Three Poems from the Alps

In his typology of ethnographic genres, John Gatewood (1984) catalogs nine prose forms used to convey the reality of the lives of others. Yet, of all rhetorical modes, poetry may be the most immediate and moving. Indeed, if we accept the dictionary definition of poetry as "a composition designed to convey a vivid and imaginative sense of experience, characterized by the use of metaphor and other condensed forms of language," then we may discover that those whom we study are often speaking, if not always writing, poetry. If this is so, then by neglecting the poetic voice, our ethnographies may be—as Gatewood suggests—"in danger of omitting great portions of the human experience" (1984:8). Reciprocally, the inclusion within our ethnographies of poetry—both that composed by those whom we have studied ("ethnopoetry") and that which we ourselves have written ("anthropological poetry")—may serve as "meditations on our common humanity" (Fratto 1982:18).