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| (Dew on a spider's web in the morning, by Luc Viatour, via Wikipedia) |
Bibliography:
1) Martha Warren Beckwith (1924). Jamaica Anansi Stories.
2) Anansi on Wikipedia
3) Emily Zobel Marshall (2009). "Anansi Tactics in Plantation Jamaica: Matthew Lewis's Record of Trickery" in Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora.
4) Martha Warren Beckwith on Wikipedia
Possible Styles:
Bedtime/Moral Story/Wisdom Tale: It's possible that I could tie all of these stories together by having an older slave tell them to a younger person--possibly in the context of bedtime, or seeing an injustice done, or something like that. Since these tales were a form of resistance, I think that this would be a really powerful way to link the stories with the frame tale. This would be kind of an ethically problematic method, though, because without doing an incredible amount of research and/or knowing someone who is Jamaican and African-American and who could provide me with feedback and tell me whether I was doing it right, it would just be me and my cultural appropriation skills hanging out with each other while I was writing, and the ghost of my Visual Anthropology teacher in my head saying, "You really don't have any business doing this. You need to take more social theory classes..."
Wisdom Tale II: Another possible idea is to have Anansi spider tell these tales himself to someone either in the present day or in plantation-era Jamaica. Since he's a trickster character, it's possible that he could remain in disguise until the very end, when both the reader and the one he was telling tales to finds out that he's actually the hero of all the stories he's been telling. Once again, though, this is going to be very ethically problematic, unless he's telling them to a person of my ethnic background.
Animal Tale/Museum Tale/Wisdom Tale III: Another idea I had was to have the storytelling take place in a museum (a museum with bugs? They have those, right?), where a child is looking at the spiders exhibit and either Anansi in disguise of the spiders themselves tell the child the Anansi stories. This actually sounds really creepy, now that I think about it, but it's a kind of cool idea--although, once again, very ethically problematic under some circumstances.
Anthropological Research: This is actually my favorite of all of the ideas, as it incorporates a method calling "objectifying your objectification" into the framework and gives me a lot more leeway in how I tell my stories in terms of choosing characters and such. The framework is this: an anthropologist (possibly the one who wrote a book that I'm using for research for this project, Martha Warren Beckwith, who trained under Franz Boas in the new school of anthropology in the early 1900s) goes to conduct field school in Jamaica, and listens to the tales being told to her by some Jamaican elders. The website could be themed as her fieldnotes, where she writes down all the stories she's been told as well as she can. This way I keep the context of the sources I'm using within the story, and I acknowledge the ethically problematic subject matter in a way that makes it much easier for me to stomach writing all of these stories. This style has some really interesting implications for commenting on Boasian anthropology in general, which is what I have taken enough social theory to be able to accomplish in a somewhat-satisfying way.
3) Emily Zobel Marshall (2009). "Anansi Tactics in Plantation Jamaica: Matthew Lewis's Record of Trickery" in Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora.
4) Martha Warren Beckwith on Wikipedia
Possible Styles:
Bedtime/Moral Story/Wisdom Tale: It's possible that I could tie all of these stories together by having an older slave tell them to a younger person--possibly in the context of bedtime, or seeing an injustice done, or something like that. Since these tales were a form of resistance, I think that this would be a really powerful way to link the stories with the frame tale. This would be kind of an ethically problematic method, though, because without doing an incredible amount of research and/or knowing someone who is Jamaican and African-American and who could provide me with feedback and tell me whether I was doing it right, it would just be me and my cultural appropriation skills hanging out with each other while I was writing, and the ghost of my Visual Anthropology teacher in my head saying, "You really don't have any business doing this. You need to take more social theory classes..."
Wisdom Tale II: Another possible idea is to have Anansi spider tell these tales himself to someone either in the present day or in plantation-era Jamaica. Since he's a trickster character, it's possible that he could remain in disguise until the very end, when both the reader and the one he was telling tales to finds out that he's actually the hero of all the stories he's been telling. Once again, though, this is going to be very ethically problematic, unless he's telling them to a person of my ethnic background.
Animal Tale/Museum Tale/Wisdom Tale III: Another idea I had was to have the storytelling take place in a museum (a museum with bugs? They have those, right?), where a child is looking at the spiders exhibit and either Anansi in disguise of the spiders themselves tell the child the Anansi stories. This actually sounds really creepy, now that I think about it, but it's a kind of cool idea--although, once again, very ethically problematic under some circumstances.
Anthropological Research: This is actually my favorite of all of the ideas, as it incorporates a method calling "objectifying your objectification" into the framework and gives me a lot more leeway in how I tell my stories in terms of choosing characters and such. The framework is this: an anthropologist (possibly the one who wrote a book that I'm using for research for this project, Martha Warren Beckwith, who trained under Franz Boas in the new school of anthropology in the early 1900s) goes to conduct field school in Jamaica, and listens to the tales being told to her by some Jamaican elders. The website could be themed as her fieldnotes, where she writes down all the stories she's been told as well as she can. This way I keep the context of the sources I'm using within the story, and I acknowledge the ethically problematic subject matter in a way that makes it much easier for me to stomach writing all of these stories. This style has some really interesting implications for commenting on Boasian anthropology in general, which is what I have taken enough social theory to be able to accomplish in a somewhat-satisfying way.
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