ABSTRACT
Extending Barkley Brown's metaphor, the process of writing an ethnography is akin to quilt-making. The author has seemingly disparate bits and pieces in the form of participants' testimonies, her own cumulative scratchings, as well as different theoretical strands and she wishes to stitch all of them together to form a coherent pattern. This chapter provides the rationale for her appropriation of the West African oral tradition of the griot(te). In traditional Senegalese society griots , usually men, were part of a caste, were generally attached to royal families and learned the craft of storytelling or "praise singing" on an apprenticeship basis. The author invokes the concept of the griotte as a feminist textual strategy that both destabilizes the conventional authority of the ethnographer and forces a tension between orality and literacy or rather the spoken and the written word. She argues that the ways in which the women she worked with tell their stories are as newfangled griottes.
