UAF Department of Anthropology

Student Research Abstract

Traditional/Transitional Woman: One Woman’s Pathway through Changing Times

This dissertation is intended to explore the ways in which Gwich’in women’s lives have changed over the past century by looking at the transitional generation between Gwich’in women raised substantially in the traditional way and Gwich’in girls and women raised with the expectations, obligations, and opportunities of modern American society.  These themes will be explored primarily through the life story and historical and cultural reflections of Vera Englishoe, a Neetsaii’ Gwich’in woman in her late 50s who has lived most of her life in Fort Yukon.  I will use a dialogic approach, based in part on Bakhtin’s notions of dialogics and heteroglossia, to organize and understand how and why Vera tells her stories and how they might inform us about Gwich’in culture and identity, as well as locate myself, other non-local influences, and Gwich’in dialogues of the past and present within the context of Vera’s story and the work as a whole.  To understand the how people make sense of themselves as a cultural group we must listen to the individual stories they tell as a part of this dialogue, understand the commonalities and differences in their voices and experiences, and understand the channels of dialogue that they are in conversation with, their ancestors, their families, their friends and enemies, their children, even their friends from other places and other cultures. 

The choice of dialogics and heteroglossia as a way to organize and understand how and why Vera tells her stories and how they might inform us about Gwich’in culture and identity stems first from the  process of anthropological and life history research.  Much of anthropological fieldwork (and life history work) takes the form of dialogue between many voices.  To ignore the conversations behind Vera’s stories is to falsify the way they were told and collected.  To disregard the conversations her stories will engage in after they are put into text is equally foolhardy.  Dialogue can also be used to understand the process through which people create, maintain, and project their identity as individuals and members of a particular group and culture.   In addition, it helps us to understand how an individual’s telling of their life story contributes to an understanding of how the values and standards of their culture influence and provide opportunities for them to live in a way that is meaningful both to them and to others.  No one voice can represent the “whole” of Gwich’in identity and experience, but Vera’s voice, her part of this larger dialogue, provides a launching point into the wider river of Yukon Flats culture and history and Yukon Flats culture and history provides a way of understanding her telling of her own life.   Finally, the dialogue within anthropology itself must be acknowledged as relevant to this research and text, including Vera’s dialogue with anthropologists both with and through me and the dialogue within anthropology that attempts to make sense of cultural identity without over simplification or unwarranted generalization.