"Home Going: An Exploration of Spirit-Centered Ethnography"
Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Place: Donovan Lounge, 2nd Floor Greenlaw Hall, UNC
Folklorist and public historian, Michelle Lanier will explore the transformative and spiritually-a rming
impact that can occur when a folklorist of faith engages with a community's faith practice. In this case that
faith practice is the tradition of "home going," or funerary mourning, within the Gullah/Geechee community
in and around St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Lanier’s presentation reveals a narrative of personal and
communal healing as she engages her own loss in the presence of grief within a community that she has, at
times, called home. "Home going" serves as the vernacular vocabulary for funerals and their associated
wakes, repasts, and memorials in a contemporary Gullah/Geechee context. "Home going" also serves as a
birthplace for the concept of a Spirit-centered ethnographic journey. Lanier both de nes and utilizes
Spirit-centered ethnography as an ideology that intentionally moves the ethnographer through vulnerability
(as de ned by Ruth Behar) to a place of reciprocity and service.
Michelle Lanier uses her background as a folklorist and oral historian to connect communitites around
the rich cultural resources of the Carolinas, with a particular focus on communities of color. She also
raises the ethical issues of public history and documentary work in the classroom as an instructor, since
2000, with Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Lanier’s “Spirit-centered” ethnographic
research on contemporary Gullah burial traditions, completed through UNC-Chapel Hill’s Curriculum in
Folklore, paved the way for her to become one of North Carolina’s liasions to the federal
Gullah/Geechee Heritage Cooridor.