Introduction
Ethnography, as a science about the cultural, religious and other peculiarities of different nations, faces considerable challenges in the modern world. The bulk of those challenges are connected with the globalization and gradual merging of all cultures while boundaries between them become more and more vague. For example, it is typical nowadays to see a store trading in automobile spare parts located close to the ancient monument of the Asian culture somewhere in China, or vice versa observe the Europeans decorating their flats according to the Asian or African cultural trends. This paper will focus on the basic advantages and challenges faced by ethnography today, and on the ways in which the book by Narayan discloses the fundamentals of the modern ethnography.
Main body
To begin with, the book “Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels” by Kirin Narayan is a valuable source of information about the present day of the field research, or ethnography. Although completed in the early 1990s, the book under consideration discloses the following aspects of the modern ethnography. It discusses attempts to combine the features of different cultures studied so that they were understandable and comprehensible for the bearers of any possible foreign culture. Interest in the most updated methods of ethnographic field research including folk stories study, interviews with their bearers, and attempts to become the part of the culture studied at least for the period of research conduct, are also the characteristic features of this book.
Accordingly, the above mentioned aspects of the book can be listed as the most burning issues of the modern ethnography. The process of globalization brings features of a certain culture into another one. Thus, the recent popularity of the Asian religions and cultures in the Western world can serve as an example here. Using the achievements of ethnography, the Western nations acquire more and more interest in the Chinese, Japanese or Indian culture. However, the knowledge of these cultures is often not developed enough which makes it hard for them to co-exist in the society. Namely for the purpose of elimination of this gap in the knowledge, the book by Narayan has been written: “…I attempted to reflect back certain facets of popular, predominantly American, interest in Hinduism for readers outside India.” (Narayan, p. x) Further on, the understanding of the adequate findings of the modern ethnography is an important factor in building the peaceful and friendly relations between the nations and cultures of the world.
However, the advantages of the modern ethnography are also considerable. First of all, ethnography is an advanced science as far as it provides for the already mentioned understanding between the bearers of different cultures and worshippers of different religions. Knowing a foreign culture better, the representatives of other cultures will have fewer grounds to build stereotypes against the former. For example, the prejudiced attitude towards the Jewish people spread over numerous ethnic groups could be easily overcome if the details of the Jewish culture were clearly explained to the society. Another advantage of ethnography is its universal educational value as it provides people with large amounts of information and widens their scopes considerably.
Drawing from this, the book by Narayan presents one of the best examples of the modern ethnographic works. It is obvious that namely modern ethnography is the subject of the book because its main aim is to unite the two aspects with which the older ethnographic schools dealt: “Anthropologists have traditionally studied the Other…the task of anthropology has been to translate one culture into the terms of another…” (Narayan, p. 7) On the other hand, “Folklorists have tended to study their own society”, and as contrasted to the anthropologists, they have “tended to focus on the cultural Self” (Narayan, p. 7).
Taking into account the above mentioned controversial points, Kirin Narayan in her work has tried to join anthropology and folklore studies so that to make the Indian culture understandable to the foreign readers without literally translating Hinduism into the terms comprehensible for the Westerners. As a person who “was brought up in India but have lived in the United States since…sixteeen” (Narayan, p. 7), Kirin Narayan tries to pass her intercultural experiences to her readers by not only presenting the tales by the Guru Swamiji, but also by analyzing them and putting them in all the possible contexts for the foreign, non-Indian readers. One of the brightest examples of such a contextualizing of the work is the initially presented system of transliterations used further in the book. Realizing not only the ways in which the Indian specific terms like dharma are read, but also what they mean in different contexts is a helpful step taken by the author to make the comprehension of her book easier.
Conclusion
So, all the above presented arguments prove that the book by Kirin Narayan discloses the basics of the modern ethnography. The science currently faces challenges of globalization that makes the intercultural understanding into the paramount need of today’s society. Accordingly, the contemporary views of ethnography as a combination of anthropology and folklore studies are reflected in the book by Narayan through the new approach to the data presentation and analysis.
Works Cited
Narayan, Kirin. Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teachings. Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 1992.