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Ethnographic traits in the writing of Mary Breckinridge *
Author(s) -
RuffingRahal Mary Ann
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
journal of advanced nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.948
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1365-2648
pISSN - 0309-2402
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2648.1991.tb01698.x
Subject(s) - ethnography , indigenous , immediacy , sociology , insider , biography , appalachia , meaning (existential) , cherokee , narrative , aesthetics , media studies , psychology , history , anthropology , political science , law , art , literature , epistemology , art history , ecology , paleontology , archaeology , psychotherapist , biology , philosophy
Mary Breckinridge, founder of The Frontier Nursing Service, employed ethnographic methodologies—partiapant observation, interviewing and fieldwork—as foundation efforts toward construction of highly responsive health‐service systems, developed under circumstances of duress, eg after World War I and pre‐industrial Appalachia In culturally representing the Appalachian, she drew upon two vast resources, her first‐hand field experience as well as her considerable rhetorical skill She narrated and described an enormity of selected ‘realities’ of Appalachian life with immediacy of detail and nonpatronizing sensitivity for ‘insider’ perspectives In an era of transition with few indigenous cultural writers, Breckinridge capitalized on her family heritage in Appalachia, which further underscored the intimacy and authenticity of her accounts As portrayed in her autobiography, crosscultural encounters of one kind and time or another supplied an infrastructure of longstanding meaning throughout her life The final and lasting impression is that, in both skills and orientation, Breckinridge's were essentially those of the ethnographer