Native Speakers - Shannon Moutinho

Native Speakers - Maria Eugenia Cotera

In Native Speakers, Cotera discusses the works of three women who begin as anthropologists and then shift toward creating works of fiction.  Even though their research may have been deeply rooted in folklore of the communities, their first efforts to publish and succeed within the academy required that they approach conform to a more scientific data presentation.  Cotera chose these three women since they shared key experiences around race, gender, identifying as a nationalist researcher or insider and navigating the imperialist powers of academia.  Their novels "Caballero," "Waterlily," and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" were all passed over until published well after their deaths.  I found the dynamics under which they worked as scientists interesting but their shift toward fiction insightful as to the possibilities of what breathes life into the presentation of an individual within a cultural group, the possibility for self-reflection or even self portrait that comes with writing someone else's story and what we, as consumers of stories, take with us as more valuable, resonating, or long lasting in terms of forms of writing.

The idea of writing fictions - formal works of fictions that are currently shelved in the "fiction novels" section of the book stores - based on the scientific work these three women did are the explicit display of Visweswaran's "Fictions of Feminist Ethnography."  However before these women wrote their novels, they navigated the patriarchal, racist, imperialist, world of the academy, conforming to academic and gendered rules and expectations that largely dictated how they behaved as well as the work they did and how it was presented - which work was considered valuable by the academic patriarchy and got published versus which was not and had to be rescued posthumously by feminist writers.  In their fiction novels however, they become their own "ciphers" for the story, managing feminist issues through the experience of fictional characters, through a feminist lens privileged to them in the context of the era when they were writing.  In essence they deconstructed colonial powers but writing about the function of colonial powers while being subjected to colonial powers themselves.

Choosing to become a novelist offers these women absolute power over the people she is writing about.  Given that the novels tell a story that so many people are able to relate to and empathize with and cannot find replicated in many other stories, it then circles around to add a layer of definition to the identity of these women as feminist ethnographer folktale artists who aim to deconstruct the common cultural assumptions about individual experience.  They are able to capture the nuances of individuals through storytelling instead of an article.

Aside from the novelist endeavors, these women also were insiders of the groups that they aimed to study.  In order to maintain that insider status they had to respect the cultural expectations and boundaries of the role of a woman in her position.  By maintaining this consistency, each researcher was able to maintain a close enough relationship with the cultural group in question and avoiding suspicion, a disowning of sorts or being addressed as "the outsider."  On the other hand, conforming to these gendered roles within the communities of study also has the potential to limit what knowledge they are privy to without losing trust of the community and completely ruining the delicate balance that research depends on.  (I think about this often when I think about conducting research with sign language interpreters - being an interpreter myself, but maintaining that type of identity, camaraderie, and role expectations which may not always allow me to get at the thing which I most want to seek answers to.)

Telling is that much of the information gleaned from these women conforming to the culture of the group they were studying in order to maintain good relationships and trust was then not valued by the academy.  It did not conform to their expectations of data or its the presentation and therefore rejected it.  In doing this, they were not only rejecting the information, but the feminist experience and truth as well; the academy essentially took an action to perpetuate the patriarchal imperialist construction of the academy.  Can we then see the 1960 and 1970's reclamation of these works as a sign that the foundation of the imperialist tower is beginning to crack?