Pursuing Stories from the Ground

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I just started my Masters degree in anthropology–the discipline to learn everything we can know about people watching. 

It may sound like a skill that requires no university degree, but people watching can be both intrusive and revealing, and thus require responsibility and care.

The study of people didn’t start this way. Initially, European missionaries wrote down notes about indigenous communities they evangelize, which were then synthesized by social researchers (who never met the indigenous communities themselves) to understand their behaviors and belief systems. 

But surely, limited information means constricted narrative. 

The father of anthropology, Franz Boas, promoted fieldwork where anthropologists are demanded to be where their research subjects spend most of their time. That can be deep in the Borneo jungle, an Islamic boarding school, or an emergency ward.

As a ghostwriter for corporations at B/NDL Studios, being able to meet sources directly is a rare privilege. Sometimes these sources live in Flores, near a dam funded by a large international bank and an NGO acting as financial intermediary is trying to assess its environmental and social impact. The story will then be told from the perspective of the community impacted. Ideally, a visit to the site will make the story more vivid. 

But sometimes site visit feels unnecessarily laborious. Why make a trip if there are transcripts, reports, and documents that can provide clues for us to build an entire story? 

Though they surely can offer a structure and some statistics, I think they lack colors. Extracting stories from these notes can lead to fuzzy narrative that results in a flattening of stories–a romanticization. 

One time, I got the chance to fly and spend half a day with communities whose stories we are trying to feature. That few hours of gathering taught me more than reading through (what feels like) thousands of documents. There are anecdotes–as told by the communities themselves–that I immediately picked up that I wouldn’t know otherwise. 

The story instantly becomes richer; the characters more engaging. 

After a few conversations, you can learn about their motivations, fears, goals, insecurities, aspirations, learning curves, and pitfalls–details are often lost in secondary sources. You see plenty of candlenut trees on the sidewalk and how kids will pick its fruits and trade them with snacks at local warung. 

Anthropologists would rather meet people ‘where they live’, where they can drop multiple layers of filters, and tell their stories with honesty.  

This is important, even for business writing. This genre that blends marketing, narrative storytelling, and corporate tales often features stories of a specific group of people. Most of the time this group is the consumer, the sellers, or local communities. As a writer, you are representing them when you write stories about this group to be presented to, say, the BOD. 

How do we write their stories with care and thoughtfulness under various limitations?

Certainly, you can ask these questions at Focus Group Discussions or market research, but you are likely to get constructed responses they think you wanna hear. 

A trip also isn’t always financially available, you have a tight deadline, or you are given a strict narrative to follow. 

But building a culture where the writers can engage directly with their sources is a goal worth having. Perhaps it won’t be an in-person meeting, where you can observe their gestures. But a one-hour long Whatsapp call (not a Zoom meeting with the whole team) with a team leader in Flores who runs community projects can make quite a difference. 

Perhaps you can’t reach the community leader, but only a staff member of your client’s local office–and that’s okay.

Hearing from people who live as close as possible to the community you’re writing about is still better than relying on secondary sources filtered through a corporate lens. 

Too many times people assume that a writer’s habitat is their desk. But 80% of writing process happens in the research, conversations, and planning. So why not use this stage to pursue stories from the ground? Investing your time and energy in this stage is perhaps more efficient than getting drowned in data that can obscure the real story.

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Letter from Our Co-Founder | B/NDL Studios

The CGF Model was born from years of practice – in journalism, in business strategy, in training – and from a belief that communication is never a soft skill.

Michelle Anindya

She is a writer and journalist. She is currently a post-graduate student of Anthropology at the University of Indonesia, focusing on how technology is used in religious communities.