Abstract

The story of tobacco as it pertains to today's tobacco farmers is in many ways an untellable story because of the stigma now associated with the crop and, in many cases, those who grow it. In this article, I describe how I came to examine assumptions about tobacco production and tobacco producers—both my own assumptions and those of others that I encountered—in order to discover what was deemed tellable in public discourses. In describing how I came to locate the tellable, I suggest increasing reflexivity in our scholarship by expanding our ideas about what counts as data. Nonconventional data—specifically, interactions with outsiders to this tradition—led me to examine what had become the tellable narratives about tobacco farming. Meanwhile, farmers taught me that what was most important to them had become untellable.

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