Among Wolves by Pachirat Timothy

Author:Pachirat, Timothy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351329620
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Grandma began stirring under her blankets of reindeer hides just as the sky changed from black to the color of a bruise. Coughing loudly, she sat up and was still for a long moment before rising with a loud sigh to her feet and moving across the hut to the embers of the fire, barely flickering with orange from the night before. She took two ends of a rope strung through the handle of the blackened and dented cooking pot and, in a rapid, easy motion, folded the left end over the right end, then twisted both in a circular motion before folding the right end back over the left and hanging the rope onto a stout metal tripod above the embers. Outside, one of the reindeer made a clicking sound, “Chok-chok-chok.” “Oh, little Bill Clinton,” Grandma said, “it’s too early in the day for you to be seeking a mate. Go back to sleep.”

KAREN [laughing]: Little Bill Clinton?

[The wolfdog, far ahead of the three humans, turns and snarls again, her fangs glinting in the light reflected off the lake. Engrossed in their conversation, the humans neither see nor hear her.]

PIERS [also laughing]: Yes, the Eveny named one of their more promiscuous reindeer after Bill Clinton. But you can see how in those fieldnotes, I deliberately excluded the first-person point of view, allowing me to focus intently on the grandmother and her perspective. In doing so, I gained insight into things that might have otherwise escaped me: the knots being tied for particular purposes and the calls used for different reindeer, for example.

TIMOTHY [taking up a mock student tone]: So, Professor Piers, are first and third person the only two choices when it comes to adopting a point of view in fieldnotes?

PIERS [playing along]: Why no, Student Timothy, there’s also third-person omniscient point of view, which I sometimes like to utilize as an exercise to keep me humble.

KAREN: What do you mean?

PIERS: Well, third-person omniscient is that point of view you sometimes encounter in novels—take Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example—where the narrator somehow is able to follow multiple characters in contemporaneous time and is able to describe not only their actions, but also their internal thoughts and emotions.58 It is a kind of “god’s eye view from nowhere,” to borrow a felicitous phrase used by Donna Haraway and others.59 So, adopting this writing stance about the same set of fieldnotes, I might write, for example:

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