The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations

By Elizabeth Keating

A unique guide that shows how asking questions like an anthropologist can uncover new sides of family members you’ve known your entire life

In The Essential Questions, 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 and grandparents and the events and experiences that shaped them – and in turn, shaped us.

The Covid-19 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. The Essential Questions offers a way to listen with new ears to those whom we most take for granted.