Week 5 - The Life Cycle

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WEEK 5 - THE LIFE CYCLE

Your ethnographies will have a chapter on stages of life, or the life cycle. This week we want you to begin interviews with people on this very broad subject. You will hand in a draft of half of this chapter just before we leave for our trip to Taveuni in two weeks (scheduled for Oct. 16). Life cycle material deals with the major stages and events in people's lives: childhood, marriage, childbirth, parenthood, retirement, death. You will collect two kinds of material for this chapter:

First you should discuss the cultural marking of life cycle stages in rituals like those recognizing the birth of a child, 1st birthday parties (usually held only for a couple's first child), marriages, funerals and so on. Fijians mark many important events with celebrations that are quite similar to one another. You should get descriptions of all the major rituals marking life cycle stages and should analyze and describe at least one such ritual which you have actually observed in detail. You have a good description of life cycle issues in the Ravuvu book, and you can use that as a model for general topics.

We are also interested in individual people's experiences and feelings about these various stages or events, so that we can get a better sense of what these mean on an emotional level. For this reason, we are interested in people's individual stories about what it is like to be a child in Fiji, a married adult, a grandparent and so on. You will get this kind of information by doing life history interviews with at least four people over the next few weeks. You may choose to concentrate on one stage of the life cycle (e.g. what it is like to be a married woman).

You can gather material that is complementary to your own individual project but should not entirely reproduce this project in your life cycle chapter (e.g. if you want to understand the experience of young married women for your individual project you might choose to explore these women's feelings about their childhood, their feelings about their parents and siblings etc. in your life cycle chapter)..HOWEVER, you should always listen to what the person wants to say and if your interviewee has something that they really want to emphasize in his/her life story you should go with this theme. E.g. in 1997, Debbie interviewed Ili who really wanted to talk about her 21st birthday party and Debbie allowed her to go with this theme even though that was not what she was initially interested in. We also realize that it is easier for females to get good interviews with females and males (i.e. Andy!) to get good information from males so you can concentrate on people of your own gender if you want to.

There are a few different ways to gather information about these topics, and we want you to do all of them to a certain extent. What you do when will depend a bit on events, your schedules and your other work. Some of this information you have already learned to an extent, so your life cycle project will be supplementing what you already have.

1. RITUALS MARKING STAGES OF THE LIFE CYCLE:

i) Ask questions about BELIEFS AND PRACTICES surrounding life cycle events. Here you will be gathering material similar to what is presented in the Ravuvu. Use him as a guide, and ask your informants about the topics he addresses. You want to see just how similar or different your information is from what he presents there. Often you can work in questions about these topics as a part of your general conversations. Ask questions about what life cycle stages are marked (some people may mark things like 21st birthdays not discussed in detail by Ravuvu). How do your informants divide the life cycle into meaningful stages? Then ask questions about what these various rituals look like: who participates? what do they do? what do they receive? what do they bring? Is their some rationale for this ritual from your informants' point of view (e.g. baby rituals introduce the baby to his/her extended family)?

ii) Of course you will get much better material from actually observing a ritual than from just asking about it, so you should observe as many rituals as possible and should, at the very least, do a detailed observation, description, and analysis of one ritual marking a life cycle stage. This description should include:

• an analysis of who came, what they did, what they brought, and what the received back: you should ask for as many people as possible how they are related to the person on whom the ritual focuses (what category of relative are they? how are they actually related to the person (e.g. FaBrDa) if this information is known?). Fijian rituals, as some of your readings suggest, bring together a community of people and define the relationships between them and between the them and the individual on whom the ritual focuses. Obtain detailed information about participation so you can analyze and describe exactly how the ritual reinforces and defines a community around an individual.

• description and analysis of what was said in the ritual: try to get someone to give you a running translation of things like eulogies in funerals, sevusevu, keening of women at a funeral, or other key speech events in the ritual. If you can't get anyone to translate for you, try tape recording speeches and getting someone to go over the tape with you later. You don't need to do a word for word translation but can just ask the person to listen to the tape and summarize what was being said.

Include your information on life cycle events as a part of your field notes (if you would like, you can separate out these notes on their own–it is up to you). You will have no formal written presentation of life cycle info this week, but remember that it is coming up next week.

2. PERSONAL INTERVIEWS with individual people about their lives.

This type of interview is often called a "life history" interview because it asks people to go through their personal lives. TAPE RECORD them. Remember that you are interested in their personal experiences with life cycle topics. Aim to get at what it is like to be a child, a married adult, a parent etc. in Fiji. The keys to doing this are:

• Choose people you are comfortable speaking with

• Make it clear to them that there is no set "answer" to your questions, that you are just interested in finding out more about their lives. It might be best to avoid saying, "I want to know more about YOU" as there is a certain reluctance in this culture to talk "about" oneself.

• Start with easy-to-answer questions, such as, "Where did you grow up?", "Tell me about your brothers and sisters" etc. From there, you can move on to such things as, "Tell me a story you remember from your childhood" or "Tell me about your mother." This way they will quickly see that there is no set answer that they should be giving.

• Ask open-ended questions, beginning with "Tell me about this" or "Tell me some more about that." The key here is to get them talking, not to find out anything in particular. Be patient.

• To as great an extent as possible, let your informant guide what you talk about. This means trying not to change the subject until the informant seems to have finished the previous subject. Of course they'll need some guidance–you can't just say, "Let's talk about whatever you want to talk about." Ask questions that have easy answers, and then let the answers guide you.

• VERY IMPORTANT: LISTEN to what they are saying. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to tune out when someone is talking to you, but you should try very hard not to do that. Give the person feedback, even repeating what they just said, to let them know that you are listening.

We want you to aim towards doing FOUR of these interviews by the end of the term–try to fit in TWO this week. Each interview should be about an hour long (or longer if the person gets going). Write a summary of the information covered in the interview so that you will know what is on the tape. Turn in your tape summaries to us as a part of your notes.

HELPFUL HINT: Tape summaries can be very time consuming if you let them–try to spend no more than a half-hour to an hour writing summaries of each tape. If you have time to listen to the tape over to help you make the summary, try to avoid turning the tape off–just type your summary as you go along. This way it will not turn into hours and hours.

Summary of Week 5's Assignments:

Complete your economics surveys, putting the notes in your field notes.

Show us through your notes that you've made some progress with your individual projects–dive into these as much as time permits.

Write the draft of your economics chapter and turn it in (see other Wk 5 handout).

Turn in written summaries of your life cycle interviews, as part of your notes.

Turn in your usual general field notes.

Do the following reading for discussion:

• read the rest of Tradition and Change in the Fijian Village paying special attention to pages 24-47, 107-139 .

• read 2 short articles to be distributed on Monday

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