Indiana University Press Reciprocal Ethnography and the Power of Women's Narratives

Folklorist Elaine J. Lawless has devoted her career to ethnographic research with underserved groups in the American Midwest, including charismatic Pentecostals, clergywomen, victims of domestic violence, and displaced African Americans. She has consistently focused her research on women’s speech in these contexts and has developed a new approach to ethnographic research which she calls "reciprocal ethnography," while growing a detailed corpus of work on women’s narrative style and expressive speech. Reciprocal ethnography is a feminist and collaborative ethnographic approach that Lawless developed as a challenge to the reflexive turn in anthropological fieldwork and research in the 1970s, which was often male-centric, ignoring the contributions by and study of women’s culture. Collected here for the first time are Lawless’s key articles on the topics of reciprocal ethnography and women’s narrative which influenced not only folklore, but also the allied fields of anthropology, sociology, performance studies, and women’s and gender studies. Lawless’s methods and research continue to be critically relevant in today’s global struggle for gender equality. From the Author Amy Shuman is Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is author of Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy and author with Carol Bohmer of Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion. About the Author Elaine J. Lawless is Curators' Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Folklore Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Missouri. She is author of multiple books including The Liberation of Winifred Bryan Horner: Writer, Teacher, and Women's Rights Advocate, Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment Through Narrative, and When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics and Community in Pinhook, Missouri.