Notes from an Anthropologist

1.  How much of yourself should you be in an interview?  Are you trying to model an interview after "natural" dialogue or should you remove yourself as much as possible so as to minimize the affects of your presence? Can you be a shy ethnographer?

2.  If you leave the interviews that you guys are about to do in an archive for the future, what will you want people to know about you?  What would you like to know about the people who did the America Life Histories interviews?

3.  What are the advantages or disadvantages of being a native ethnographer vs. being a foreign ethnographer?

4.  Do you need to like your informant?  Do you need empathy to get a successful interview?  Should the interview be pleasurable for the informant?

5.  Does it matter that all of us would get a different life history if we interviewed somebody?

6. Is a tape recorder a perfect record of an interview?

7.  What kind of power relationships are there in the interviewer-interviewee relationship? Would it be wrong to pay someone for a life history?

8.  Is a life history something that is waiting to be told?  Or is it something that you fashion?  Do people in all cultures tell their lives the same way?  Does accuracy matter?

9.  How do you ask open-ended questions?

10.  Would you want to give a life history?

Courtesy of Nancy Abelmann
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
February 1998