NARRATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY AS SOCIAL SCIENCE DISCOURSE

While spending my mandatory year of fieldwork among the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala I learned that a woman was planning to conduct a healing séance soon. So, one chilly evening my husband Dennis and I joined a small group of spirit seekers in an ancient adobe house. Its single room had a ten-foot ceiling with round rafters and tiny mica windows. Along the eastern wall, under a mass of dusty crepe-paper streamers, stood a rickety table covered with a long tapestry. In the center was an equilateral cement cross, embedded with green and blue stones. Stacked at each corner of the table and around the cross were strangely shaped quartz crystals, fulgurites, potshards, and black obsidian blades.