1. a story in which people, things and happenings have another meaning, as in a fable or parable: allegories are used for teaching or explaining.

2. the presentation of ideas by means of such stories.

In a recent essay on narrative Victor Turner argues that social performances enact powerful stories – mythic and commonsensical – that provide the social process “with a rhetoric, a mode of emplotment, and a meaning” (1980:153). In what follows I treat ethnography itself as a performance emplotted by powerful stories. Embodied in written reports, these stories simultaneously describe real cultural events and make additional, moral, ideological, and even cosmological statements. Ethnographic writing is allegorical at the level both of its content (what it says about cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is implied by its mode of textualization).

An apparently simple example will introduce my approach. Marjorie Shostak begins her book Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman with a story of childbirth the !Kung way – outside the village, alone. Here are some excerpts: