The Essential Questions, Elizabeth Keating, PhD
The Essential Questions, Elizabeth Keating, PhD
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The Essential Questions
Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

Author: Elizabeth Keating, PhD

Narrator: Nan McNamara

Unabridged: 3 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/15/2022

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

Uncover new sides of family members you've known your entire life with this indispensable guide.

Just as the oral histories of people around the world are disappearing amid rapid change, there is a risk that your family's personal stories, too, will be lost forever. In The Essential Questions, anthropologist Elizabeth Keating helps you to uncover the unique memories of your parents and grandparents and to create lasting connection with them in the process.

As you seek to learn more about your family history, how do you get beyond familiar anecdotes and avoid the frustration of oppositional generational attitudes? By asking questions that make the familiar strange, anthropologists are able to see entirely different perspectives and understand new cultures. Drawing on her lifelong work in this field, Keating has developed a set of questions that treat your parents and grandparents not just as the people who raised you, but as individuals of a certain society and time, and as the children, teenagers, and young adults they once were. The Essential Questions helps you to learn about the history of your elders, to see the world through their eyes, and to honor the language they choose to describe their experiences.

About Elizabeth Keating, PhD

Elizabeth Keating, PhD, is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. A linguistic anthropologist who studies culture and communication, she has been a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland and a visiting scholar at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Moonkiszt on March 21, 2024

While we spend time reading the stories of others, it is important to consider our own stories, and the stories of our own families - however they are composed. Someone out there has helped you get where you are. . .chances are they are included in your circle of "family." Elizabeth Keating's book......more

Goodreads review by Melanie on February 15, 2023

This takes the average person to capture family history through anthropology. It is slightly different approach that gets family talking and for you to think about the whys and hows of your family history. How did this book find me? It popped up on Cloud Library and intrigued me as I'm interested in......more

Goodreads review by Joy on December 03, 2024

The book is divided into sixteen chapters, each with questions designed to start a dialogue with a family member about basic backgrounds, everyday encounters, family history, rites of passage, ideas that shaped their family, treasured possessions, handling fear, etc. Each begins with an opening ques......more

Goodreads review by Marta on June 22, 2024

A great guide for interviewing parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and so on. I look forward to using the questions in this book to interview my own family. I wish my grandparents and their siblings were still alive so I could Interview them as well.......more

Goodreads review by Ibrahim on December 30, 2022

This book helped me discover my grandmother. This is a guide on how to interview your grandparent (or other family figure) to capture their life story. Keatings is an anthropologist who specializes in collecting family stories. The book is incredibly practical: The first two chapters are on how to con......more