Walking in Dallas with dead people 1

Abstract

For much of their careers, Art Bochner and Carolyn Ellis have sung and conducted a chorus of mermaids’ songs (Gergen & Gergen, 2011). Sometimes an elegant harmony, sometimes a contrasting cacophony, their work “complexifying” (as Carolyn says), the theoretical and methodological groundings and iterations of ethnographic and autoethnographic inquiry have changed the disciplines of communication and sociology, and many individuals’ lives, along the way. Davis (2008) suggests that funerals “connect the private experience of grief with the public performance of ritual” (p. 409). Like poetry, “they emphasize our humanity … they pull us in through our bodies” (p. 411) and are “multivocal” (p. 413), similar to the mermaids’ songs that have characterized Art and Carolyn’s work. This piece, a multi-vocal performative auto-ethnography, seeks to “connect the private experience of grief with the public performance of ritual;” in this case, the daily ritual of walking becomes the multivocal text that laments the deaths of loved ones.