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Stories of the Life

Hustling Is Not Stealing consists of a long introduction written by John Chernoff and 72 short stories told to him by a Burkinabe woman in 1977 and 1979. Under the pseudonym Hawa, the storyteller recounts events from her life as an ashawo (translated in the title as “ bar girl”) in Ghana and Togo. Chernoff recorded, transcribed, and arranged the stories, but the words are Hawa’s. In that sense, this book is an autobiography. In another sense, it is more like a collection of Latin American testimonials, a genre in which the first person singular sometimes refers to individual, private experience and sometimes to collective, public experience. And in still a third sense, it may be an example of what Swidler and Watkins (2005) call “hearsay ethnography” or what Chernoff himself calls “ethnography to the second power.” Not fitting neatly into any available genre, Hustling Is Not Stealing is difficult to evaluate. Should we read the narrated events as plainly true, in the way we would expect fieldnotes or historical descriptions to be? By switching around place-names and deleting potentially identifying details, Chernoff resists that kind of literality. Should we instead read the stories as cultural products, strongly generic in their structure, cadence, and narrative style or even recounting events that occurred to many women or to no woman in particular? By emphasizing Hawa’s objectivity and memory for detail, Chernoff partially resists this reading as well. Yet he notes that Hawa “provid[ed] a broader vision that encompassed the whole text of her life as an ethnography and as a critique of her society” (p. 95). Perhaps we should read Hawa as a selftrained ethnographer, as well as a particularly eloquent informant. Related to the question of genre is one of authorship. Why is Hawa not the author of this book? Or at least a coauthor? Much of the charm of this unusual book lies in the sensation that we are reading Hawa unmediated by an ethnographer, but of course we are not, as Chernoff rather brutally reminds us by listing himself as sole author. Although nonfiction, Hustling Is