A Genre of Failed Novelists and Poets: Exploring Ethnography through a Narrative Lens
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Guided by Ruth Behar’s provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of novelists and poets and building on a special issue of Anthropology and Humanism on the art of ethnography published in 2007, I explore the histories, potentials, and boundaries of ethnography as a genre and craft. Relying on narrative theory as a resource that can enrich ethnography, I provide a close reading of several ethnographies, focusing on issues of character, time, and plot. I argue that a focus on narrative helps ethnographers put in conversation multiple selves’ shifting roles in ethnography. Narrative provides tools to put in dynamic dialogue these different selves, animate our texts, and write more accessible and enjoyable ethnographies. On another level, consulting with narrative theory is a reminder to claim all our ancestors and take pride in ethnography as a queer genre whose strength lies in its openings and porous boundaries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it