Testimonio, Ethnography and Processes of Authorship

‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war

“…Above all else, testimonio is about the affirmation of the individual experience ‘in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle’ (Beverley, 1992: 103; Gelles, 1998; Hanlon & Shankar, 2000). If it loses that, it is not testimonio .…”

Maternal Politics and Religious Fervor: Exchanges between an Andean Market Woman and an Ethnographer

“…Using life stories as a vehicle for ethnographic representation presents specific challenges (Crapanzano 1984:935) 1 . In the wake of controversy surrounding the truth value of I, Rigoberta Menchú , the genre of life stories ( testimonios ) received increased scrutiny from scholars (the contributors to Arturo Arias's 2001 edited volume offer an excellent synopsis of these debates; see also Menchú 1984; Stoll 1999; and Gelles 1996, 1998). Claudia Ferman (2001:157–158, paraphrasing John Beverly) alerted anthropologists to how testimonial subjects appropriate those who take down their life stories for their own purposes; and Pratt (2001:43) and Ferman (2001:163) showed how life stories frequently merge veracity and verisimilitude, as well as individual and collective experience, through the lens of historical memory.…”

“…Testimonios almost always have a political undercurrent to them. As Paul Gelles (1996, 1998) and George Lovell and Christopher Lutz (2001:200–201) point out, such life stories “make abstractions real by personalizing events and recounting heroic stories of individual resistance to entrenched inequities in face of overwhelming odds.” Tellers of testimonios and ethnographers who take down their tales structure their reading of their interaction in light of what they hope to achieve and project. For me, as an ethnographer, it has been a conscious, ethical choice to publish parts of Lucre's life story, with her permission, 2 and to accompany it with commentary and analysis that portray the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of Andean market women's lives.…”

Beyond translation: Truth and Rigoberta Menchú

“…Testimony, he concludes, is both an art and a strategy of subaltern memory (p. 277). Grandin and Goldman (1999) write,``it is no great surprise that political leaders rearrange events in their lives for political reasons. In his presidential campaign, Abraham Lincoln presented himself as a backwoods hayseed even though he was an accomplished legislator and lawyer ' ' (p. 26).…”