Summary Of The Brotherhood: Ethnography Of A Firefighter

Foundations of College Writing
November 9, 2013
The Brotherhood: Ethnography of a Firefighter In Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society, the writer’s, McCurdy, Spradley, and Shandy use the term “microculture” and define it as a culture associated with groups that form for a variety of reasons, but do not consume every hour of the member’s time (McCurdy 15). We learn that a microculture has its own language, behaviors, and standards that are shared amongst the group. People can be involved in multiple microcultures all at one time. For example, a firefighter is part of the firefighting microculture, but s/he could possibly be a member of the PTO at their child’s school, or maybe be a member of the bowling team. I have read
It was all in the southbound lane and we were in the northbound lane, but we just parked there because there’s just people everywhere; they’re just screaming, crying, whatever. I jumped the Jersey barrier and this guy is just FUBAR-ed. He’s still alive; it would have been better if he was just dead, but he died in the back of the ambulance. What we think happened, or appeared to have happened, was that he wrecked his truck and as it was rolling down the interstate; he got ejected. His truck was sitting sideways south of the accident and the weird thing is that some of the bystanders said that right after that happened, he stood up, and then, he got hit 2 or 3 times by other vehicles. He was, for as bad as he was messed up, still moving his eyes, still breathing, and still had a pulse. We boarded him quick, threw him in the back of the ambulance. The medic met up with us. We didn’t leave right away because we had that feeling that he wasn’t gonna make it. It was pretty much a give-me that he wasn’t gonna live. They put him a monitor on him, his pulse was like 20, then went to 16, then like 14, then like 12, and his breathing was getting shallow, and the biggest thing is the color of his skin. It went from red like road- burn to purple and then, it just went white when his pulse hit zero, and then, he died; there was no way to save him. He had a hole the size of a soft ball missing out of the side of his head like right here beside his right eye.
Another aspect that I did not look at is how the job affects their mental stability, such as how they deal with deaths and gruesome sights. Although I did not look at these aspects, I carefully analyzed the rescue aspect in the interviews with Weston, Rick, Matt, and Celeste. Each informant had a different reason for becoming a firefighter and each of them have a different outlook on the firefighting microculture, but they were all brought together in the brotherhood with one common goal: saving