Sterling Brown: an ethnographic perspective

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Beverly Lanier Skinner

The methodology that Stanfield outlines for studying oral-based cultures is one that Sterling Brown had already employed before, during, and after his tenure as administrator of the WPA Writers' Project and researcher in the Gunner Myrdal-Carnegie study that resulted in the celebrated treatise An American Dilemma. (Joanne Gabbin chronicles Brown's professional and artistic accomplishments in her groundbreaking work Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition.) In fact, Brown anticipated Stanfield and Afrocentric cultural scholars like Asante, Ladner, Hamnett, and Merton by writing poetry and collecting oral histories in addition to publishing academic-style treatises to enlighten the world about African-American culture. In other words, rather than using a strictly empirical methodology for treating the unquantifiable and unprovable, and rather than generalizing from the particulars he culled from his travels among black folk in the South, Brown found a culturally functional alternative to the established but inadequate academic form of ethnographic reportage. He created a multi-voiced, polyphonic, self-reflexive, diversely genred oeuvre. He self-consciously and, I might add, defiantly represented an emic ethnography, one that reflects the values of the culture being described, rather than the traditional etic ethnography, which reflects the values of the newcomer to a culture (Vidich and Lyman 26). I call such an emic approach an authoethnography, since one writes of one's own culture from the position of cultural insider.

The autoethnographer is more than the sum of native informant and participant observer, the former being the so-called native guide for the ethnographic researcher and the latter being the outsider ethnographer engaged in fieldwork. The autoethnographer is more than what James Clifford terms the "fieldworker-theorist," whose "cultural description [as of the 1920s was] based on participant observation" (Predicament 30). The autoethnographer is nothing like the cultural anthropologist, whom Vidich and Lyman describe as a self-defined newcomer to the habitat and life world of his or her subjects (41). Rather, the autoethnographer has cultural roots in, and an insider's grasp of, the group being described and therefore needs no native informant to assist in the translation of language and culture. Of cultural necessity, the autoethnographer renders the description of his or her own culture on levels that exceed the narrow boundaries of the academic report from the field.

During the time that Brown wrote and studied his own culture, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were ascending the anthropological throne of intellectual and scholarly authority and were influential in discrediting native informants on the grounds that natives of a culture lack impartiality and objectivity. According to Clifford, "It was tacitly agreed that the new-style ethnographer, whose sojourn in the field seldom exceeded two years, and more frequently was much shorter, could efficiently 'use' native languages without 'mastering' them." Mead and others, in spite of objections from followers of Franz Boas, "established that valid research could be accomplished on the basis of one or two years' familiarity with a foreign vernacular. A distinct primacy was accorded to the visual: interpretation was tied to description. After Bronislaw Malinowski, a general suspicion of 'privileged informants' reflected this systematic preference for the (methodical) observations of the ethnographer over the (interested) interpretations of indigenous authorities" (Predicament 31).