Sterling Brown: An Ethnographic Perspective

Abstract

I would like to propose a method for reading the poetry of Sterling A. Brown in light of Brown's complete oeuvre. My proposed method is informed by interdisciplinary inquiry, including recent ethnographic theory and qualitative research methodology and an emerging cultural studies discourse that I and others term black cultural critique. This approach is not intended to overlook any aspect of the aesthetic values or artistic achievement of Brown's poetic output. Rather, this approach intends to offer an additional, interdisciplinary, theoretical context in which to appreciate Brown's poetic achievement. My thesis is that Sterling Brown was a postmodern ethnographer who by the 1940s had pioneered solutions to three major problems with which today's cultural anthropologists are grappling: (1) what form ethnographic should take, (2) what methodology can result in competent ethnographies of non-hegemonic, oral-based cultures, and (3) what ways the authority of native informants can be acknowledged in ethnographies. James Clifford and George Marcus offer an eloquent explanation of why I feel it is important to look at Sterling Brown's poetic output from an ethnographic perspective. They see ethnography as an emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon [whose] authority and rhetoric have spread to many fields where 'culture is a newly problematic object of description and critique' (Writing Culture 3). I suggest that, if we consider Brown's entire oeuvre-poetry, literary criticism, oral history, and cultural critique-from an ethnographic perspective, we can emerge with the understanding that the sum of his writings constitutes an ethnographic methodology that reflects postmodernist sensibilities. However, it was not until the 1970s and '80s that ethnographers like Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the late Victor Turner advocated the pursuit of what Sterling Brown already had accomplished-namely, blurr[ing] the old distinction between art and science and challeng[ing] the very basis of the claim to exacting rigor, unblinking truth telling, and unbiased reporting that marked the boundary separating art from science (Vidich and Lyman 41). Brown's methodology answers the call of numerous ethnographers and anthropologists who seek honest, nontraditional, competent ways of the ethnos of non-hegemonic and non-Western cultures. Before I proceed with my argument, let me offer some definitions. The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology defines ethnography as writing about customs or, more generally, the description of cultures based on firsthand observation and participation in fieldwork. Fieldwork is the process of observing and participating in life ways of people. Anthropologists report the