0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Dancing Lessons from God
It was difficult to forget this story, buried somewhere in my notes.
What had happened seemed an important ethnographic moment in
participant observation. The story was not told to all who participated
in the workshops. It seemed to emerge as an unexpected gift of nar-
rative from person to person. What then should I, as good, or good
bad ethnographer, do about or with the story?
InAlice in Wonderland ( 1957 [ 1986 ]) the characters of Lewis Car-
roll celebrate “unbirthdays.” They espouse this as a recommended pol-
icy, since people have many more unbirthdays than they do birthdays.
As ethnographers, we always have questions we never ask, because
we do not have the time, or do not have the opportunity, or because
we feel we just cannot. It is likely that we have many more unques-
tions that remain unasked than we have questions. During her tell-
ing of this story, I became aware of the unquestions I was not asking,
even though perhaps the solely good ethnographer might have asked
them. As the good bad ethnographer, I simply did not feel I could
ask them. (What does the face of an infant look like if the inside of
its mouth is burnt out, and does this matter to its mother?) Some of
these unquestions that I never asked were related to the growing ab-
sence of the storyteller from the story itself. Unasked Unquestion # 1 :
Where were you when all this was going on? Presumably she would
have been there as well, along with her mother and grandfather, a wit-
ness to the scene, and thus possibly definable as a hibakusha herself,
and not just the daughter of a hibakusha.Unasked Unquestion # 2 (a
corollary to # 1 ): Was it really the uniqueness of being the daughter of
a Christian, or being the daughter of a hibakusha, or some combina-
tion of both, that made her being different so difficult in a society in
which pressure to conform to norms is so great?
And so on, and so on, with many other unqueries. Unasked Un-
questions grouping # 3 (a missed opportunity to bring in standard eth-
nographic questions related to anthropological kinship concerns): So,
what happened to father (your own, not your mother’s or father’s)?
Was he there with the rest of the family? Was he off to the war as was
commonly the case with men his age at the time? Did he have a war
related death, or did he survive and not remain with the family af-
ter the war? Unasked Unquestions grouping # 4 : Why the growing
