The Power of Anthropology in Unearthing Family History and Culture | Elizabeth Keating

In retrospect, Elizabeth Keating wishes she would have used her skills as an anthropologist when she interviewed her mother about family history.  To help others avoid her mistakes, Elizabeth shares how we can use interviews with living family members to uncover the everyday experiences and cultural nuances of previous generations.  Elizabeth encourages listeners to embrace the value of family stories and their priceless insights to help us understand not only what happened to our ancestors, but to envision what life was like from their perspective and experience.

About Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Keating is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s just written a book "The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations" that helps people find out more about their own family’s history. Her specialty in anthropology is Linguistic Anthropology, the study of language and culture.

Connect with Elizabeth:

Website: elizabeth-keating.com
Instagram: @elizabethkeating44
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Keating

Are we connected on Instagram or Facebook yet? Find me @msheathermurphy

Transcript

The Power of Anthropology in Unearthing Family History and Culture | Elizabeth Keating

Stories in Our Roots, ep. 75

Heather Murphy: Hi Elizabeth, thanks for joining me on my podcast today.

Elizabeth Keating: I am so happy to be here talking with you.

Heather Murphy: I am so excited because I started off college as an anthropology major, and then when I found out family history was a thing at my university, I switched. So I am very intrigued at the combination of both of these things, and I'm really excited to talk to you. What I'd like You to talk about first is how you came to combine that anthropology and interviewing living family members.

Elizabeth Keating: What happened to me is something that happens to a lot of people. I lost my mother and I realized after she was gone that there was so much that I didn't know about her and I was curious about her and I had no way then of asking her. Even though I had interviewed her a couple of years before she died, asking her this and that about the family, mostly genealogy, I neglected to ask her about what her own growing up was like, and her childhood and teenage years.

What was it like to grow up in that time, as a woman particularly, and in her part of the country? I had really no idea. And so I thought that I would like to understand better what could I have asked my mother? I'm an anthropologist and I thought, well, maybe I can use my anthropology training to understand What would draw out a way of life better? And what better than an anthropologist or an anthropology approach to draw out a way of life?

Because in fact, that's what anthropologists do is they go to different groups and different cultures and different places, and they try to understand What is ordinary life like? And so I thought about that and developed some questions along with the help of many older people. So what I did was I interviewed a lot of people of grandparent age, and I asked them questions to see what sort of questions and what sort of an interview would draw out a way of life. And I had so much fun doing it. I've learned so much about ways of life and different people in different parts of the world. And I was having such a fascinating time that I asked my students at the University of Texas, Austin, my anthropology students as, one of their class Projects every semester to interview 1 of their grandparents and they loved the project. They use the same questions that I put in the book, " The Essential Questions" and they brought back to class the most wonderful stories. So then I decided I wanted to write a book about it because I wanted more people to find out what fascinating lives people have lived in our own families and we have no idea.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. So could you help us understand better what an anthropologist does? I'm sure for a lot of our listeners, we may have heard of anthropology and maybe it elicits ideas of somebody going to a remote location with a society that's completely cut off from our modern perspective. What is an anthropologist actually do? 

Elizabeth Keating: The key to anthropology is to adopt the other person's point of view or the other group's point of view. And that's the magic of anthropology is that anthropologists try to really stand in the shoes of another person, if they're wearing shoes, sometimes they're not. I've talked to many grandparents who said they went barefoot all from May until September.

but also to, to try to see and to try to even imagine and to behave as if you are living in someone else's culture. So, when I did my first anthropology field work on a small island in the Pacific, I lived with the family of the secondary chief, and I did what they did every day. And I ate what they ate and practice the rituals they practiced and observed ordinary life and took part in it myself.

And it taught me a lot. there were things that they imagined that I had no idea about and vice versa, of course, but it was a, a wonderful world opening about another human way of life. And similarly, even if you are just doing anthropology with a group,. a different group, say, an American group, for example. I'd also did anthropology field work in the deaf community in Austin, Texas, with a deaf PhD student of mine, and that was just down the street from us in a way, but it was a totally different world, a world of visual language, a world of very different kind of, you know, Culture in a way they do speak of deaf culture, and that was tremendously fascinating to learn about deaf culture and sign language. So anthropology's main idea is to not just to view another group or another person as if they're someone that you're interviewing or someone who is interesting, or you're watching what they do on a reality TV show. But what is it like to actually live as they do?

And that's a very, very interesting process. And when you do that with your own grandparents and parents that you're interviewing and other family members, what you try to do is imagine what it might have been like to grow up in the time that they grew up. So, what was it like to grow up in Britain in World War 2? And what was it like to grow up in rural Texas where your father was changing jobs all the time?

Heather Murphy: How does understanding that culture, in your book you refer to it as like an insider and outsider perspective, what are the benefits that we can get from looking at our parents and our grandparents and trying to learn their stories from that insider perspective?

Elizabeth Keating: What we can learn is a lot of empathy, for one thing. For example, in my family, when the women were growing up, that were my grandmother's age and my mother's age, they didn't have the opportunities that I've had to choose a profession and to pursue it. And they also were growing up in the post war period, my mother at least, and that was a very difficult time for women too, and men as well.

It was a terrible readjustment period after having gone through some very difficult years. Before that, there was the Depression where many of the people I talked to had grown up in families that lost their money. So it's possible to understand a different way of life that we can scarcely imagine, really. You can look back in the history books, and you can see pictures of the different architecture back then, or the different transportation systems, or the different technologies.

But what was it like to actually use that ringer washer or to go into the basement every day as one grandmother told me she did to help her mother do the laundry and she had to feed it through the ringer part and then go hang it up on the line and wash day was always on a certain day. And she talked about coming home from lunch and that was what she did during lunch period at school and then went back to school. And so you get a sense of the rhythm of their day. Lots of people talked about, Oh, we, we just were let loose in the day. And our parents told us to come back at, at lunchtime or come back at nightfall, come back when the streetlights are on. And that's very rare today. Today, people are much more cautious and worried about what's happening to their children when they're not under supervision. 

Heather Murphy: In your book, you list some mistakes that you made while you were interviewing your mother and in retrospect, and one of them is that we were in your own frame of reference, rather than allowing yourself to be from your mother's or allowing your mother to, like, use her words to describe situations.

How can we both kind of be that insider that we talked about you, but without putting our own perspective and projecting that on to them and what we get out of them. 

Elizabeth Keating: That's an excellent question, and it's a very important one whenever you're interviewing anybody that you're interested in finding out something about. It's very important to be able to do a few things while you're interviewing, and one of the most important things, strangely enough, is to be able to be silent.

To be able to hold a long period of silence because you want to be sure that you give them enough time to recollect their thoughts. They're going way back in time and these are often memories they haven't thought of since then, or in years and years. And they'll tell you that. Oh, I haven't remembered that in years and years.

And so you, they need to linger a few moments in that memory to collect it for you and to be able to organize it so that it makes sense to you. And that takes some silence on their part, of course, because most of us can't think so well in great detail, very far ahead of. When we're speaking. And so that's a very important thing is to be able to be silent.

Another important thing in this project, when you're trying to find out about your family history, from the point of view of your own elders is not to give your own judgment, and that seems odd in a conversation because conversation is normally a back and forth of ideas, but in this case sometimes grandparents can be reluctant to share details and intimate stuff with you if they feel like you're going to be judging them, because, of course, they want to be thought well of in your eyes.

And so you want to be sure that you're not being judgmental. And the best way is to withhold judgment and to just Do a lot of acknowledgment kind of tokens, as we would call them, where you're just showing your assent and nodding and so forth and giving them encouragement to keep going. So that's very important.

And of course, not interrupting them. And when I learned the 1st time I was interviewing. I learned how much I cut people off. So they weren't nearly finished by the time I asked the next question. And I didn't realize that at the time, because Americans are very, very careful about silences in conversation.

We think silences can mean something is wrong and so people hurry to fill them to show that everything's just fine. But in this situation, that can mean a loss of where the person was, especially when you're talking about older people, they can lose track of where they are, maybe a little bit more easily than someone who's only got 12 years of memory to, uh, to remember. 

Heather Murphy: another mistake that you said you made was focusing on building your questions about what you already knew about your mother. Can you elaborate on that?

Elizabeth Keating: Yes, what I did there was I asked her about people that I barely knew and she knew well. Because we had moved away from most of our family because of my father's job. And she knew a lot of people by name and by reputation that I didn't know at all. And so I built my questions on what I knew a little bit about already, but wanted to know more.

So I had no idea what I didn't have any clue about. And the way the questions in the book are structured, they're structured so that what you're doing is asking about ordinary life. You're asking about what was the home or house or apartment you grew up in like, so you want a description of those 4 walls.

And that is a fascinating answer. It sounds very mundane, but when people start talking about the home they start talking about a lot about the family and about culture. So I didn't know to ask my mother, what was the house like you grew up in? And I didn't know to ask her, what was the neighborhood like?

What was a day at school like? what did you wear? What was your favorite thing to wear? What sort of things did you talk with your friends about? What were human interactions like? How were you taught to speak to older people and so forth. That is the sort of thing that elicits real stories that you don't have any idea about and they have forgotten that they know.

Heather Murphy: So asking these types of questions, how does that help us understand our parents or grandparents culture and why is that important to understand?

Elizabeth Keating: Our parents' culture is very important to understand because it made us who we are. All of the ideas that were current at that time about child raising about what women should wear. This was always a bone of contention with my mother, but and it had changed dramatically over the generations. So, for her, what I wore signaled something that it definitely didn't signal to me. And clothing does have these properties where it's very symbolic. And things like that can change over time. And it's interesting to understand what the characteristics of each particular time are and how people really the beliefs they had and the kinds of, even just the, the sorts of expectations and assumptions people had, what were their expectations of what was going to happen next? How did their life change when they first got married or how did their life change when they had kids? Asking people about their identity back then is very revealing because it gives you a sense of what some of the gender roles were that were common at the time. And it also allows you to understand the regional aspects of every country. We have a tendency myself included to generalize about Americans or Canadians or Europeans or Africans and really, there's so much diversity that when you start to find out about your own parents and grandparents growing up, you find out about some really interesting regional distinctions that might not exist anymore, but existed back then. And you get a sense of the kinds of ideas that shaped you.

Heather Murphy: Through the interviews that you've done and your students have done, what are some of those maybe common things or unusual things that you've come across that have come to light because of asking these questions in this way?

Elizabeth Keating: Lots of really interesting things have come to light, according to my students. So, first of all, they never visualized their gray haired grandparent or great aunt as someone who had a different date every week. And so when they start to ask about what dating practices were like, that's always an interesting question, because sometimes people feel a bit shy at first, but they get really warmed up.

And that becomes a great place of bridging and bonding between the generations because, of course, young people, if it's a young person that's doing the interviewing, they're at that very vulnerable stage when they're finding their life partners. And that's always a time of great tribulation. So there's can be a lot to talk about at that point.

So that, idea of sharing between the cultures can be very much fostered through these conversations about different aspects of their early life.

Heather Murphy: An interview that's focused on getting genealogical information is much different than the type of interview that you're trying to help people have. Sometimes though, with asking those deeper questions and those questions that might get more emotional responses, it can be intimidating to sit down with your grandparent and ask them About things that you don't know if they feel positive or negative about. How can we work through or address those feelings of, um, kind of hesitancy to get to that emotional level and that deeper level with the people we interview?

Elizabeth Keating: These questions are designed to be questions that are very descriptive in nature. In other words, to talk about the home you grew up in, or to talk about a day at school, or to talk about different sort of kinship practices, who got together at family dinners and things like that. And so it Is possible that you wouldn't even touch on any topics that would be sensitive in the way that most people would think of it.

In other words, you're not really asking marriages and divorces in the family, which is often what people are asking for when they're trying to figure out family trees, but you're really just asking, well, what was it like back then when. When young men and young women, found their life partners, what's were the expectations and practices so you can stay on a level that is really doesn't have to divulge anything that someone doesn't really want to divulge, so it's really up to them. And that's another reason why I think it's very important for them to be in control of the answering. In other words, to let them speak in the style and speed that they're comfortable with and at the tempo. that's to keep them in control of the narrative.

Some people like to disclose a lot. And some people don't. And that's perfectly fine. Believe me, there's so much interesting to find out, even if you don't find out all the skeletons in the closet, there's fascinating details in everyday life. And people will think, oh, I just led an ordinary life. But once they get talking, you'll be surprised.

Heather Murphy: And I can see this approach as so instead of solely asking questions directly to them about, okay, what was your experience with this, broadening it and asking what was common at that time takes the pressure off of them, especially if they think they're not significant or there's things that they don't want to talk about their life, but they're okay talking about what was common. And that kind of does give an idea of who they were at that time because of what they chose to tell you.

Elizabeth Keating: Yes, exactly. They have so much to to show by the stories they tell.

Heather Murphy: Another thing you mentioned in some of the writings that I looked at is letting the people that you interview honoring the language that they choose to develop, and I know you're focused a lot on linguistics, what do you think does that really add, like, what should people be looking for or trying not to interrupt to get that treasure from the language part of it?

Elizabeth Keating: Yes, you're right. I'm a linguistic anthropologist. And that means I focus on language and culture. I think language is a fascinating tool that humans have. And yes, I'm always delighted to hear the different ways that people express themselves regionally and historically and stylistically lots of different ways.

And of course, when someone's being interviewed, it's a rather formal context. So You have a tendency where people might tend to be a bit more formal in the beginning, but they should loosen up a bit and you should get a really good recording of the specialness of their voice. You know, everyone has a special voice imprint and when we talk and when we express ourselves, we have so much color and life in our voice, or if we're deaf, if we're signing, we have our own unique way of saying things. And that's the magic of recording these interviews is that you will have the Recording of the person's voice, which is very, very special. 

Heather Murphy: what would be the most important thing if somebody sits down to interview their family, what would be like the number one thing that they need to keep in mind that could have the biggest impact on that interview?

Elizabeth Keating: I would say, first of all, to do it and second of all, to let the person speak and to sit back and enjoy what they have to say, even if they go on a long time. In other words, it's your family member, you can break this up into different segments. And I've had people say at the end of 15 minutes on the first question. Oh, I'm way off topic. And I say, that's perfectly fine. I want to hear everything. Because in a way the questions are just prompts. So once they get going and start to tell you about their childhood and their teenage years and what life was like back then and what culture was like. They're off and let them go.

And then you can go back to the other questions. And if they didn't cover the items and details that you're interested in, you can ask something in addition. So it's great if you have someone who has a lot to say and usually, if people are a bit shy, it's because they might think that they aren't the right person to help you or they aren't the most articulate person and you just assure them that you're the perfect person.

And you really do want to interview them. And the thing is older people. gEt ignored a lot and they don't get paid too much attention to. But the wonderful thing is if you sit down and talk to them, they are so thrilled to be asked because they have so much experience.

Think of the thousands and hundreds and thousands of interactions they've had over their lifetime and people they've met and experiences they've had. And so they're really fascinating to talk to as long as we know how to get them started and how to get them talking about something they really know about.

They really know about the past. And if you can draw it out in really interesting details, like about the ways of life, then you can also get a great picture of what your family was like back then.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much for talking with me. I love this combination of anthropology and family history. Can you tell us more about your book?

Elizabeth Keating: My book came out last November with penguin random house, and it's been doing very well. I've been getting a lot of wonderful feedback from it. And it's been such a pleasure to talk to people about it. So the book, you can get at most of the major booksellers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other booksellers.

And I'm, I really would hope that people will take it seriously before it's too late to collect the stories in their family when those first person narrators and historians are available to us to, uh, to probe for all of their insights.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, and one thing as I look through the book too, while the questions are great for interviewing, I also see a lot of value in looking at those questions and thinking about ancestors that have passed on that you can't interview, but Thinking of those questions to yourself, okay, what was this person's life like in these different ways?

Sometimes you'll be able to find something out, sometimes you won't, you'll just have to use your imagination and thought. But I think using these questions, whether for living ancestors or deceased ancestors, can really help us to understand, like you were saying, who a person is and not just what happened to them.

Elizabeth Keating: Yes, exactly.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much for being here.

Elizabeth Keating: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure to talk with you.