Myerhoff's "Third Voice": Ideology and Genre in Ethnographic Narrative

Abstract

This text is a revised part of an introduction to Remembered Lives. The Work of Ritual, Storytelling and Growing Older (1992),' a volume of the most important ethnographic essays that Barbara Myerhoff wrote between 1968 and her death in 1985. This was a period when she repatriated her work and undertook ground-breaking studies of the cultural creativity of elderly Yiddishspeaking Jews. Her work, and particularly her ethnographic narrative Number Our Days, has been accorded canonical status across a range of disciplines. In pages that memorably evoke the structure of feeling of Yiddish immigrant life, Myerhoff retails the life histories of elderly working-class Jews as a wholesale allegory of Americanization. The myth of the one-generation proletariat is conflated with the Eriksonian ages of man and Victor Turner's theory of ritual to produce a narrative of upward mobility through the realms of the spirit and the psyche and, through the professional success of the immigrant's children or grandchildren, the realm of the social as well. In this writing, Myerhoff persuasively represents and analyzes the oppositional character of the elders' cultural productions, and at the same time occludes its social and historical sources.2 She captures the tangy flavor of Jewish socialist culture, but drains it of its ideologically alien and contestatory character. Nothing the old people do is construed in terms of politics; everything they do is construed under the concept of definitional ceremonies and thereby credited to the account of spirituality and existential self-affirmation. Myerhoff's third voice brings the voice(s) of Jewish socialism under the monologizing regime of anthropological authority, even as it seeks to initiate a break with disciplinary conformism. This text offers a critique of Myerhoff's writing practice as part of its larger