How to Interview Your Family by Elizabeth Keating

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A guide to getting to know your family, revealing how asking questions like an anthropologist can help us break free of entrenched family dynamics and develop a richer understanding of those closest to us.

In HOW TO INTERVIEW YOUR FAMILY, the anthropologist Elizabeth Keating draws on her decades in the field to offer a set of 13 questions – about space, interactions, identity, kinship – that push beyond what we already know about our relatives and draw out what it feels like to inhabit a particular life. We might know that Grandma put Mom to sleep in the top drawer of a cupboard as a baby, and that our Uncle Leroy slept with an iron lung during the polio years, but what was it like for Grandad to be a nurse when men didn’t usually take that role? Keating reveals that asking questions like an anthropologist, and adopting that openness necessary to learning about a culture outside our own, can help us learn more about our own parents, grandparents, and the events and experiences that shaped them – and in turn, shaped us.

The coronavirus pandemic has made us more aware than ever of how precious our family is, and how limited a time we have to spend with one another, especially our elders. HOW TO INTERVIEW YOUR FAMILY offers a way to listen with new ears to those whom we most take for granted.

ELIZABETH KEATING is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught for over 20 years. A linguistic anthropologist who studies culture and communication, she has published over 50 journal articles and has given talks at Google and other major companies. She has been a visiting scholar at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and has given over 75 talks at national and international venues. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Agent: Tisse Takagi

Publisher: TarcherPerigee Delivery: Winter 2022 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Proposal Length: 55,000 words

All rights available excluding US & Canada (TarcherPerigee)