Field notes January 23, 2015:
As I walked out of my
nearly empty room and as people started gathering on my porch to help load the
taxi and see me off, I lost it. I
started crying. Hawama, in what I’m sure
was her attempt to make me feel better, started dancing. This clownish act worked, for I then began
the ridiculous process of crying through laughter.
But in the end, crying
through laughter might just be the best way to go out.
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| Freshly dressed in my parting gift of a beautiful smock, I sit and pose with the community elders |
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| Here I pose in yet another beautiful smock gifted to me by the people of my other field site |
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| And a final parting pose with my adoptive family |
A year ago yesterday, I finished fieldwork and left life as
a fieldworker in Upper West Ghana. Approximately 3 months ago I think I mostly
recovered from fieldwork and life as a fieldworker. This is not unusual. It seems that most people returning from
extended fieldwork have a phase of weirdness upon return. As academic drones, we’re not necessarily in
a non-weird state going into the field. I
bet most returnees would agree that this weirdness is something different than
reverse culture shock. I did not have to
feign disappointment at my ability to binge watch Netflix. Nor did I find myself missing a daily dose of
slimy okra soup or non-stop dust seeping into every pore or maggoty latrines. I sure as hell didn’t regret returning to
anonymity in my whiteness. Being anonymous is my jam as the kids say. And
being white is a damn luxury.
I borrow from The New Pornographers by admitting that my 9
months of recovery were Adventures in Solitude. Even though I found myself finding perfect solace, if not completely
cracked out on narratives guided by female protagonists exploring new contexts
in ethnographic ways, I could not fully acknowledge that I was in something—some
contemplative and computational phase of reintegration. I figured my adventuring in solitude spoke to
a flare up of introvertedness that fosters skepticism of and is unfulfilled by
large places and small talk. It wasn’t
until I found myself confessing to a friend that I missed laughing that I
realized something else was at play.
I was adventuring in solitude because very few people could
or would adventure through my fieldwork processing with me. And that makes
sense. Non-anthropologists often assumed I was on a peachy keen long travel
escapade. As for my fellow anthropologists, everyone’s projects are very
different and everyone’s field sites are very different. However, given that
long term fieldwork is the thing that defines anthropology, I find it odd that
we really don’t talk about it as a practice regardless of the inherent
variation. When we do talk about
fieldwork as a practice, it’s full of bravado and a little bit of cowboyesque
bull shittery. We try to one up one another with what life comforts we lacked,
how many tropical illnesses we acquired, or how we came to hold our own in the
local liquor. I am sure many would disagree with me, but to a large extent we
still glorify the adventure of the exotic.
I had a dearth of cowboy stories. Is it exciting that instead of getting
malaria I got a stye and an ear infection because I was taking so many
anti-biotics to prevent malaria that I pillaged my microbiome and made myself
vulnerable to any standard infection?
Not a sexy story. Worthy of an O. Henry award, perhaps, but not going to
impress people who pride themselves on surviving the unusual.
I was expected to perform certain kinds of fieldwork stories
for those who inquired. People would
give marginal attention to my accounts of dealing with a triumvirate
of persistent male harassers in Accra, an audience getter largely because this
very issue of women harassed in the field is now, thankfully, part of a larger
scholarly dialogue. But no one wanted to
hear any of my stories on the theme of mining--how I couldn’t deal with the
ongoing guilt I felt for being a data miner or how compromised and
incapacitated I felt when my 14 year old friend ran off to a mining camp to
conduct, presumably, business that 14 year old girls can conduct in mining
camps to earn money for school.
My “a snake that I’m pretty sure was a black mamba almost
got into my house!” story was the one that garnered interested audiences and
thus became my go-to account. The antics of my 10 year old friend Jeremiah also
won over crowds. But to be fair, I
really do enjoy telling people about Jeremiah.
I miss that creative kid like crazy.
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| Jeremiah making fun with a mosquito net |
Not surprisingly, people don’t want to hear about anything
that does not evoke laughter or some sort of badassness. And that’s not to say that those aren’t fun
or relevant stories to share. It’s that
all the other stories need to be shared too so that we can be better
fieldworkers, cognizant that the things that we feel in the field are relevant
to our experience and are the very barometer of our ability to interpret what
is going on and to maybe re-interpret how we should approach it. So since I felt like a giant walking buzz kill-kill
joy, I internally digested.
But I hope that
future returned fieldworkers do have the space to be giant walking buzz
kill-kill joys if they need to be. Those bummer stories ARE fieldwork. And the more disjointed the world becomes in
terms of gross inequities in resources and well-being, and the more
anthropology seeks to explain the causes and consequences of such inequities, the
more bummerish these stories will become.
I’m worried about us as practitioners if these stories do not bother us.
I’m worried that we let our ongoing quest to be knighted by the “harder”
sciences as a legitimate science discourage self-reflectivity. I’m pretty sure we can be better scientists
by being self-reflective and being consistently thoughtful about our
positionality as researchers. There’s probably even some science on that.
My 9 months of digestion was also long conversation with myself
to consider what the hell I did in Ghana for 18 months, why it should matter,
and most importantly, how do I move forward as an engaged citizen and not just
as an eager beaver academic with journal impact factors defining my concept of
impact. I needed time to not just
reflect but to project. I needed room to split the difference between an
interpretation of fieldwork as an incredibly challenging chapter of personal
growth and as “very important research that will transform the world.” These 9
months have largely been spent trying to understand what, exactly, I can do
with data that can tell a story about how it feels to be vulnerable to climate
change, to pressures of urbanization, and to marginalization from national and global
economies. Who needs to hear this story
so that this story can germinate into reaction and action? How do I get it there? This remains a challenge.
These 9 months of solitude were also spent remembering to
laugh despite feeling irate. It is jarring to in the
span of 36 hours, travel from a remote corner of the Ghanaian savanna, where
people are legitimately worried about whether their children will receive an
education through the 5th grade to the microcosm of university life
in Athens, GA, where people generally worry (which is a polite word for whine)
about not getting an A on C quality work that at large state schools inflates
to a B+. I wanted to hiss at anyone demonstrating unrecognized privilege. This included me and does, I suspect, explain
the etiology of my no laughing illness.
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| Hawama, ever the hero, the lone 60+ plus dancer at a wedding full of dancers in their 20s. |
So, these 9 months were also spent reminding myself that I
can still exist as modestly comfortable as I am in my context without drowning
in guilt or outrage for bearing witness to and understanding what goes on in other
contexts--that I could, in a way, continue to cry, but most self-sustainably through
laughter. And taking a lesson from
Hawama, dancing has seemed to be a very relevant catalyst. I definitely lack
her smooth moves, but I know she’d approve that I’ve been taking every
advantage to dance my way through the blues of writing a dissertation based on
very depressing realities.
Thanks for reading my
fieldwork musings. Thanks to those who
emailed and WhatsApped me while I was in Ghana. Thanks to all who enable me to dance and belly
laugh through my final PhD chapter. Thanks to TV on the Radio for the song Killer
Crane, which is oddly the perfect soundtrack to a sun setting on the savanna,
the perfection of which stands as the metric confirming my choice of field
site.
But most of all,
thanks to the 148 Ghanaian men and women who shared their lives with me, who
challenged me in ways that the formalities of a classroom never can or will, who
cultivated me into a damn fine fieldworker, and who in the process helped
confirm a gut and heart instinct to continue formal training in anthropology even
though my brain instinct has said “no!” many a time. May I do some modicum of justice
to what they have given.
