“This short video presents our object-centered story-telling method and its relationship to our recent ethnographic research. Our approach is to use objects of personal significance to our informants which elicit deeper accounts of their lives. In this case, the objects belong to women working in the Canadian trucking industry, with its intrinsic elements of displacement.
The film begins with a brief introduction to the origin of this method, then is followed by a recitation of three prose poems we create from the ethnographic accounts of the objects. We extract significant words from our informant’s accounts of the objects: a decorative crystal, a pair of work gloves, and a ring. We then use free association to order these words and to generate a sentence from each word that reflects the object and our field work. This reveals unexpected insights, and emphasizes our own subjectivity and its role in our interpretation of our field experiences.”
The project has been presented at:
The Society for Cultural Anthropology Displacements virtual conference, 19-21 April, 2018