Isabella Lazzarino
Major: Anthropology, English, and International Studies
Bio: Isabella is a recent graduate of Fordham University with degrees in Anthropology, English, and International Studies. Alongside this grant research, she completed a thesis for International Studies on western corporations and patterns of colonial exploitation in Colombia. Isabella is currently studying at the CUNY School of Professional Studies for an M.A. in Museum Studies.
Title of Research: Writing the Ancestors: Ethnographic Storytelling
Mentor: Natalia Mendoza Rockwell, Department of Anthropology
Abstract: Investigating a familial history anthropologically means investigating themes that emerge within both the self and the kinship units from which the self is constructed. Transgenerational research of four themes was conducted; identity, assimilation, micro-interaction analysis, and the anthropological understanding of remembering things that have been collectively forgotten. The research was collected through interviews, research, and invention in place of historical knowledge. This research was assembled as both ethnographic analysis and creative writing that merged the imaginative and inventive with the anthropological: ethnographic storytelling. Productions of self emerge as a response to the past; the theme of transgenerational inheritance is investigated in my own family and life. I investigate personal identity and constructions of self as a reaction to the cultural inheritance and non-inheritance of the past through the use of research, narrative, storytelling, and imagination. I argue that personal narratives and transgenerational identities are in constant states of being lost and uncovered; hidden and re-written. Personal identity, then, is a constant plane of knowing and unknowing past forms of self. Ethnographic storytelling invokes the mysterious or the erased and utilizes it to re-invent stories that shape current expressions of self. Ultimately, through ethnographic storytelling, ancestry is preserved through both the imaginative and the historical as a form of resistance to past erasures and oppressions.