I See Your Singular Pasts and Raise You Interpretive Frameworks: Authorial Self as Historical Ethnography's Method

Ethnographic inquiry requires first-person narration, even when it studies the past. This article explores two distinct ways of using "I" in historical writing: one, that which Enzo Traverso names the "singular past," speaks of the author's own story, memory, and family history; the other, that of historical ethnography, speaks through the author's grappling with ethnographic fact, about social formations that are otherwise hard to see. My argument proceeds in four parts. First, I show how the "I" of ethnography was utilized in the traditions of francophone, anglophone, and Soviet ethnography; next I explain why this narrative voice is a necessary part of the historical ethnographer's method; I then show how "singular pasts" structured Soviet and post-Soviet Russian public memory; finally, I explain how I myself used the ethnographic first person to understand Soviet history through and beyond Russian "singular pasts."