10. Looking at Voice in A Space on the Side of the Road
Ethnographers' struggles with this predicament of implication are made visible in the authorial strategies they use to address it. In A Space on the Side of the Road, for example, postmodernist ethnographer of Appalachian folkways Kathleen Stewart (1996), like so many anthropologists and critics before her, took on the problem of representation in ethnographic writing by first rejecting the premise that narrative coherence is a possibility. Her own ethnographic product, she said, "is a collection of fits and starts in the moves of master narrative itself," and a thing that "is made up of moments of encounter, shock, recognition, retreat" (p. 7). It is a "nervous" artifact, one that works through "a tension between interpretation and evocation" (p. 7). Stewart's strategy for managing this narrative difficulty is to attempt to preserve the distinctive qualities of her participants' voices through ethnopoetic transcription and juxtaposition: To redeem her guilty mediations of the voices of her participants, she strives for immediacy in her representation. Consider, for example, this rendering of a conversational encounter between two of the participants in her study, Clownie Meadows and Madie Plumly. Stewart framed the encounter by inviting the reader directly into the imagined space of the scene. She wrote:
Picture Clownie Meadows arriving at the stand in Odd one day when several of us were standing around talking. At a pause in the talk Madie Plumly asked him how he was "gettin' along." I was, as usual, taken aback by the quick assumption of a story line without even the briefest abstract characterization of the self (as in "I'm fine" or "They've got us working seven days a week" or "I've been down with the flu"). (p. 34)
In addition to inviting her readers to "picture" the scene she hoped to describe, Stewart wished to recreate the auditory experience of the scene, as well. She went on to render the conversation between Clownie and Madie as she heard it, attempting (in contrast to Deborah Brandt, 2001) to represent the auditory qualities of their speech:
Well, I started down the road,
oh must a been last Thursday I'd say it was.
Well it was the day we had all that rain and the rain comin' down, buddy, I'm a tellin' you.…
An hit was right there out yonder at that big old red barn down past Miss Walker's and there's a stand a pine right there.
And that old Ford truck a mine, hit tuk to shakin' and a carryin' on, buddy. (p. 34)
Unlike Brandt's decision to edit out the marked features of speech as produced by stigmatized speakers, Stewart chose to invoke the poetic features of the talk she heard through strategies of transcription that rendered the speech's phonetic and intonational patterns, as well as its cadence and rhythm. Both researcher–authors, however, made editing decisions in relation to what they imagined their ethical responsibilities to be as storytellers and in relation to their perceived audiences' needs.