Jero Tapakan and Other Teachers: Stories, Friendship and Ethnographic Practice

Compelling speech and spirited conversation in Ball almost always includes good stories. Healers draw oil a fund of stories to heal, divert and entertain their patients. Stories take on new life over many tellings and patients and healers mutually construct narratives that open tip new healing possibilities. These processes also characterise the ways in which relationships between ethnographers and their circle of teachers, relatives, friends, colleagues and the local people who become teachers and mentors can be forged through the shared experiences that make stories. In long-term research relationships, the close friendships that develop become stories in themselves as lives become intertwined in a cultural and emotional space that is outside the 'ironic' mode of ethnographic inquiry. These themes are explored through discussion of the author's friendship with the Balinese healer Jero Tapakan, as well as through other field research relationships.