Illustrated Man, #7 – Shane, the Lone Ethnographer

In this installment of Illustrated Man we’re joined by anthropologist and comic book aficionado, Sally Campbell Galman, assistant professor of child and family studies at the U Mass School of Education. Dr. Galman is author and illustrator of Shane, the Lone Ethnographer, an introductory text that uses comics as a vehicle for teaching field methodology.

MT: Tell me something of your love for comics. What is the personal history of your tastes and interests?

SG: As a girl growing up in Japan and Hawaii surrounded by early Anime culture and the comics scene on base I was phenomenally uninterested in comix/comics and the associated culture. I think a large part of this was that back then (1980s) it was a heavy, heavy masculinist scene that alienated a lot of girls and boys, and maybe I was responding to that. The genre is defined much, MUCH more widely now and I think that’s a lot more welcoming for girls and women as well as subaltern men and people of color, to name a few.

I really wasn’t interested in that as much as I was in drawing — drawing was what I spent my days and nights doing and developing. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not classically trained in ANY respect, but I do remember there was this little Ed Emberly book about learning to draw animals from basic shapes that rocked my 5 year old world.

It’s probably a little pedestrian for the dyed-in-the-wool comics fan but the two artists who turned me on to the possibilities of the graphic novel and the panel or strip-format comic were Gary Larson and Art Spiegelman. The former was so quirky — it gave me the idea that there could be more than just superheroes or Prince Valiant or Cathy. The latter taught me about diversity of style and subject matter. The Maus series changed my world from an artistic and political point of view, considering I first came across it in 6th grade. Again, things are much different now, and as an adult (with the internet!) I have a much better range of stuff to read.

MT: Why did you think it would be a good thing to bring comics and anthropology together? Is there something that comics can do for anthropology?

SG: When I was in high school, in Hawaii, at Punahou School, I started trying out a comic strip that I later developed into Stating the Obvious, my strip that ran at Grinnell College for some years. From there I kept working in small ways until my thesis advisor, Margaret LeCompte, suggested that I should find a way to bring art into my scholarly pursuits. I connected with Mitch Allan at Left Coast Press (at that point he was with Alta Mira Press) and Shane was born.

I’m not even sure where the Shane idea came from, to be honest – I seem to remember my grad school PhD colleagues Andrew Brodsky and Eric Eiteljorg were sitting around in a small group discussion in a class for which we had NOT done the reading trying desperately to answer the discussion questions and got a little punchy with the Wild West theme. Who knows?

The process took a long time. I kind of just sat down and wrote it, thinking through my own understanding of fieldwork and fieldcraft as I went through. I’m working on the sequel now, which is Shane’s homage to data analysis. It’s hard to sit down and get it done because unlike a Word document which is so easy to edit and change (and may be viewed as a more robust form of scholarship and therefore ‘credit’ in the tenure and promotion game) any change in the pen-and-paper drawing game is laborious. Also taking the time to sit down and lose yourself in the story takes time. Even with all the technology out there I am still a pen-and-ink-and-pencil-and-eraser-shavings-everywhere luddite girl.

As for what comics can do for anthropology – or for any field or discipline out there: I think that any time we push the boundaries of what ‘counts’ as a legitimate text, of who can be the voice of scholarship and science, of what that ‘voice’ looks like and of who we purport our readership to be we democratize the profession and make knowledge more accessible to more people. Don’t get me wrong: scholarship, academic work, theory, and knowledge production are all deeply complex work. However, so is visual work and visual representation – just because it is different and some people think it is more accessible (which, as we know, isn’t always the case) doesn’t mean it is simple or a sub-genre. Funny pictures do more than make us laugh.

MT: Shane is different sort of critter from other comics I’ve reviewed on this blog, it’s more like an illustrated textbook. Why did you decide to write the book in the way that you did? What motivated you to use comics to teach ethnographic methodology?

SG: The honest but probably hugely uninteresting answer is that’s just how my brain works. I literally sat down and drew out the frames as they came to me (in pencil), with a vague idea of where I wanted to go. In terms of the ghosts of the ancestors [of anthropology] who guide Shane along her journey, I did make that choice deliberately because I felt like ethnographic methods newbies (in the field of education specifically) don’t draw from the real, live Heroes of Social Science like they should.

In terms of motivating to teach this way, well, I think in pictures and always have. My students will tell you I teach in pictures, so the book was a natural. It was also a great way to use something I can do well, drawing, to improve on something I was and am learning to do well, teaching.

MT: In the writing process did you find that the pitfalls you had to navigate were unique to writing comics or were they similar to the difficulties of writing a conventional text?

SG: Writing this book was much more difficult mechanically from writing a conventional text. But having now written two books and one (and a half) comic books, the comic is easier because I think both pedagogically and pictorially.

MT: Describe taking this to press. Did you have to do some extra work to convince the publisher that this was a worthwhile idea? How was pitching this book different from pitching a more conventional academic work?

SG: I didn’t have to do extra work, actually, beyond putting together a proposal – but since at the time of writing Shane I never had done a standard book prospectus, I didn’t know differently! I was lucky enough to work with an extremely supportive editor, Mitch Allan, now at Left Coast Press, who showed me what to do and was extremely helpful. The press I worked with for the original Shane had to figure out how to work with my style, the size of the pages (I tend to work on huge pieces of vellum that have to be shrunk down to fit) and so on, but everyone was pretty game and it came together beautifully. I did run into a few naysayers who looked down their noses at comic books and had lots of bad energy to spread around, but there are always going to be idiots out there.

The hardest thing, honestly, is mechanic! I am sitting down to write another one, working in the summer heat. My office isn’t air conditioned (this is New England, after all), so even if there was room for a drafting table it would be too sticky and wet. And I mean page-curling wet! Working at home, well, with three children under six years of age, there’s a lot of PB&J on every surface. So I’ve been slowed down until things cool off in the fall.

I really, really need a studio space either at home or elsewhere, but that isn’t in the budget. But, oh, the dream! If any of your readers want to sponsor a studio for me, and thereby help me generate more Shane at a faster rate, I can tell them where to send the check!

MT: You taught a comic course at UMass. How did that go? What do you read in that course?

SG: What I was really blown away by was how much my position as a comix/ comics cultural outsider came into play. Comics is about more than art and text; there’s a vibrant and important culture associated with the genre that’s really spectacular. Think about it – artists and fans coming together across a range of media (visual art, novels and short stories, television and film and more) to create spaces where it is possible to completely subvert the dominant paradigm (or cater to hegemony – there is certainly a lot of that out there too). It’s great.

However, I’ve always existed on the fringe, located much more in the universe of children’s book art such as can be found at our own local Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art right here in Amherst. The course really opened up an entirely new world to me. It is also important to note that the courses were overwhelmingly male. I think I had two female students. I contrast that to the course I am teaching this fall on Childhood as a Cultural Artifact — that one is 100% female.

I tried to balance some ‘classics’ with a concern for getting a group of readings together that covered a range of styles and subject matter; I also tried to include as many women authors as possible. I would have liked to include a much larger reading list but for one credit I didn’t want people to go blind reading. Also, the cost of many graphic novels and comix is downright prohibitive, so economics also prevented a huge reading list.

  • Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
  • The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
  • Maus I A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
  • Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
  • A Contract with God by Will Eisner
  • Blankets by Craig Thompson
  • Palestine by Joe Sacco and Edward Said
  • Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
  • Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  • Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
  • Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
  • One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry
  • Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
  • Epileptic by David B.

 
MT: So tell me about sequel. What prompted it and where are you taking Shane next?

SG: The sequel is a book about doing data analysis – something that is, in my experience, very, very difficult to teach. But a lot of fun! I’m hoping to get that draft done very soon and maybe pilot a few chapters in my spring qualitative data analysis course.

MT: In anthropology there’s a lot of lip service paid to the notion of breaking out of the mold of prestige publishing, yet our professional culture is not changing. I think, in part, it is because the people with the greatest influence and most social capital in our discipline have the least to gain by a reconfiguration of what counts as ‘real’ anthropology. How has your work been received by other anthropologists? Is there something comics do for anthropology? What can anthropologists learn from comics?

SG: As to your Great Big Huge Giant Question, well, there are lots of complex answers. But for our space here I’ll say that everyone should get to be the ‘knower’ and, just as we all engage in cultural production of one kind or another, we should all be able to participate as ‘real’ anthropologists. Comics have the potential to democratize the academic establishment, or at least question and then expand the boundaries of legitimacy. I also think that the more plentiful and diverse voices that get to contribute to how we understand culture, and speak to culture in ways that are treated with respect can only improve the field. More voices are always better.

There have to be standards, sure — research has rules and I’m not advocating a free-for-all abandonment of method — but we need to challenge it in measured, complex and varied ways. One of the best ways of doing that is to question what “counts” as scholarship. I had lots of people tell me that my “little comic book” wouldn’t sell/publish/count for tenure and so on, that I was wasting my time, that I was silly, that it was “fluffy” — but that’s the same stuff people said about qualitative research during the so-called paradigm wars in educational research and look how those critiques are seen in the clear light of day!

I’ve had great responses from my colleagues in the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) and loads of support from most of my UMass colleagues. As for those folks out there who are not supportive, who say that my work isn’t anthropology, isn’t “real” or “rigorous” or adequate or legitimate scholarship, I think a lot of them are responding to real and radical changes in academia over the last few years. In terms of the shifting sands of the old knowledge economies writ large, some degree of insecurity is understandable. On one hand I want to encourage them to reflect upon the nature and purpose of their work in light of these changes — but on another hand I want them to just mind my swath. (That, by the way, is a quote from another comic artist and Grinnell College alum, Zander Cannon.)

I think anthropologists can learn a great deal from comics, and comic writers can learn a lot from how academics position themselves and their research participants; anthropologists walk a very fine line when it comes to positionality and comic artists, as constructors of complex, often multi-directional narratives do the same.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Project Cataloger at The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and currently working on a CLIR ‘hidden collections’ grant to describe the museum’s collection of early 20th Century photography. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and a Masters in information science from the University of Tennessee.

One thought on “Illustrated Man, #7 – Shane, the Lone Ethnographer

  1. “There have to be standards, sure — research has rules and I’m not advocating a free-for-all abandonment of method — but we need to challenge it in measured, complex and varied ways. One of the best ways of doing that is to question what “counts” as scholarship.”

    Agreed. That’s a pretty important question and I hope more people keep pushing the point on this. I think things need to open up a bit–and this includes alternative ways of publishing and presenting anthropology (films, etc). I definitely think it’s really important to think more about what counts, who makes that decision, and what that means in the grand scheme of things.

    Great post. Sorry for lagging on posting a comment–I meant to write something a few days ago…but you know how it goes.

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