Stories of Ruth: An Ethnography of the Dunne Girls

This article includes stories, transcripts, and personal reflections that represent the lives and worldviews of my mother and aunts, who use multiple rhetorical approaches to describe and understand their mother and family history. Many of these narratives focus on various forms of caregiving, and in telling their stories, these sisters choose options that include religious, historical, cultural, and emotional modes of interpretation to understand the context of their lives and their mother's life and illness in both reasoned and expressive ways. In between their narratives, I reflect on the challenges of writing and theorizing ethnography, particularly of one's family.