This thesis is based on collaborative research conducted
over ten years with three elders of Athapaskan/Tlingit ancestry,
in the southern Yukon Territory, Canada Mrs. Angela Sidney, Mrs.
Kitty Smith and Mrs. Annie Ned are also authors of this document
because their oral accounts of their lives are central to the
discussion. One volume examines issues of method and ethnographic
writing involved in such research and analyses the accounts
provided by these women; a second volume presents their accounts,
in their own words, in three appendices.
The thesis advanced here is that life history offers two
distinct contributions to anthropology. As a method, it
provides a model based on collaboration between participants
rather than research 'by' an anthropologist 'on' the community.
As ethnography, it shows how individuals may use the
traditional dimension of culture as a resource to talk about
their lives, and explores the extent to which it is possible f or
anthropologists to write ethnography grounded in the perceptions
and experiences of people whose lives they describe. Narrators
provide complex explanations for their experiences and decisions
in metaphoric language, raising questions about whether
anthropological categories like 'individual', 'society' and
'culture' are uniquely bounded units. The analysis focusses on how these women attach central
importance to traditional stories (particularly those with female
protagonists), to named landscape features, to accounts of
travel, and to inclusion of incidents from the lives of others in
their narrated 'life histories'. Procedures associated with both
life history analysis and the analysis of oral tradition are used
to consider the dynamics of narration. Particular attention is
paid to how these women use oral tradition both to talk about the
past and to continue to teach younger people appropriate behavior
in the present. The persistence of oral tradition as a system of
communication and information in the north when so much else has
changed suggests that expressive forms like story telling
contribute to strategies for adapting to social, economic and
cultural change. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/41444 |
| Date | January 1987 |
| Creators | Cruikshank, Julie |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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