The necessity of ethnography to this project became apparent before I began to conceptualize the archive itself. In many ways this project began the day that I received my great-grandmother’s scrapbook in the mail two years ago. As I flipped through the pages, skimming notes and news clippings and touching little plastic spoons and tissue flowers, a story began to take shape. I saw, in the scrapbook, an undefined, chaotic collection of artifacts of the life of Jane Logan from 1933- 1935. I recognized the potential story hidden within the artifacts, and in the relationships between artifacts, waiting to be pieced together.

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The next step was to dig deeper into the scrapbook — picking apart, rearranging, and assembling knowledge — which required an ethnographic approach toward elucidating the specific personal, cultural, and historical contexts of Jane’s life. Ethnography invites the researcher to participate more or less directly in the crafting of cultural narratives within particular contexts. As researcher-participant, the ethnographer recognizes that his/her personal reactions and interpretations are vital to the research, but still must be checked against other viewpoints (Kantor et al.). My impressions of Jane’s scrapbook artifacts are, therefore, always triangulated with other (primary and secondary) cultural-historical texts. 

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Chiseri-Strater, echoing White’s history as fiction-making, stresses the importance for the ethnographer to be “conscious of constructing, not merely representing the other” (her italics) (127). The ethnographer is always aware of the craftedness of his/her work and makes that craftedness apparent to the reader. I address the craftedness of this archive throughout the rationale, describing my methods of research, editing, and presentation in an honest and open manner. I do not mean to suggest that this archive is any less truthful or critical a depiction of teen culture in the 1930s; but it is important that I draw attention to the necessary subjectivity and positionality involved in all work of this sort. Jane’s positionality (as a middle-class college student in the 1930s) combines with my positionality (as a 21st century graduate student) to form a multilayered, twice-constructed narrative. Jane edited her life by authoring and collecting certain items in her scrapbook, and I further edited those items in the composing of this archive. The result is a twice-filtered image of Jane’s life in the 1930s.

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My desire to connect with my great-grandmother’s experiences and to present her life in a positive, affirmative manner is perhaps the central prejudice that influenced my research. Although I did not necessarily intend, from the onset, to portray my great-grandmother in a positive light, I cannot help but recognize that my personal proximity to her would make it impossible for me to approach her scrapbook from an objective standpoint (if we can even say that an objective standpoint is possible is any situation). What’s more, my position as a 21st century graduate student of English with a proclivity for feminist scholarship undoubtedly shaped my selection of Jane’s scrapbook artifacts. Jones reminds ethnographers, “Because we cannot know, write, or stage it ‘all,’ we are free to create a vision of what is possible” (768). Thus, the narrative I have constructed is mine— and in a lateral sense, Jane’s— and is, therefore, only one of a myriad potential visions.

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Working with Archives

 

Archival work has become increasingly popular in humanities scholarship in the past few decades, a trend which could perhaps be contributed to (1) an effort to uncover and legitimize histories that have previously been muffled or cast as unimportant in the largely paternal historic tradition (Bordelon; Wernimont and Flanders) and (2) the affordances of digital technologies that alleviate physical and temporal constraints on archival research by providing access across locales (Buehl et al.; Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater).

Archives most often consist of mundane, or ordinary, artifacts that epitomize the daily customs of a person, cultural group, institution, etc. They are “repositories ‘of record’ and thus sites of memory and power … that fuel the historical imagination and provide the evidence for complicating the narratives of our past” (Buehl et al. 298). The original, physical archive that provides the primary material for my digital archive is Jane’s scrapbook, which contains items that serve as a record of her daily life.1 She includes notes about attending parties and driving around with friends and cigarette packs and disposable spoons to commemorate nights out and luncheons. 

There is an ongoing political project in the humanities to recapture, or reassert, particular histories (as narratives) through a focus on the mundane, everyday practices of people, groups, institutions, etc. embodied in archives. Suzanne Bordelon, for instance, examined the National Council of Teachers of English (NTCTE) archive’s “mundane texts”— correspondences, meeting records, interviews — to recover women’s voices and create a new historical narrative that accounts for the significance of those voices. Through archival research, ethnographers can reveal how “marginalized groups have worked against and around the status quo, as well as the silencing such groups have confronted” (Bordelon 350). Although my own archival research may not be quite as provocative as Bordelon’s, the same project of recovering marginalized voices of women guides my research. Jane’s scrapbook artifacts illustrate a struggle between women students and the paternalistic structures of colleges that placed constraints on their social freedom. Jane and her fellow students pushed back against school rules by smoking cigarettes, riding around in cars, and even launching a mass student strike (see exhibits j., l., and m.). It is the ethnographer’s duty to organize and interpret such archives so as to preserve what might otherwise “pass secretly, silently, or unattended” over time (Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater 311), “bringing [that] lost information to light” (Wernimont and Flanders 426). By narrativizing Jane’s archival artifacts, I construct a specific history of teen culture in the 1930s that has not been read by anyone until now.

Jane’s scrapbook can be sub-categorized as a personal/family archive, which poses a particular set of research concerns that can differ from those of institutional archives. Editing personal/family archives — anything from boxes of old letters to cookbooks to scrapbooks — lends itself particularly well to ethnographic study due to both the invested interest of the researcher (a researcher who has a personal, familial relationship to the subject(s)), as well as the cultural-historical value of such personal artifacts. Family archives are comprised of “objects of tradition — symbols of the rituals, behaviors, language, and beliefs that teach a culture about itself” (Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater 312). Jane’s archive (her scrapbook) provides icons of 1930s teen culture (e.g., cigarettes and date cards) and insight into the rituals and behaviors of 1930s teen culture (e.g., notes about riding in cars and going to the drugstore).

 

It is perhaps worth noting that the importance of documents and artifacts in personal/family archives is self-contained. Their inclusion in the archive indicates that they were deemed worthy of saving/preserving at one point in time by a particular individual. From an ethnographic standpoint, the significance of items to a particular individual (or cultural group) automatically makes them worthy of study.

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Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater identify one primary obstacle in researching personal/family archives: “finding a focus” (327). Finding a focus — articulating themes, stories, and common threads — is the difficult work of the ethnographer. The ethnographer is charged with shaping the cultural-historical items into a meaningful arrangement. This is perhaps where my digital archive differs most from typical archives. My intention, as ethnographer, is not only the recovery of cultural-historical texts, but the arranging of those texts in a specific narrative.

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The process of narrativation — the constructing of a historical story (White) — has meant, for me, establishing relationships between artifacts in Jane’s scrapbook, placing them in context with one another and in the broader contexts of Depression-era America and teen culture. For instance, Jane’s student handbook from the Appalachian State Teachers College (ASTC) and the student strike newspaper article can be better understood in relation to one another. The reasons behind the student protest listed in the latter document are elaborated in the former document. Although the two documents were not placed near one another within the pages of Jane’s scrapbook (in fact, the ASTC handbook had come loose from the scrapbook and was merely tucked inside the third page, making its original placement unclear), there is a clear, significant connection between them. I (re)arranged Jane’s scrapbook artifacts with an objective to form both personal (to Jane’s life) and historical connections between artifacts, a process that required me to balance autoethnographic and ethnohistorical methods of research and presentation.

 

I was particularly influenced by autoethnography and ethnohistory while assembling this archive because the items in Jane’s scrapbook are both biographical in that they characterize her life and historical in that they signify a particular socio-cultural moment in the past. For example, Jane’s note Ride with Doug (exhibit l.) depicts not only a specific event in Jane’s life — an afternoon with Doug during which the pair drove around a specific region of southern North Carolina — but the broader significance of riding in automobiles as a social (and rebellious) activity in teen culture. The note gains further historical significance when placed against the backdrop of Depression-era North Carolina, during which time the majority of people could no longer afford to own and/or maintain automobiles and would often turn old cars into “hoover wagons” by removing the engines and strapping on horses (Price Davis 6). The disparity between Jane’s experience and that of the average North Carolinian, in this instance, extends and interrogates — adds additional layers to — the portrait of both Jane’s life and the Depression-era South.

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Autoethnography is ethnographic research that relates the autobiographical and personal to broader socio-cultural narratives (Jones). It compels “personal stories [to] become a means for interpreting the past, translating and transforming contexts, and envisioning a future” (Jones 767-68). Fundamentally feminist in nature, autoethnography makes the personal, public (or political) by encouraging researchers and readers to explore the personal experiences of individuals against broader social and cultural backdrops. Similarly, ethnohistory involves understanding history through the perspectives of the people who actually lived during a particular time period (Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater).

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In this archive, I tell my great-grandmother’s story within the larger contexts of teen culture, women in the 1930s, North Carolina in the 1930s, and America in the 1930s. These four contextual backdrops interact with my great-grandmother’s experiences, revealing important themes through similarities, disparities, and absences. Placing Jane within these varying contexts imbues her scrapbook artifacts with specific socio-historical value.

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Furthermore, I encourage my readers to relate the exhibits in this archive not only to their historical knowledge of teen culture in America, but to the contexts of their own lives as well, thereby adding yet another contextual layer to the text. Like most current work in autoethnography, I aim to produce a reaction in the reader, to be, as Jones puts it, “explicit in moving readers … intellectually, emotionally, and toward concerted social, cultural, and political action” (784). I do not merely intend to disseminate information or provide a tool for historical reference; but rather I intend to surprise and provoke my readers intellectually and emotionally through the telling of a very real personal and historical narrative.

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1 My project is a re-archiving of Jane’s scrapbook, which is itself an archive. Jane produced an archive of her life by collecting artifacts to commemorate events and writing notes about what she did, who she met, and where she went. I re-archived Jane’s archive through the selection, organization, and explication of particular artifacts in her scrapbook. From her personal archive, I constructed a cultural-historical archive of teen life in the 1930s.

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