Can Ethnographic Narrative Be a Neighborly Act?

Abstract

Ethnographic narrative, because it presents reality in rhetorically compelling accounts of people and events, causes and consequences, has the potential for being a representation offered for interpretation to the people studied for the sake of entering dialogue with them about ways of gaining greater freedom in concrete circumstances. The author proposes neighborliness, a concept taken from the practice of teachers and pastoral workers in the liberation movements of Latin America, as a way ethnographers can assist teachers and researchers at all levels of the educational system to free their energies from a segregated and hierarchical system in order to discover possibilities for greater autonomy and participation in civic and other communities. The article suggests that university professors engaging in ethnographic narrative as a neighborly act for the sake of teachers in schools could affect the segregated and hierarchical structure of education and begin a process in which teachers “lower” on the educational hierarchy could perform neighborly acts for university professors confined by the tenure system.