Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

Aki about TuPac, TuPac about Aki - Exploring an Indirect Perspective in Street Ethnography

Geir H Moshuus

NOVA (Norsk institutt for forskning om oppvekst, velferd og aldring)

(Norwegian Social Research, Oslo)

Norway/Noruega

Ethnographic work today is author-driven-production in which stories or narratives make up the central part (cf. Clifford & Marcus, 1986). In Bohannon’s famous essay “Shakespeare in the bush” the Tiv were arguing with Bohannon about her presentation of Hamlet, to make what they thought was “a very good story” (Bohannon 1966:32). By studying how the Tiv argued with her about the meaning of Hamlet, Garro and Mattingly (2000) maintain that Bohannon found a way of wrestling with how the Tiv viewed their world, a way that differs from the conventional direct line of questioning informing most ethnographic encounters. Although anthropology has always been concerned with stories, Bohannon’s essay gives us a glimpse of Tiv culture by showing us how Bohannon struggled with her audience for the correct way of framing Hamlet: Rather than focusing on the story, Bohannon was focusing on how the story was being constructed. This approach is not the most common. As Garro and Mattingly puts it: “Even when anthropologists have been highly cognizant of the aesthetic qualities of a culture’s enduring myths and folktales, they have not been so keenly aware that the personal stories they were hearing might be more than transparent mediums for communicating significant social facts” (2000:4). This paper presents the story of Aki, a young man of immigrant origins, accused of attempted murder. The context of his story is the ongoing shaping of informal multicultural collectives on the streets of Oslo, Norway. Most studies of this reality are based on data collected through interviews. I argue that this kind of data collecting might introduce the researcher’s own preconceived ideas as the cultural framework for what the researcher hears and understands. Instead I suggest that we approach participants in street activities through the themes and topics that they introduce and reinterprets. I develop my argument by showing how I got a better understanding of Aki’s story of attempted murder from listening to his presentation of Gangsta Rap. What did I learn when I learned about TuPac from Aki? Direct questions never elicited reflections leading up to the murder attempt, even though he was willing to talk about it. Only when we turned to TuPac and Gangsta Rap did I make some progress. Our conversations revealed Aki’s street life in new ways. One possibility is that Gangsta Rap is closer to the language that expresses Aki’s gang world, another ¬– and more probable – is that Aki had extensive knowledge of this music style and was happy to share it. While he taught me about Gangsta Rap, both what he included in that story and what he left out taught me about Aki. In his essay, “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin says: "[The storytelling] sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel" (Benjamin 1970: 91-92). Extrapolating from Benjamin, the clay vessel forms the potter just as a storyteller becomes a storyteller by the stories he or she tells. Storytellers do not only tell us a story, they also tell us some deep truths about themselves. How they tell the story reveal (to themselves as well) who they really are – or want to be. As Aki told me about Gangsta Rap, the story clung to him, allowing me to see who Aki – the storyteller, the potter, really is. Aki’s story provided me with clues as to why Aki was standing trial for attempted murder, not actual murder. From his Gangsta Rap stories I glimpsed what stopped Aki from becoming a murderer.

About Geir H Moshuus 

Geir H Moshuus is a social anthropologist with a doctoral degree from the University of Oslo based upon the dissertation "Young Immigrants of Heroin. An Ethnography of Oslo's Street Worlds", 2005.