The Shame

The hardest part about fieldwork is acknowledging that I exist as a willing, eager and accepting anthropologist integrating into a new context, but also as a human undeniably still part of my own, non detachable cultural context.  I call this The Superhero Syndrome.  I blame the origin of this syndrome on the superhero ethnographers who integrate themselves into their books as individuals who give 110% to their field site and are void of any discomfort.  They do things like learn to play local instruments in their spare time and are fluent enough in the local language to make jokes.

I do things like read my Kindle in my spare time. I’ve read an alarming amount of books.   

My inefficiencies in mastering different tones in a tonal language are the joke in my rudimentary language skills. In Wale, the words for breast and sleep are the same.  I like to bid people adieu in the evening by telling them to “breast well”.

When I compare myself to this mythological creature, one mostly created in my head, I feel like a failure.  I call the primary emotional ailment of this syndrome The Shame. 

The Shame creeps in when I decide to sit inside the minibus waiting to fill up with people rather than wait outside under the mango tree with the men.  The Shame creeps in even though it is raining outside and being inside the minibus makes more sense than sitting under the semi-protection of the mango tree.   The Superhero ethnographer would be out there with the men, being drizzled on and would not have to ignore emotional exhaustion about suggested betrothals or requests to take children back to the US with her.  Nothing breaks through the culturally relativistic armor of a superhero.

Avoiding interactions with men that are irritating and sad.

The Shame creeps in when I find myself hideously uncomfortable and bored in my participant observation activities and yearning for my ipod. The Superhero ethnographer would find 8 hours of groundnut harvesting as intellectually stimulating and enriching as any other method of data collection.  And she wouldn’t whine about the biting ants or have to use a 5 year old as her metric for successful rate of harvest.

My pal Mazu-helps prove the theory that all 5 year old children will eat more of what they harvest than put in the bowl for taking home

The Shame creeps in when I deny the omnipresent children access to my room.  The Superhero ethnographer wouldn’t intentionally leave her door without an outside handle in order to prevent those 10 and under from barging in whenever they want.  The Superhero would have an open door policy and wouldn’t need time to read or write in her journal about her failures as an anthropologist because she’s not a failure and doesn’t ever need to be alone.  This Shame is paradoxical because it also emerges when I do decide to goof around with kids instead of focusing on my research questions.

My pal Fadila trying to break in

The Shame creeps in when I decide that I need to work on managing my data rather than collecting more.  The shame marches in when I decide to blog rather than collect data.

Entering data.  Not collecting it. 

The Shame creeps in when my 10 year old pal Jeremiah draws a picture of me (under my commission) and in the resulting image he shows a woman carrying water on her head—a woman with the face that is inexplicably reminiscent of a chicken.  I feel shame because I feel like he has captured the true me—the anthropologist who does not collect her own water but rather pays girls in small change or bananas to fetch water for her.  He knows my shame.  That’s why my face is that of a chicken.  The superhero ethnographer would master heading her water from the borehole to the house so that it wouldn’t be an activity that could potentially take 2 hours of the day.

Me as a chicken heading water from the borehole

The Shame creeps in when I decide to eat biscuits for dinner rather than go over to my landlord’s house for what will most likely be maize porridge and orka soup, a meal I can’t pretend to like.

The Shame creeps in when I have to meet my research assistant teary eyed because my BBC app just informed me that Robin Williams committed suicide. The Shame tells me that I shouldn’t be emotionally attuned to the suicide of a comic when I’m in the midst of people doing their best to not let their own worries about food and money get the best of them. The Shame creeps in even though I am a researcher researching mental health and he suffered with one of the most complicated mental health issues in the world today.  

The Shame is a stupid and very minor demon in my head that I eviscerate through journaling and an ongoing attempt to make mindfulness and meditation more of a practice in my life so that when I return to the grad school climate, where fiercer demons exist, I can be more vigilant. I’m not failing at anything in fieldwork other than harvesting the same amount of groundnuts as those who should be my true gauge for success--14 year olds. I’m a human, not a superhero.  We’re all humans, not superheros and being human is hard.  I don’t know what demons existed in Robin’s head and how they got there and why they wouldn’t go away.  But I hope that with the death of someone who made a decent living making people laugh, something he seemed destined to do, we turn a new page in integrating discussions on the complex genetic, psychological and cultural causes of depression to a healthier place.   Russell Brand recently wrote a piece in The Guardian honoring Williams.  He questions:

Is it melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must be broken?  To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our times?  No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end their lives.

This academic does sign onto that theory. This is pretty much the theory this anthropologist is using in her research.   I didn’t plan on integrating mental health in my PhD pursuit, but once I started reading and thinking about it, I didn’t see how I couldn’t study it.  Our metrics of success are wonky.  We’re a world of extremes.  There’s no way that our current climate (social, economic, atmospheric) is not leading to mental health issues. But it takes more people to accept these issues as problems than deny them before a more honest discussion of depression can emerge.