Folklore Research (49:2) special issue on the stigmatized vernacular. This edited volume, developed from a conference panel, is already influential in previous instantiations and is sure to be more so now. Its relevance and potential applications have only grown since the contributors began this conversation a few years ago.
The editors, Diane Goldstein and Amy Shuman, open with an introduction that situates this work in existing scholarship; they offer an especially useful overview of relevant theories of stigma and tellability, including those articulated by Erving Goffman, Harvey Sacks, and William Labov. They provide insight, developed in later chapters, into “situations where not only are individuals stigmatized but so are the vernaculars associated with them” as well as into “the relationship between the stigmatized individual and our role as researchers” (2). The case studies through which these issues are explored make up the subsequent chapters, examining stigma in contexts of tobacco farming, type 2 diabetes, trauma, and political asylum.
Chapter 1, by Ann K. Ferrell, is titled “‘It’s Really Hard to Tell the True Story of Tobacco’: Stigma, Tellability, and Reflexive Scholarship.” Ferrell draws on ethnographic fieldwork and rhetorical analysis of public discourse to identify changing narratives about tobacco farming in Kentucky. She notes that contemporary tobacco farmers as an occupational group are invisible and stigmatized, as narratives regarding tobacco’s history, heritage, and harmful effects on health have become more tellable than that of tobacco’s continued economic importance. Ferrell also exemplifies an important trend in this volume, wherein reflexive methods of research are expanded to better understand and represent contexts of stigma. In her case, she notes, referring to conversations both in and outside of academic spheres, “[m]y data came to include…my own initial assumptions about tobacco farming, along with the assumptions that emerged in conversations about the topic of my research….[T]hese assumptions represented those narratives about tobacco farming that are tellable in public” (18).
In chapter 2, Sheila Bock writes about “Contextualization, Reflexivity, and the Study of Diabetes-Related Stigma.” Bock describes her fieldwork in Columbus, Ohio, working with African Americans who were dealing with both diabetes and the health disparities prevalent in their communities. Her examples illustrate, through analysis of reported speech and reflexivity regarding her own embodied presence as a researcher, how her research participants engaged with processes of stigmatization. This emphasis on process is present throughout the volume, and is one major way it builds on previous scholarship: “What we see…is not stigma management, as Goffman discusses, but rather a critical engagement with stigma as a process” (60). Bock also points to a larger problem where researchers fail to see themselves as part of their participants’ contextualization—as “communicative resources” (57) and as at times “complicit” (60) in stigmatization—opting instead to see themselves as “context” separate from the “text” they are observing (62).
Similar to Ferrell, Bock examines how her methods and findings shifted once she thought critically about informal conversations regarding her research topic. Where Ferrell recognizes “tellable tobacco narratives” (21) in these conversations, Bock discovers “stigmatizing storylines” about diabetes (49). Diane Goldstein’s chapter also includes discussion of how a reader’s response afforded her a new perspective. This volume’s compilation of these case studies highlights the nuances and benefits of applying expanded reflexive approaches to ethnography.
In chapter 3, “Rethinking Ventriloquism: Untellability, Chaotic Narratives, Social Justice, and the Choice to Speak For, About, and Without,” Diane Goldstein explores precautions for representing disordered, confusing narratives. She draws out tensions between the ethnographic tendency toward multivocality, the problems with “ventriloquism” (Ritchie 1993), and the potential for chaotic narratives to contribute to their narrators’ stigmatization. Goldstein’s examples come from contexts of trauma (primarily disability, rape, and violence) where ineffability, fragmentation, disassociation, and “purposeful ambiguity” (81) coalesce to make narratives incoherent. Goldstein concludes, “[c]haos requires care” (83); consequently, when including narrators’ own voices will not empower them, “sometimes speaking for, about, or without is the better choice” (83).
Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer complete the volume with chapter 4, “The Stigmatized Vernacular: Political Asylum and the Politics of Visibility/Recognition.” This chapter discusses the centrality of stigma to folkloristics, and explains that “the study of stigma in folklore is situated between discourses of veneration and repudiation” (111). The authors use their central example, the case of a Cameroonian woman seeking asylum in the U.S., to explore visibility, tellability, and the “ways that stigma and normalcy produce each other” (93). In the asylum process, people are doubly stigmatized, as victims of persecution at home and then often as applicants discredited by officials (92). Shuman and Bohmer write that, “[i]nitially, like others, we attempted to demonstrate how increased attention to different cultural contexts would prevent some of the mistakes immigration officials made” (107). However, they eventually realized that “[a]ttention to cultural context fails because it is not possible to define the normal when the normal everyday has been completely replaced by routinized violence” (108). Thus as it does elsewhere in this volume, notably in Sheila Bock’s chapter, “context” requires rethinking in situations of stigma.
As Shuman and Bohmer put it, “[t]he concept of the stigmatized vernacular represents a shift in the field of folklore and in the study of stigma, a shift from studying people at the margins to studying the conditions of marginalization” (111). This volume is an important call for that shift as well as an engaging illustration of how to continue making it, and as such is critical reading for folklorists and those in related disciplines. Beyond this, though, the editors write that they “see [their] task as opening a conversation broader than the discipline” of folkloristics (10). Though the work is decidedly academic writing, it also has applications for others who work with stigmatized individuals and groups, most notably agricultural, health care, legal, and public policy professionals. Its most significant contributions will likely be towards changing reflexive ethnographic methods, especially for researchers who work in contexts of stigma.
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[Review length: 995 words • Review posted on June 22, 2017]