In the Field: Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology 9780520964211

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. The Fieldwork Tradition
2. First Fieldwork: Irish Travellers
3. Politics and Fieldwork: Nomads in English Cities
4. Applying Anthropology in an Alaskan National Park
5. Studying Subsistence in Sitka
6. On the Move: Work and Mobility in Newfoundland
7. Native Anthropology: Studying the Culture of Baseball
8. Falling into Fieldwork in Japan
9. Photography and Film in Ireland and Alaska
10. Taking Students to the Field: Barbados
11. When the Field Is a City: Hobart, Tasmania
12. In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro: Students in Tanzania
13. Fieldwork from Campus
14. The Changing Nature of Fieldwork
Appendix Discussion Points
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

In the Field

also by George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch

Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life Tasting the Good Life Wine Tourism in the Napa Valley The Parish behind God’s Back: The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados George Gmelch

Playing with Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties Inside Pitch Life in Professional Baseball The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism Double Passage: The Lives of Caribbean Migrants Abroad and Back Home Urban Life (with P. Kupinger) In the Ballpark (with J. J. Weiner) The Working Lives of Baseball People Baseball beyond Our Borders (with D. Nathan) J. M. Synge in Wicklow, West Kerry & Connemara (with A. Saddlemyer) To Shorten the Road (with B. Kroup): Folktales from Ireland's Travelling People Sharon Bohn Gmelch

Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman The Tlingit Encounter with Photography Irish Life and Traditions Gender on Campus Tourists and Tourism (with A. Kaul) Tinkers and Travellers (photographs by P. Langan and G. Gmelch)

In the Field Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gmelch, George, author. | Gmelch, Sharon, author. Title: In the field : life and work in cultural anthropology / George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2017050751 (print) | lccn 2017056498 (ebook) | isbn 9780520964211 (ebook) | isbn 9780520289611 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520289628 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Anthropology—Fieldwork. | Ethnology— Methodology. Classification: lcc gn346 (ebook) | lcc gn346 .g54 2018 (print) | ddc 306.072/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050751 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi 1. The Fieldwork Tradition 1 2. First Fieldwork: Irish Travellers 7 3. Politics and Fieldwork: Nomads in English Cities 31 4. Applying Anthropology in an Alaskan National Park 50 5. Studying Subsistence in Sitka 70 6. On the Move: Work and Mobility in Newfoundland 87 7. Native Anthropology: Studying the Culture of Baseball 105

8. Falling into Fieldwork in Japan 120 9. Photography and Film in Ireland and Alaska 142 10. Taking Students to the Field: Barbados 164 11. When the Field Is a City: Hobart, Tasmania 185 12. In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro: Students in Tanzania 201 13. Fieldwork from Campus 221 14. The Changing Nature of Fieldwork 238 Appendix Discussion Points 251 Notes 259 References 271 Index 277

illustr ations

2-1. Sharon and George Gmelch in Santa Barbara, California just before leaving for fieldwork, 1971 10 2-2. A typical unauthorized Traveller camp in Finglas, county Dublin 12 2-3. The late-morning routine at Holylands as people mobilize for work 19 2-4. Taking a lunch break on the road in county Wicklow 22 2-5. Ann Maughan prepares dinner for her family 26 3-1. An illegal Gypsy encampment next to St. Pancras railway station, London, 1981 34 3-2. Police and county council workers enforce a Traveller eviction in Leicester 42 3-3. Inside a Gypsy “flash” trailer at Appleby Horse Fair 47 4-1. The Alsek River and glacier viewed from a bush plane window 57 4-2. A Tlingit fisherman watches for salmon striking his gill net on the Alsek River 60 4-3. A fish camp on the Alsek River 64 vii

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5-1. Crescent Harbor, one of Sitka’s boat harbors 73 5-2. Some of the catch from subsistence salmon fishing 78 5-3. A Sitkan picking blueberries on Harbor Mountain 81 6-1. Traditional racks or “flakes” for drying cod, 1972 90 6-2. With the decline in cod, a thriving crab fishery emerged 91 6-3. Mobile workers on an oil rig supply vessel in St. John’s harbor 95 6-4. Bay de Verde, an “outport” on Newfoundland’s Conception Bay 96 7-1. George as a young minor league ballplayer, 1967 109 7-2. Conducting interviews in the clubhouse of the minor league Springfield Cardinals 115 8-1. Morgan Gmelch and classmates at Tonoyama Daiichi Yochien 124 8-2. Sharon with her women’s nakama or friendship group 126 8-3. Preparing for Sports Day at Tonoyama Daiichi Yochien 129 8-4. Sharon with Nobuko Kinoshita, Athuko Horishima, and children at a park in Hirakata 130 9-1. Elbridge W. Merrill with unidentified Tlingit boy and woman near Sitka, 1905 145 9-2. Chief L.aanteech, Sitka, 1905 146 9-3. Female cannery workers at Funter Bay, Alaska, 1907 148 9-4. Interviewing the O’Leary and Connors family at their home in Tullow, county Carlow 156 9-5. Filming an interview with the McCarthys at the Spring Lane, Cork 159 9-6. Student research assistants Aisling Kearns and Carolyn Hou in a shared camping trailer 160 10-1. Student Sara Finnerty with her homestay family in the village of Josey Hill 168

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10-2. Homestay mother Valenza Griffith and family in Coles Cave, St. Lucy Parish 170 10-3. Men clean flying fish, a staple of the Bajan diet, on the beach near Bathsheba 174 10-4. A typical street scene in the parish of St. Lucy 176 11-1. Aerial view of the city of Hobart, Tasmania 187 11-2. One of Union College’s anthropology field-school groups 189 11-3. Sharon talks to students during a field trip to Bruny Island 197 12-1. A developed portion of downtown Moshi, Tanzania 205 12-2. Swahili teacher Joyce Semiono with friends and neighbors 211 12-3. Student Jason Klusky relaxes with members of his internship NGO 217 12-4. Students are instructed in bow hunting by Hadza men 219

ack now ledg m ents

During the decade this book was in progress, many people advised and assisted us. Early on, Tom Curtin, Richard Nelson, and Kenji Tierney helped us understand what a book needed to do to invite student readers into the world of cultural anthropology. We are also indebted to Karen Brison, Lucia Cantero, Rob Elias, Morgan Gmelch, Jerry Handler, Rabia Kamal, Steve Leavitt, Chris Loperena, John Nelson, Craig Root, Diane Royal, John Ziegler, and Rue Ziegler, who were always ready sounding boards and who contributed new perspectives. Katharine (“Kat”) Beal, Constance Clement, Maria Delgado, and Howard DeNike were superstar editors. Kat and Maria, together with Jacqueline Cepeda who also read the entire manuscript, added a valuable student perspective. Colleagues, friends, and relatives who were too kind to say no when asked if they were willing to read a particular chapter include Judy Adler, Matt Barg, Jim Eder, Ellen Frankenstein, Larry Hill, Terry Hill, Jan Holmes, Anthony Howarth, Noboku Kinoshita, Joanna LaFrancesca, Debbie Miller, Barbara Neis, Richard Nelson, Nicole Power, Sharon Roseman, Jack Stuster, and Adrian Tanner. They served as informal fact checkers and gave us good advice on what passages to keep and what to excise.

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Seth Dobrin, Renee Donovan, and Kate Marshall, our editors at UC Press, provided wise counsel. Ten anonymous reviewers made valuable early suggestions that we took to heart and that have made this a better book. We are also grateful to Bradley Depew who shepherded the manuscript through the production process and to Anthony Chiffolo for his careful copyediting. We owe thanks to our former field-school students, especially Chris Berk, Johanna Campbell, Carolyn Canetti, Pat DiCerbo, Ellen Frankenstein, and Pearl Jurist-Schoen for digging into their memories to help us reconstruct our times together. Our son, Morgan, also played an important role in this regard. We also wish to thank our anthropology colleagues at the University of San Francisco and Union College for providing a nurturing atmosphere for scholarship. Finally, our deepest gratitude goes to the many people in Ireland, England, Barbados, Tasmania, Tanzania, Alaska, and Japan who over the decades assisted us in our fieldwork, giving us their time and trust. Their lives and their stories opened new windows onto the world.

To Richard K. Nelson—anthropologist, nature writer, conservationist, and lifelong friend. And for our son, Morgan, and the many students who have accompanied us to the field over the years.

1

The Fieldwork Tradition

This book offers a personal and humanistic glimpse of the life and work of cultural anthropology. Many manuals or “how to” books on fieldwork are available. Our aim instead is to explore what being an anthropologist and doing fieldwork are like. We tell stories from our own experiences as well as recount some from the many students we have taught over the years. By doing so we hope to convey the range of topics anthropologists study and the different kinds of research they do. We describe the strategies and techniques we used to gather data, some of our findings, and the problems and pleasures of doing fieldwork. We hope these stories impart a sense of the anthropological approach to knowledge as well as the excitement and challenge of living in and learning from other cultures. The chapters that follow include experiences in diverse cultures, with representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.

the field “The field” refers to the cultural setting where anthropologists do their research. Until a few decades ago, this was usually a non-Western place and involved living among tribal or peasant peoples. Typically, fieldwork 1

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meant moving into a village, learning the language, gaining rapport, and living as closely as possible to the way of the “natives” for at least a year. Many anthropologists still go to distant and unfamiliar places to do this kind of fieldwork, but today the field can be just about anywhere, from a village in Kenya to a New York City street corner, an ethnic enclave in Paris, or the corridors of a transnational corporation. It can also refer to more than one place, since more and more research requires or benefits from a multisited approach. Now it is common among scholars studying migration, for example, to do fieldwork in both the migrants’ home society and their destination communities. Regardless of geographic location or cultural group, however, the notion of “the field” or being “in the field” is symbolically and emotionally laden. Doing fieldwork remains a rite of passage in anthropology, turning graduate students into professionals. The appeal of and opportunity to travel abroad and learn about another culture by living among its people probably attract as many students to anthropology as its vast subject matter. The prospect of conducting surveys or reading manuscripts, in contrast, holds less allure as the reason someone would choose to go into sociology or history. While in the field, there is no sharp boundary between an anthropologist’s work and play, public and personal life. In contrast, the sociologist administering a survey or the historian reading documents in an archive usually commutes to his or her research site and returns home at the end of the day. Not so for most anthropologists. Even during casual conversations or while just hanging out at their research site, anthropologists are always “on the job,” their antennae up. As we hope becomes evident in the following chapters, fieldwork is more than a particular methodology of research. It is also a transformative experience for the individuals who engage in it. Going to the field means leaving one’s own culture and immersing oneself deeply in the life of another and is usually totally absorbing. As such, it is a personal as well as a professional crucible. In the process of learning about others, anthropologists also discover a great deal about themselves and their own culture. It is no wonder that a mystique surrounds the discipline.

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fieldwork: past and present For readers who may not know the history of anthropology, we should point out that fieldwork has not always been a core component of the discipline. Most nineteenth-century anthropologists were “armchair” scholars who never ventured into the field, relying instead on the descriptions of native life written by missionaries, colonial administrators, and explorers as the data upon which they based their hypotheses and theories. These early cultural anthropologists were less interested in individual cultures than in developing grand schemes of how culture had evolved. Fieldwork did not become an essential part of the professional practice of anthropology until the early twentieth century, largely due to the pioneering research of Franz Boas among the Inuit and Kwakiutl (or Kwakwaka’wakw) and Bronislaw Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders.1 By residing among the people they were studying, and living to a large extent as the locals did, Boas and Malinowski produced descriptions of culture far richer and vastly more reliable than the schema produced by earlier armchair anthropologists. When we began graduate school in the late 1960s, there were few published accounts of fieldwork. Ethnographies were written almost as if no fieldworker had been present. In fact, most anthropologists said little about how they collected their data and even less about their experiences in gaining entrée into a distant society, learning a littleknown language, or getting along with their subjects. Some observers have suggested that anthropologists didn’t say much because of the idiosyncratic and personal nature of field research. Perhaps. But there were a few exceptions, all written by women and at a time when there were not that many women in the discipline. Laura Bohannon, under the nom de plume of Elenore Bowen, published Return to Laughter in 1954, a popularized and somewhat fictionalized version of her research among the Tiv of Nigeria. She used a pseudonym to protect her reputation as a serious ethnographer. Hortense Powdermaker in Stranger and Friend (1966) described her research experiences in four different

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cultures. A few years later, Jean Briggs in Never in Anger (1970) vividly recounted the hardship and cultural misunderstandings of her fieldwork among the Inuit, who shunned her for a time. We remember an anthropology department meeting at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1969 when a group of graduate students asked the faculty to offer a course on field-research methods. Some were preparing to depart for field sites across the developing world with only a vague idea about how to carry out this mysterious thing called “fieldwork.” One senior professor told us that he couldn’t teach such a course because fieldwork was so highly individual. Every culture was different, and doing good fieldwork meant being able to adapt to and develop relationships with the people you were studying. That, he said, “can’t be taught. Figuring out how to do it is part of the challenge of fieldwork . . . it’s sink or swim.” Another professor chimed in to say that having devoted his entire career to studying a tribal group in Southeast Asia, he could not possibly advise us on how to study Mexican villagers, Athabascan Indians, or Filipino farmers—some of the groups that our fellow graduate students were heading off to study. There were no textbooks or guides for fieldworkers back then; the closest was the 1951 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology. The first edition, published nearly a century earlier in 1874, had been subtitled For the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands. Its aim, in the words of the authors, was to be “a handy aide-memoir . . . to stimulate accurate observation and the recording of information thus obtained by anyone in contact with peoples and cultures hitherto imperfectly described.”2 There was also a small body of anthropology folklore about the arcane and largely useless advice about fieldwork that famous anthropologists had given their departing graduate students. Renowned British anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown reputedly told his students to “get a large notebook and start in the middle because you never know which way things will develop.” At the University of California, Berkeley, Alfred Kroeber instructed his charges to buy notebooks and pencils “and take a big skillet.” Before leaving for his first fieldwork in a village

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in India in 1952, Alan Beals was told by his mentor, “Never accept free housing and always carry a supply of marmalade.” While the UCSB faculty did not take up our suggestion to offer a research-methods course, they did agree to invite Berkeley anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker to campus. She had studied under Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist most responsible for convincing the entire discipline of the value of long-term fieldwork, and she had recently published her lively field account. Despite ill health, she accepted the invitation and traveled down the coast to meet us. Almost reverently, we grad students sat at her feet on the living room floor of Professor David Brokensha’s house in the hills above Santa Barbara, listening to her stories. Her enthusiasm for fieldwork was infectious and made us eager to get our own research under way. When we finished our doctoral dissertations in 1975, there still wasn’t much interest within the discipline in personal accounts of field experiences. When I (George) wrote about my fieldwork in the first draft of my doctoral dissertation, my advisor, Charles Erasmus, wrote in the margins, “Is all this necessary? It all seems very graduate studentish.” Another member of my committee referred to the account as “Boy Scout tales” and recommended deleting the chapter, which I did in the next draft. A few years later, however, when the dissertation was revised into a book, I reinserted it as an appendix, and a decade later when the book was reissued, it became a separate chapter, reflecting the changing opinions within anthropology about the value of reporting one’s field experiences. Today, not only are there an increasing number of books about fieldwork, but some anthropologists also post blogs as they carry out their research. Today, the attitude of our UCSB professors, who in the 1960s and 1970s thought themselves unable to teach field methods, seems archaic. Few anthropology departments today do not offer such a course, and not just for graduate students. Indeed, a research-methods course is now usually required for undergraduate anthropology majors, and some departments offer summer “field schools” in which students travel

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to and live with local families in another culture while learning how to conduct fieldwork under the supervision of a faculty mentor. A few words about our own academic backgrounds before turning to the chapters. Our intellectual underpinnings are fairly typical of anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s. We both majored in anthropology as undergraduates: George at Stanford, and Sharon at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We both went to graduate school at UCSB, and, therefore, early in our careers we were the products of the curriculum and training offered there. UCSB was like most graduate programs in that the interests of its graduate students varied depending upon the particular professors they studied under. Cultural evolution, cultural ecology, and cultural materialism were then the major theoretical orientations of the UCSB faculty. Whatever the paradigm, we all embraced anthropology’s aim to understand human cultures in the broadest possible terms and took pride in the discipline’s comprehensive approach—historically, geographically, and holistically considering all aspects of culture. We were trained and took our “comps” (comprehensive exams) in all “four fields”—cultural anthropology as well as archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology—learning about humans as biological as well as cultural beings. We have spent eight of the past forty years in the field, living among and studying Irish Travellers, English Gypsies, the Tlingit, Barbadian villagers, Japanese suburbanites, rural Newfoundlanders, American baseball players, and tourists and tourism workers in many places. Some of our fieldwork, especially in the early years, wears the label of classic “people and places” ethnography in which the research involved a fairly holistic description of a culture. Most of it, however, has focused on specific issues or slices of culture rather than the whole pie. Again, our aim in writing this account is to convey what life and work in cultural anthropology is like. Although there is much in the following chapters about how research is done, this is not a conventional text. We also hope these fieldwork accounts and stories impart a sense of the excitement and challenge of living in and learning from other cultures.

2

First Fieldwork Irish Travellers

Our first, and longest, fieldwork engagement has been with Irish Travellers, an indigenous nomadic group similar to the Roma and other Gypsy populations. Anthropologists often maintain long-term relationships with the people they first study, and that has been true for us. George and I began working with Travellers in 1971 when, as a married couple in our twenties, we moved into a camp on the outskirts of Dublin to begin the fieldwork that would form the basis of our doctoral dissertations. We left the field thirteen months later to write up our observations but returned regularly through the 1980s and again in 2001 and 2011. In between, we maintained contact with some Travellers through occasional letters and holiday cards and, later, e-mail. In chapter 12, I discuss our return in 2011 when we brought back hundreds of photographs taken in the 1970s in order to explore with Travellers the dramatic changes that had taken place in their lives. The following account, however, is of our first fieldwork, when Irish Travellers were still nomadic and many were moving to urban areas for the first time.

a different kind of nomadism Despite their outward similarities to Gypsy groups, Travellers are native to Ireland and one of several indigenous nomadic groups in 7

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Europe.1 They have traveled Ireland’s roads for centuries, at first on foot, then in horse-drawn carts and wagons, and still later in trucks and trailers. Their nomadism, in contrast to the movements of huntergatherers and pastoralists, is based not on animal migrations and seasonality but on the sedentary population’s need for certain services and products. Consequently, they and similar groups are sometimes classified as “service” or “commercial nomads.” In the recent past, Irish Travellers were primarily tinsmiths, chimney sweeps, peddlers, horse dealers, and agricultural labors. By the late 1950s, as these rural-based occupations became increasingly obsolete, they began migrating into urban areas in search of new ways to make a living.2 Most women initially walked from door to door in the suburbs, asking for handouts, in an adaptation of rural peddling, while men and boys scoured the city for scrap metal and other recyclables. Both of these activities—as well as Travellers’ “illegal” and unsightly camps and urban householders’ concerns about safety, property values, and other issues—resulted in a public outcry. No longer part of the fabric of Irish life as they had been in the countryside, Travellers were increasingly viewed as social parasites living “off the backs” of the settled community.

serendipity and first fieldwork We first became aware of Travellers, or “tinkers” as many Irish in the 1970s called them, while still in graduate school. In 1970, I participated in a summer anthropology field school in Ireland and lived in a small fishing and farming community in county Kerry. On the drive there, I saw Travellers camped on the roadside and wondered who they were, but it was George who had the first opportunity to get to know them. While waiting in Dublin for my program to end, he found work collecting demographic information for a biological anthropologist studying Traveller genetics. He met several families then and took their photographs, sending copies back to them that fall. Little did we know how significant this would later prove.

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Both intrigued by Travellers, we purchased a copy of The Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (1963) before leaving the country. It laid out the findings of the government commission that had been charged with investigating the “itinerant problem.” The report documented not only the problems that the influx of Travellers was creating in urban areas but also the harsh conditions most families lived under—their poverty, illiteracy, lack of the most basic amenities, poor health, and shortened life spans. It recommended the construction of official “sites” where families could legally park their wagons and trailers and have electricity, water, toilets, and better access to health care and schools. Although the report paid some attention to preserving Travellers’ nomadic life, the ultimate goal was clearly integration; the logo of what soon developed into a national Itinerant Settlement Movement was a curving road leading to a house. Back in graduate school that fall, George showed Charles Erasmus, a faculty member and his advisor at UCSB, some of his Traveller photographs. Erasmus was intrigued and surprised to learn that no cultural anthropologist had ever studied them.3 Soon, he was urging us both to abandon our plans of going to Mexico for our doctoral research and to seek funding for Ireland instead. His enthusiasm was infectious. The dream of most anthropologists at the time, although rarely achievable, was to find a culture that had not been studied. We immersed ourselves in the social-science literature—conducting what is commonly called a “lit review”—on Ireland and on similar nomadic groups in other parts of the world in order to begin formulating our research “problems.” I decided to explore how Travellers, who are so fundamentally like other Irish people in that they are English-speaking, Roman Catholic, and indigenous to the country, had maintained a separate identity for generations. George wanted to examine their city-ward migration and adaptation to urban life. Convinced that these were the most significant issues to study and with modest research grants to support us, we returned to Ireland the following summer to begin our doctoral fieldwork. Dublin, with the largest and a rapidly growing population of Travellers, seemed the best place to go.

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Figure 2-1. Sharon and George Gmelch in Santa Barbara, California, just before leaving for fieldwork, 1971.

Our Aer Lingus flight landed on July 19, and our fieldwork began the same day during the cab ride into the city when George asked the driver about Travellers. “The government is trying to house them,” he told us, “but they don’t want to be locked up.” In what later proved to be a common stereotype, he added, “One family got a house, but they let the horses inside and cut the banisters up for firewood.” He claimed to have seen the horse looking out their second-story window. After checking into a bed-and-breakfast and catching a few hours’ sleep, we made a list of things we needed to do: rent a flat, buy a used car, obtain a year’s visa, and contact local officials about our research. Eager to get under way, George phoned Eithne Russell, a social worker he’d met the previous summer. She invited us to attend a Traveller

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wedding the next day, assuring us that the family wouldn’t mind. She thought they’d be delighted to have some Americans there. As it turned out, George had met members of the family the previous summer and had sent them photographs, so we were welcome. The ceremony to sanctify the “match” or arranged marriage of Jim Connors and Mags Maughan took place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Churchtown, a Dublin suburb. We arrived expecting a large gregarious crowd, but only a couple dozen people were there, and an air of detachment seemed to pervade the gathering. Most of the men stood outside the church, while the bride’s father and female relatives waited uncomfortably on the pews inside. When the fifteen-year-old bride finally appeared, she seemed shy and looked somewhat woebegone in her wrinkled wedding dress. The groom’s expression was difficult to decipher. When the priest took them by their elbows and jockeyed them into position in front of the altar, instructing them on what to say and when to say it in what seemed to be an unnecessarily loud and impatient tone, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed on their behalf. A handful of neighborhood children drifted in during the ceremony and stood at the back, gawking at the spectacle before them. Then suddenly, it was over, the customary Mass omitted. As the newlyweds emerged from the church, a young garda (police officer) leaned out his patrol-car window and called Jim over, advising him to “start out right” and be “well-behaved.” As Eithne explained later, petty larceny was becoming a growing problem among Travellers in the city, and Jim was out of jail on bail for the ceremony.

identifying a community and settling in Within the week we had purchased a used VW Beetle, leased a small “bedsitter” (studio apartment), and begun visiting Traveller camps around the city. One of the first issues we faced as fledgling anthropologists was delineating the boundaries of the population we hoped to study. As graduate students participating in rural field schools, we had

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Figure 2-2. A typical unauthorized Traveller camp in Finglas, county Dublin.

each lived in a small village. Dublin, in contrast, was a large city with 1,500 Travellers scattered around in at least 50 camps. Some were roadside encampments of two or three families; others were groupings of up to a dozen families who squatted on undeveloped land or amid the rubble of derelict building sites in the city center. The government had also established three official Traveller sites for up to forty families. As lone researchers planning to do in-depth participant-observation research, we needed to identify a community where we could live with Travellers. Participant observation is a research technique in which the anthropologist learns about the life and culture of a group by living with it for an extended time—usually a year or more—and sharing in its activities on a daily basis. The goal is to develop as complete an understanding of people’s lives as possible, including the behind-the-scenes behavior that survey research or a visiting interviewer seldom catches. Learning about a culture in this way also generates insights and questions that a researcher might not otherwise formulate, and it provides many opportunities to

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check ideas and interpretations with the people under study. Since an important goal of anthropology is to grasp the emic, or insider’s point of view, what better way to achieve it than to live alongside people and participate in their daily lives. A drawback of participant observation as a research strategy, however, is that it cannot be replicated by another researcher nor its conclusions easily evaluated for reliability. And sometimes dangerous conditions may put the resident researcher at risk. We dealt with discomfort and occasional fear while living with Travellers, but seldom more. After visiting most of the camps around Dublin, we began concentrating on two official sites. Both had large, somewhat stable populations who were not subject to eviction as were Travellers camped on the roadside or squatting in vacant fields. Labre Park, located in Ballyfermot on the west side of the city, was Ireland’s first Traveller site and had space for thirty-nine families who lived in small one-room dwellings called tigins (Irish for “little house”), with extra family members occupying wagons and trailers parked nearby. Holylands was an undeveloped site in Churchtown on the opposite side of the city. Here, families parked their wagons and trailers on two wide strips of asphalt separated by a central, grassy field. A single water tap and a rarely used outhouse were the only amenities for about twenty families.

finding a role and developing rapport Arriving in a camp, we’d park our battered VW and walk off in separate directions to approach individuals or groups of Travellers, hoping to engage them in conversation. Our first impressions were not flattering and were undoubtedly colored by our own insecurities. The men looked tough and intimidating with weather-beaten faces, tobacco-stained fingers, and an evasive manner. The women, although less forbidding because many were pregnant and somewhat matronly in appearance, also seemed distant. Fieldwork among Travellers, we feared, might be more difficult than we had anticipated.

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Travellers’ initial reactions to us varied. On early visits we were usually surrounded by children clamoring for a handout—“Aah, miss, could you give us a few coppers?”—as they did with most buffers (nonTravellers) they met. We never gave since doing so would have cast us in a role that was incompatible with fieldwork and the friendships we hoped to create. No matter which camp or official site we visited during those first weeks, the men remained aloof. Sometimes George would approach a group standing around a campfire only to have it disintegrate as, one by one, the men drifted away until eventually he was alone. It was difficult not to take such rebuffs personally. I had more luck with the women, but even they were not always friendly. Some people were curious about us; others, suspicious. A common problem in doing field research in many places is that the anthropologist doesn’t fit into any familiar outsider category. To the Travellers, we were neither social workers, settlement committee volunteers, government officials, clergy, or police. On top of that, we were Americans. We later learned that some Travellers initially suspected that we were undercover agents. Our first visit to Holylands had taken place just one week after a suspicious death: a man had been found hanging from a tree the morning after a drunken argument with his wife. She, we were later told, had raised her skirt over her head, exposing herself to others at a campfire and thereby deeply shaming him. The police concluded that the death was suicide, perhaps accidental, but some in the camp believed it might have been a murder and initially thought that we had been sent to investigate. The early stages of fieldwork, whatever the setting, are often challenging and stressful. Untutored in the culture and the nuances of language, beginning fieldworkers are unsure of what behavior is appropriate and, consequently, are forced to learn largely by trial and error. Moreover, they are dependent on the cooperation of people they hardly know. During the early weeks, I always felt on guard, constantly monitoring my behavior: wanting to be friendly but not too friendly, wanting to show interest but not be overly curious or intrusive. We both ate whatever food

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was offered us, casually negotiated our way around the scrap-metal piles and animal excreta that littered the site, and strived to act composed no matter what happened, which included sitting on mattresses saturated with baby urine on a couple occasions. Early on, Travellers repeatedly asked me the same questions, even during the course of a single conversation: “Are you married? How long have you been married? Is he your husband? Do you have any children? Don’t you like children? Are you from America? Have you seen cowboys? Do you know Elvis?” Travellers were genuinely curious about these things, but we also had few shared experiences on which to base more wide-ranging conversations. I also interpreted their questions as a test of our truthfulness. That is, were our answers consistent? Some days, the thought of seeking out people to talk to, risking rejection, and answering the same questions over and over was almost too much to bear. At first, most of our conversations were with children, teenagers, and the elderly. We tried to clarify our role as American anthropology students who wanted to learn what it was like to be a Traveller. We explained about writing doctoral dissertations, which they interpreted to mean books. When they asked how long we were going to stay and we answered, “A year,” they were skeptical. Most contacts Travellers had with outsiders were short-lived—a brief economic transaction, questioning by the police, and the like. After repeated visits, however, people began to realize that we might be serious. As we became more familiar, they became friendlier. We were gradually building rapport— that necessary sympathetic relationship and understanding between a researcher and the people he or she lives among. Not being Irish may have worked to our advantage. Besides the novelty of our being Americans, it probably lessened their suspicions that we were something other than what we claimed. After several weeks of commuting between Dublin camps, we chose Holylands as our primary research site.4 Its layout was better for fieldwork than that of Labre Park since the families were camped in wagons and trailers facing one another across a central field rather than being strung

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out single file in crowded tigins. This made daily life readily observable. Holylands also contained a better cross section of the Travelling community. Some families hailed from the more prosperous East and Midlands, while others came from the poorer west of Ireland. Some had been living in Dublin for nearly a decade, while others were recent arrivals and still quite mobile. Besides a stable core of families who remained on the site the entire thirteen months of our research, another dozen or so families came and went. Although we had met most of the families living at Holylands by the end of the first month and felt quite comfortable with them, commuting to camp each day from our rented bedsitter was unsatisfactory. Travellers often made plans on the spur of the moment. Some days we would arrive in camp to find that virtually everyone was gone. George’s attempts to accompany various men on scrap-collecting or horsebuying trips were no more successful. He might arrive at the site first thing in the morning and then wait hours, never certain they wouldn’t decide to skip the activity altogether. Few Travellers could tell time or had any need to, and understandably, our “appointments” were far more important to us than to them. Increasingly, we realized that we were missing out on important events. This was reinforced each time we arrived in camp to be told something like “You should have been here last night, the guards [police] came up and took Big John.” More importantly, we wanted to lose our outsider status and get “backstage,” to borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s metaphor, to blend into the background of camp life so that people would feel comfortable and act naturally around us. Travellers were used to dealing with non-Travellers in superficial and manipulative ways. It was important for us to view their lives from the inside, to observe everyday behavior, and to try to learn what they really thought and, as much as possible, to see the world as they saw it. Moreover, because Travellers had never been studied in-depth before, we felt a need to collect as wide a range of ethnographic data as possible. Only living in a camp would enable us to do this.

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Early in the second month of our fieldwork, several people in Holylands suggested that we buy a wagon and move onto the site. It was foolish to pay rent, they said, when we could live at Holylands for free. One day Red Mick Connors and Mick Donoghue took George around to other camps in the city to find a barrel-top wagon to buy, and within a week they purchased one for £100 (US$250). It was in need of paint and a few repairs, but this gave us something tangible to do each day when we arrived in camp. And now that it was clear that we really intended to move in, the social distance between ourselves and Travellers lessened. As we worked on the wagon, people stopped by to give advice, lend a hand, or simply chat. Some days we arrived to find that someone had worked on our wagon in our absence. Michael Donoghue painted its undercarriage a bright canary yellow—its proper color. His father, Mick, made a new window frame for its front Dutch-style door. Paddy Maughan found replacement shafts and later helped George bargain for a horse, a large black mare named Franny. When our fieldwork was over, we sold her to Paddy at the same price (US$350), not realizing she was in foal and, therefore, worth considerably more. (When we returned to Ireland in 2011, several Travellers confessed that they had known this at the time but that they had been warned by their parents not to tell us since that would interfere in another Traveller’s business.) I made curtains for the wagon’s windows and laid red linoleum tiles on its tiny floor. Nanny Nevin gave me a lucky horseshoe to nail above the door. Once the repairs were complete, we bought camping gear—sleeping bags, a lantern, pots and pans, dishware, wash basins, and a small camp stove—and moved in. Our transition from regular visitors to camp members was completed the first night when we were awakened around midnight by the roar of trucks and vans racing into camp, followed by loud talking and laughter as people returned home from the pubs. Not long after the camp had settled back down to sleep, a loud argument broke out in the trailer next to us. Accusations and obscenities were hurled back and forth, followed by screams, thuds, and shattering glass. I crept out of

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bed and cautiously peered through the wagon’s small front window, catching an oblique glimpse of my new neighbor as she staggered out her trailer door. It was the first time either of us had ever heard, let alone witnessed, domestic violence. It would happen several more times during the year, raising an ethical dilemma, although there was no real way for me to intervene except to hide my neighbor when she fled. Only a close male relative like a brother or son would intervene on a woman’s behalf. The next morning we acted as if nothing had happened. Everyone we saw, however, seemed subdued and somewhat sheepish. As Nanny Nevin walked by our wagon, she coyly asked me how well we’d slept but made no direct reference to the fight. Sam, the eight-year-old son of the family involved, came closest when he said, “You must have learned a lot last night.” Indeed we had. Many of the polite public fictions maintained for visiting outsiders had been broken. We soon realized that Thursdays, the day that the men received the “dole,” or unemployment payment, were days of heavy drinking for many that, not infrequently, ended up in arguments and, sometimes, domestic violence once they returned home. Living on the site dramatically improved our rapport. We could now talk to people casually while going about our daily chores of hauling water, preparing meals, or searching for our mare. We no longer had to force conversations as the visitor must but could wait for opportunities to talk to arise naturally. People quickly became accustomed to us and comfortable with our presence. We had gotten backstage and were beginning to know and share the private lives of Travellers. Our research and lives soon fell into an enjoyable routine. Because Travellers spent much of their time out of doors, they were more accessible than the people who had been in the villages in the west of Ireland and Mexico where we previously had done student fieldwork. Every family lit a campfire in the morning and kept it going until they went to bed at night. A blackened kettle of water was kept hot, and pots of tea were brewed throughout the day. Much of our fieldwork involved talking to people while sitting around a campfire. At night, most men and some

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Figure 2-3. The late-morning routine at Holylands as people mobilize for work. The men on the cart are leaving to collect scrap metal in Dublin.

younger couples went off to the pubs to drink. For several weeks we wanted to join them, since we imagined that it would be a good opportunity to talk, but didn’t feel confident enough to ask. Then one evening we were invited along by some of the Connors men and learned that they had been talking about doing so for a while but hadn’t been sure that we would want to be seen with them in public or go to the few working-class pubs that served Travellers. After that, we joined them most evenings, often sitting around the campfire afterward to talk and drink some more. Sports provided another outlet for socializing. The boys and younger men in camp often played handball or a version of cricket using a tennis ball and a board as a bat. George had discovered the value of sports in building rapport and creating friendships while living in Mexico after he joined a village basketball team. With this experience in mind, and

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seeking a way to get more exercise, he suggested to several men that they form a soccer team. No one at Holylands had played on an organized team before, but the idea quickly spread, and soon a team was formed and christened the “Wagon Wheels.” During the week the teenagers and younger men practiced in a nearby field, often having to clear it first of their horses, which they illegally grazed there. On weekends they drove to different venues around the city to compete. Their matches—all against teams comprised of non-Travellers—were eagerly anticipated and underwent endless analysis afterward. George’s role in organizing the team and his play as goalie further cemented our place in camp. When we returned in 2011, there was much reminiscing about the wonderful times spent playing soccer and beating the buffers (settled people) during the Wagon Wheels’ first and only season. Even adults and children born long after our initial departure from Ireland knew about the team, although they mistakenly believed that it had been unbeaten the entire season—a lesson in how unreliable memory can be or how important embellishment is to good storytelling.

participant observation and field notes Most of our data were collected through participant observation, that is, by observing and participating in the everyday life of the camp and then writing up detailed field notes. Participation, however, is always a matter of degree. We didn’t, for example, regularly accompany Travellers on their daily economic rounds. Our time was usually better spent by staying in camp where we could have extended conversations with people, observe the ebb and flow of camp life, and be around when unexpected events occurred. We also used the hours when most adults were away on their economic rounds to pursue other aspects of our research, such as visiting archives and government offices, interviewing settled people who worked with Travellers, or typing up our field notes. Still, it was important to directly experience what men and women did when they left camp each day to earn a living and to observe the

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kinds of interactions they had with settled people. On a few occasions I accompanied women “gegging [begging] the houses,” and George joined the men on their scavenging and scrap-metal-collecting rounds, although they made it clear to him that a “scholar” like himself, by which they meant an educated person, should not knock on any doors. Being with Travellers on such occasions produced insights. While out with Mick Donoghue on his scrap-collecting and knife-sharpening rounds, for example, we encountered the disrespect Travellers often faced. As we drove through a middle-class neighborhood in Mick’s horse-drawn cart, several youths ran after us, yelling, “Knacker,” and tried to jump onto the back of the cart.5 A horse-buying trip to the Midlands with Bun Connors was memorable largely for what it revealed about illiteracy. Bun followed a long and convoluted route in his lorry, passing up several road signs that clearly indicated a more direct way. We also hitched our mare, Franny, to our barrel-top wagon and journeyed into the Wicklow countryside for several days with the help of teenagers Anthony Maughan and Michael Donoghue in order to learn firsthand what traveling entailed. Our first afternoon, we experienced some of the discrimination Travellers faced when, soon after making camp, a farmer cycled by and not long after a patrol car arrived: the farmer had accused us of chopping up his fence posts for firewood and breaking a window in one of his outbuildings. Much of our data were gathered through conversations or informal interviews. Every morning we each jotted down the topics or questions we hoped to explore during the day, steering conversations toward them. In the process we learned what topics were sensitive, when (and when not) to ask direct questions, and which subjects were acceptable to broach in front of whom. It isn’t always easy to know which topics are neutral since what is considered harmless in one culture may be sensitive in another. So we started with the general. Early weeks at Holylands were spent learning about the logistics of traveling, the skills of tinsmithing and rural peddling, and the characteristics of settled people in different parts of the country. As time passed, we left the historical

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Figure 2-4. Taking a lunch break on the road in county Wicklow, with Anthony Maughan and Michael Donoghue.

and general behind and raised contemporary and potentially sensitive issues—welfare, discrimination in the city, drinking, family problems, and trouble with the law. We each kept separate field notes and regularly reviewed them to see what information was thin or missing and to formulate new questions. We jotted these questions down on paper, which we carried with us to consult during the day. When we had heard the same answers often enough to be confident of the accuracy of the information, we moved on to new topics. We seldom took notes openly. Since most Travellers were illiterate at the time and could not have known what we were writing, we felt that it would be insensitive to do so. Instead, we each returned to our wagon during the day to write down a few key words and details from which we could later type up complete field notes. These “jotted notes” were usually enough to recall an entire conversation or event. Only when the information we were being told was detailed or a conversation had evolved into an interview did we openly take notes.

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Examples included family histories when many names and places were mentioned or when someone was attempting to teach us Gammon (also known as “Cant” or “Shelta”), the Travellers’ secret argot. We rarely used a tape recorder as it usually attracted a crowd of children and young adults who wanted to sing into it. In retrospect, we probably could have taken notes more openly after the first couple months. Doing so would have let people know when we wanted to have a serious conversation and signaled that we felt what they had to say was important enough to record. The importance of keeping good field notes had been drilled into us in graduate school and the field schools we had each attended. Not only do your notes form the bulk of your data, they are also a nice measure of what you have accomplished. Well disciplined, we tried to set aside time every day for typing our notes. In this pre-computer era and lacking thumb drives or cloud storage, we each made carbon copies and mailed them home. We stored our originals away from Holylands, along with the electric typewriter we typed them up with, to prevent any possibility of their being taken or lost. Our joint efforts over the thirteen months of fieldwork produced nearly three thousand typed pages of notes. Proud of this “evidence” of our diligence, the first thing we did upon returning to California was to build two wooden file boxes to hold them. Although we both arrived in Ireland with a clear “problem” to study, anthropologists of our day were less concerned with theory than with ethnography—detailed descriptions of a culture. Furthermore, no one at the time had done extended fieldwork with Travellers, and little was known about their lives. Consequently, we believed we should collect as much data about their culture and history as possible, whether or not we could see a direct connection to either of our specific projects.6 George, for example, collected information on and later wrote an article for a folklore journal about the history of the barrel-top wagon. Many topics came up spontaneously, initiated by Travellers. Individuals frequently stepped up into our wagon, shut the door, and sat down to talk. Anthropologists as neutral outsiders who have shown

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great interest in the people they live among often become confidants. Information and feelings that could not be shared with other Travellers because of family rivalries or fear that the information might someday be used against them could be discussed with us. We didn’t need to remind each other never to reveal to other Travellers what we learned in private. Being a couple proved to be an advantage in the field. Singly, we would not have been able to interact freely with members of the “opposite sex.” Travellers described themselves as “jealous,” and we observed incidents of men arguing and sometimes beating their wives after learning that they had spoken to another man on the site even when the interaction had been totally innocent and other people had been around. Our immediate neighbor, Red Mick Connors, once returned home from the pub and upon learning that his wife Katie had given another man a match so he could light his cigarette, began yelling at her. Katie had been surrounded by her children and had not left the doorway of her trailer to do so, which I had witnessed and intervened to tell Mick. When on my own, I had access to women, children, teenagers, and the elderly of both genders. George’s situation was reversed, although he had to be careful to avoid being alone with teenage girls. As a couple, we could not only share our observations about the opposite gender but join in a greater range of activities such as going to the pub with other couples at night. Like all anthropologists, we relied heavily upon the friendship and assistance of a few individuals who became our primary teachers, or “key informants” in the jargon of the day. We were mindful of developing friendships and collaborations with members of each of the three major “clans” (the word that Travellers used for their large extendedfamily groupings) living in camp: the Connors, the Donoghues, and the Maughans. I became particularly close to Nan Donoghue, the woman who had been beaten our first night in camp, and later wrote her life history.7 George was particularly close to Red Mick Connors, and the feeling was mutual. When we returned in 2011, his adult daughter Mim

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told George that he had been “me daddy’s best friend.” Anthropologists often develop close friendships with people in the field.

adjusting to fieldwork Fieldwork is a process of adjustment for both the anthropologist and the people he or she studies. We had habits that Travellers then regarded as unusual, if not bizarre. In our early weeks on the site, children gathered around us in the morning to watch us brush our teeth, talking and pointing: “Ah, would you look, Sharon’s scrubbing her teeth.” On our return in 2011, we learned from some of these children, now older adults, that they had begun brushing their own teeth as a result. And we heard other stories of how Travellers had been scrutinizing us at the time we were observing them. They were surprised that I knew how to drive a car and that I wore jeans, something almost no Travelling women did at the time. Reading a book was unusual since all but one of the adults at Holylands were illiterate. When women asked me why we did not have children, I told them about birth-control pills and explained that we wanted to wait. At the time, birth control was unknown among Travellers. The Roman Catholic Church had deemed it a sin, and the state had made it illegal. Today, this is no longer the case, and Traveller family size has dropped as a result. Other women remarked with mild amazement that we never yelled at each other (we undoubtedly did, but never publicly). Our most difficult adjustment was to the loss of privacy. Travellers found it odd when one of us went for a walk alone. The idea that anyone would want to be on their own struck them as odd, since they did nearly everything in the company of others. Growing up in large families and living in crowded conditions, they were unaccustomed to privacy. Wagon and trailer walls were thin, and there were always people around. Travellers, especially youths and men, routinely entered other families’ dwellings without warning or sat down at another family’s campfire to listen for a while and then leave, sometimes without uttering a word. We

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Figure 2-5. Ann Maughan prepares dinner for her family; “Big John” is on the far left.

could expect visitors at any time. George installed a latch inside our wagon’s Dutch-style front doors as a deterrent, but most people merely opened the top windows and leaned in to talk or else reached down, unhooked the latch, and entered. This loss of privacy was a small price to pay for the acceptance and friendship we received, as well as the information it provided. While we made an effort to get to know everyone at Holylands, it was inevitable that we relied upon some individuals and families more than on others. We had little contact with one of the Maughan families, primarily because the adults drank heavily, were often difficult, and created problems for everyone in camp. The eldest son, “Big John,” age twenty-six, was sometimes abusive. At various times he tossed a burning log under our car, threw a rock through our wagon window, and challenged George to a fight. George described one incident in his field notes:

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Yesterday as we were driving out of the site, Big John stepped in front of the car. He was drunk and wanted a ride downtown. We reluctantly made room for him. A couple miles down the road, he changed his mind and insisted we take him back to camp. Already irritated and not wanting to appear weak, I told him politely yet firmly that he could either get out of the car now or continue on with us. He refused, so I pulled into a police station which happened to be nearby. As soon as I stopped, he jumped out of the car and we drove off. This morning he came up to the fire where I was sitting with Red Mick, Jim and Mylee. He was drunk again and announced that he had been in jail all night because of me. Waving his fist, he said, “I’m giving you fifteen minutes to pull your wagon out of this camp or I’ll burn you out.” All eyes were on me. I said, “Well, you’ll have to burn me out then.” He mumbled something and staggered off. The men assured me that I’d said the right thing, but I’m not so sure.

Fortunately for our peace of mind, his family left Holylands about a month later.

other sources of data Camp life soon fell into a comfortable and productive routine, which began most mornings with chatting with our immediate neighbors, the Donoghues, whose campfire we usually sat at while getting breakfast. Many days ended up back at the same campfire, enjoying further conversation with the Donoghues and passersby. In a letter, George described our routine as winter set in: Dec 5, 1971: The wagon is cold in the morning. I usually stoke up the small wood-burning stove and get back into my sleeping bag until the wagon heats up which considering the small space doesn’t take long. The small bunk across the rear of the wagon is just six feet across so my head and toes touch, but I’ve gotten used to it. The wagon has great atmosphere. It creaks in the wind and you can hear the pitter patter of rain on the canvas roof. Unless the weather is bad, we eat on the wagon steps or at the campfire next door. At first the kids eyeballed my Cheerios as they had never seen boxed cereal before, nor have they eaten grapefruit. We wash up in a plastic dish pan and use the surrounding fields like everyone else for a toilet. There is

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no rule about which direction men and women go, so you try not to surprise anyone. By late afternoon the men and women return from their rounds and there is usually good conversation around the fires. After dinner, we sit around the campfire again or else go to the pub or sometimes to a movie with Travellers. The pubs are noisy and smoke filled but the atmosphere and conversation are good. I am often able to get people to talk at length about the topics I’m working on. The pubs close at 11, and we’re back in camp and in bed by midnight.

Wanting to know how representative what we were observing at Holylands was of other Travellers, we continued to periodically visit other Dublin camps. We also regularly attended a weekly meeting of Dublin social workers working with Travellers. This enabled us to check our observations against theirs and learn about what was happening in other parts of the city. Late in our fieldwork, I was invited to fill in for six weeks when a social worker in a nearby neighborhood went on leave, which gave me the opportunity to more directly experience some of the issues that arise between Travellers and settled Irish in the welfare sphere. Together, George and I made short trips to other parts of Ireland to learn about Travellers’ situations outside Dublin. We also spent two weeks in England and Scotland, visiting local officials dealing with Travellers and Gypsies there as well as relatives of one Holylands’ family. During the year, we got to know many settled people who were active in the Itinerant Settlement Movement, including its leadership, which was valuable to our research, especially mine, which also explored the type of contact and interactions Travellers had with members of the settled community.8 The friendships we developed with several middle-class Dublin families were especially rewarding. The occasional social evening spent in their homes was not only a pleasant change from camp life but almost always yielded new insights and questions for one of us to pursue. They also directed us to teachers, government officials, clerics, physicians, and even scrap-metal dealers working with Travellers, whom we would later interview.

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We also spent many hours in the National Library, searching for early historical references to Travellers, and in the library of the Irish Times, going through bulky fi le folders of newspaper clippings (long before such fi les were digitized and searchable). These documented clashes with householders and the police over trespassing and efforts by the Itinerant Settlement Movement to settle Travellers. In the archives of the Folklore Department at University College Dublin, we discovered a set of questionnaires about Travellers that had been completed by schoolteachers across Ireland in the early 1950s. These painted a picture of Travellers’ work and nomadism before their cityward migration and revealed many of the superstitions and folk beliefs that settled people held about them. When either of us felt depressed, anxious, or simply at loose ends, we could go to one of these places and escape into solitary and productive work. When a complete break from fieldwork was needed, Dublin provided cinemas, theater, museums, art galleries, plays, shops, restaurants, and the zoo—a range of diversions unavailable to anthropologists working in rural villages.

final thoughts On August 15, 1972, thirteen months after our first conversation with the taxi driver on the drive into Dublin from the airport, we left Holylands and Ireland. We had become very close to some families, making our departure emotional on both sides. We promised to return, which we did several times through the 1970s and 1980s and again in 2001 and 2011. Now, looking back nearly fifty years later, we sometimes wonder why they willingly took us in. How many middle-class Irish or American families would put up with two foreigners moving into their neighborhood, watching how they behave, and asking endless questions about their lives? On the other hand, Travellers didn’t lose anything by accepting us, and most Holylanders seemed to enjoy the novelty of our presence and, we think, appreciated our friendship and the genuine

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interest and respect we had for their lives. When we returned in 2011, we were honored to learn that three children—one George and two Sharons—had been named after us. We were also pleased to discover people’s fond memories of the Wagon Wheels soccer team and the extent to which it and we had become a part of Holylands families’ folklore.

3

Politics and Fieldwork Nomads in English Cities

For the first half century of anthropology’s existence in North America, most research was “pure,” that is, conducted for its own sake with little attention given to its practical applications.1 Today, half of American anthropologists are employed full-time by government agencies, NGOs, and the like to help solve specific social problems or provide the cultural context needed to develop new programs or policies. Typical goals include alleviating poverty, improving health, and evaluating the effectiveness of government and nonprofit initiatives. A friend of ours studies behavioral issues associated with isolation and confinement in order to help NASA design better training programs and space stations. Other applied work involves museum curation and historic preservation. Still other anthropologists are hired to help corporations understand how to increase efficiency, improve worker satisfaction, or deliver better services and consumer products. Others, like us, are employed in academia but occasionally do applied research. We have conducted several research projects for federal and state agencies. Our first—the subject of this chapter—was for Britain’s Department of the Environment (DOE) and the Welsh Home Office.2 It involved studying the mobility patterns of Gypsy and Irish Traveller families living in England and Wales and the problems that 31

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the lack of legal places to camp created for them, for nearby residents, and for local government officials. The focus was on the estimated five hundred highly mobile regional and “long distance” families for whom providing legal campsites was most difficult. This chapter explores these issues and the problems of some applied work—in this case, the way politics can intrude upon fieldwork.

names and terminology Before proceeding, some clarification of group names is necessary. Although the term “Gypsy” is a pejorative ethnonym (a name applied to group members by outsiders) in some European countries, this is not the case in the United Kingdom. There, it is the term used by many “Gypsy” organizations (for example, the National Gypsy Council) as well as most group members. The term “Traveller” is sometimes used interchangeably with “Gypsy” because of the similarities in the economic adaptation and lifestyle of the two groups. To further confuse matters, other terms may also be used, such as “Romanichal” and “Romany” (or “Romani”), by those who consider the terms “Gypsy” and “Traveller” to be too broad.In the words of British anthropologist Anthony Howarth, “With the advent of political correctness and Gypsy/Traveller NGOs and Facebook sites, use of all of the terms—Travellers, Gypsies, Pavee, Mincier, Romanichal—has become complicated. However, most Gypsies in the U.K. still refer to themselves as ‘Gypsies’ and they do this with a great deal of pride.”3 Like Gypsies in other countries, those in England and Wales descend from populations who left northern and northwestern India as early as 500 CE.4 The earliest references to them in Britain date to the early sixteenth century, when some arrived presenting themselves as “Egyptians” or Christian pilgrims from “Little Egypt”—understood to have meant the Middle East—from which the English term “Gypsy” evolved. During their many migrations, Gypsies have absorbed language, customs, and marriage partners from surrounding populations.

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In Britain, generations of contact with householders and indigenous nomadic groups—English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Travellers—has Anglicized their speech and surnames, although they maintain a distinct identity and customs.

nomads in cities Prior to World War II, Gypsies in the United Kingdom lived in the countryside much of the year. They harvested fruit and vegetables and performed many of the services for the settled community described for Irish Travellers in chapter 2. In winter, when rural work was scarce and travel difficult, many moved into towns and cities. After the war, they began frequenting urban areas on a more permanent basis. By then, many rural trades were becoming obsolete, and campsites were being eliminated as suburbs and highways spread. In 1959, the Highways Act made camping on the roadside or “lay-bys” illegal. At the same time, postwar reconstruction and urban-renewal projects provided new opportunities, particularly in construction and scrap-metal collecting. It was at this time that Irish Travellers began arriving in the United Kingdom in numbers, although there had been some cross-channel (Irish Sea) movement for decades.5 By 1980, when our research began, virtually every British and Welsh city, especially those in the industrialized heart of the country, had Gypsies and Irish Travellers living there. Although nomadic Gypsies and Travellers formed less than 1 percent of the United Kingdom’s population at the time of our study, they had a high profile.6 Their “illegal” campsites spawned many complaints from local householders and businesses. The evictions that resulted created personal and financial hardships for families and cost local authorities money. In 1968, the government enacted The Caravan Sites Act, requiring all local governments to provide serviced campsites for the Gypsy and Traveller families “residing in or resorting to” their area. By 1980, 166 such “sites” had been built, and another 30 temporary camping places, often just a dirt field, had been made available.

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Figure 3-1. An illegal Gypsy encampment next to St. Pancras railway station, London, 1981.

Together, these provided space for less than half the population and catered primarily to localized and less nomadic families. While most householders acknowledged the need for Gypsy sites, few wanted one built near their neighborhood. “If the average householder can even glimpse a Gypsy by standing on top of his wardrobe and looking out the corner of his bedroom window,” a government official in Manchester told us, “he’ll complain.” Residents objected most strongly to the idea of paying to build sites for the “long distance” or highly mobile families we had been asked to focus on, those who lacked local ties and moved into areas unexpectedly. The typical response by local residents was to demand their eviction. When plans to build an official

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site for them were proposed, residents protested and were supported by their elected representatives. Many legislators believed that the only way to truly end the Gypsy or Traveller “problem” was for them to settle and integrate into society. “Make them settle down for good and live like the rest of us,” declared a Tory councilor. “Why should they be any different?” His views were widely shared. Our goal as anthropologists was to learn what Gypsies needed and wanted as well as the problems local authorities faced, and to provide the DOE with as fair and unbiased an overview of the issues as we could. We were also tasked with making recommendations.

the research project George and I arrived in Leicester, a city in the British Midlands, by train on July 7, 1980, after a flight from New York to London the previous day. This was where our research colleague, David Smith, taught and lived. David had been involved in earlier research on Gypsies and Travellers, had proposed the current project in 1978, and had been working with the DOE and Welsh Home Office to lay the groundwork.7 This included obtaining our work permits, which required making the case for why we should be hired as the project’s researchers rather than two U.K. residents. Our prior work with Irish Travellers gave us the necessary credentials. It was great to be met by David at the train station and immediately be taken to a furnished apartment on Leicester Polytechnic’s lovely Scraptoft campus.8 The project’s office was located in a converted eighteenth-century manor house, on whose estate grounds the campus had been built. It was a large and airy room on the second floor that overlooked formal gardens with a beautifully ornate iron fence and gate. With David’s help we quickly settled in. During the first week we obtained university library cards and explored the campus—its library, Senior Commons’ room where we could take tea with other faculty twice a day, gym, tennis courts, pottery

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studio—and tranquil environs. We took the bus into downtown Leicester and were suitably impressed with its timbered Elizabethan buildings and thirteenth-century Guild Hall as well as its clean streets and human scale. We opened a bank account, browsed in a bookstore, and picked up maps at the tourism office. We located a lending library and, observing an entire wall of books in Punjabi, were visually made aware of the city’s multiculturalism. The next day, David gave us a tour of the surrounding countryside. We were fascinated by his Renaissance breadth of knowledge; he seemed to know everything from the roosting habits of local sparrows to the minutiae of Tudor architecture. Stopping at a quaint village pub for a pint and a Ploughman’s lunch (bread, cheese, and pickle), we spent the entire afternoon talking about the research. We were happy to learn that our schedule as the project’s principal researchers was flexible but disappointed that our planned ethnographic fieldwork had been scaled back. The DOE’s steering committee—comprised of DOE officials, two members of the National Gypsy Council (NGC), and representatives from several local authorities—wanted a survey and were interested only in information that directly related to the central concerns of the project: the migration patterns and accommodation needs of the most nomadic Gypsies and Travellers. Only statistics, David said, were likely to convince them of the validity of whatever recommendations we might make. We decided to use an interview-based survey with a number of opened-questions as our major research tool and to aim for a sample of one hundred families. While discussing what to ask, it emerged that three generations earlier, David’s ancestors—Smiths and Taylors—had been Gypsy horse dealers who had become grooms and then lost their Gypsy identity. David did not identify as a Gypsy but had many contacts in the Gypsy and Traveller communities based on his work as an educator, local historian, and accomplished wagon and cart painter. A few days later, we drove to Manchester to meet Huey Smith, a Gypsy leader and head of the NGC, who was on the project’s steering

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committee.9 The normal two-and-a-half-hour trip to Manchester with David talking the entire way and driving 90 mph couldn’t go quickly enough for us. David warned us to anticipate a confrontation with Huey since Gypsy affairs were highly politicized and given Huey’s personality. Instead, Huey turned out to be very cordial and took us to a department-store cafeteria for lunch where he refrained from asking us a single question about our backgrounds, work, or intentions. Afterward, we returned to his small office which was located on the grounds of a public school.Its walls were covered with maps of England, Scotland, Wales, and London with pins marking Gypsy sites; its floor crowded with stacks of NGC publications. Huey then laid out the history of Gypsy politics and regaled us with stories of the NGC’s battles with other groups he claimed were organized and run by “intellectuals” who used Gypsies as front men. He also revealed the grudges he held against various scholars whom he accused of stealing government money that had been earmarked for Gypsies. Hours later, on the way home, David told us about some Gypsies’ accusations about Huey’s own nefarious financial doings. We listened as attentively as we could, but having to absorb so much new information was exhausting. Only a week after arriving we were in the car again, this time driving to South Hampton, again at breakneck speed, for a week-long conference on Traveller education. Most of the ninety-five attendees were teachers or government officials, but a few Gypsy representatives were there. It was a great opportunity to make contacts and to learn more about the issues facing Travellers in England and Wales. Listening to talks and discussions about Gypsies for eight to ten hours a day, even though the focus was on education, provided us with a wealth of background information that would otherwise have taken weeks, if not months, to acquire. Most presenters were articulate, if not erudite. But the conference also underscored what a sensitive political issue Gypsies and Travellers were in the United Kingdom and impressed upon us the need to be careful about whom we listened to. We also received a warning from one participant that our findings might not be published

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or distributed as we might expect. Nevertheless, the more we learned, the more engaged in the project we became. The conference had its lighter moments too. Most presenters injected humorous anecdotes into their talks, which were greeted with uninhibited laughter from the audience. The personable headmaster of a local school volunteered to drive us to visit a nearby Gypsy site. On the way there, he further contradicted just about every stereotype we held about the reserved and “proper” Brit by revealing his salary, the difficulty he had having sex with his wife while caravanning with friends, and even that his hemorrhoids had forced him to give up sailing. On the drive back to Leicester, the three of us decided that George and I should spend some time in Ireland, interviewing Travellers about their migration patterns and economic activities in England. We reasoned that since Irish Travellers were the objects of so much animus in the United Kingdom, they might be more forthcoming at “home.” So in mid-August we took the ferry from Holyhead, Wales, to Dun Laoghaire, Ireland—the main route Travellers used to cross the Irish Sea into the United Kingdom. With the help of Mervyn Ennis, a social worker we knew, we were able to interview forty households about their migration to and travel within the United Kingdom. We also talked to social workers, government officials, and ferry and port personnel on both sides of the channel.. We returned to Leicester in mid-September and began making weekly research trips to different parts of the country in search of Gypsy encampments. Unlike most anthropological research, we spent a lot of time on the road, looking for groups of Gypsies and Travellers. It was easy to locate official sites, but our primary interest was in the mobile population. We often learned of an encampment only to arrive there to find that families had moved on or been evicted. Initially, we stayed in hotels, but the smell of cigarette smoke (smoking was then permitted in hotel rooms) soon prompted us to look elsewhere, and we began staying in smoke-free youth hostels instead. Leicester proved to be a good base from which to operate since it is located in the middle of

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the country. Our goal was to administer our survey in as many parts of England and Wales as possible, also talking informally to families about their travel patterns and evictions, their thoughts about official sites, and related topics. On these trips, we also interviewed the local authorities who dealt with Gypsies and Travellers (for example, county and city planners, government officials, site wardens, and police). During the course of the year we visited close to one hundred camps, everything from single caravans on the side of the road to large groups, including a sixty-caravan encampment of carpet dealers parked in a field outside Hounslow, a London suburb. Such large groups could be intimidating. As soon as we parked our car, we were usually surrounded by child and teenage “gatekeepers” who aggressively quizzed us on our purpose for being there. We were always greeted by dogs too. The small ones could be real pests, nipping at our ankles as we walked toward the caravans. But as George later wrote in his field notes, “So much in gaining the cooperation of strangers depends on how you approach people and explain your purpose for being there. Finally, we’ve become experienced at this, and our confidence about what we’re doing determines in large measure the kind of reception we get.” Today, this is advice we regularly give students. Many families turned out to be perfectly willing, if not happy, to talk to us. Some expressed surprise that the “authorities” were actually contacting them in person to seek their opinions. Others expressed frustration, saying they had answered similar questions before. It was often striking how different our experiences of a particular group turned out to be from what we had been told to expect by local authorities. The families we spoke with were almost always more approachable and reasonable. We listened over and over again to stories about the hardship of evictions, the economic losses families endured when forced to leave an area before their work there was done, and the missed doctor’s appointments and family members left behind (sometimes in the hospital). Most families simply wanted to be left alone, to be allowed to stop or camp wherever they liked. But given the realities of modern

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life and the harassment they experienced from local authorities, the police, and householders, they knew this was not possible. We asked them about the kind of official campsites they might be willing to live on and what amenities and rules were reasonable. When we met Irish Travellers, we discovered that it meant a lot to them that we had previously lived with Travellers in Ireland. Upon discovering this, they’d usually run through a litany of names until we found mutual acquaintances. I once had the awkward pleasure of speaking with a man who at the end of our conversation pulled out a book and handed it to me, saying, “Now, this person knew what they were on about.” Somewhat embarrassed, but also gratified, I hesitated before admitting that I’d written it. Much of fieldwork in anthropology is simply listening, a fact of research that is often underappreciated. We realized this when David accompanied us on occasion to visit a local authority. We were frustrated by his propensity to talk, and I found myself mentally pleading, “I know what you know. I want to know what they know!” Interviewing is not the same as a conversation, which David often appeared not to appreciate. Other frustrations also cropped up due to personal and cultural differences. David didn’t take many field notes, got mired in insignificant detail, and struck us both as inefficient. In what seemed to be a British propensity, he would meet with us in the office in order to set up a meeting for the following day to discuss something that could have been dealt with then and there. But he was also knowledgeable and patient and had a dry, ironic sense of humor.

travel and evictions Which government department a social issue or population is allocated to reveals a lot about how it is perceived. In the United States, American Indian policy was once handled by the War Department. Policy for Gypsies was at the time of our research the purview of the Department of the Environment. Gypsies were apparently categorized as an envi-

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ronmental issue—a moving blight on the landscape—as they roamed the countryside and urban areas, largely uncontrolled, arriving unexpectedly to camp wherever they could, to the alarm of local homeowners and the government officials responsible to them. Local residents objected to the “unsightliness” of Gypsy camps, the visual clutter of parked trailers and trucks with milk churns, wash basins, domestic paraphernalia, and litter scattered about. Carpet and scrap-metal dealers were the worst offenders because their camps, if they remained long enough, contained heaps of cut carpeting, cannibalized car bodies, and domestic appliances. Tarmacadam (asphalt) layers traveled with trucks and heavy equipment. Other complaints included damage to landscaping and fencing as families tried to gain entrance to land on which to camp. Sometimes buildings and public facilities were vandalized. Just as frequently, house dwellers were disturbed by the noise of the electric generators that some families used, by barking dogs and straying horses, or else were worried about sanitation, theft, or property values. The typical response was to complain to the authorities and demand that the families be sent packing as soon as possible. Many local councils employed private security firms to enforce eviction orders; others had their own Gypsy eviction task forces. The procedure was costly.10 Knowing this, some Gypsy carpet dealers and tarmac layers intentionally moved and camped in large groups in order to make evictions logistically difficult and more costly and, thereby, gain more time in an area. Local authorities also incurred the expense of cleaning up the site and, in many cases, of trenching the periphery of the land or barricading it with concrete posts, rubble, or fencing to prevent future encroachments. Evictions were the bane of Gypsies’ existence. Of the 118 families we ended up formally interviewing in 16 English and Welsh counties, 90 had been forced out of their previous campsites. In the previous twelve months, they had moved an average of seventeen times, or about once every three weeks, usually in response to eviction. Many of Britain’s Gypsies and Travellers, therefore, were probably more nomadic in

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Figure 3-2. Police and county council workers enforce a Traveller eviction in Leicester.

1980–1981 than they had been at any time in their history. The experience of one of the couples we interviewed is instructive. After being evicted several times in Birmingham, Percy and Margaret Boswell decided to leave the city and head east. Arriving in Leicester, our home base, they found a place to camp on the outskirts of the city near two other Gypsy families—the Gaskins and the Prices. They spent the first night settling in and talking to their neighbors about work opportunities and mutual friends. The next day, Percy and sons began their search for tarmacking jobs. They found several, and things were going well when ten days later a convoy of police cars and two open-bed trucks carrying city workmen pulled up in the morning. “All right, lads. Get up!” bellowed one of the policemen, according to Percy. “You have an hour to pull off or we’ll tow you off.” It was early, and the families were still in bed. Striding past their barking dogs, four officers went from trailer to trailer, banging on doors and repeating the message. “Give us time to get our breakfast and feed the children,”

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Percy had yelled as his baby began to cry. “We have a court order. You’re to be off by eight or we’ll tow you off,” came the answer. The trailers were parked about thirty yards from the highway, shielded from motorists’ view and a nearby factory by a heavy barrier of bushes and shrubs. It had seemed a perfect spot, but once again they were being evicted. Percy dressed quickly, and while Margaret turned on the gas to make tea and rouse the children, he went outside to confer with the other men; about this time we arrived on the scene. The men debated about whether to cooperate. They were angry enough to force the local council to tow their trailers away but knew they could be mishandled and damaged in the process. Their conversation was mostly a way of passing time, since they had little choice but to leave. Margaret and the other women went about packing. There seemed to be little urgency in their actions; perhaps they felt there was no reason to treat the authorities with undue consideration. Besides, it took time to feed and dress the children, wash the dishes, fold the bedding, and put loose items securely away. Outside, the older children were loading the trucks with firewood, bags of coal, work tools and tarps, spare truck batteries, assorted scrap, and the milk chums that the families used to store water. The police stood some distance away, watching. After Percy and the other men hitched their trailers to their trucks, the youngest children piled into the cabs while the teenagers and dogs climbed into the back. Then they slowly pulled out, trailers lurching from side to side over the uneven ground and onto the road. One patrol car pulled in front, and two others brought up the rear, escorting them away. The Boswells had been forced out again. Since the men still had asphalting jobs lined up, they would try to stop as soon as they could. It was expensive to lose a day’s work and to tow a trailer, so they hoped the police would not follow them far. The Gaskins and the Prices knew of a few places nearby, they had told us, a vacant field next to an industrial park, a strip of land by highway construction, a little-used parking lot. As we watched them disappear down the road, the city’s workmen

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busied themselves digging a deep trench around the perimeter of the land just vacated. No Gypsies would camp there again.

prejudice and stereotyping All Gypsies suffer from stereotyping and their failure to conform to the settled community’s romantic image of “Gypsies.” In the early nineteenth century, when England was reeling from the excesses of rapid industrialization and urbanization, their picturesque and seemingly carefree, nomadic lifestyle had inspired the admiration of such authors as George Borrow and Sir Walter Scott. Painters during the Romantic Movement, like Richard Westall, often placed Gypsies and their tents and donkey-drawn carts in their bucolic landscapes. Contemporary Gypsies, who tow their trailers with trucks and often live in the midst of urban decay rather than camp in tents at woods’ edge, were, and still are, often regarded as “imposters” by mainstream society. We were frequently told by householders and some local officials that such families were “drop-outs” or “vagrants,” not “real” Gypsies. As one Camden (London) councilor said when justifying his district’s eviction of several families, “If we had a happy group of rural Gypsies sitting around making clothes pegs, then the committee might have been minded to leave them there.” Prejudice also stems from the belief that Gypsies and Travellers no longer pull their weight in society. Not recognized for the useful services they perform, such as the recycling of scrap metal, they are seen instead as living off the welfare state, tapping into the full range of benefits available to the poor and honest ratepayers while deliberately shunning regular employment. “There was no Gypsy problem until the Gypsies entered the 20th century,” a local official responsible for carrying out evictions in Birmingham told us. Years ago, they were camped on land where they wouldn’t be seen. And they were poor, visibly poor. Now they have moved into cities to make a living and there isn’t enough open land for them. And now that some drive

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flashy Volvos and own flashy caravans, there is little sympathy for them. People resent Gypsies driving better cars than they have.

Gypsies and Travellers have been the objects of public scorn and the repeated targets of government policy for hundreds of years. Nomads always create problems for the state, no matter where they are found. Their lack of permanent residence makes them difficult to count, control, and tax. They also cause resentment, and sometimes envy, if for no other reason than they can succeed outside the formal economy and conventions of settled society. In contrast to most workers, they operate independently and control the terms of their labor. The family remains the primary economic unit, with all capable members contributing to its livelihood. Their subsistence and identity has long been linked to their mobility and family-based operations, which have allowed them to fill gaps in the market that are uneconomic or too variable for businesses that are large or rooted in one place. When they exhaust the possibilities in a local area (for example, collect all the available scrap metal), they simply move on. They can also switch from one activity to another to take advantage of changing opportunities. Unencumbered by property and income taxes and the overhead of a permanent business establishment, Gypsies and Travellers have managed to live successfully on the margins of settled society for centuries.

the “settled” and local authority view As mentioned, we not only talked to Gypsies and Travellers, we also interviewed local authorities in half the United Kingdom’s counties. They provided us with local statistics, insights on residents’ attitudes toward Gypsies, information on the logistical and legal issues they faced, and, always, biscuits and tea. Most took their task of providing official campsites for Gypsies seriously, but given zoning regulations, businesses’ and taxpayers’ vehement objections, highway safety concerns, funding restrictions, and the like, there was always a limit to the

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number they could provide and their location. We usually found government officials, who are appointed civil servants, to be much more supportive of Gypsies and their needs than were local councilors who were elected by residents and beholden to their constituents. For them, supporting a Gypsy site could cost reelection. Every few months, we attended DOE steering-committee meetings in London to report on the progress of our research. Midway through the research, we began to make some preliminary recommendations. At a meeting in January, we were told that we needed to pay closer attention to the “perspectives” of local authorities—in other words, to scale back our recommendations. For example, we had argued the importance of providing individual flush toilets on camping or transit sites, rather than the much less expensive communal and chemical toilets that many local authorities favored. We knew that the latter would not work, as they were inclined to smell, and no family, especially Gypsies, wanted to share a toilet or to clean up after someone else. Gypsies have strong “pollution” beliefs related to personal hygiene and separation. Unlike American camping and living trailers, no Gypsy trailer includes a toilet; they are considered unclean, both literally and symbolically, especially in such close proximity to living and food-preparation spaces. As a personal experience, our research in England was enormously rich. We spent a year traveling throughout England and Wales and took short research trips to Scotland and Ireland. We interviewed people in nearly one hundred Gypsy camps and also spoke to them at major gathering places like the Appleby and Cambridge Fairs and The Derby at Epsom Downs, where Gypsy and Irish Traveller families camped next to each other, yet separately, on the infield, while the queen sat in the royal box to watch the races. We felt fortunate to meet so many interesting people. Our disappointments related to the restrictions surrounding the research, particularly having to rely so heavily on a narrowly focused survey. To get around this, we included as many open-ended questions as we could, kept detailed field notes, and, later, included lengthy quotes in the final report to enter the Traveller “voice” into the record. It was

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Figure 3-3. Inside a Gypsy “flash” trailer at Appleby Horse Fair, a traditional gathering place for Gypsies and Travellers.

our first applied research, and we went into it without fully comprehending its highly politicized nature. Political and policy considerations slowed the research down in the beginning, kept its parameters narrow, and eventually sidelined it. After a year of traveling, hundreds of hours of interviews, and additional months spent analyzing our data and writing a 175-page report, remarkably little happened.11 The report was shelved. We never got an exact accounting of who or why that decision was made. The research had been conceived under a Labour government but hatched under Margaret Thatcher. During her Conservative Party’s rule (1979–1990), Gypsies and Travellers fell to the bottom of the government’s priority list. A civil servant in the DOE did write a brief watered-down “circular,” purporting to be a synopsis of our research, which was sent to all local authorities. It contained little or no mention of many of the things we had recommended, such as providing a national network of transit sites for long-distance Travellers that contained individual family amenities

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(toilet, electricity, and water), architecturally defined spaces, and trash removal. In effect, it was similar to the Bush administration’s deletions of major sections from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports on climate change in the early 2000s, and the Trump administration’s deletion of the EPA’s climate-change website.12 Our report also underscored the right of Gypsies and Travellers to continue traveling. But it was entirely the wrong political climate for such recommendations and the government expenditures they would require. As Gypsy Margaret Boswell told us after the research, “The Gorgios [non-Gypsies] doesn’t want sites being built. . . . They just want us to disappear.”

epilogue Government policy toward Gypsies at the national level has swung back and forth, alternatively punitive and somewhat “positive,” depending upon the party in power. In 1994, the Conservative government of John Major released all local authorities from their statutory duty (under the Caravan Sites Act of 1968) to provide serviced campsites for Gypsies and Travellers. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a further shortage of authorized places for families to camp. In response, more families began purchasing land in order to build their own private sites. In late 2015, in an ironic move after years of discouraging nomadism, the Conservatives mandated that in order for Gypsies or Travellers to be legally eligible to apply for planning permission to develop their own private sites, they must first prove to local authorities that they lived “a nomadic lifestyle.” Public attitudes have not softened either. In 2003, the Guardian newspaper reported the following incident. Imagine an English village building an effigy of a car, with caricatures of black people in the windows and the number plate “N1GGER,” and burning it in a public ceremony. Then imagine one of Britain’s most socially conscious MPs [member of Parliament] appearing to suggest that black people were partly to blame for the way they had been portrayed.

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It is, or so we should hope, unimaginable. But something very much like it happened last week. The good burghers of Firle, in Sussex, built a mock caravan, painted a Gypsy family in the windows, added the number plate “P1KEY” [a derogatory name for Gypsies which derives from the turnpike roads they travelled] and the words “Do As You Likey Driveways Ltd— guaranteed to rip you off ”, then metaphorically purged themselves of this community by incinerating it.13

During a discussion of the problems posed by an unauthorized Gypsy camp in 2007, an official with the South Cambridgeshire District asserted that the council would “never get rid of the bastards,” adding, “If I had cancer, I’d strap a big bomb around myself and go in tomorrow.”14 More than thirty-five years after our research, it seems that the more things change, the more they have stayed the same—especially when politics is involved.

4

Applying Anthropology in an Alaskan National Park

This chapter describes fieldwork conducted for the National Park Service (NPS) on the activities of commercial fishers and hunters in a rugged wilderness area that had been added to Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Before I (George) discuss the research, which was undertaken to help the Park Service develop a management plan, a little background is necessary. Glacier Bay is a world-famous region where tidewater glaciers spill from high mountains, filling the bay with icebergs. It has long been a favorite destination of cruise ships bringing tourists who thrill to the sound and sight of calving glacial ice. The new wilderness area being added to the park was located over the mountains on a remote stretch of southeast Alaska’s outer coast that is inaccessible except by bush plane or, with great difficulty, by boat. Called “Glacier Bay National Preserve,” the park’s new area is locally known as Dry Bay.1 Dry Bay was used seasonally by fifty to sixty salmon fishermen, both Tlingit and non-Natives.2 A few hunting guides also flew clients into the area to hunt moose, bear, and mountain goat. When this remote region was ceded to the NPS, which then took responsibility for its protection, little was known about it. Nor did managing commercial fishermen and hunters fit with the Park Service’s standard mission of protecting nature—wildlife, flora, and water resources. 50

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Anticipating difficulties, based on an ongoing conflict between Tlingit and non-Native fishermen, the NPS had tried to swap the Dry Bay area to the state of Alaska for a different wilderness parcel. When the state declined, the NPS was forced to undertake the research for which I was awarded the contract, aided by the support of an anthropologistfriend in the Park Service. Unlike my previous fieldwork in Ireland and England, each of which had lasted over a year, this research, typical of many applied projects, was to be completed in one summer.

learning the ropes I first flew to the Park Service’s Alaska Headquarters in Anchorage to be briefed for a few days and outfitted for living in the bush. There I received a cram course on subsistence issues, Alaskan Native cultures, and NPS policies. My primary mentor was Ken Schoenberg, a short bespectacled archaeologist with years of experience working in the Alaskan bush. My other teacher, Kathryn Cohen, was a petite, no-nonsense resource specialist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ADF&G) Subsistence Division, which was cosponsoring the study. There was much to learn in a short time. At the end of the third day, I wrote in my journal, “It is very, very interesting but I’m exhausted from trying to absorb all this new information; and I still haven’t gotten used to the long days. It’s light well after 10 PM, making it hard to sleep.” On my last day in Anchorage, I was taken to the Park Service’s warehouse to assemble gear for the field: Coleman stove, pots and pans, sleeping bag, dried foods, topographical maps, a shotgun (for protection from bears), and a bulky Zodiac inflatable boat with outboard engine, which I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to use, much less get onto an airplane. As part of my final orientation, Schoenberg lectured me on the danger of bears and how to deal with them: wear bells, carry a whistle, and make lots of noise so they can hear you coming. “Always carry a gun outdoors and,” he warned, “keep it beside you at night. If you encounter a bear, stand tall and never run. Running provokes a chase instinct. If

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attacked, curl up in a ball and play dead. Whatever you do, don’t move.” Schoenberg drove home the seriousness of his lesson with a story of a young woman geologist who was attacked by a brown grizzly bear in the Brooks Range. She had played dead while the bear gnawed on her arms. “She lost both arms but she saved her life,” Schoenberg declared. I wondered if he really had needed to tell me that story.

mistaken identity With four bags of gear in tow, plus a Zodiac and outboard engine, and a little unnerved by all the bear talk, I boarded an Alaskan Airlines flight for Yakutat, the only settlement on a three hundred–mile stretch of southeastern Alaskan coastline. I was to spend a week there, getting acquainted with some of the Tlingit people before being flown by bush plane fifty miles down the coast to Dry Bay. I would also meet Tlingit elders to explain my research and obtain their approval. Before the gathering took place, I began to wonder what was happening. People in Yakutat were decidedly cool. Few passersby returned my greetings. In one case, while walking along the dirt road from the village to the pier, a man walking toward me swung over to the other side of the road about thirty yards before we passed. When I passed, he turned his head and looked off into the distance. When I entered Flo’s, the local café, the patrons lowered their voices. And when new customers came in, they took the tables farthest from mine. “Damn,” I thought, “what have I done?” Mentally, I reviewed my first few days in the village, searching for anything that might explain this icy reception. I remembered jotting down some notes to myself while sitting in the café a couple of days before, mainly a list of things I needed to do. Perhaps that had aroused suspicion. I thought about how it might have been perceived: an unknown man walking around the village at all times of the day, then taking notes in the café. I was no stranger to this situation. I’d been the object of suspicion before, first as a graduate student in the Mexican highlands in an

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anthropology field-training program. Sharon and I had arrived in the village of San Antonio Acuamanala in the middle of a fiesta, and a crowd had gathered, watching curiously as we unloaded our gear. During the next few days, we were asked many questions about our religion. It seemed to take a long time before people warmed up to us and talked willingly. Later, we learned from Cecilia Sanchez, the village nurse, that a week before our arrival a small plane had flown over the village, dropping leaflets promoting Seventh Day Adventism. In this remote Catholic village, we had been mistaken for Protestant missionaries. It is common for locals, especially in remote places, to slot strangers into one of the few cognitive categories they have for outsiders, such as missionary or government official. Who was I being mistaken for? The next morning I went to the U.S. Forest Service office to get some aerial photographs of Dry Bay. As soon as I explained who I was and what I wanted, the woman at the desk burst out laughing. “Everyone thinks you’re with the IRS,” she explained. “They think you’re here looking for unreported fishing income!”

meeting the village council When the village council meeting took place, John Chapman, the head of Glacier Bay National Park, was there to introduce me. Park Service officials had already had one meeting with the council, but the Tlingit elders had not yet met “the researcher.” I explained to them how I would go about doing the assignment. Like most anthropologists, I would live among the people in Dry Bay and observe and participate in the activities that took place there; I would write up my observations and the things people told me in field notes that would later be used to write a “report.” In addition to participant observation, I said, I planned to survey and complete an inventory of all summer fish camps. A Tlingit elder spoke and suggested that Native fishermen might be less than eager to participate in the study. I had already been told about the tension and a few nasty incidents between non-Native and Tlingit fishermen, and

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I could appreciate his skepticism that an outsider (and a non-Native) could understand the Tlingit point of view. The Tlingit, the largest and best-known of the southeastern Alaska Native cultures, have traditionally been a maritime people, living by fishing, hunting, and gathering shellfish in the tidal zone. By the time the Russians first made contact with them in 1741, they were one of the most sophisticated of foraging societies in the world, with an elaborate material culture, social organization, and cosmology. To the outside world, the Tlingit are perhaps best known for the “potlatch” and for elaborately carved commemorative and funerary poles (popularly called “totem poles”). Today, they live in twenty-five villages and towns scattered along four hundred miles of Alaskan coast from Yakutat to Ketchikan. Many still fish and hunt for subsistence, and some are commercial fishermen as well. Others hold wage jobs, and some are collegeeducated professionals. Although the village elders seemed cool toward the research, they did give us their approval. Perhaps naïvely, I remained enthusiastic. I was excited by the prospect of working in the Alaskan wilderness and comparing how different people—the Tlingit and non-Natives—fished and used resources. Before leaving Yakutat for my field site, I thought it would be a good idea to try out the Zodiac, especially since two experienced Alaskans were available—Kathryn Cohen, the ADF&G resource specialist, who was in Yakutat to finalize my research plans, and Judy Ramos, a young Tlingit woman who had been hired as my research assistant. Perfect companions for an exploratory trip on the nearby Situk River. We set off in the early afternoon on a bright and sunny day. But we hadn’t gotten far downstream when the Zodiac’s engine struck a gravel bar, breaking its shear pin and leaving us without propulsion. At first we tried to paddle back upstream, but the current was too swift, so we beached the boat and tried bushwhacking our way upriver through the dense undergrowth, which included thickets of heavily spined Devil’s Club. This didn’t work, forcing us to turn back. Our only alternative then seemed to be to float down the river to the ocean and find a fisherman

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who could take us back to Yakutat. We had no idea of how long this would take, and not having anticipated any of this misfortune, I had neglected to bring along food or warm clothing. Nor had Kathryn or Judy come prepared, as we had planned to be on the river for only an hour or so. All through that afternoon and evening we floated down the Situk. By midnight—now twelve hours on the river—all of us were hungry and cold, and there was still no sign of the ocean. In the semidarkness (at 59° north latitude the sky does not get really dark in midsummer), we startled a moose and her calf. They came crashing through the brush along the riverbank, scaring us witless. Not long after that we came to the first of several logjams and, while trying to pull the Zodiac over it, I fell into the river. Not wanting to risk hypothermia, we stopped to make a fire, using gasoline from the outboard engine in order to dry my clothes. All night long we wondered, “Where in the world is the ocean?” Privately, I beat myself up for having been so ill-prepared. After all, as a Boy Scout, indeed an Eagle Scout, hadn’t I internalized the mantra “Be Prepared”? During the night I also wondered what Judy Ramos’s Tlingit relatives were thinking back in Yakutat when she didn’t return home from going on the river with her new white male supervisor. And I thought often of the warning that Clarence Summers, the Yakutatbased ranger, had given me about being careful and prudent. He liked to say, “Small mistakes that are inconsequential in the lower 48 can be fatal in the north.” Tougher than myself, Kathryn tried to keep up our spirits by making light of our situation. It was hard for me to see any humor in our predicament. Judy sat silent, seemingly unable to make conversation. This being the first time I had met her, and still not knowing much about Tlingit culture, I wasn’t sure if her reticence was personal or cultural. Later, I learned it was both. Around daybreak we finally reached the camp of two fishermen, who built a fire and shared their breakfast, a large can of beans and some granola bars. We collapsed on the riverbank and slept until midmorning. Judy found a logging road that led back to Yakutat, about ten miles

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away. While they stayed with the Zodiac, I set out on foot, unfortunately outfitted in heavy rubber boots designed more for wading than walking. By the end of the day we were all safely back in Yakutat. Judy returned home to the great relief of her family; Kathryn Cohen flew to Juneau, and I never saw her again. I set to work finishing my preparations for my field research in Dry Bay and resting my blistered feet. The night before my departure for Dry Bay, Clarence told me a harrowing story about a missing kayaker he had once been dispatched to find. The young man had just passed the Massachusetts bar exam and was a wilderness enthusiast. His parents had given him a trip to Alaska as a graduation present. He wanted to camp and explore Glacier Bay by kayak. When he failed to return home, the Park Service was alerted and a search undertaken. Clarence found his empty camp on a small gravel island at the far end of the bay. Some distance away, he spotted two boots with feet and leg bones but no body. Lying on the gravel nearby was a camera. Clarence removed the film and had it processed. The cause of death was pretty clear from the prints that came back. The last six frames on the roll showed a bear swimming toward the island, then emerging from the water and making its way up the gravel bar in the direction of the photographer. Clarence told the story in graphic detail, and by the end I wasn’t sure whether his intent was to educate me after my “adventure” on the Situk River or to scare me off altogether.

dry bay I chartered a small plane to Dry Bay. Sitting in the copilot’s seat on the flight, I got a good look at the terrain as we left Yakutat. I could see the edge of the Malaspina Glacier, the world’s largest, which covers an area the size of Rhode Island. Our route followed a flat coastal foreland latticed with rivers and small streams flowing to the ocean through muskeg and spruce forests. From their milky appearance, it was apparent they were fed by glacial runoff. I counted three brown bears and four moose. In no hurry to return to Yakutat and proud of the dazzling

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Figure 4-1. The Alsek River and glacier viewed from a bush plane window.

scenery, the young pilot turned inland toward the mountains and over the pass where a small plane, loaded with rafters, would crash later that summer. Within a few minutes we were above the snow-covered peaks of the Brabazon Range where glaciers descended from U-shaped valleys, their ice and snow streaked black with dirt and rock debris. Back on course, we soon landed in a clearing near the small Park Service cabin where Clarence had recommended I stay. Within minutes I had unloaded my gear and stood watching the plane disappear over the horizon. The only sound was the distant and receding hum of its engine. I never felt more alone. As I lugged my gear toward the cabin, my shotgun perched atop each load, I noticed large bear tracks in the sandy soil, and then claw marks on the cabin door and window frame. That night, and each night thereafter, I put the gun next to my sleeping bag. “Put the buckshot in first and then the slugs,” Ken Schoenberg had instructed, “because if you have a bear inside your tent at night, you won’t be able to see him well, and you’ll want a wider pattern of shot to make sure you hit something.”

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While I had dutifully recorded all of Ken’s advice in my notebook, privately I had thought that he was overdoing it. Now, I wasn’t so sure. That evening I wrote in my journal, “For the first time this trip, I feel a little lonely for home and wonder if it was really wise to accept an opportunity like this just because it offered a new experience.” I stayed in bed the next day until 1:00 p.m., unable to face the uncertainties of my situation. Adding to my woes, my Coleman stove would not light even after I took it apart and reassembled it, so I could not boil water or make a hot meal. When I finally did get up, I attached the noisemaking bells to my shirt, put my whistle around my neck and my shotgun over my shoulder, and set out downriver, hoping to meet a few of the local fishermen. I walked several miles before reaching the first fish camp; the next one was another mile away. It was immediately apparent that Clarence, by recommending that I live at the cabin, either didn’t understand that anthropologists need to live among the people they study or didn’t want the study to succeed. Though the cabin was cozy, staying there would mean that I would get little work done. The only feasible alternative, which turned out to be a good one, was to move all my gear six miles away to a small fish-processing station that was little more than a few WWII-style Quonset huts where the fishermen came to unload and sell their fish. A small work crew gutted the salmon, iced them, and packed them to be flown to Yakutat in an ancient DC-3. It was only here that the fishermen met, some lingering to relax and socialize.

a tale of two rivers The fishermen worked on two rivers. Monitoring the salmon that returned to both, while also keeping an eye on the fishermen, was an ADF&G fisheries biologist named Alex Brogel. Raised in Germany, Alex had been drawn to Alaska as a young man by its wilderness. Now middle-aged, Alex became my teacher. The Alsek and the nearby East River “are as different as rivers can be,” he explained to me as we sat on

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a riverbank the morning we met. Despite being only a few miles apart, the Alsek River is huge and flows through some of the most remote land in North America. It’s the only river along five hundred miles of coastline to have muscled its way through the high Alaskan coastal ranges. Over two hundred miles long, it has a volume greater than any river along the entire Pacific Coast other than the great Columbia. The East River, in contrast, springs from an artesian source and runs just seven miles to the sea. The following day, Alex invited me out in a small boat to illustrate their differences, which I dutifully recorded in my notes. The Alsek’s current is swift, averaging six knots; while the East River is a gentle two knots. The Alsek is extremely cold (38 to 42 degrees) since most of its volume is glacial melt water; while the East River is shallow, warm (55–65 degrees) and non-glacial. The Alsek is turbid; its milky gray color gives it the appearance of watery cement; while the East River is crystal clear. Yet both rivers have large salmon runs, and spawn all five species of Pacific salmon: sockeye, king, coho or silver, pink, and chum.

In both rivers, salmon are caught with gill nets, which are staked from the riverbank and then stretched across the current by small boats and anchored. The nets hang vertically in the water so that salmon migrating upstream to spawn run into them and become entangled, usually around the gills (hence the name gill nets). The trapped fish are then “picked” from the nets by the fishermen, who pull themselves along the nets in their boats, and taken to the fish processor once or twice a day where they are weighed, gutted, and iced until they can be flown out for further processing and distribution to West Coast markets. In the succeeding days, sometimes while sharing a meal on the riverbank, Alex showed me how differences between the two rivers pose unique challenges to the fishermen. Since the East River is clear, salmon can see the gill nets. For this reason, fishing was traditionally done at night when the nets were less visible. The turbidity of the Alsek River, in contrast, means that the time of day has little effect on fishing success. One benefit of the East River’s clear water, however, is that fishermen can see the migratory fish and know exactly where to set their nets.3

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Figure 4-2. A Tlingit fisherman watches for salmon striking his gill net on the Alsek River.

They can also chase visible schools of fish into their nets by driving their boats back and forth across the shallow pools where the fish pause to renew their energy before continuing upstream. The warmth of the East River also produces lots of underwater vegetation or “moss” that clogs the nets, forcing fishermen to shake them regularly. It is exhausting work and means that East River fishermen spend far more time at their nets than those who fish on the Alsek. While the Alsek lacks moss, it has drifting logs and chunks of ice flowing down it from calving glaciers upstream. Both can foul or destroy nets. I watched one fisherman lose two nets to an iceberg the size of a car. Harbor seals are another headache. They are clever, understand how gillnets work, and feed on the salmon trapped in them. After a

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severe storm once caused fishermen to abandon their nets temporarily, they returned to find a seal behind each one, driving fish into the net and then eating them. Another animal predator that competes with the fishermen is the brown or grizzly bear, which is attracted to the caught fish. Bears will wade into the water or haul the nets onto the bank to get at them. Not only are fish lost, but the nets’ webbing is damaged as the bears tear at it to remove the fish. Consequently, fishermen on both rivers pack guns. Over the summer I heard a lot of local lore about bear encounters and the behavior and movements of individual bears. To protect their nets, fishermen use different strategies. One man spread his dirty laundry on the bushes near his nets to give the area a strong human scent; another used a noisemaking cannon, like those used to scare birds from cornfields. When fishing at night, some men kept a lantern or fire burning on the riverbank. And some fishermen shoot bears illegally. One Alsek fisherman claimed to have killed more than twenty bears in his twenty summers on the river.

struggling to gain rapport In Dry Bay, like Yakutat, I was again met with suspicion, although of a different sort. The NPS had informed all the fishermen about the research and who I was—an anthropology professor from New York. In this case, I might have gotten a better reception had I been an IRS inspector. The fishermen had been opposed to Dry Bay’s becoming part of the National Park Service. The land had previously been under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service which, in large measure, had let the fishermen and hunters do as they pleased. Now they feared new regulations would restrict their activities. And they did not want anyone, least of all the federal government, telling them what they could or could not do. As one non-Native fisherman pointedly told me, “I came here to get away from Big Brother.” Yet my job was to document the very activities—fishing and hunting—they feared might be restricted, or taken away altogether. That I

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was a college professor didn’t help, and worse, I was from “back East.” “A pointy-headed intellectual,” I overheard one fisherman say. Had I been from the University of Idaho, I might have been more acceptable. I told the fishermen that I was really from the West, having grown up in California, but that seemed to make little difference. During my first week camped at the fish processor, a young, grizzled fisherman named Virgil, high on drugs or alcohol or both, came up to me on his threewheeler, pistol visibly at his side. “Keep your fuckin’ nose out of my business or there’ll be trouble,” he threatened, looking down at his pistol. I wrote in my journal that night, “Very tense situation. . . . I hate the feeling that people think I’m prying into their personal lives, even though I’m not.” Apparently, Virgil had seen me talking with the backcountry ranger and assumed I was giving out information on them. I had tried to explain to him what anthropologists do and why the Park Service had to conduct this study, but he sped off before I could finish. A few days later, another unfriendly fisherman asked how much I was being paid by the Park Service. I told him, thinking, “Jeez, I’m asking them all kinds of questions—I can’t not answer theirs.” But it really wasn’t any of his business, and later I regretted having been so forthright. The other white fishermen were not overtly threatening, but they, too, made it clear that they were opposed to the research. It was “unnecessary.” some said, and “a waste of taxpayer’s money.” Some also said I could not possibly learn enough in one summer to make it worthwhile. During the first few weeks in the field, the difficulty of getting a good night’s sleep in the short nights of an Alaskan summer didn’t help my mood. And if that wasn’t enough, I was caught in the middle, between two groups who didn’t like or trust one another.

indian-white conflict Competition between the Tlingit and non-Natives over fishing sites had strained relations between the two peoples, complicating my fieldwork. The conflict stemmed mostly from the two groups’ having very different

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fishing strategies. The Tlingit liked to move from one river to another to take advantage of the arrival of different runs of salmon, often working four different rivers during the five-month-long salmon season. The white fishermen liked to remain in one place. They lived in individual fish camps scattered over a wide area upriver from the Tlingit. Some were descendants of Norwegian and Finnish immigrants who had arrived in Alaska around 1910 to work in a newly built cannery at Dry Bay. The cannery closed suddenly in 1912, when the company’s only vessel sank while crossing the sandbar at the mouth of the Alsek River, losing the entire season’s catch of fourteen thousand cases of salmon. A half dozen of the Scandinavian workers had returned the following season to fish, building small cabins along the riverbank. Other non-Native fishermen had joined them after World War II. While the Tlingit clustered together in tents near the river mouths, the whites lived alone in their fish camps, each consisting of a small cabin, an outhouse, a storage shed, and a smokehouse. Their camps are spaced along the river so that no one is in sight of his neighbor. Except for the occasional white trapper, they leave the area after the last salmon run in early autumn. During the winter, fierce, icy winds sweep down the Alsek gorge from the Yukon, and there’s no point in staying. Fishing permits are also a sore point. All fishing requires a commercial fishing permit, which most of the Tlingit once owned. Only 160 permits exist for the entire region. During times of financial need, some Tlingit had sold their permits to non-Natives for less than their real value and later had been unable to afford the $50,000 or more to obtain another. Denied the opportunity to fish for a living as their fathers and grandfathers had before them, young Tlingit resented outsiders whose money has enabled them to buy into their fishery. In the four years prior to my arrival there were thirteen documented incidents of conflict in Dry Bay between the Tlingit and white fishermen, a few involving firearms. White fishermen had fired at Tlingit fish camps several times in an attempt to drive them away. One Tlingit fish camp had been set on fire, and the helicopter used to haul the Tlingits’ catch to the fish processor had been shot and disabled.

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Figure 4-3. A fish camp on the Alsek River.

This confl ict was precipitated by the return of Tlingit fishermen to Dry Bay after a twenty-year absence. Most Tlingit had left the area in 1958 after a huge earthquake (8.0 on the Richter scale) whose epicenter was not far from Dry Bay struck. It was the largest West Coast earthquake since the 1906 San Francisco quake and had fissured the earth and caused the region’s alluvial-deposited land to undulate like waves on water, knocking people off their feet. Down the coast from Dry Bay, at Lituya Bay, the quake set off a landslide so massive that the resultant tsunami denuded the forest to a height of 1,720 feet above the level of the bay. In the Dry Bay area, one side of the Doame River was thrust forty-five feet upward (the largest vertical uplift ever recorded), blocking its outlet to the sea and forcing it to flow into the East River, which disrupted that river’s salmon run since the migrating salmon no longer recognized the unique chemical smell of their river. Following the earthquake, the Tlingit avoided Dry Bay and fished the rivers near their homes in Yakutat instead.

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When the salmon runs eventually reestablished themselves in Dry Bay, and after hearing rumors of enormous catches and huge profits, the Tlingit returned to the area. The non-Native fishermen, especially the newcomers who didn’t know the history of the Tlingit fishery or how the earthquake had disrupted it, resented the new competition. Threats and attacks on the Tlingit caused more Yakutat Natives to travel down the coast in a show of support and strength. “When my brother was shot at, I said to myself that I had to go down there and help out,” one man told me. “I was not going to let those white fishermen run us out.”

caught in the middle While each group was distrustful of the other, my research required that I develop rapport with and gather information from both. Although I divided my time between them, some individuals disliked my interacting with members of the opposing group. During the first weeks, when I approached a group of white fishermen, one by one they walked off, only to regroup somewhere else, just as the Irish Travellers had done when I began my fieldwork among them. After the summer was over, I learned more about what the fishermen had thought of me from the backcountry ranger, Richard Steele, who heard much of the gossip. They joked about my appearance—I wore tennis shoes instead of rubber boots—and they said that my speech, like my clothes, was too “clean.” The rumor was that I lived near the safety of the fish processor because I was afraid of bears. Ranger Steele also described what he had observed during my interactions with the fishermen: “Your body language just didn’t fit with theirs; you stood erect, while they tend to slouch with their thumbs cocked in their pockets. And you made too much eye contact, while they prefer to look away and fidget.” Although the Tlingits never walked away from me when I approached them, they didn’t make me feel welcome either. My early attempts at conversation were often met with minimal responses and sometimes

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silence. The Tlingit are reserved and private people, unaccustomed to asking or being asked direct questions. And in the beginning I didn’t have enough knowledge of Alaska, the region, or the issues that concerned them to have an informal conversation without asking questions. Sometimes rather “dumb” questions. When I arrived at one of their tents, I often had the feeling that I was intruding, that they were busy and didn’t have time to chat. Nevertheless, my rapport with members of both groups improved gradually. At the fish processor, after each fisherman unloaded his catch, he usually hung around to talk before returning to the solitary life of his fish camp. In addition to the things that any stranger in a new setting does to develop good relations with local people, I drew the younger men into playing Frisbee, pitching horseshoes, or shooting baskets on a makeshift backboard. The games often ended in relaxed conversation, sometimes over beer. I tried to demonstrate to both Tlingit and white fishermen that I respected their knowledge and capabilities: the way in which they dealt with the hazards of bears and of fishing in small boats in the swift, frigid waters of the Alsek River, where the risks were real, and where falling overboard could easily mean death. (Two fishermen drowned, including my best informant Warren Pellet, the following summer.) Of course, I listened attentively to what they said, like a conscientious schoolboy. They were, after all, my teachers. I told the fishermen that everything I learned from them was confidential and that, even in my own field notes, I was not using their real names. (I used pseudonyms, naming each fisherman after a different bird that he reminded me of and that I could easily remember.) I promised to let them read and comment on the draft of my report, and if they disagreed with some point but could not convince me I was wrong, I would include their objections in an appendix to the report. I believe the fishermen, both Tlingit and white, gradually came to accept that I had an open mind about them and that I had not come with fixed ideas about the appropriateness of fishing and hunting or

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building cabins in a protected wilderness. A few fishermen even invited me to their fish camps for a meal. Sharon’s arrival in Dry Bay one month into the field season also seemed to help. While the wives of fishermen did not come to Dry Bay, mine had, and she was seven months pregnant.4 She hiked with me to distant fish camps and took a severe pounding in a boat while ascending rapids, miles up the Alsek River. Some thought she was foolish to come to Dry Bay in her “condition,” where storms can ground bush planes for days, putting medical attention out of reach. But whatever the wisdom of her being there, her presence seemed to make people accept me more easily. But the turning point in my rapport with the local fishermen happened on the Fourth of July. All the white fishermen gathered at the fish processor to celebrate by playing a softball game on a bluff above the river. In my first two at bats I hit long home runs. Later, when our only bat broke nearly in half, I helped one of the fishermen repair it with screws and plenty of tape, and with choked grips, we resumed play. In the field, enthusiastic about the game and forgetting for a moment my low status among the fishermen, I gave the fielders directions. When a debate broke out over a quirky play, I knew the rule that resolved the disagreement. Being able to play ball was something the fishermen could relate to. After the game, there was good-natured joking about my play, and the fishermen seemed decidedly friendlier. During the game, the ranger, without my knowing, had told some of them that I had once played professionally in the minor leagues. Among Irish Travellers, I had often played sports with the men and thought it had made them more accepting of me, but I had never really known for certain. This time, at the end of the summer when I had a long chat about my fieldwork with ranger Steele, he said, “The icebreaker was the softball game. When they saw how hard you hit the ball and that you really knew how to play the game, you became a regular guy. You were no longer just a weirdo professor from back East who wore tennis shoes and had good posture.” The ranger’s observations

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also revealed to me that I had failed to realize how differences in social class can be as big an obstacle to developing rapport as differences in culture. When arriving in Dry Bay, I had unconsciously assumed that I would have little difficulty making friends with the white fishermen, who ostensibly were from the same mainstream American culture as myself. It would take more understanding and effort, I thought, to get to know the Tlingit. But the difference in class between me—a whitecollar academic—and the largely blue-collar fishermen was no less a barrier. While I received confirmation from the ranger that I had been accepted by the whites, I wasn’t totally sure what the Tlingit had thought of me and my research until several years later when I got a phone call from an Alaskan attorney representing twelve Yakutat fishermen in a suit against the state of Alaska over fishing rights. The Tlingit wanted to know if I would come to Alaska and help them. They wanted to know if I would testify in court as an “expert witness” on the history of their fishing in the Dry Bay area. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game had banned setting gill nets in the ocean outside the mouths of the Alsek and East Rivers. Since only the Natives fished in the surf, they believed that the fishing ban was discriminatory. The ADF&G claimed surf fishing was not “traditional” among the Tlingit. They knew it was and hoped that I could back them up. I testified for the Tlingit in the Alaska Superior Court. It was the final irony—a complete reversal of roles. There I sat in the witness stand, giving so-called expert testimony about various aspects of Tlingit fishing and culture while in the gallery sat the real experts, the Tlingit fishermen who, along with Alex Brogle, had taught me virtually everything I knew about them and their fishery. When it was all over, outside the courthouse, I was thrilled when they said in their own understated fashion that I had gotten it right. I valued their words as much as any professional recognition. They also made me think back to the white fisherman who had said that no outsider could ever learn

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enough in a single summer to make a difference. The experience made me proud to be an anthropologist and glad that I could give something back. And unlike our Gypsy research in England, the findings of this research had already been put to good use in the National Park Service’s new development plan.

5

Studying Subsistence in Sitka

Anthropologists have always been interested in the strategies people use to obtain food. Food is the basis of human life, and how it is obtained influences other aspects of culture, including group size and the division of labor. This is why introductory anthropology texts often begin their discussions of human behavior and cultural variation by classifying societies in terms of their dominant mode of production: foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, and agriculture. All four subsistence strategies exist today, although the number of people practicing the first three, especially foraging, has declined dramatically. Today, both small-scale and industrial agricultural food systems dominate, and even the most isolated societies are enmeshed in the global economy.

doing applied research Alaska is unique, certainly in the United States, in the number of people who harvest wild foods. The state has bountiful land and marine resources, and indigenous cultures—Aleut, Athabascan, Alutiiq, Haida, Inupiat, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Yup’ik—that to varying degrees still practice traditional food-getting strategies, while also earning money from paid employment. Many non-Native Alaskans choose to live in 70

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the state precisely because of its rich natural environment and the opportunities it provides to hunt, fish, and collect wild foods. Subsistence is defined in the law as the “customary and traditional uses of wild resources for food, clothing, fuel, transportation, construction, art, crafts, sharing, and customary trade,” but not sale.1 Alaska’s first subsistence statute, passed in 1978, prioritized the subsistence use of the state’s wild, renewable resources over other uses such as commercial fishing and recreational hunting. It also created a research unit—the Division of Subsistence—within the Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G), which uses social-science methods, especially those of cultural anthropology, “to understand subsistence activities within a broad socioeconomic and sociocultural context.”2 Subsistence was also prioritized in federal law in 1980 with passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Under it, when fish or game populations are deemed by state biologists to be insufficient for all users, rural Alaskans will be given preference over others. The “rural” designation was a political compromise meant to protect Native subsistence rights, since more Alaskan Natives live in rural areas, while not discriminating on the basis of ethnicity.3 In 1983, we were awarded a contract by the ADF&G’s Subsistence Division to conduct research on contemporary subsistence or “self-provisioning” in Sitka, Alaska.4 At the time, most research on the subject had been conducted in small villages with majority Native populations. To broaden its understanding of subsistence, the ADF&G wanted to examine its role in the lives of people living in an urban setting. Despite Sitka’s small population of 8,200, it was then the fifth-largest community in Alaska and classified as urban.5 Our task was to discover everything we could about the town’s subsistence economy. To what extent and in what ways did these urban households, the majority of which were non-Native, rely on wild foods? What species did families hunt, fish, and gather? How often and how far did they travel to do so? Why did people choose to forage when they could so easily buy food at one of Sitka’s grocery stores? What resource-use issues

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were of greatest concern to residents? Our findings would be written up as a report that would be used by the ADF&G and other government bodies to help manage Alaska’s wild resources sustainably.6

sitka: the place and its people Sitka sits on the Pacific coast of mountainous Baranof Island in southeast Alaska. It can be reached only by air or sea. It lies within the boundaries of the earth’s largest intact temperate rainforest and America’s largest national forest, the Tongass, which covers seventeen million acres. The Tongass is home not only to Sitka spruce, western hemlock, black-tailed deer, and brown bears, but also to salmon. It is often referred to as a “salmon forest” because of the huge numbers of fish that return from the Pacific to spawn and die in its rivers and streams, adding nutrients to the forest in an elegant, synergistic cycle. As much as 80 percent of the nitrogen found in riparian-zone foliage comes from salmon. The mixture of mountains, forest, and sea creates an environment of great beauty. The view out to sea is dominated by 3,200-foot Mt. Edgecumbe, a dormant volcano on nearby Kruzof Island. The scenery is enhanced by the many small islands that dot Sitka Sound. Indeed, the Tlingit name for Sitka, Sheet’ka, means “the village behind the islands.” Sitka’s urban landscape is also picturesque with harbors, fishing boats, and historic sites like onion-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral, a remnant of Russia’s nineteenth-century colonization. Most important from the viewpoint of the research is Sitkans’ easy access to many edible land, tidal, and marine resources. About one fifth of Sitka’s population is of Tlingit descent. The Tlingit have resided in Sitka for millennia, hunting, fishing, and gathering at clan-based harvest sites and locales. They also ranged widely to trade. The latter often involved bartering locally obtained wild foods like herring eggs deposited on hemlock branches for less easily obtained items like eulachon (also known as candlefish, Thaleichthys pacificus) oil. Intertidal resources like seaweeds and clams were, and continue to be,

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Figure 5-1. Crescent Harbor, one of Sitka’s five boat harbors.

important. Unlike foragers in many parts of the world, the Tlingit traditionally lived in semipermanent villages, only moving to fishing and sealing camps in season. The area’s abundant resources provided such a rich and varied diet that more frequent nomadism was unnecessary. Today, like Sitka’s non-Native population, virtually all Tlingit have paid employment, many working in commercial fishing or processing, health services, tourism, or government.

settling in In early June, I (Sharon) flew to Sitka with our nine-month-old son, Morgan. George had arrived three weeks earlier to convert our friend Richard (Nels) Nelson’s small boathouse into our temporary home. It was perched on pilings over the water of Sitka Sound. George helped a local carpenter panel its bare stud walls, lay a plywood floor, wire it for

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electricity, and install a picture window to get light and a view of the bay. It was a very Alaskan space, the rafters loaded with all manner of gear: ropes and paddles; plastic floats that had drifted across the Pacific from Japan; life vests and orange survival suits to be worn whenever we traveled any distance by boat; fishing poles; and a skin-covered kayak from Nels’s research with the Inupiat. Tucked into the corners of the room were folded tarps, five-gallon plastic tubs, and assorted tackle. A table beneath the window served as our desk. Rounding out the amenities were a garage-sale refrigerator, and, as it turned out, a dangerous propane stove. The first time I turned a burner on, a sheet of flame shot across the floor, narrowly missing Morgan who was playing nearby. The bathroom and running water were across the road in Nels’s basement, which was crammed with more gear and the fruits of his subsistence activities: shelves of salmonberry and huckleberry jam and a freezer full of venison, halibut, and salmon. Our boathouse apartment and Nels’s home became our operational base. His partner, Nita, precise and endlessly patient, managed the project’s finances, took on the tedious task of transcribing our interview tapes, and answered many annoying computer-related questions. It was our first fieldwork using a computer, which is now hard to believe. We had a state-of-the art Kaypro, one of the first personal computers. It was the size of a small suitcase and weighed twenty-nine pounds but was considered portable. It had just 64 kB of memory; today’s iPhones have 15,000 times as much.

the research design In order to get a well-rounded view of Sitkans’ resource use, we adopted a multimethod approach, including participant observation. George joined a softball team to get to know people and would often do short, informal interviews in the outfield during batting practices. I met locals interested in subsistence while taking a course on identifying edible wild plants. We also attended community events, such as dinners at the

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Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) Hall where wild foods were always served. We read the local newspaper and listened to Raven Radio—call sign KCAW. My favorite program was Problem Corner, whose announcements often related to resource use; people would call in to sell equipment or trade smoked salmon or berries for some other wild food. Once I had to laugh, despite the seriousness of the call: “Will the woman who is eating foxglove at the corner of Cathedral and Seward please report to the Emergency Room at the hospital before you go into convulsions!” We also did our own subsistence harvesting. While fishing, picking berries, or digging clams in the intertidal zone, we were able to watch and often talk to others engaged in the same activities. We processed our harvests in Nels and Nita’s kitchen and backyard smoker. Like most Sitkans, we put up salmonberry jam, smoked salmon, and even tried our hands at making kelp pickles and kelp chips. We also shared many potluck meals with others, where it usually took little effort to steer conversations onto subsistence. The research also involved formal interviews with local experts and resource specialists, including ADF&G and U.S. Forest Service biologists, Fish and Wildlife protection officers, and Tlingit elders. We consulted community and cultural organizations, like the Cooperative Extension office and the ANB, and local businesses, including a boat dealership, sporting-goods stores, air-charter firms, taxidermists, and supermarkets to learn the full range of local people’s resource use. We even arranged for students in a tenth-grade high school English class to write essays about their favorite subsistence activity. In addition to the rich qualitative data these interviews and activities provided, the ADF&G wanted a large survey that would yield representative and broadly generalizable information about the proportions of Sitkans involved in different subsistence activities and the where, when, and to what end they harvested local resources. Although ADF&G regularly hired cultural anthropologists and valued qualitative research because they knew its importance in understanding the context and reasons for people’s behavior, they also needed statistics to help craft

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regulations and to present to state and federal agencies. So we developed a 106-item survey on Sitkans’ household use of local resources. It covered all activities associated with hunting, fishing, and plant and intertidal gathering, including the sharing and distribution of what was obtained. We also had supplemental questions on commercial fishing and trapping for those households that engaged in these activities. We had used surveys in earlier fieldwork, but this was our first large-scale survey using a random sample.7 Since we could not possibly interview every household in Sitka in the three months allocated to the research, we settled on a 6 percent sample (n=146). We had three part-time research assistants to help conduct the interviews: Libby Halpin, Matt Kookesh, and Gabe George. Matt and Gabe were Tlingit ADF&G employees, and their observations and cultural insights helped enormously. I enjoyed the challenge of devising a method to select a random sample. I began by obtaining a map of Sitka’s electoral districts, the number of electors in each, and a list of everyone living on boats. I calculated the percentage of Sitka’s total population living in each district to determine how many households in each we would need to interview in order to get our desired sample size. Next, I devised a simple way to randomly select which streets in each district we would go to and which households to interview on each street.8 Finally, our team of five set to work, each person armed with clipboard, pens, printed surveys, and a detailed map of his or her allotted districts with the selected streets and the number of needed households marked in red. Conducting a study for the ADF&G gave the research legitimacy, as well as a reason to enter nearly 150 homes in order to talk to local people about their resource use. It enabled us to meet a broad range of people and demonstrated the synergy that can exist between qualitative and quantitative methods. The study was announced locally on the radio and in the Daily Sitka Sentinel newspaper, which contributed to people’s cooperation. When we showed up at the door, people often expected us and were pleased to be included. We interviewed only

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adult household heads and ended up with an impressive 97 percent response rate. Our interviews usually took about an hour to complete, but some lasted twice as long. We encouraged people to discuss their harvesting activities in detail and wrote up the extra information in field notes. “Really enjoyed my two hours with him,” George noted after talking to a sixty-year-old Tlingit man who was a heavy resource user. “He could see what I was looking for and stayed on subject.” Most people talked readily about their subsistence activities, often taking time to remember or to calculate how much they had harvested in the previous twelve months or to really attempt to explain why they engaged in a particular activity. Only when it came to telling us where they harvested a scarce resource, like abalone, did they hesitate or hedge their answers. Occasionally, we were invited to sample foods as we talked. One elderly Tlingit woman fetched a bottle from her refrigerator to show me the Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus) tonic she had made by soaking shavings from its stems and inner bark in water. She drank some each day as a cleanser and restorative and also to ease her arthritis.9 We usually returned from a day of interviewing mentally drained but at the same time invigorated by the information we’d obtained.

the importance of subsistence The survey confirmed what we had been observing, namely that most Sitkans—Tlingit and non-Native alike—were engaged to some degree in harvesting wild resources. At least one person in 83 percent of Sitka’s households had fished in the previous year, having gone out an average of thirty times. Yes, thirty times. More than three-quarters of households had harvested wild plants—berries, beach greens, roots, and mushrooms. Some people had also collected downed logs from the forest and drift logs from the beach to heat their homes. Fifty-six percent of households had hunted, making an average of seven trips the previous year, usually in search of black-tailed deer. Sixty percent had harvested

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Figure 5-2. Some of the catch from subsistence salmon fishing.

intertidal resources, collecting everything from clams, cockles, abalone, seaweeds, and kelp to sea cucumbers, urchins, scallops, limpets, and octopus. A few Tlingit families had gathered seagull eggs from coastal shores. Many intertidal resources are traditional Tlingit foods, though a few, like seaweeds, were becoming increasingly popular with nonNatives. Tlingit means “people of the tide” or “low-tide activity people,” according to the late Tlingit historian Mark Jacobs Jr., who also liked to say, as did others, “When the tide is out, the table is set for the Tlingit people.”

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While some Sitkans were heavy resource users, others focused on a few activities and ignored the rest. Examples of heavy resource users were a fifty-five-year-old Tlingit man and his two adult sons. Together they had taken eight deer, a mountain goat, a sea lion, and two seals during the previous twelve months. They had caught their subsistence and sport limits of all five species of salmon, which they smoked, dried, and canned. In addition, they had also caught ten halibut and approximately fifty Dolly Varden trout. From the intertidal zone they had collected four types of clams, gumboots, cockles, crab, herring eggs, and octopus and had dried ten gallons of seaweed for household use. The family had also picked cloudberries and blueberries, which they dried or preserved in seal oil, along with larger quantities of salmonberries and gray currants, which they both ate fresh and made into jam. They had also harvested numerous greens, including goose tongue (Plantago maritima), wild celery (Heracleum maximum), Indian rice (Fritillaria camschatcensis), Hudson Bay tea (Ledum groenlandicum), and Devil’s Club. Together, the father and two sons had trapped an estimated $5,000 worth of mink and otter. They also traded the herring eggs they had harvested for ribbon seaweed (Palmaria mollis) and euchalon oil from Tlingit living in other communities. By comparison, a non-Native couple in their early thirties, one a dentist and the other a bookkeeper, classified themselves as “moderate” users. In the previous year, they had shot a deer and a brown bear (using only the hide) and had also hunted unsuccessfully for mountain goat, ducks, and geese. They went fishing about ten times, catching two pink salmon, one king, three halibut, and a few Dolly Varden trout and rock fish. While they had not collected any intertidal foods the previous year, unlike in the past, they had picked enough blueberries, salmonberries, red huckleberries, and strawberries to put up forty pints of jam. They had also gathered fourteen cords of wood from the beach, which supplied all of their winter heat. Subsistence activities are just as popular today as they were in 1983 at the time of our survey. Since 2012 I have brought student groups from the

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University of San Francisco to Sitka for a summer field course on “Culture and the Environment.” Much of it focuses on resource use and sustainability. Students learn directly from resource specialists and researchers, observe and talk to local residents, and harvest their own wild foods (mostly, salmon and berries). Their findings, although informal, indicate that subsistence in all its forms—fishing, gathering, and hunting—is still important to large majorities of the population. One reason is easy access. “We live it every day,” explained an employee in the town’s planning office. “We have wild foods right in front of us all the time. I can’t even go out and take a picture for my work without walking on the tide flats. . . . Nature is around us all the time.” Recreation is another reason for resource harvesting. Sitka is a fairly isolated place with limited leisure options. For many people, being in nature and harvesting wild foods is healthy and takes the place of other forms of entertainment.

the appeal of subsistence To better understand the appeal of various subsistence activities, we asked people to rank—on a four-point scale from “very important” to “not important”—the role that different motives played in their decision to hunt, fish, and gather. The survey data, once again, reinforced what we were learning from casual conversations and participant observation. Harvesting, which is time consuming and can be physically demanding, nevertheless brings much pleasure. More people ranked their “enjoyment” of being outdoors and of engaging in specific harvesting activities as “very important” than any other motive for engaging in subsistence. “One reason I like hunting so much,” explained one man, “is that you walk ten times slower than you’ve ever walked before and that gives you a chance to see the scenery. You see a lot of animals that you’d not see otherwise. Deer hunting is really a high quality way to be out in the woods.” According to another, “When I’m hunting, I am closest to being in harmony with my surroundings. I become part of the world. Some of the neatest things I’ve seen in life have happened when

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Figure 5-3. A Sitkan picking blueberries on Harbor Mountain.

I’m out hunting. I once saw a wolverine beat up and chase off a bear.” A woman who gathered both plant and intertidal resources said, “I like being busy without any stress. And I like the quiet of being out of town. I can do it for hours. I also like the fact that I get something out of it— the food as well as the pleasure.” On one trip with Nels, we spent a couple hours fishing for halibut and bottom fish before we decided to motor to Redoubt Bay to dip net for salmon. Arriving there, we discovered that the run was too small, so went ashore to pick salmonberries—filling a five-gallon bucket, which we later weighed at thirty-four pounds, in about two hours. We were childlike in our glee: “Wow, have you ever seen so many berries!” “Amazing!” “What a great day!” On the boat trip home, we tried to pinpoint what had given us so much pleasure and concluded it was the combination of discovering such a rich patch, being outside, eating and

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enjoying the berries as we picked, knowing they were wholesome and free, and anticipating putting up a year’s supply of jam. Anyone who has spread salmonberry or huckleberry jam on toast or eaten fresh salmon or halibut will easily understand why the “taste of wild foods” was the next most frequently cited reason our survey respondents gave for subsistence harvesting; 68 percent considered it to be “very important.” For Tlingit interviewees, the “taste of wild foods” ranked higher than any other motive for engaging in subsistence except “it is part of my cultural background.” Harvesting and eating wild foods is central to Tlingit culture and identity. As John Littlefield once said, “You can’t buy smoked deer meat dipped in seal oil at Sea Mart [local supermarket]. You just can’t. I consider it Tlingit soul food.” “Non-Natives don’t understand how much these foods are a way of life,” explained the head of the Sitka Native Education Program (SNEP). “Your body craves them. Herring eggs and other foods are a part of our culture. That’s why we go to so much trouble to get them for the elders and to teach young people about them.” State regulations allow “proxy” harvesters to fish and hunt for elderly or disabled residents, and local Native groups conduct special subsistence harvests in order to provide wild foods to their elders. Tlingit elders told us that eating wild foods is “eating the right way” or “the real way.” Wild foods are also essential to Tlingit ceremonials. In 2015, a middle-aged Tlingit woman I spoke with had been accumulating food for a future potlatch or memorial party and had amassed fifty gallons of dried seaweed and two freezers full of venison, fish, and herring eggs—an estimated eight hundred pounds. For the Tlingit, subsistence is haa kusteeyí—“our way of living.” Traditionally, the year was reckoned largely by harvest activities like Xáat Dísi, “salmon month” (July).10 While it’s difficult to explain exactly what makes providing your own food so gratifying, over half of the people we interviewed cited this as a “very important” reason they harvested wild foods. “I enjoy being outdoors, but being independent is what it’s all about,” one deer hunter explained, adding, “If you knew everything there was to know about the

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natural resources we’ve got [in Sitka], you wouldn’t have to go to the store at all.” A Tlingit man explained, “I can’t put it into words. I just feel that I’m home when I’m using what’s in the environment.” One of the biggest rewards of my summer “Culture and the Environment” course is providing students with the opportunity to personally connect to nature through subsistence. The following comment from one student’s journal, written during a camping and fishing trip on nearby Kruzof Island, captures some of the gratification and wonder she experienced. Pulling the net out of the water and seeing I had caught a salmon was one of the most satisfying feelings. “Yes, I did it. I caught my own food. I am physically putting food on the table to sustain myself and those around me.” . . .. [T]he sound of the sharp knife cutting down the center of the salmon, and the colorful soft fish eggs crowded in my hand before I tossed them back into the sea. . . . Once we grilled the salmon and were able to enjoy it for dinner as a group, the satisfying feeling from before came back again.

For many Sitkans, and this student, the act of drawing sustenance directly from nature and sharing its bounty with others is a deeply satisfying experience. Many people also cited the “nutritional value of wild foods” as one of the main reasons they harvested. While few people probably knew the exact nutritional content of the wild foods they harvested, they did know that they were fresh and of high quality. A laboratory analysis of twenty locally available wild foods instigated by Helen Hooper, a Sitka resident and nutritionist at Mt. Edgecumbe Hospital, concluded that Sitka’s residents have a “nutritional gold mine” at their doorstep. Seaweeds, for example, are outstanding sources of minerals and vitamins; salmon and herring eggs are high in calcium; cockles are excellent sources of iron. From recent conversations and student surveys it appears that Sitkans today are even more aware of the nutrition value of their wild foods. “Lowering food costs” was another reason Sitkans engaged in subsistence, cited by 44 percent. This was especially true for hunting households. “Deer meat is important to our family,” wrote one Tlingit teenager in his subsistence essay, “because it cuts down on the grocery

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bill and also takes the place of beef. A couple deer can last from three to six months in our family.” According to our survey, hunting households had taken an average of 2.2 deer the previous year, yielding about 200 pounds of venison. Even harvesters who do not need to save money may be motivated in part by economics. “It’s all free,” a woman explained to me during an edible-plants fieldtrip. “That’s what I like about going out like this. It’s like a garage sale, only better. That’s what I like about beach combing too.” When the cost of living rises or a household breadwinner loses a job, subsistence becomes even more important. “It’s because of the increase in grocery prices,” said a sixtyyear-old woman, explaining her involvement in subsistence. “I’ve been learning more, too. Last year I took classes on mushroom gathering and how to properly can food.” Limiting some of the economic benefits of subsistence, however, are the expenses of hunting and fishing: boats, fuel, licenses or permits, tackle, and ammunition. The relative cost of fuel and gear, however, declines when people harvest multiple resources on the same trip. Sitkans who go fishing for salmon in August and September often bring a rifle along in case they spot a deer. Hunters who use their boats to reach their preferred hunting locations typically bring along fishing gear and perhaps a crab pot, too. “Besides the deer,” reported one man, “we often come back with fifteen beautiful Dungeness crabs.” But as one Tlingit man told us, which is true for many people, “The money you spend on it, to harvest those things is not the overriding concern. It’s an emotional tie to the land.”

community and the value of sharing One unexpected finding of our research was the amount of sharing that takes place. A third of the households we surveyed cited “sharing wild foods with others” as a very important reason they harvested.11 Fishers gave one-fifth of their catch away, on average. Hunters gave venison to an average of three households in addition to sharing with their hunting

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partner. Intertidal and plant gatherers were less likely to share their harvest. Explaining why she rarely gave berries away, for example, one woman said, “They’re like gold. A big halibut is a different story, but after spending three hours in the rain for a bucket’s worth [of berries], you hang on to them.” Elderly Sitkans and residents who cannot obtain their own supply of wild foods often receive them from others—from neighbors and proxy harvesters. One woman reported receiving venison, fish, jam, and fresh berries every year from several neighbors. A commercial fisherman regularly saves damaged fish (for example, those bitten by seals) for an elderly neighbor. Wild foods are also given to community institutions and organizations such as the Pioneer Home, a state-supported retirement home for elderly Alaskans, and the Alaskan Native Brotherhood. Serving harvested food for dinner is a matter of pride for many Sitkans. Halibut, smoked salmon, and more exotic fare like pickled shrimp are often taken to dinner parties in place of the bottle of wine common among the middle class in other parts of the country. Food both nourishes and signifies. For some, serving wild foods signals their conservation, close-to-the-land ethos. For many Tlingit, wild foods are a routine part of group-sponsored dinners and community potlucks and an affirmation of their culture. At one ANB event we attended, grilled halibut, deep-fried rock fish, venison lasagna, chicken-of-the woods mushrooms (Laetiporus sulphureus), abalone, goose tongue, and blueberry cobbler were on the table. Indeed, our research showed that sharing and communally eating wild foods is an activity that binds people together and is an important part of Sitka’s collective identity.

making use of the data Sitka remains one of the few large Alaskan communities for which good data about subsistence harvesting exists. Our findings clearly showed that subsistence harvesting was not restricted to small rural villages and that it was central to the lives of many Alaskans, not just Alaskan Natives. In 1992, Alaska state subsistence law was amended to distinguish between

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places where subsistence was “a principal characteristic of the economy, culture, or way of life” and places where this was not the case. The latter were declared “non-subsistence areas” where subsistence fishing and hunting would no longer be permitted. Most were cities like Anchorage and Fairbanks and the state capital of Juneau. Sitka, despite its relatively large size and prior “urban” designation, was reclassified and spared because subsistence had been demonstrated to be central to its economy, culture, and way of life. “Your study [in Sitka] has been quite important over the years in the policy arena,” James Fall, director of the ADF&G’s Subsistence Division, told me in a 2016 e-mail. “I think it’s safe to say that without the reliable early research in Sitka, these outcomes [the protection of Sitkans’ rights to subsistence harvesting] might have been different.” Food insecurity and undernourishment are serious problems in many parts of the globe today, including the United States. In the developed world, many practices of factory farming and the biotech food industry are putting the environment and our access to healthy food at risk. “The pathways our food takes from the land where it is grown to our bodies,” notes Alaskan environmentalist Zachary Brown of southeast Alaska’s Inian Islands Institute, “have become so convoluted (and secretive) that we need investigative journalists like Michael Pollan to reveal them to us.”12 Our study prefigured in some ways growing concerns about food quality, safety, and adequate supply. More people in the developed world today are buying local organically grown food, planting home or community gardens, raising backyard chickens, and learning about wild foods. The Sitka research also revealed that subsistence activities have benefits and rewards beyond the provision of healthy food. Community is strengthened through the sharing of harvested foods, as is the individual harvester’s connection to place. When people use wild resources in this direct and very personal way, they have a greater interest and stake in protecting them.

6

On the Move Work and Mobility in Newfoundland

All ethnographic fieldwork is “collaborative” in the sense that it requires ongoing communication between the researcher and the people being studied. This is one of the main differences between the social and natural sciences: in Powdermaker’s words, “There is no reciprocal personal communication between the physicist and atoms, molecules, or electrons, nor does he become part of the situation studied.”1 As we hope is evident from previous chapters, an ethnographer cannot do fieldwork without engaging others—whether it involves simply hanging out together, informal interviewing, or in-depth formal interviews. Sometimes the collaboration is explicit, as when I gave fishermen in Dry Bay, Alaska, a draft of my National Park Service report, invited their comments, and incorporated them into the final report. Occasionally, collaboration results in coauthorship with local informants. While this is usually regarded as a newer development, Franz Boas coauthored work on the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) with his native informant George Hunt a century ago. The leading champion of collaborative ethnography today is anthropologist Luke Eric Lassiter, who, in The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, posits that collaboration is a way to construct a more equitable social science—one that gives greater consideration to the perspectives and voices of the people anthropologists study. 87

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The collaboration I (George) focus on in this chapter is “team research” in which professional researchers from different academic disciplines and community partners work together in a joint intellectual effort. This kind of collaboration is also becoming increasingly common. Here I describe my experiences working on a large, multidisciplinary team project in Newfoundland, Canada.

the “on the move” project In 2011, over coffee at anthropology meetings in San Francisco, anthropologist Sharon Roseman of Memorial University of Newfoundland asked if I would be interested in joining a group of Canadian researchers in developing a grant proposal to study work-related mobilities. The topic was important and timely since a wide range of people globally are engaged in different forms of mobile work, from manual labor to whitecollar positions that often involve multiple modes of transportation— cars, buses, trains, ships, and planes. These work mobilities, she continued, have far-reaching consequences for workers, their families, communities, and governments. The research team would study the full spectrum of mobile work in Canada, from people who commute hours each day to those who make extended journeys and are away from home for weeks or months at a time. The latter includes truck drivers who are constantly on the move to more specialized workers like offshore-oil-rig operators who stay at sea for long stretches before returning home. I was interested. From media reports, I already knew that many Newfoundlanders had become “turnaround workers” who traveled to the opposite side of Canada to work three-week rotations in Alberta and British Columbia’s oil sands. The project came to be called On the Move (OTM); its principal investigator was a sociologist, Barbara Neis. My invitation to join the research group stemmed from research I had done on return migration to Newfoundland in the 1970s. My subjects back then were not mobile workers but people who had left Newfoundland years before to work in

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mainland Canada or the United States and who were returning home to live, often in retirement. In a later phone conversation with Barb Neis, I was given a choice of several categories of mobile workers to study, including professional hockey players. This was a temptation, given my lifelong interest in sports. But the hockey research I was being offered would have taken place in other Canadian provinces, not Newfoundland, which I was interested in getting to know again. So I chose Newfoundland’s offshore oil and gas workers. One year later, after Barb was awarded a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I was on my way to Newfoundland. Before saying more, some introduction to the place and its people is in order.

newfoundland Newfoundland and Labrador comprise Canada’s most easterly province, one of the last to join the Canadian confederation in 1949. The province consists of the island of Newfoundland and mainland Labrador to the northwest—an area only slightly smaller than California but with a small population of just 500,000 people. Over half live on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, with most residing in and around the capital city of St. John’s. Aside from St. John’s and a few small regional centers, most other Newfoundlanders live in tiny coastal communities called “outports.” Outports originated in coves and bays near good cod-fishing grounds, some accessible only by boat. (The English term “outport” was originally applied to all ports outside of the city of London.) Outports were close-knit communities of extended families who lived in simple, square, two-story “saltbox” houses perched near the water. Scattered among the houses and along the shoreline was the material culture of fishing: boats, nets, sheds for processing fish, and raised platforms for drying cod. People’s lives depended on fish, supplemented by kitchen gardens, some livestock, and other subsistence activities like

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Figure 6-1. Traditional racks known as “flakes” for drying cod, 1972.

berry picking, moose hunting, and cutting timber for wood and fuel. “Every season,” explained Pauline Sutton, one of the people I got to know well during the research, “brought forward its own bounty— whatever was needed to survive.” The island’s early settlers sometimes gave their communities fanciful names that reflected the playfulness and sense of humor still characteristic of Newfoundlanders today. Near my research site on the Avalon Peninsula are the communities of Come by Chance, Heart’s Content, Heart’s Delight, Heart’s Desire, Red Head Cove, Cupids, and Dildo. Outport life changed abruptly in 1992 when the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans banned fishing for Atlantic cod, ending a fivehundred-year-old fishery—one of the world’s largest—and its accompanying traditions. The moratorium gave Newfoundlanders just one week to remove all their traps, nets, and other gear from the water. It was declared to protect the resource—cod—which had collapsed due largely to the actions of large foreign trawlers or “dragger” fleets that scoured the seafloor, including spawning grounds, scooping up everything in their

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Figure 6-2. With the decline in cod, a thriving crab fishery emerged.

path. High-tech fishing equipment like sonar enabled fishers to take such large catches that cod stocks were decimated. “You could see the fish coming down, down, down,” Bob Sutton explained to me as we sat at his kitchen table in the outport of Bay de Verde. We had to use more fishing gear to catch the same amount of fish. Common sense would tell you something’s going wrong. I was on the wharf listening to the radio when the [moratorium] announcement was made. We were expecting a reduction ’cause we knew something had to be done, but not a complete closure. My god, I didn’t know what to say.

His wife, Pauline, chimed in: “Bay de Verde went to a dead stop.” Bob and Pauline then joined the several thousand other “turnaround workers” to the oil sands of Alberta and British Columbia, traveling more than 2,500 miles each way to work their rotations “out west.” Other former fishers have found jobs in Newfoundland’s growing offshore oil and gas sector,2 the focus of my research for the On the Move project. A few have remained fishers, but no longer for cod.

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beginning fieldwork Our project’s budget included funding to hire graduate-student research assistants. One of the goals of the research grant, in fact, was to train a new generation of social scientists who would continue the research on work mobility for their master’s degrees or doctorates. I invited Diane Royal to join me. Even though she was not then trained in anthropology, she had worked for me as an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco and had then gone on to get a master’s degree in Global Health. Given her diligence, social skills, and amiable nature, I thought she would be perfect for the Newfoundland research. Diane was then working for a health nonprofit and was soon to be married. Knowing that she eventually wanted to get a PhD, although not yet sure in which field, Diane took a leave of absence from her job and packed her bags for Newfoundland. We arrived in St. John’s for our first stint of fieldwork in late June 2013 and checked into a student dorm at Memorial University. It was only my second time back at the university since I had been a research fellow there in 1973. I showed Diane, raised in sunny California, the tunnels that underlie the university to enable students and faculty to get to class in winter without going above ground. Although it was officially “summer,” the weather in June was breezy and frigid with occasional snow flurries. Neither of us had come prepared for the cold, so our first mission became finding a store where we could buy warm gloves. During lunch that day, we discovered that our server had a brother who worked offshore on an oil rig. She said that he’d be glad to be interviewed and gave us his contact information. This pleasant conversation, our first since arriving the night before, reminded me of the friendliness and hospitality of Newfoundlanders that I had enjoyed so much in my early field research, a characteristic for which they are deservedly famous.3 A few days later we met the key members of the project’s Newfoundland contingent: Sharon Roseman, Kelly Vodden, Nicole Power, and

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Barb Neis—an anthropologist, a geographer, and two sociologists, respectively.4 Diane and I were to be the first into the field. In discussing our research plans, several members of the team suggested that we base our fieldwork in the small town of Arnold’s Cove (population 900). It was close to the Come by Chance oil refinery and a tanker terminal, where oil from the offshore rigs was offloaded. Our colleagues surmised that many mobile oil workers would be living in and around Arnold’s Cove and that the town might be a good example of a community being changed by the presence of a migratory workforce. Diane and I were grateful for the recommendations and spent the next several days in Memorial University’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies, where we read everything we could find about Arnold’s Cove and its neighboring communities. We then reserved two rooms at the town’s appropriately named Tanker Inn, the only accommodation available in the area, confident that we would find tanker crews and potential interviewees staying there. Arnold’s Cove was wet and foggy the day we arrived. Located on an isthmus, it is one of the foggiest places in Newfoundland. The townspeople hold an annual Fog Festival, trying to turn a liability into a tourist attraction. Eager to get our research under way, we dropped our bags in our prefab mobile-home hotel room and headed out to visit the local government office, post office, library, and refinery. We were hoping to meet or at least get the names of mobile workers we could contact. Everyone we encountered was friendly and willing to assist us, but by the end of the day our efforts had produced only two names, and both were away working on an oil rig. The next day, the town manager suggested that we hang out at Robin’s, a local coffee and doughnut shop, frequented by workers from the nearby oil refinery and by men building a new offshore oil platform, a billion-dollar mega-project called Hebron. Robin’s proved to be a bonanza for our research, with workers stopping by throughout the day; nearly all those we approached were willing to talk. We spent several days at the coffee shop, conducting informal interviews and writing up field notes at night. Taking a break to hike on a local trail, we met a

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young woman who worked at the front desk of the dormitory where workers building the Hebron platform stayed. She agreed to meet us later at Robin’s for an interview and to provide the names of some workers. Before leaving Arnold’s Cove, we inquired about rental accommodation for the following summer, thinking it was an ideal research site. We left town pretty pleased with all the data we had gathered and the contacts we had made. But not so fast. Upon returning to St. John’s and reconnecting with the research team to fill them in on our progress, the group fell silent. I noticed a few raised eyebrows and some awkward glances between team members. Finally, Barb broke in, “This isn’t exactly what we had in mind. It’s not what we had written into the [research] proposal.” Further discussion revealed that Diane and I had overlooked a key word in the description of the population we were to study: transshipment. That is, our work sector—the one I had chosen over studying professional hockey players—was solely intended to be mobile workers involved in the movement or transshipment of oil and gas, that is, the men and women who worked on tankers and supply vessels. The many people we had just interviewed on the Hebron project fell into the construction sector that was being investigated by others on the project. Our team members were kind, quick to make excuses for our blunder, such as “These things are to be expected when you’re the first ones into the field.” And “It’s not surprising . . . when you are living away, in San Francisco, and have not been part of our many discussions.” Their generosity, however, didn’t erase my embarrassment. Diane and I returned to San Francisco with egg on our faces and scant data relating to our research population, although we did have a much better grounding in the whole project. Unfazed, Diane decided that she not only wanted to return to Newfoundland for more fieldwork the following summer but to pursue a PhD in anthropology there. “I really enjoyed doing fieldwork, listening to Newfoundlanders talk about their lives and telling their stories,” she explained. “I’d never met people who were so easy to talk to . . . I love

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Figure 6-3. Mobile workers on an oil-rig supply vessel in St. John’s harbor.

that they have a long and complex history and many have a deep connection to the sea.” That winter she was accepted into the anthropology program at Memorial University, got married, and then both she and her husband, Matt, quit their jobs, loaded their belongings into a borrowed Chevy Suburban, and camped their way four thousand miles across North America to Newfoundland. In the summer of 2014, and again in 2015, 2016, and 2017, Diane and I continued our fieldwork. The work evolved, as ethnographic field research tends to do. Our interviews with workers on offshore oil tankers and supply vessels was expanded to include men and women who work on the offshore oil rigs. We felt this worksite was too intimately connected to the transshipment of oil and gas not to be included. A more significant turn in our research occurred as we became interested in understanding the impacts of work mobility on a single community. What did it mean for town organizations, such as the volunteer fire department, when its members were absent for half the year, working on distant rotations? What did it mean for hockey and softball teams

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Figure 6-4. Bay de Verde, an “outport” on Newfoundland’s Conception Bay.

when many of their players and coaches were absent for half the season? What did it mean for the families they left behind? Our open-minded Principal Investigator Barb Neis raised no objections to our decision to expand our research design to include a community-based study. In a Skype call, Barb said, “It’s important to give researchers the freedom to pursue questions of their own interest . . . to do what they do best. Otherwise you’re not going to get good results.” Diane and I chose Bay de Verde, a stunningly scenic fishing community, and several smaller outports nearby as our field site.

collaboration Over the next few summers, Diane and I learned a good deal about the benefits and challenges of multidisciplinary team research. Collaborating with other scholars was not entirely new to me. Sharon (Gmelch) and I had worked together several times, once with educator-historian David Smith as described in chapter 3, and twice with other anthropologists,

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including the subsistence and resource-use study in Alaska dealt with in chapter 5. But before the Newfoundland research, I had never been part of a large and truly multidisciplinary team; Canada-wide, the OTM project involved fifty-one coinvestigators, based in twenty-five universities, representing eighteen disciplines. The team included statisticians and policy specialists (demographers, political scientists, lawyers, etc.), who looked at legislation and government policy relating to work mobility, and on-the-ground fieldworkers (anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists).

interdisciplinarity—learning how others think A starting point when working with researchers from other disciplines is language—learning one another’s jargon and arriving at some agreement on the terms and concepts that will guide and inform the research. The key concept in the OTM grant proposal was “employment-related geographical mobility” (ERGM), a term coined to capture the diverse types of mobility the team wanted to study. I wondered aloud if there wasn’t a simpler term, one that sounded less like academic jargon. After all, migration scholars in the past had described similar phenomena using words like sojourning and circular migration. I feared that “employment-related geographical mobility” would be an off-putting mouthful to our nonacademic community stakeholders, and that it would make it more difficult to describe the project to potential interviewees. In all fieldwork, researchers must come up with a sort of elevator speech, a straightforward, simple way of describing their research to local people. And sure enough, the first few times Diane and I explained our research to potential interviewees using “employment-related geographical mobility,” we struggled. It was a turnoff, not a description that would make a local person feel like inviting you inside for conversation and a cup of tea. Before long we were describing our research as a study of “mobile workers” or “work mobility” and, even more plainly, as “what it means to work away.”

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Other team members may have felt the same unease with “ERGM” as gradually they, too, shifted to using “work mobility” and “extended commuting for work” when talking about the research. Collaborating also meant learning how other disciplines think. How, for example, do they view the relative value of qualitative versus quantitative data? Do they trust soft data obtained from participant observation and hanging out with locals? Or do they have faith only in numbers? Years ago, in a collaboration with two sociologists on a small study of drinking behavior in Ireland and the United States, I found them impatient with the open-endedness and emergent nature of anthropological fieldwork. They didn’t understand that fieldwork in anthropology is constantly evolving according to what the researcher is discovering on the ground. Conversely, I was skeptical of their survey approach, especially after the American principal investigator on that project constructed an interview guide about drinking behavior for me to use in Ireland without having done any preliminary fieldwork there. As I predicted, some of the questions he designed made absolutely no sense to the Irish. Fortunately, most of my colleagues on the Newfoundland team were primarily qualitative researchers. Nonetheless, I wondered if they thought it strange that Diane and I had arrived our very first summer in Newfoundland having read relatively little on work mobility and bereft of preliminary hypotheses. We viewed our first trip to the field as exploratory. Unintentionally, perhaps, we were playing upon one of the fundamental strengths of anthropology. We started out by asking open-ended questions in order to get the lay of the land and to learn what our subjects thought was significant. Taking account of the interests of the study’s subjects gives their views equal weight with “scientific interests” in setting research priorities. Local people can often identify urgent research needs more clearly than the outside ethnographer, and certainly more clearly than the armchair researcher. Research that arises from what the subjects themselves believe is important is also more likely to find an audience when published. As the research continued,

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we could and would reassess and recalibrate. This approach was the opposite of the top-down, deductive rather than inductive, cross-cultural drinking study mentioned earlier in which the hypotheses had been formulated and the questionnaires for both American and Irish drinkers had been designed and printed out before anyone had set foot in the field.5

ethics, irbs, and informed consent From the collaboration with the Newfoundland team, I acquired a new perspective on ethics in fieldwork, that is, the standards for ensuring the ethical treatment and protection of one’s research subjects. This was especially so in the area of informed consent and in protecting the confidentiality of informants. The OTM project required us to ask all interviewees to sign a consent form—or to give their verbal agreement on tape—after we had explained enough about the project so that they could make an informed, voluntary, and rational decision about whether or not to participate. Sharon and I had always tried to make certain that our research subjects understood what we were up to, both the objectives of our research and what we would do with the data we gathered from them. But we had never asked them to sign a form or to explicitly acknowledge on tape that they understood the research and were giving us permission to proceed. Prior to this project in Newfoundland, the one instance in which I had tried to use a consent form had ended disastrously. The story is worth telling. I had been doing a study of resource use among the Inupiaq (Eskimo) in a remote part of Alaska, in the Noatak National Preserve. The National Park Service, which had funded the study, had given me money to hire a half-time Native assistant. Sixty-five-year-old Dwight Arnold spent four hours with me each day, mapping the locations where residents from the village of Noatak harvested plant and animal resources and helping me to understand how subsistence patterns had changed over time. By the end of the summer I had recorded

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forty hours of interviews with Dwight. I told him that I thought these recordings about Inupiaq life and subsistence should be saved in an archive for future generations. He had no objection, and I mailed the box of tapes to the Elmer E. Rasmussen Archive at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The archivist wrote back, saying that they were happy to have the tapes but that they could not accept them without signed permission— a consent form—from Dwight Arnold. I suspected that Dwight, who was not very literate and certainly not knowledgeable about the ways of the academic world, might not understand. So I put off asking him to sign the form until the end of my fieldwork. The last thing we did together was to travel by boat 160 miles down the Noatak River, from the village of Noatak to the Bering Sea, to record “place names”—the landscape features that the Inupiaq had named and the stories behind those names. At the end of the journey, before I was to depart on a bush plane the next day, I pulled out the consent form and asked Dwight to sign it, explaining again the role of an archive as a repository of traditional native culture. Dwight had no problem with the concept of a library wanting to preserve his knowledge but did not understand why he needed to sign a form—a form that he could not make sense of. Dwight seemed hurt, as if I had betrayed our friendship and trust, and said that he could not sign such a paper. My departure was awkward, and I deeply regretted what had happened. Sadly, I never heard from Dwight again. The tapes, which had been returned to me, were never deposited in an archive and were lost during a move from New York to California. In subsequent research with professional baseball players, getting any of them to sign a consent form was out of the question. At the ballpark, where I did most of my fieldwork, my role as an anthropologist was perceived to be similar to that of the journalists and beat writers who interviewed ballplayers daily without ever raising the issue of informed consent. Ballplayers are expected by their clubs to cooperate with writers since the teams depend upon publicity to engage their

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fans. Asking a player to read and sign a consent form would likely have produced a confused reaction similar to Dwight Arnold’s. In other fieldwork, notably in Barbados where I had done extensive oral-history interviewing for two different projects, I also had not used informed consent, at least not the formal, written kind. Frankly, I had never given it much thought. The approach that Sharon and I had always used with oral-history interviews provided, we believed, evidence of consent every bit as good as a written form and may have protected our subjects more. Namely, we gave each interviewee a copy of the transcript of their interview to look over, comment on, and correct as they saw fit. In short, nothing was published that the interviewees had not seen and reviewed. So I cringed when I learned that Diane and I would be expected to ask our offshore oil and gas worker interviewees to sign consent forms. Ultimately, we compromised by verbally asking—with the tape recorder running—for their acknowledgment that they agreed to our using their story in the research. Another of the project’s guidelines that took some adjustment was its elaborate system for protecting field data—field notes and audio recordings—and the confidentiality of our interviewees. Diane, for example, was required to secure her computer, field notes, and other research materials every evening in a large, bright orange “lockbox.” Diane’s computer was already password protected and the data it held encrypted. The lockbox was required by the project, but it seemed excessive to me.6 My skepticism softened a bit, however, after being reminded of an anthropology graduate student’s experience in Ireland in the 1970s. Leaving her community for a weekend trip, she had left her field notes in a suitcase underneath her bed. Her curious landlady discovered and read through them. Feeling violated by descriptions of her own family’s behavior, she took some of the notes to the village pub and shared them with others. There was outrage over what some villagers regarded as a betrayal of their confidences. When the student returned to her village, she was lambasted by her landlady and told that she was no longer welcome in the house. The parish priest intervened but advised her to

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leave the community. Well into her fieldwork, she was forced to find another field site and practically start over. A similar thing happened to a student of ours in Barbados. Zara had left her belongings with her homestay family at the end of the field program while she traveled for a week. During her absence, her homestay mother opened up her word processor (this was the era before personal computers and passwords) and read some of her field notes, including an account of a loud fight that had taken place in the household during which her teenage son had brandished a knife. Upset, she refused to return Zara’s word processor. Worse than her losing equipment and her notes, Zara never had the opportunity to explain the confidential nature of field notes and how they would be used, or repair the damage done to their relationship. Diane’s lockbox would have prevented both of these incidents from happening today, but then, so might a computer password. Diane, fresh from a graduate seminar on research methods, suggested that my reservations about these ethical guidelines and bureaucratic Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures might be generational. That is, I had come of age when there were neither IRBs nor much discussion of ethical behavior in fieldwork. She had a point. I couldn’t remember receiving any instruction on field ethics when I was in graduate school. I asked several colleagues of my age, and they too had no memory of being taught or of having to read anything about ethics during their graduate training, other than being told to respect the privacy of our informants by not repeating what they had told us and not using real names in what we later wrote and published. Jim Eder, at Arizona State University, e-mailed the following: The most I can recall is a few hallway conversations with faculty, and a few anecdotal asides in class. And they had more to do with anthropologists who were said to have misbehaved toward their mentors, students, or peers—rather than toward the people they were studying. I suppose I felt that I already knew how to behave, and hence such ethical issues, as I understood them at the time, didn’t really concern me.

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Another of my grad-school colleagues, Richard Nelson, replied that the only discussion he’d had regarding ethics was with his major professor, Catherine McClellan, who warned him before he left for fieldwork in the Inupiaq village of Wainwright, Alaska, against having girlfriends or sexual escapades in the village. “It was very good advice,” said Nelson, “if for no other reason than there weren’t nearly enough women for the available pool of young men, so it was important not to cause jealousies.” The ethical treatment of field subjects, whether in the 1960s or today, also involves self-interest, not wanting to spoil the climate for future research in the community, whether for oneself or for others. This usually entails, besides respecting our mentors’ or informants’ privacy and confidentiality, reciprocating for all the help they provide us. The latter is done in a variety of ways, from offering people assistance during fieldwork to giving them gifts at the end to helping support their childrens’ education after leaving the field. Photographs and copies of publications are often sent back and relationships maintained through correspondence and return visits. In sum, collaborating with my OTM team colleagues caused me to think more explicitly about the relationship between fieldworkers and their subjects and about our obligations to them. The standards imparted during my graduate-student days were lax and informal, perhaps leaving too much up to the discretion of the individual researcher. Although I do think most fieldworkers have treated their subjects ethically. Most anthropologists go into the field with a genuine desire to learn and in doing so acquire an empathetic stance toward the people they live among, which makes them sensitive to behavior that might cause harm to their subjects. Of course, there will always be exceptions, cases when anthropologists have unwittingly caused harm despite their best intentions and, rarely, overtly unethical or careless behavior. It is largely due to the latter that the sometimes onerous ethical guidelines of today exist.

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other challenges: sharing data and publication An obvious benefit of collaboration is the large amount of data generated by a team of researchers. By the end of our work-mobility research (in 2018), the interviews conducted by the eleven Newfoundland fieldworkers will have produced about ten thousand pages of transcripts. The challenge becomes how to share, integrate, and make use of all this data. Developing a single system for coding the transcripts is essential if the data are to be compared. With the researchers coming from different disciplines and having slightly different interests, it has not been easy to settle on a single set of codes that are useful to all. Another challenge of team research is keeping all the researchers and graduate students both on task and on schedule. It is tempting for the researchers, all of whom are independent academics, to go off on tangents, investigating areas of personal interest and forgetting that they are part of a team. Finally, there is the challenge of integrating and eventually publishing the massive amount of data collected. Particularly thorny is how to integrate the field-research data with the statistical and policy information being amassed.

conclusion At the time of writing, Diane and I are in our fifth year of the research. At times the learning curve has been steep, and there have been frustrations over red tape and gaining access to our subject’s work sites, particularly tankers and oil rigs. However, the team collaboration has been immensely rewarding: working with caring, bright, and often funloving colleagues from other disciplines has made the research among the most enjoyable of my career. When the OTM project is done, I will find it difficult to return to my anthropology silo and solitary fieldwork. It’s not surprising to me that many now argue that multidisciplinary collaboration will be the future of research in the social sciences; already it is strongly favored by funding agencies.7

7

Native Anthropology Studying the Culture of Baseball

Why would an anthropologist want to study baseball? That was the first question a few reporters asked me after the publication of Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball—a book based on several seasons of fieldwork riding buses and hanging out with ballplayers. The short answer was that sport is a central part of American culture, so why not study baseball? Anthropology is interested in all aspects of culture. But many people, and presumably the reporters mentioned above, still equate cultural anthropology with the study of “tribal” societies, or worse, they confuse it with archeology. I’m surprised at how many people, upon learning that I am an anthropologist, still ask me where I dig. Even some of my academic colleagues don’t understand why I and other social scientists choose to study sport. In part this may reflect a lingering elitist view that equates sport with the body and not the mind (that is, the physical versus the intellectual) and, therefore, not worthy of academic attention. Similarly, sport’s association with “play” and “leisure” contributes to a less-than-serious stigma. (Anthropologists initially dismissed tourism as a legitimate field of inquiry, in part for this reason.) Yet sport is pervasive. The space given to sports coverage in American newspapers surpasses that given to the economy, politics, or any other single topic; sport also consumes a major portion of our 105

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television programming. Just think of all the cable channels dedicated solely to sports. The teams we support, say the Yankees versus the Mets, reflect a wider identification and imagined community. The sports we play and how we play them can also tell us something about who we are as a people. But that wasn’t the reason I chose to study baseball. Instead, baseball had special meaning for me because it had been my boyhood ambition, and for several years during the 1960s it was my career (as a player in the Detroit Tigers minor league system). Studying it was a chance for me to understand more about something that had dominated my life and identity before I became an anthropologist. This is an example of what is sometimes called “native anthropology” or “insider anthropology”—the study of a group the anthropologist belongs to. It was Sharon who first suggested in the early 1990s that I study ballplayers. A few anthropologists were beginning to study sport, and she thought it would be interesting for me to look at how the culture of professional baseball had changed. I hadn’t paid much attention to the game since my playing days, except when asked to explain something— like why left-handed batters are better lowball hitters than are righthanded batters. During the summers we were usually abroad doing fieldwork in places where the American game had little or no media coverage and was effectively out of sight. I may also have ignored baseball because I didn’t want to be reminded of the mess I had made of my career due to a reckless foray into hometown journalism. But as our son, Morgan, began playing Little League and I agreed to coach, my interest in the game began to return. One day as I walked through the family room while he was watching a game on TV, I saw a familiar face on the screen—Jim Leyland, my old teammate, who was then managing the Pittsburgh Pirates. Another former teammate, Gene Lamont, stood in the coaching box at third base, fifty pounds heavier but still recognizable. With two former teammates still in baseball, the idea of my going back to study it entered the realm of possibility. I sat down and watched the rest of the game.

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looking for a research topic My initial idea was to relate the changes that had occurred in baseball since my playing days to the changes in American society during that period—to look at baseball as social history. Did the increase in international players, the specialization on the field (for example, the emergence of designated hitters and closers), and the growing income inequality between elite players and all others reflect similar changes in American society? Put differently, were the changes in baseball really a microcosm of the changes in American society? This idea fizzled after I attended a well-known symposium, “Baseball and American Culture,” held annually at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The symposium draws baseball scholars, especially historians, from across the country. After listening to their papers and discussions about the game and its place in American society, I realized I was out of my league. As an anthropologist devoted to the study of other cultures, I knew comparatively little about historical trends in my own society. It was presumptuous to think I would have something new to add. But the symposium did point me in a new direction. During the discussion of a paper on professional baseball in Canada, the speaker mentioned to the audience that I had once played in the Québec Provincial League and might be able to shed some light on the topic. Cast in the role of insider, I did have something to contribute. After the session, several participants came up to me with further questions. The advantage of once having been a player became apparent, as was my own discipline’s perspective and methodology. I redefined my inquiry: I would do an ethnography of professional baseball in the same fashion as I had previously studied Irish Travellers and other groups. I would seek an insider’s perspective and render explicit what is often unseen or obscure to fans, including why superstitions, pranks, and storytelling are such a big part of baseball life.

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deciding on a methodology When I returned home, I retrieved the journals I had kept during my playing days from our attic. I was stunned to find this entry from Rocky Mount, dated July 1, 1967: “If I play minor league baseball long enough, I would like to write a book about the rigors of the life.” I had no recollection of ever wanting to write a book about baseball. I also rediscovered the details of my final days in pro ball, something I had long repressed. I had been released from baseball prematurely, my career ended by a threatened libel suit over a newspaper article I had written for a hometown newspaper about racism and the Ku Klux Klan in the North Carolina town I was playing for. Having grown up in a middle-class suburb of San Francisco, and having gone to an all-white high school, I’d had little exposure to racial discrimination. So it was a shock upon arriving for the new season in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to see blacks and whites sitting in different sections at the ballpark, ordering food from different concessions, drinking from separate fountains, and using separate restrooms. And when we were on the road and stopped to eat in restaurants, I was startled to find that my black and Latino teammates were often barred from entering the main dining area. This was 1967, three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which I thought should have put an end to such segregation. Upon being told that the Rocky Mount chief of police was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and that his brother was an area Grand Dragon, and shocked by the treatment of my black teammates, I decided to write an article about segregation for a Bay Area newspaper. A copy of the article anonymously made its way from California to Rocky Mount’s police chief. Within two weeks, I was fired, or in baseball jargon given my “unconditional release.” An agreement had been struck between the Detroit Tigers and Rocky Mount: the police chief would drop his threatened libel suit if Detroit removed me from Rocky Mount. My encounter with segregation ended my baseball career and ultimately led me to switch my major at Stanford (from biology to anthropology) and become an anthropologist.

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Figure 7-1. George as a minor league ballplayer, 1967.

Long accustomed to doing fieldwork by taking up residence with the people I wished to study and immersing myself in their lives, I wondered how I might do this with baseball players. Perhaps accompanying teams on road trips was the answer: it would allow me to be in close quarters with players and coaches on the bus and in hotels, restaurants, and clubhouses. But when I first proposed traveling with the Double A Birmingham Barons—a team co-owned by my college friend Marty Kuehnert— no one in the parent Chicago White Sox organization would approve my request. I got a similar response from the two other clubs where I had contacts. As I wrote in my journal, “I’m having difficulty getting permission to travel with a team. Everyone seems agreeable but then says they have to get approval from someone above them, and then I never hear back. Seems no one wants to take responsibility.” Gratefully, Marty persisted in his request for me to shadow the Barons on a road trip. When it reached the desk of White Sox president Jerry Reinsdorf, he took a

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chance, and I went on the road with the Barons. It was a hot, sticky day in mid-June 1992, and the Barons were on the bus heading for Jacksonville, Florida. Manager Tony Franklin stood up to introduce me: I’d like you to meet George Gmelch. He’s an anthropologist studying your lives as ballplayers. I don’t know why anyone would find what you do interesting, but that’s his business and he’s a whole lot smarter than me [laughter] Anyway, he was a player in the Tigers organization in the sixties, so he knows his way around. I want you to help him anyway you can.

The players turned in their seats, craning to get a good look at me. I smiled a lot, trying not to show my nervousness. I quickly realized how different the world of pro ball had become. We’d gone only a mile from the ballpark when the bus pulled into a Blockbuster video store. Half a dozen players piled off and returned with a stack of videos. Around 4:00 a.m., during the fifth consecutive film, Robo Cop 2, I finally wadded up bits of paper napkin, stuffed them in my ears, and thought back to the cramped team buses of the sixties when players passed the time by playing cards and trivia games, looking out the window, and actually talking to one another. Back then, someone usually had a guitar, and a few would join in singing, or we’d listen to the music from Shifty Gear’s ruby red record player. On the Barons’ bus, the banter and fellowship I fondly remembered was missing. After one player’s Walkman broke, he told me he didn’t know how he was going to survive the trip. I began to think of myself as a baseball Rip van Winkle waking up after a twenty-year sleep in Academia.

research insecurities and developing rapport In the coming days there were times when I doubted my ability to do the research. When I played, few players had been to college, and there was wariness about things intellectual. In fact, my teammates had nicknamed me “Moonbeam” because, besides being a left-hander from California, I read books and sometimes visited libraries. When I met Jamestown Expos

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manager Eddie Creech for the first time and used the term “occupational subculture” in explaining my research, he said, “Whoa, slow down with them big words. You’re talking to an uneducated Southern boy.” Creech turned out to be bright, articulate, and helpful, but his response made me wonder how his players would react to my scholarly queries, and whether I could even relate to the guys. Would they accept a bearded, graying, middle-aged professor hanging out with them? My concerns proved baseless. On the night of that first road trip with the Barons, I made my way to the back of the bus to use the toilet. As I passed the players, some half asleep in the darkened bus, they briskly moved their outstretched legs from the aisle to let me pass. It was a small gesture, but done in a way that suggested I was welcome. The ballplayers, with few exceptions, turned out to be good subjects, agreeable to being interviewed. Professional baseball needs media coverage; therefore, baseball management expects its players to cooperate with writers. Players didn’t always have a lot to say. Some spoke in clichés and, unless prodded, answered questions without giving them fresh thought. In their defense, as one manager told me, “It is their reaction to being asked so many incredibly stupid questions by people who just don’t have a clue.” But since I wasn’t asking the usual questions about team performance, managerial decisions, injuries, or personalities, after a while I was able to get most players to answer thoughtfully, especially once they detected that I had some understanding of the game and life. Early on in the research, I noted in my journal, A lot of my conversations are fishing expeditions as I often don’t know what information I’m really looking for at this point. But if I can get players to talk [at length] about some aspect of the game, often interesting insights do emerge. The challenge right now is to find the right questions to keep the conversations going.

It was helpful that players were already accustomed to tape recorders since most sportswriters also use them in their interviews. While there was some new jargon, such as “the show” for the Big Leagues or “going yard” for home run or “cheese” for fastball, it didn’t

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take me long to get up to speed. Once I got the hang of traveling with minor-league teams and got to know the players better, my insecurity disappeared. But I wondered if once having been part of the baseball culture—as an insider—would make it difficult for me to see today’s baseball culture clearly. During my last playing season, and already serious about anthropology, I had tried to do some field research, hoping to write a paper about the subculture of professional baseball. But my fieldwork failed, and nothing came of it. Not only was I too inexperienced at collecting data and writing field notes at the time, but I was also too immersed in the game to really see it, to understand what was noteworthy. Anthropologists believe that difference makes it easier for us to see or grasp the culture of the groups we study. When studying your own group, what you observe often seems commonplace, and you can anguish over the obviousness of everything people are saying. Years later, I would see that problem again in taking students abroad on anthropology training programs or “field schools.” Students doing fieldwork in the Caribbean and East Africa always had an easier time seeing and describing culture patterns than those who went to Australia, which has more cultural similarity to the United States. Likewise, those going to Australia had it easier than the group I had once taken much closer to home in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

native anthropology: pros and cons As noted earlier, for me to study baseball was akin to doing native anthropology. There has never been much native or insider research in anthropology, probably because most graduate schools have encouraged their students to do their PhD fieldwork in an unfamiliar, and preferably a very distant, culture.1 When studying one’s own culture, it is often more difficult to sense what is significant and what is not. It is also assumed that it will be harder for an insider to be objective about his or her own culture. The insider may also enter the field setting or social situation with assumptions that he or she does not think to question.2

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Clearly, these are things to watch out for, but there are also benefits to insider research. Insiders may have an easier time gaining entrée to the field as they are likely to have personal contacts, as I did in baseball. Insiders also know the language or jargon. Based on their experiences, they may have access to aspects of local culture, particularly emotive and intimate dimensions that an outsider may never fully understand. Examples of this in baseball are the anxiety and fear of failing that rookies experience when going to their first spring training, and the desperation that one feels during a prolonged slump. On the other hand, the different point of view of the outsider may lead to a different interpretation of the behaviors that spring from such feelings. One disadvantage of having once been an insider is the expectation that you will understand and be sympathetic to your subjects on certain issues (for example, in baseball, the unreasonable demands of fans for autographs and the hardships of long road trips). On the other hand, the insider or native may depend too much on his or her own background and may desire to say or write what is good for his or her people. Anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has also pointed out that the native anthropologist may have difficulty transforming self-evident cultural knowledge into genuine anthropological understanding. Almost three decades had elapsed since I had last been part of the baseball world— since I had last been a true insider—and this made these issues of familiarity of less concern. Besides, baseball had changed. For starters, it had become very multicultural with the arrival of many Latinos and some Asian players. Many aspects of baseball’s culture including its food, music, clubhouse atmosphere, and a looser and flamboyant playing style revealed the Hispanic influence. Professional baseball in the 1960s had been predominantly a white-American game; by the 1990s, nearly one third of major leaguers and half of minor leaguers were foreign born. Surnames like Martinez, Rodriguez, and Hernandez were supplanting Smith, Jones, and Williams. Today, the most common first name in baseball is José, and the most common surname is Ramirez.

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gaining access and major-league gatekeepers Once I learned the ropes, access became easier. I was soon granted press credentials at minor and major league ballparks. To obtain a press credential you have to convince the team’s media-relations director that your research is worthy and that it will have some publicity value for the team. Also, it is important to make clear that you are not a risk, that you know how to behave appropriately in the dugout and clubhouse before the game (for example, not being intrusive, respecting when players are busy and not available to talk, not taking pictures or asking for autographs) and in the press box during the game (for example, not bothering the beat writers and never cheering). Dressing appropriately, in the same fashion as the sportswriters and club officials, is important to blending in. That meant wearing khakis or Dockers and a polo shirt. Like the sportswriters, I also carried a small tape recorder and a steno notebook (journalists of all stripes prefer the long and narrow spiralbound notebook to the more standard five-by-eight version). Nevertheless, sometimes I would notice a sportswriter looking at my press credential, which is worn around the neck, trying to read my name and affiliation. Sometimes a reporter would ask what I was researching, and that often led to productive conversations. While they weren’t interested in the same kinds of questions about baseball that I was asking, they have a great deal of knowledge because they are at the ballpark every day, and some travel with teams as well. Most were willing to share their knowledge. I was insecure when I first began doing interviews with major leaguers, some of them stars. In my mind I was not a professor of anthropology but an ex–minor league ballplayer hanging out in major league clubhouses, asking American celebrities to tell me about their lives. As an anthropologist I could do that, but as a former athlete who had never quite reached the big time, it was more difficult. That problem disappeared as I got to know players better and shed the baggage of my past.

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Figure 7-2. Conducting interviews in the clubhouse of the minor league Springfield Cardinals.

One drawback to having once been an insider, a former ballplayer, is that some people may not take you seriously as a researcher. The situation that always made me uneasy was being in confined quarters, such as in a corner of the clubhouse with a group of players where there was a lot of horseplay and joking. It made the boundary between the in-group of players and me, the outsider, palpable. I did my best to avoid those situations, opting instead to talk to players one-onone, although I did value the opportunity to observe such behavior.

the ballpark as research setting My ballpark fieldwork days began four hours before game time when the first players and coaches trickled in. During “pregame,” like all credentialed media, I had access to the field, dugout, and clubhouse. I had a lot of time to conduct interviews since players are occupied with their pregame preparations (stretching, throwing, batting practice, etc.) for

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only about half of the four hours they are at the ballpark before the game. During the game, I watched from the press box and occasionally interviewed baseball wives near the family lounge. It wasn’t the kind of participant observation I was accustomed to, but it would have to do. A lot of anthropological research is serendipitous, including my decision to include baseball wives and groupies. While I was interviewing New York Yankee centerfielder Bernie Williams, he kept saying, “Oh, you should really talk to my wife, she would know better than me.” After a while, I thought, “Well, why not?” The next day I interviewed Waleska Williams, and she was terrific—informative, funny, and unafraid. She introduced me to other Yankee wives, and I wondered why I had not thought earlier of including them. Speaking to baseball wives led me to an interest in groupies who are the young, often provocatively clad and overly made-up young women who pursue ballplayers and who are a major concern and threat to baseball wives. My attempts to interview groupies, however, got off to a rocky start. At a minor league game in London, Ontario, I asked the usher if she could introduce me to a few of these young women. Misunderstanding my motives, she returned with a policeman. Groupies became a separate chapter in my book Inside Pitch, which looked at their motivations, strategies of seduction, and relationships with players. Taking notes while occasionally sitting in the stands sparked the curiosity of nearby fans. I’d glimpse them glancing over my shoulder, trying to read what I was writing. Some assumed I was a scout, although they should have known better since I had no radar gun. It took me a while to get used to middle-aged fans being obsessed with the doings of ballplayers half their age. The first time I sat in the stands, a man in front of me was wearing a baseball jersey with the name “Jefferies” emblazoned on the back. Gregg Jefferies was then playing for the New York Mets. His parents had been good friends of mine; Sharon and I had lived next to them for a baseball season in Drummondville, Quebec, where Gregg’s father and I were teammates. Gregg was just a toddler then, and it was hard for me to imagine that he was now someone’s idol.

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One of the great pleasures of returning to baseball was being back in ballparks. Ballparks are magical places: emerald-green fields crisply outlined in chalk, the sweep of the grandstands stacked in tiers, and the silhouette of the light towers with their bright lights against the dark night sky. Phillip Lowry titled his book Green Cathedrals because the more he studied ballparks, the more he thought they resembled places of worship. (Sport is to a large extent a secular religion.) Ballparks are also exciting for their activity: batting practice, fielders taking infield, outfielders shagging fungos, fans pleading for autographs, players being interviewed by the media, others sprawled on the grass stretching or playing pepper, groundskeepers watering the deep brown infield dirt or renewing the foul lines with fresh chalk. For me, no research setting will ever match the ballpark. Ironically, when I began the research, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy watching baseball, as I had not watched it for many years. I had come to think of the game as slow. But being back in the ballpark reignited my interest as a fan, and I came to enjoy not just the fieldwork and the setting but watching the games as well. Interviewing and hanging out with players reminded me of things that I had done, the ambition that I’d had, and the kind of person I had been when I was a ballplayer at their age. Another bonus of the research was that it took me back to many of the towns I had played in a generation before—towns in Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, Québec—and to Tiger Town, Detroit’s spring-training facility in Lakeland, Florida. Revisiting them and their ballparks, with the smell of grass, pine tar, and rosin and the sound of metal spikes clacking on the cement runway leading to the dugout and field, brought back many vivid memories. At night I dreamed that I was playing baseball and hitting better than ever. I was a star. Reconnecting with former teammates and two old girlfriends, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, helped me rediscover who I had been in my youth. Our recollections of one another, though a generation old, were unclouded by new, shared experiences.

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During a spring-training game in Tucson, Arizona, I had a chance encounter with Gail Henley, twice my manager in the minor leagues. I saw him sitting in the wooden grandstand behind home plate and went up to him and said, “Hello, Gail Henley! Do you remember who I am?” He looked up, squinting in the sun, and said, “Yah, you were my first baseman.” It took him longer to remember my name. We sat together during the game and reminisced about old times. I confessed that I had concocted the phony telegram sent to our cocky, relief pitcher Nick Ross about his engagement having been broken off and that the water balloon that hit the pedestrian on Key Biscayne Boulevard below the Miami Colonial Hotel had been dropped from my room. I asked Gail what kind of a ballplayer he remembered me as and was taken aback when he gave a detailed scouting report of all five tools—running speed, arm strength, hitting for average, hitting for power, and fielding. At the end of the game, just before we were about to part, I blurted out the big question that had nagged me all these years: Had I been a real prospect? Could I have made it to the big leagues had I not screwed up in Rocky Mount and gotten myself released? Gail hesitated before answering. “No,” he said softly, “you were good, but you weren’t the complete package. You were lucky to get out of baseball when you did and finish school.” I felt a pang, disbelief, and some defensiveness. I wanted to say, “What about my putting up big numbers in the Florida State League and what about my being awarded bat, glove, and shoe contracts?” Weren’t they only given to “prospects”? But I didn’t—there was no reason to argue. Later, I felt an odd sense of relief. Gail’s assessment put an end to my fantasies about the profession I had lost. While my research journey occasionally became personal, it was an understanding of the life and culture of baseball that I was after, and that has become a permanent interest. I now teach a course on the anthropology of sport, and every now and then I request a media credential and go back to the ballpark to talk to players to keep up with how things are changing. The satisfaction of studying baseball has made me wonder why I didn’t do it earlier. Perhaps it was too risky. Warren Goldstein, a professor of

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American Studies and the author of Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball, recalls the reaction of his would-be dissertation advisor, who upon receiving Goldstein’s prospectus to study baseball history, stormed into the department office and slammed it on the secretary’s desk, loudly announcing that he would have nothing further to do with this “ridiculous” project. Only two decades later, after his academic credentials were secure, Goldstein finally turned his pen to baseball. We have now reached the stage where sport is a legitimate academic pursuit.

8

Falling into Fieldwork in Japan

For many of its practitioners, anthropology is as much a way of engaging with the world as it is a profession. We became very aware of this in Japan, where on two occasions we were visiting faculty at Kansai Gaidai, a private university in Hirakata City. While the Union College students we were accompanying lived with Japanese families and studied at the university’s International Center, our role was to teach a course, organize field trips, host informal dinners for the students, and be available to troubleshoot should the need arise. During our first stay in the fall of 1988, George taught while I was on sabbatical and free to write. Our son, Morgan, was five. On the second trip in 1996, our roles were reversed, and by then Morgan was a teenager. On both occasions we ended up falling into fieldwork, in part because of professional and personal curiosity, but also due to having a child in the field.

first impressions We arrived in Japan on both occasions in the heat and humidity of late August, grateful to be met at Osaka’s airport and whisked away in an air-conditioned car. I remember little of that first forty-minute drive to the university, but the brand-new two-story house that was to be our 120

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home made a big impression. It was located a short distance from the university on a quiet lane opposite tennis courts, a small bamboo grove, and a Buddhist cemetery. Waiting in front to formally greet us was Kenji, a member of the International Center’s office staff. After helping us unload our luggage, he unlocked the front door and directed us inside. Tired and eager to get settled, we dropped our suitcases in the entry and stepped up onto the raised main floor. “Aaaa, ie!” Kenji yelped. Only then did we notice the entry’s getabako (shoe cupboard). Embarrassed by such a novice mistake, we slipped on our suripa (slippers) and sheepishly shuffled after him for our instructional tour of the home. It turned out to be a design marvel. Prefabricated by Panasonic, it contained everything from a vegetable storage bin concealed in the kitchen floor to a high-tech TOTO toilet that could wash and blow-dry your bottom. Unfortunately, most of Kenji’s careful explanation of how the appliances worked was lost on me. I was so exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open. Nevertheless, I could see that it was a beautiful home. Its best feature was the traditional room that had translucent shoji screens covering the windows, a wall alcove containing a scroll and an elegant ceramic pot, and a tatami (woven straw mat) floor that gave off a fresh grassy scent. Morgan later insisted that we eat all our meals there, sitting cross-legged on the floor at its low table and using chopsticks. Despite Japan’s many surface similarities to the United States, arising mainly from the same high level of economic development, we were immediately fascinated by the differences, and over the next several months we strived to understand and adapt to them. Living in Japan required a cultural adjustment that was similar to fieldwork, yet in some ways more intense since we had arrived less prepared—without extensive background reading or language training. To begin making sense of what was around us, we immersed ourselves in the culture as much as we could. I abandoned plans to write up the research materials I had brought with me and instead audited three courses on Japan at the university. As a family, we accompanied

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International Center colleagues on class field trips, read about Japan (including translated children’s books), and watched Japanese news and films at night. At dinners with others, we steered conversations onto Japan and asked questions about areas of confusion. It soon seemed like the only time we were “off duty” was late at night and before leaving the house in the morning. By far the most instructive, however, were two opportunities to participate in Japanese life as “insiders,” at least as much as our gaijin (foreigner) status would allow.1

a child in the field “Why do all the people have black hair? Why are all the cars white?” Morgan asked soon after our arrival. These were good observations, which did reveal something about Japan at the time: the first, its homogeneity; the second, its conformity. “Is there only one Santa in the whole world? Does he know Japanese?” he asked as Christmas approached and we began seeing Santas standing next to Buddhist monks on subway and train platforms. Morgan’s presence seemed to make it easier for people to approach us in public places. While resting on the grass at a local park, for example, a jogger stopped to talk. A high school physics teacher who had traveled widely, he spoke excellent English. Forty-five minutes later, he invited us to his home where his wife served fruit and juice and, to my utter surprise, gave me and Morgan a big hug as we left. Weeks later, while standing in line to enter Osaka’s baseball stadium to watch the Kintetsu Buffaloes play the Nankai Hawks, a club official pulled us aside, gave us better tickets than those we had purchased, and later took Morgan, me, and several of our students on a tour. A week or so after our arrival, we asked Dean Yamamoto of the International Center for help with enrolling Morgan in kindergarten.2 The summer holidays were ending, and school was set to resume. Morgan needed children his age to play with and appropriate activities to burn off some of his energy. He’d already been lured into throwing water balloons

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off the roof of the International Center while in the company of a resident faculty member’s eleven-year-old son. A few days later we found ourselves sitting with the principal of Tonoyama Daiichi Yochien, its head teacher, and an interpreter for a pre-enrollment interview. Beyond the expected background questions, the principal asked us a lot about Morgan’s likes and dislikes and our goals for his future, including the kind of person we wanted him to become. “Wow, he’s only in kindergarten,” I thought, but managed to say, “We want him to grow up to be a good person—to be kind to others and happy.” This seemed to satisfy him, and we moved on to utilitarian matters like school fees and where to get his uniform (maroon shorts, white shirt, reversible white and pink hat, and rubber-soled classroom shoes). We were given a questionnaire to fill out, which among other things asked for our “motto,” hobbies, Morgan’s birth weight, and pets. Morgan’s school was a single-story wooden structure with a long covered veranda and many windows, which filled the classrooms with light and made the drawings and colorful cutouts pinned to the walls all the more cheerful. A piano stood in the corner of one classroom, with triangles, drums, and flutes stored nearby. Neatly stowed in the corner were tumbling mats, balls, and rhythm sticks. Outside, a spacious play area had, besides the usual slides and swings, a fenced area where chickens, rabbits, caged parakeets, and a myna were kept. Morgan was the first foreign child to attend the school, and we soon understood why we had been questioned so thoroughly about his interests. The curriculum his first couple of weeks was modified to include more sports and art in order to make him feel comfortable and make his transition easier. Language, however, was an issue. The teachers and teacher’s aides had all taken English in high school and college but, like most Japanese people, seldom spoke it. None of the children knew English, nor did Morgan speak any Japanese. The first day, he was on the verge of tears much of the time, wouldn’t interact with his teachers, and refused to join in group calisthenics, which was quite a sight—a brownhaired boy a head taller than the rest, standing rigid in the middle of a sea of twisting and bending Japanese children. Things improved,

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Figure 8-1. Morgan Gmelch and classmates at Tonoyama Daiichi Yochien.

however, when the class went to a swimming pool. There he joined in kicking and splashing and putting his head underwater. Fortunately, children at this age communicate a lot through mime and play, and within days Morgan had become friends with Junichi, although it took a while before he used his name, and was being greeted upon his arrival at school with shouts of “MO-GA, MO-GA.” A couple months later, Jeremy arrived. With a Japanese mother and an American father, he was bilingual. He and Morgan bonded immediately. My admiration for the Japanese grew each day, largely due to the cheerful enthusiasm of the school’s students and teachers and the help that Terumi, a teacher’s aide who spoke some English, gave Morgan. But I was equally grateful to the six mothers who invited me to join their nakama or “inside group.” All in their thirties to early forties, they were stay-at-home moms who had stopped working when their first child arrived in order to devote themselves to their socially expected (and valued) roles as wives and mothers. In Japan at the time, this was a

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full-time job. Most of their husbands were “salarymen” who worked long hours and seldom seemed to be home. Women had almost singular control over the family domain: managing their husbands’ salaries and household expenses, representing their families in neighborhood events, and preparing their children to succeed in school. In Japan, as I was to discover, the primary purpose of kindergarten is not to prepare children academically but to teach them how to behave properly, to cooperate, and to conform to the demands of group life. My new friends all walked their children to school or brought them on the back of a bicycle in the mornings, and then stood talking to one another. The pattern was repeated each afternoon when school let out. They formed a friendship group that met for social outings and recreation. Three of the women are still close friends today, and I remain in correspondence with Nobuko Kinoshita, who gives me periodic updates and news: “I am teaching Japanese to a foreign student and two lecturers from America and England”; “Jun-ichi [her son] is working at the Ministry of Land, Chubu district”; “Adachi-san’s daughter Rika passed the national exam for license to nurse”; “Next week Furuta-san is going to hold a one-man exhibition of pencil miniatures in Kyoto. I will send you the photos later”; “Today I have to let you know sorrowful news. Nishida-san’s husband passed away.” Athuko Horishima, a pretty mother of three, lived closest to me and took the initiative to meet me one morning in order to cycle to school together. Balancing two children on her bike, she led me and Morgan up and down spotless streets lined with tile-roofed houses, past tiny rice fields and family shops with futons draped over their balcony railings, along a concrete-lined river, until finally we arrived at school. She was also the first of the women to invite me to her home. With the other mothers’ help, she planned a lunch for the entire group and contacted the office staff at the International Center to make sure I had understood her invitation. Horishima-san lived with her husband and three children in a cramped, company-owned apartment. Despite the hot, humid weather,

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Figure 8-2. Sharon with her women’s nakama or friendship group.

we all knelt on the floor around the low table in the middle of the room and grilled takoyaki (a battered octopus snack) and took turns rolling the balls with wooden skewers in their cupped cast-iron pan. Our faces glistening with sweat, we looked up words in our Japanese-English dictionaries as we sought to find out more about each other—jobs, hobbies, birth dates, travel, when we had married. They had all married between the ages of twenty-three and twentyeight and had left their jobs—three as bank employees and three as “office ladies”—to become ryosai kenbo, or “good wives and wise mothers.” All except Nagai-san had met their husbands on their own; hers had been an omiai, or arranged meeting. Their hobbies included sewing and embroidery, cooking, making paper-covered boxes, singing, and drawing. As two o’clock approached, I left to collect the children from school with Furuta-san, a jolly woman who frequently joked about her weight and that of her chubby son, Tathuya. When we returned, we

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shared a bottle of wine, tea, candy, slices of apple, and fried potato, while looking at Horishima-san’s family photographs. Meanwhile, the children played. By the time we parted ways, my cheeks ached from smiling, and my head throbbed from four hours of intense listening and the general effort of communication. Nevertheless, I had enjoyed myself and felt that I was on my way to genuine rapport. The value the Japanese place on nonverbal communication, empathy, and unspoken understanding undoubtedly helped compensate for my linguistic deficiency. “Now when I see the women at school,” I noted in my journal a few days later, I feel much more a part of their group and because we do belong to the same group—the mothers of children who attend this school—they include me. “Belongingness,” group orientation and empathy, are all strong aspects of the cultural personality of Japan. I’ve met with a lot of kindness, friendliness, and far more out-goingness than I’d expected based on reading about Japan and from what people had told us. I have already been inside two homes.

Soon I began joining my friends on outings during the school day and sometimes on weekends with our children. We went to parks, to flower arrangement and bonsai shows, to temples, and to a public bathhouse. We also continued to make lunches together at one another’s homes.

mothers and the school For mothers, yochien (kindergarten) represents a major time commitment, beginning with the daily task of preparing their children’s obentos (box lunches). Morgan’s classmates’ obentos were carefully prepared miniature meals, with separate compartments for rice and bite-sized morsels of fish or meat and pickle or cooked vegetables. Lunches were meant not only to be healthy but also to delight the eye through color and “cute” arrangements (for example, a radish flower, a hard-boiled egg decorated as a rabbit). These, according to the mothers and researchers, reminded children of their mothers’ love and eased their transition from the indulgence and

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individualism of their lives at home to the demands of group life at school. Elaborate obentos were also a measure of women’s commitment to fulfilling their societal roles as mothers and co-educators.3 My sending Morgan to school with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, juice box, and raw carrot sticks in a paper bag was simply not up to Japanese standards—for lunches or motherhood. The expectation, especially then, was that women of young children did not hold jobs and were available to meet any and all school obligations. Not only did they have to make the daily obento and transport their young children to and from school on foot or by bike, but they also had to fulfill frequent requests for supplies and attend special mother-child events at the school. These included going to music recitals, preparing a special mother-and-child lunch together, and making and flying kites together, all on short notice. They were also expected to attend PTA meetings and organize large events including “Sports Day” and the school’s fall festival. Sports Day was especially time-consuming. There were games, competitions, and races to be planned, a photographer to be hired, prizes and supplies to be purchased, invitations to be sent out, booths and decorations to be set up, and food to be prepared. “Morgan’s sports day was today,” I recorded in my journal. The PTA had gone to a lot of trouble creating games and contests, decorating, and organizing. It was all very well done with thirteen different events—tug-of-war, wheelbarrow and father-child piggy back races, bean bag toss—that were always carried out in teams—the reds (wearing pink caps) versus the whites (wearing the reverse side). It was great fun. . . . I sat with Horishima and Kinoshita and then Furuta and Neshida. Horishima’s husband didn’t seem to be around, so I asked them about him. They got a dictionary and pointed to the Japanese word meaning “shameful” or “disgraceful.” They seemed slightly disgusted, but it’s sometimes hard to tell.

Sports Day opened with the principal giving a formal speech to the children lined up before him. He then retired to the VIP tent to drink tea and watch the proceedings with local dignitaries, emerging only to shoot off his starter pistol at the beginning of each new contest. Although all

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Figure 8-3. Preparing for Sports Day at Tonoyama Daiichi Yochien.

events, both parent-child and children-only contests, were competitive, none was individual. George was selected to be one of the two ninjas in a contest to see which relay team could dress their ninja quickest. His selection was undoubtedly meant to make us feel included, but there must have been added entertainment value in watching the children buzz back and forth to dress a tall gaijin in a black ninja costume. When I asked Nobuko in a recent e-mail what she remembered most from our shared days at the yochien, she wrote, “The most impressive event was Sports Day to me. We were very excited by George’s Ninja form, weren’t we?” In the final event of the day, a children’s relay race, Morgan as anchor—face pinched with determination—took off after receiving the baton and cut the first corner to gain the lead, causing a collective gasp to escape from the crowd. Not only is winning downplayed in Japan, but Morgan had in effect “cheated” in his effort to bring his team victory. No one said anything to us about it, and I’m not sure Morgan fully realized what he’d done, but I felt a bit embarrassed.

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Figure 8-4. Sharon and Morgan with Nobuko Kinoshita (left) and Athuko Horishima (right) and children at a park in Hirakata.

Just two weeks later, the school’s annual fall festival was held with still more preparation to be done, almost exclusively by mothers. A python, monkey, and albino skunk were brought to the school. There were also handicrafts and food for sale. I helped serve hotdogs and took my turn pounding rice with a heavy mallet to produce mochi (sticky rice cakes), with Kinoshita-san demonstrating great confidence in me by willingly putting her hands in the large wooden mortar to turn the glutinous rice between my inexperienced blows.

the japanese way Kindergarten revealed other Japanese values, like the importance of doing things the correct or proper way. This principle was instilled at school through daily rituals. These began with the children’s arrival just before 9:00 a.m. when they were expected to say, “Ohayou gozaimasu”

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(“Good morning”) to every member of the staff before running off to play. It ended with the departure ceremony at 2:00 p.m., when all the teachers lined up and the children walked past them single-file, saying, “Sensei sayonara, minasan sayonara” (“Goodbye teacher, goodbye everyone”). Other ritualistic activities included changing into and out of the proper footwear—outdoor shoes for playing in the school yard, uwabaki (inside shoes) for the classroom, and special slippers for walking into the toilet—donning the proper clothing (for example, smocks, aprons, caps) for particular activities or types of play, and then putting everything away in its proper place. The latter included moving tables and chairs and sweeping the floors after lunch. Even on a November outing to a tangerine orchard, which George and I accompanied, other rituals were observed. At lunchtime, reed mats were unfurled, and the children immediately removed their shoes and scampered onto them. A short obento song was sung, during which the children placed their hands together in the prayer position, bowed their heads slightly, and said, “Itadakimasu” (“Thanks for the food”) in unison before eating.1 Dressed only in their school shorts and lightweight shirts, they were expected to ganbaru, or tough it out and not complain about the cold wind that was blowing that day. Many shivered; a few huddled in the little shelter where the mats were stored. But only Morgan openly complained and begged us to let him put on the sweatshirt I had brought. When George asked one of the teachers if the children wore long pants or heavier clothes in the winter, she said, “No, getting used to cold is good training.” Only through discipline and adversity does a person develop and master the self. Lining up to leave, after visiting a small Shinto shrine and after having searched unsuccessfully for animals in the adjacent woods, the children in unison formally bid goodbye to the forest and its unseen creatures. One weekend, Horishima-san came to our house to visit, bringing a gift of chestnuts from her mother’s home and photographs from our first group luncheon. After looking at them together and checking the dictionary several times, we walked over to the university, leaving the

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children to play in the yard under George’s supervision. I showed her the pottery studio where we were taking a class. Here, too, the proper form was stressed. Our Japanese instructor, Yoshio Inomata, made the class spend hours wedging clay, practicing centering, and throwing cylinders on the wheel until we did them correctly. While the Japanese students followed this regimen without comment, patiently working to master each skill, the American students complained. “Every year it is the same,” Inomata told us. “American students are impatient. They say they want to ‘create.’ They want to make pots before they know how.” An American colleague once told us that the office staff had refused to mail a letter for him because he had not followed the correct form; he had neglected to attach the honorific “sama” to the addressee’s name. The cultural contrast between Americans and Japanese in this respect was nowhere more visually apparent than in the foyer of the International Center. Here, the street shoes belonging to Japanese students rested in designated alcoves or were lined up neatly, heels butted against the step up to the main floor with toes pointing out, while those belonging to the Americans and other foreign students were strewn all over. It must have driven the Japanese staff crazy to have to pick their way through the mess each day. Once, I invited my friends to attend a class I was auditing on Japanese women. The instructor, Sylvia Hammano, was an American lawyer and former Classics professor, who had met and married her Japanese husband, Tenzo, while in graduate school in the States. In class, Sylvia approached the position of Japanese women from a critical and feminist stance. She had been giving us a steady stream of news clippings about workplace inequalities and harassment, the plight of “OLs” (office ladies), male bias in the medical profession (for example, abortion being the only form of birth control available to women), and the emerging story of World War II’s “comfort women” who had been forced into the military to sexually service Japanese troops. She was delighted with the idea of having a panel of Japanese women come to the class. As a feminist, however, she may have been disappointed. My

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friends were middle-class housewives and mothers who pursued hobbies like drawing, flower-arranging, and calligraphy, and who found fulfillment in domesticity. Their apparently uncritical stance about the status of women in Japan must have been discouraging. Of course, this was their tatemae—their public or polite front. I sometimes glimpsed their honne, their inner or true feelings. In Japan, friends are some of the few people likely to do so. “Today I rode with Horishima to Kinoshita’s house,” I recorded in my journal. It is close to the school on a dead-end street at the base of a hill. A torii nearby marks the entrance and the steps leading to a Shinto shrine. It is a larger house than Horishima’s with nice wooden floors, a large tatami room, laundry room, and a Western-style toilet near the front door. Through the windows you look into the bamboo and vegetation on the side of the hill. We made sweet potato cakes, rice, and bean cakes together. It was very comfortable and I feel like these women are my friends despite the limits of our communication. Today I learned that Nagai-san and her husband are planning to move to the countryside because he can no longer take the pressures of being a “salaryman,” with its commute, long working hours, authoritarian office structure, and required after-work socializing. (The Japanese have a real knack for coining apt expressions. I’ve read that salarymen are often referred to as “weekend guests” because they spend so little time at home.) I also learned that one of the women’s husbands is away a lot, drinks too much, and is a womanizer. He has brothers who apparently also drink too much. I was surprised they were so open about this.

Horishima-san came to my house several times to practice English and “talk” about American customs while Mayumi, Hiroyuki, and Morgan played. On Halloween, I invited her to bring her children trick-or-treating to the homes of the university’s foreign faculty. This custom must have seemed as exotic to her as many Japanese practices did to me. We dressed the children up as pirates as best we could, then followed them around, with Horishima-san snapping photographs. Four years later, I experienced feelings of deep cultural shame when a Japanese exchange student was shot in Louisiana on his way to a Halloween party. Approaching the wrong house in costume, he did not

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understand and therefore did not react when the homeowner yelled “freeze,” reportedly in response to his wife’s scream for help. This incident horrified the Japanese public; tens of thousands of people signed petitions calling on the United States to implement strict gun control. This was another thing I appreciated about Japan—its safety. Japanese society also seemed to function well. People were sensitive to one another’s feelings and needs. I rarely experienced or observed public unpleasantness: the kind of rudeness or impatience that is a fairly routine part of American life. Instead, shop keepers greeted me with “Irashaimase” (welcome); strangers readily helped me find my way, often going far out of their own way to do so. People routinely said, “Gomennasai” (sorry) or “Sumimasen” (excuse me), the latter not only as apology but also to acknowledge others for having extended some kindness or courtesy to them. When Morgan’s kitten, Chiisai (Small), which some Union students had found and given to him on his birthday, was run over, a neighbor we’d never spoken to silently showed up at our door with a box and shovel and led us to the nearby wooded area to solemnly bury her. During our first week in Japan, we had asked a member of the office staff where we should go to rent or purchase used bikes. Two were delivered to our door the next day. When we inquired about a VCR, one was given to us to use. We learned only at the end of our stay that it had been “borrowed” from an unmarried male office-staff member, presumably someone low in the pecking order. Such thoughtfulness, undoubtedly reinforced by our status as visiting professors, made us hesitant to express undue interest in anything lest someone feel obligated to give it to us. After experiencing Japan’s smooth-functioning society, the United States seemed less like a “society” than a collection of individuals. This is not to suggest that Japan didn’t and doesn’t have its share of contradictions, social dysfunction, and pathology—men groping young women on crowded subways, ijime (school bullying), political corruption, and the yakuza (gangsters), to name a few—but the Japanese know how to work together as a group and value harmony.

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When we returned to Japan in 1996, I continued to see my women friends, but not as frequently. The nakama, minus Nagai-san who had moved to the countryside with her husband, was intact even though their children no longer attended the same school and were now adolescents with busy lives. When we got together once with our teenage children, it was apparent that they could not hang out together without a common language or interests. Morgan was on the cusp of fourteen when we arrived and not happy to have left his friends in upstate New York. I was also much busier, teaching two courses. George’s foray into informal fieldwork began at this time. Trying to keep Morgan happy and occupied, he involved him in sports. They played catch with a baseball and practiced batting and fielding on campus. They also shot baskets in the university gym. I will let George continue the story of what happened next.

rock, paper, scissors While shooting baskets in Kansai Gaidai’s gym with fourteen-year-old Morgan, a Japanese student in black shorts and a brilliant yellow jersey approached us to ask if we would like to join his group in a pickup game. “Sure!” I thought. Over the years, I have often played sports with locals both for exercise and as a way to get to know them, so I looked forward to joining them. Morgan and I walked over, and each player bowed politely while introducing himself to us, although a bit lower to me than to Morgan because of my age and, presumably, my rank as a professor. At the end of the session, they asked if we would like to join their basketball “circle,” which met for two hours, five mornings a week at eight in the morning. Despite the early hour, we were both eager. Their basketball circle was one of the many clubs on campus (high schools have them too) in which members met daily to play a sport or pursue an interest together. Other circles at Kansai Gaidai included archery, badminton, kendo, ping pong, soccer, storytelling, ikebana (flower arranging), French conversation, and even typing. Each club has

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an upperclassman who serves as group leader; ours was Mikoshiba Masato. He reserved time in the gym and organized the games. As the club’s senpai, or senior person, his instructions and decisions were not questioned by his juniors, his kohai. But in other respects, our circle was much like the informal groups of faculty and students who regularly meet to play basketball on American college campuses. Japanese university gyms look a lot like American gyms, but there is a difference: Morgan and I had been turned away our first time because we had not brought a fresh pair of shoes. After I started to explain to the attendant that I was already wearing my basketball shoes, I realized that his concern was not whether I had the appropriate rubber-soled shoes, but where my shoes had been. As in Japanese homes and temples, shoes that have been worn outside could not be worn inside the gym. While they may carry no visible dirt, they were kitanai (dirty) nonetheless. From then on, we carried our basketball shoes to the gym, and removed our street shoes in the foyer—placing them neatly with heels against the wall—before donning our sneakers and stepping onto the gym floor. Then, after bowing to our teammates in greeting, practice began. Playing a game straightaway was out of the question. We always warmed up first with twenty minutes of drills and shooting around, which seemed interminable to us. What was going on? At home in the States, there are no drills before pickup or intramural basketball games. People shoot and stretch just enough to get loose; it’s the actual game or competition that counts. In Japan, practice seemed as important as the games. I soon learned that this penchant for practice is intrinsic to all Japanese sports and many other activities as well. Baseball practices in Japan, for example, are so arduous that some visiting American players refer to Japanese baseball as “work ball.” Americans play baseball; Japanese work at it. Japanese believe, far more than Americans, that there is a direct relationship between how hard a person practices and how skilled he or she ultimately becomes. Americans know that practice is

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important, but they also believe that no amount of drilling will turn someone into a star unless they have the innate ability. To the Japanese, however, there seems to be no ceiling; the harder a person works to develop the proper technique and form, the better he or she will get— determination and persistence pay off. Players are also expected to always “do their best,” even during practice. This approach did not sit well with Morgan, a fairly typical American adolescent, who tended to expend as little energy as possible on drills. Our first scheduled game against a company team from Osaka called Swish produced further surprises. After the obligatory half hour of warm-ups and drills, our senpai, Masato-san, motioned for everyone to gather in a circle. Then, to my amazement, he called out “Janken” (rock, paper, scissors). Without hesitation, everyone pumped their fists twice, then threw out a fist, flat hand, or forked fingers. Fujimoto Yoshi, the club’s best ball handler, and I, the tallest player, both lost while three of our weakest players ended up in the starting five. The fact that the Swish team was bigger and more experienced made no difference in how Masato-san went about choosing our starting team. Not surprisingly, Swish dominated play. The momentum shifted only when its manager began substituting his smaller players into the game. At the same time, Masato-san sent in Fujimoto, me, and our other subs. The momentum then turned, and the play evened out. However, even in this real game against a tough opponent, it never became physical; none of the aggressiveness so characteristic of pickup basketball in American gyms occurred. At one point, I collided with a Swish player when I lunged to steal a pass. The expressions of surprise—no one said anything, of course—made it amply clear that such forceful play was unusual and unwelcome. Like Morgan’s attempt as a kindergartener to win his leg of the relay race on sports day, we were both playing hard to win. After ten minutes, Masato-san called time, and the first game ended. Competition was apparently going to follow the pattern of our daily games in which we played a series of short, timed games, each followed by a break, more practice, and then janken to make up new teams. I

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couldn’t understand why we didn’t just continue playing until one team scored a set number of points, as we do in the States and everywhere else I had played pickup basketball. Later, during a sukiyaki dinner at our house (and probably emboldened by a cup of hot sake), I revealed my frustrations to teammate Jun Yamaji. In so many words, he explained that short games avoid embarrassment. Indeed, ten minutes is rarely long enough for the play to become so lopsided that some players look bad. Yamaji confided that he, too, would like to play longer games but could not question the leadership of our senpai. After a short break, Masato-san brought our team and Swish together in one large circle and called for janken. We were now going to mix up the two squads. Although I had nothing against playing with the strangers from Osaka, I simply saw no need for it. And by leaving the selection to chance again, we’d undoubtedly have lopsided teams again. At home, we try to divide players into two fairly evenly matched groups. I tried to suggest that we make the games more competitive by swapping a player or two, but my hints were ignored. Janken not only avoided embarrassment by ensuring that no one felt less wanted by being selected last, it also reinforced the collective nature of the game by regularly mixing players up. Janken is also tradition; Japanese children learn the game at an early age. On Morgan’s kindergarten trip to the tangerine orchard, his teachers had stood in the aisle of the bus the entire way, playing game after game of janken with the kids. Our mixed Swish and Kansai Gaidai teams played three more games. The passing and playmaking involved everyone on the floor, not just the stronger players. This was also different from American pickup games, where the best ballplayers usually monopolize the shooting; in Japan, the weaker players were passed the ball and expected to shoot just as often. “It makes them feel included,” teammate Yoshi explained to me later. After play was over, Masato-san yelled, “Mop!” It was time to tidy up. Each member of our circle grabbed one of the mops stored in the corner of the gym, and in unison, much like a baseball grounds crew’s dragging

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the infield between innings, we weaved back and forth across the gym floor. In Morgan’s kindergarten classroom years before, the children had similarly helped clean. Once in the formal school system, Japanese students routinely clean their classrooms, lunchrooms, and sometimes even the school’s washrooms—it’s another behavior that helps create a sense of collective responsibility and group identity. At Kansai Gaidai, I watched the rugby, baseball, football, and soccer teams rake their dirt playing fields after practices and games, and following a three-day campus festival, I watched students pick up every speck of litter. After exchanging bows, followed by a few Western handshakes, one of the opposing players asked me how I liked playing basketball in Japan. I no longer remember exactly what I said, but having been reared on American playgrounds and competitiveness, I never found Japanese basketball as satisfying. Without good competition between two teams that were equally matched and both playing their hardest to beat each other, it just wasn’t as much fun. Yet as I came to understand the underlying premises of the Japanese approach, my appreciation grew. Less competition than group event, the activity was meant to be social and supportive. Players worked together to perfect their skills and enjoy one another’s companionship. Everyone was included and made to feel valued. Basketball in Japan reflected society’s commitment not only to hard work and learning to do things correctly, but also to the importance of the group and people’s sense of belonging. After a few weeks of daily practices and the game against Swish, I began to take an academic interest in how the Japanese play pickup basketball. Sports introduced from the outside—like American basketball and baseball in Japan—are invariably modified to fit the new milieu. I had played basketball with locals in other cultures, including a village team in the Mexican highlands, a university club in England, and pickup games in Australia and Barbados, but nowhere had the local version of basketball been as different from the American game as it had in Japan. Before long, I found myself not only observing and participating but conducting some informal interviews with teammates,

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comparing ideas with Morgan, consulting colleagues in the International Center for explanations of behavior that still perplexed me, and, eventually, writing a journal article titled “Pickup Basketball Meets Janken.”4 After returning to the States, Yamaji, one of my Japanese teammates, visited us and went with me to a pickup basketball game at Union College. He had intended to play, but after watching awhile, he left the gym. When I asked why later, he was evasive, but the answer seemed apparent. American basketball—even pickup games—was too individualistic and aggressive. The best players handled the ball most of the time and dominated play. There was little concern for the less talented and no thought about their feelings or the potential for embarrassment. Yamaji saw ten individuals on the floor, but no group. This undoubtedly had been one of the underlying impulses prompting Sharon’s women friends at Morgan’s kindergarten to adopt her as their gaijin—she needed a group. Let me (Sharon) now pick up the story. Although I never published anything stemming from my informal fieldwork with my nakama, Morgan’s kindergarten class, or the Japanese students I taught during our second trip, as George did with an article on basketball, I had kept a journal and notes. Upon returning to Union College after our first visit, I developed an introductory course on Japanese culture, which I taught a few times before faculty arrived whose research expertise was Japan. We also incorporated small pieces of Japanese culture into our lives. Our home has been shoeless ever since our initial return. For several years, we celebrated Japan’s Children’s Day with Morgan, flying a koinobori or carp windsock (symbolizing strength and success) from our front porch on May 5. Japan also inspired the addition we built on our Victorian home in upstate New York. It has a Japanese-style bathroom and large windows in the main room that take advantage of the pruned sight lines we created into the woods beyond, bringing nature indoors. Anthropology in its attempt to understand cultures from an insider’s perspective makes it difficult not to engage with the places we visit in an

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immersive way. Having a child in the field greatly aided us in this. Seeing things from a five-year-old’s, and later a teenager’s, perspective was novel and insightful, and Morgan’s presence created opportunities for engagement that simply would not otherwise have occurred. This was a lesson we learned in Japan, where we both fell into fieldwork and ended up engaging in accidental anthropology.

9

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Visual anthropology is almost as broad topically as its mother field of cultural anthropology. It encompasses still photography, ethnographic film, and new forms of media including websites. It also examines visual representations, everything from art and architecture, to body adornment, political murals, and museum displays. Although photography was used in the field by Franz Boas as early as the 1890s—mainly to show variation in human physical types and to document objects, like canoes and totem poles, that were too large to collect—its first use as a method for understanding culture came with Margaret Mead and Gregory Batson’s photographic analyses of Balinese character and childhood in the late 1930s and 1940s.1 In later writing Mead urged anthropologists to embrace photography, especially film, as a multisensory and more objective way of recording culture.2 Of course, film is just as socially mediated as written ethnography, but it is an important research tool and, as Anne Grimshaw has said, one of many “ways of seeing in anthropology.”3 As the number of anthropologists engaged in research using the media of photography and film grew, the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) was formed to promote “the use of images for the description, analysis, communication, and interpretation of human (and sometimes nonhuman) behavior.”4 Today, it publishes its own journal, Visual Anthropology 142

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Review, and organizes sessions and a film and media festival at the American Anthropological Association meetings held each year. In this chapter, I (Sharon) describe two research projects involving the use of still photographs: one, an analysis of historical images; and the other, an experiment with photo-elicitation, that is, using photographs in interviews to encourage reflection and draw out personal memories. I also discuss two forays into film, one as the coproducer of an ethnographic film and the other as a subject of a documentary.

the tlingit encounter with photography My first research in visual anthropology was sparked during a casual conversation at the end of our subsistence research in Sitka, described in chapter 5. I was talking to Peter Corey, then the director of the Sheldon Jackson Museum, when I asked if there was a research topic in Sitka that he was surprised no one had yet pursued. “Yes,” he replied. “Elbridge Merrill’s photographs.” This instantly got my attention. Photography has long been an interest; over the years, I have taken several courses and absorbed more while working alongside my photographer mother-in-law in her darkroom. After leaving Peter’s office, I went to look at the two known collections of Merrill’s work. His images spanned a thirty-year period, from his arrival in Alaska in 1899 to his death in 1929, and covered a wide range of topics, from portraits, still lifes, landscapes, scenes of town life, and people at work to Tlingit ceremonials and historical events like the “last potlatch” hosted by Sitka’s Kaagwaantaan clan in 1904.5 Besides being technically excellent, I found them uncommonly compelling. Who was this early photographer? What had been his relationship with the Tlingit? And what could his images reveal about Tlingit lives in the early decades of the twentieth century? And so began my next research journey. The following summer I returned to Sitka to systematically examine Merrill’s work and get a sense of his interests and his relationship to the

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Tlingit. I also interviewed elderly Tlingit and non-Native residents who had known him, and searched for references to him in local newspapers and private correspondence. I found that although Merrill had been glowingly eulogized upon his death in 1929, people knew surprisingly little about him. Elderly residents described him as having been “refined,” “friendly,” and “kind,” yet very private. “He didn’t say two words about himself,” historian Robert DeArmond, a former roommate, told me. I was also told that all but his closest friends had addressed him as “Mr. Merrill.” So who was this man that Sitka’s Tlingit are said to have called the “father of pictures”? When twenty-nine-year old Merrill arrived in Sitka from the East Coast in 1899, he found a segregated community, not unlike those in the Jim Crow South.6 The Tlingit lived in two defined areas of the town— the Indian village and the “cottages”—the latter was a neighborhood occupied by married graduates of the Sitka Industrial Training School, a Presbyterian-run Native boarding school. The town’s public schools were also segregated, with one for whites and Creoles (persons of mixed Russian and Native heritage) and another for the Tlingit. When white and Tlingit children met outside of school, they were more likely to throw rocks at one another than to mix. Local organizations like the fraternal Arctic Brotherhood and the Girl Scouts did not accept Tlingit members. Elderly Tlingit bitterly told me about posted signs reading, “No dogs or Indians allowed” and about the cinema’s segregated seating. But I was also told that “Mr. Merrill had none of this racial prejudice.” An intriguing photograph given to me by a Tlingit friend appears to confirm this. It shows Merrill sitting on a beach in 1905 with a Tlingit woman and child nearby; the signature on the back indicates it was taken by a Tlingit, “Sitka Jim” (figure 9-1). Other evidence, including the photographic access evident in Merrill’s images, indicated that he had a good relationship with many Tlingit. I was told, for example, that he at times hunted with a Tlingit man and had taught his son photography. Was the latter “Sitka Jim”? It was also clear that Merrill admired

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Figure 9-1. Elbridge W. Merrill with unidentified Tlingit boy and woman near Sitka, 1905. (Photo by “Sitka Jim,” possibly Jim Jacobs)

the skill and artistry of Tlingit material culture: their elaborately carved masks, halibut hooks, bowls, and house posts and intricately woven spruce-root baskets and hats and Chilkat blankets. He both photographed and purchased these. Unlike early social reform photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who had documented poverty in New York City and elsewhere, Merrill did not use his photography to expose social injustice. He did not seek out bleak conditions in Sitka’s Tlingit village or overtly document the town’s racial divide. His images of the Tlingit are, for the most part, straightforward and do not turn them into objects of the viewer’s compassion or condescension. He used the same poses and conventions when he photographed them as when photographing Sitka’s non-Native inhabitants. Although a few Tlingit studio portraits do suggest a nobility of spirit that evokes the romantic “vanishing Indian” stereotype, Merrill did not remove signs of Western influence to make

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Figure 9-2. Chief L.aanteech, Sitka, 1905. The Kaagwaantaan clan adopted the double-headed eagle from the Russians. (Photo by E. W. Merrill)

the Tlingit appear untouched by “civilization,” as did his famous contemporary photographer Edward S. Curtis. His photograph of Chief L.aanteech (figure 9-2), for example, shows him standing in front of his Western-style home, wearing jeans and leather shoes. The nononsense composition Merrill employed indicates that this was a portrait, not an image calculated to reflect a stereotype. As I got deeper into Merrill’s work, I began to wonder about other photographers. I soon found evidence that by the mid-nineteenth century, not

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long after the invention of photography, the Tlingit were being photographed; first by survey teams, then by museum collectors and early ethnographers, and finally by studio photographers and tourists from the “Lower 48.” New questions then emerged. What subjects and scenes did these outsiders choose to document? And what did their choices reveal about their cultural biases and intent? How were their images used? As visual anthropologist Jay Ruby has noted, “Films and photographs are always concerned with two things—the culture of those filmed and the culture of those who film.”7 I was also interested in the role the Tlingit had played in shaping the images taken of them and when and for what purposes they had adopted this alien technology themselves? Twenty years later the final results of this broader study were published as a book, The Tlingit Encounter with Photography (2008).8 By then I had visited archives scattered across the United States and Canada and looked at hundreds of photographs, often examining them with a magnifying glass for small clues. (Today, most of these images, including Merrill’s, are digitized, which makes research like mine much easier.) I had also read seemingly endless newspaper articles, private letters, journals, diaries, government documents, and expedition reports from the relevant periods. The research took far more time than it should have, but I never regretted doing it. Small discoveries were exciting, and I enjoyed piecing together the puzzle. Along the way, I discovered much about the difficulties of interpreting photographs, especially when examining a single image. One image taken in 1907, for example, showed five female cannery workers (figure 9-3). Four of the women sit with closed or downcast eyes while the fifth woman glares, somewhat warily, back at the camera. Were they annoyed at being compelled to pose for a photographer from Juneau’s Case & Draper studio, especially since it was unlikely they were going to be paid? After years of dealing with visiting commercial photographers and tourists, the Tlingit were well aware that pictures of them had value like other commodities. Tlingit vendors in Sitka, for example, usually demanded payment when photographed by tourists. But maybe

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Figure 9-3. Female cannery workers at Funter Bay, Alaska, 1907. (Photo by Case & Draper)

the women’s expressions indicated something else. Were they irritated with this particular photographer? Possibly they were familiar with some of Case & Draper’s other images of Tlingit women, like the soft porn the studio sold to miners. Or did their pose indicate a gendered sense of propriety? A larger, group portrait taken the same day that includes both male and female cannery workers also shows all the women looking down, pointing to the later interpretation.

from photographs to film As research projects so often do, one study leads to another. While teaching at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks during a sabbatical, George and I were visited by Ellen Frankenstein. Ellen had been a student in our first field school in Barbados (see chapter 10) and had recently graduated from the University of Southern California’s Center

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for Visual Anthropology. She and George had begun work on a film about return migration to Barbados, and she had traveled to Fairbanks to review some footage with him. I was then working on my Tlingit research and one evening showed Ellen some of Merrill’s photographs. She found them as compelling as I did, and almost before either of us realized it, we were talking about making a film. We envisioned a documentary about Sitka’s Tlingit that would make generous use of Merrill’s photographs to examine the dramatic changes their culture had undergone in the early decades of the twentieth century. I obtained a planning grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum, and the following summer we traveled to Sitka. While Ellen familiarized herself with the town, I presented our idea at a meeting of the Alaskan Native Brotherhood (ANB) and sought its approval. My prior research in Sitka helped. Both the ANB and Alaskan Native Sisterhood (ANS) endorsed the project and selected three respected Tlingit elders to serve as consultants. Ellen filmed several interviews and footage of the town in order to produce a short sample piece or trailer that could be submitted with funding proposals. As we talked to people in Sitka that summer, however, we realized that a cultural revitalization movement was going on. Lots of activity, aimed largely at Tlingit youth, was underway to “bring the culture back.” Suddenly, a strictly historical treatment of the past seemed comparatively unimportant, and we refocused the project. Research in anthropology is typically flexible and emergent, changing in response to what the field researcher encounters on the ground. The following summer, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and a skeletal crew—the two of us with Barbara Malcolm, a film-school friend of Ellen’s, to handle sound—we returned to Sitka. Our anthropology backgrounds served us well as we participated in community events and spent time “hanging out” in order to get to know people and understand the cultural context of each activity we hoped to film. We visited people in their homes and at work and attended an educational “fish camp” designed to teach Tlingit youth subsistence skills.

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When it came to arranging on-camera interviews, I usually met with people in advance to seek their permission and to discuss the topics we thought they could address. During the filming, I assisted, first, as an oncamera interviewer, and later, after we changed our approach, by asking off-camera questions. Getting good sound was a problem due to interruptions and background noise—who knew refrigerators and distant boat motors were so loud? Sitka’s rainy climate often foiled attempts to film outdoor activities. We also continued to seek additional funding and in-kind support from Native groups and local businesses. Ellen and I typically watched the footage together to discuss what we liked, to identify emerging themes, and to decide what to film next. We sought to balance interviews with activities and to film people in natural contexts that were sufficiently different from one another to be visually interesting and revealing of contemporary Tlingit life. We needed to include elders that the Tlingit community regarded as important, yet we also wanted to introduce younger people and those not normally heard from into the film. We also wanted to portray the broad range of what Sitka’s Tlingit were doing to remain connected to their past and to promote their culture. This included language, dance, carving, weaving, subsistence activities, and more individual concerns. One of the Tlingit highlighted in the film was taciturn Bob Sam, who had taken it upon himself to restore an abandoned cemetery. He discovered that clearing the brush and righting toppled headstones was not only helping him reconnect to his culture, it was also helping him release his anger toward white society. The film ended up exploring the complexity of culture, identity, and the meaning of tradition. Our goal was also to present a positive and nonstereotypical portrayal of contemporary Native American life. One of the Tlingit featured in the film, for example, was Dave Gallalin, a rock and roll devotee who had his own music program on Raven Radio but who was also a traditional silver carver. Collaboration can be difficult. Ellen and I disagreed at times about which people to include and about how much footage of the physical environment was needed. Sitka’s mountains and craggy coastline are

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not only stunning but also have deep meaning to the Tlingit, both spiritually and as a source of subsistence. Ellen’s urban background initially prevented her from seeing this value. Ellen and Barbara also clashed, resulting in Barbara’s returning home, leaving us without someone to handle sound. Dan Gilbert, a student of mine from the Barbados program, arrived for a time and was a great help. He also injected some much needed humor in what had developed into a tense—and, at times, unpleasant—collaboration. That fall and winter, with Ellen in Los Angeles and me in upstate New York, we discussed editing decisions by phone and mail. Our biggest decision was who to hire to help Ellen edit. She characterized the choice of consulting editors as being between a “Cadillac” and a “mean and hungry student.” The former, she argued, would be experienced but expensive, while the latter would work extra hard, might be more creative, and would be cheaper. I voted for the Cadillac, she for the hungry student, which is who we ended up with. Weeks later, Ellen sent me the first rough cut. Its opening included stock footage of Eskimos in the snow; I could hardly believe my eyes.9 They were an entirely different culture, lived a thousand miles to the north, and on tundra, not the lush temperate rain forest of the Tlingit. They were also an Alaskan stereotype. When the rough cut got into our own material it was—of course—much better, but it was hard for me to get over the initial shock of those introductory scenes. In December, we returned to Sitka with a polished, one-hour rough cut to show to our Tlingit advisors and the public. By returning, Ellen would also be able to shoot some winter footage. The response to the rough cut was very positive. A couple of our advisors quibbled about what other Tlingit had said or failed to say in the film (for example, why someone had neglected to acknowledge an important forbearer). Others felt that certain customs such as the clan system and cremation needed further explanation. At two well-attended public showings, we handed out response sheets, and while not everyone in the audience filled them out, the comments we received were helpful. We learned that people liked

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the film’s inclusion of young Tlingit (instead of just elders) and the natural settings in which people told their stories. One viewer remarked on its footage of the environment, reinforcing my own belief that it had been an important element to include: “Shots of the place itself were somehow very moving. They gave me a chance to see . . . it again for the first time and imagine what it was like here before the onset of Western culture.” One suggestion from the director of the Sitka National Historical Park concerned a scene that Ellen had gone to great effort to film. While interviewing the late Albert Davis, then leader of one of Sitka’s few remaining clan houses, we asked if it would be possible to see some of the ceremonial regalia—clothing and spruce-root hats—to which he was referring. He sent his frail wife, Gail, to fetch them. We carefully followed her up the stairs into their dark cavernous attic, dragging along lights, camera, and sound deck to film her retrieving the items from a large chest. We liked the attic scene because it was atmospheric and added context and visual interest to Albert’s interview. Albert was an important elder, and we wanted him in the film, despite his lessthan-clear speech, and felt we had found a way to do it. But as the park’s director pointed out, the footage showed two elderly and vulnerable people living alone with clan objects worth tens of thousands of dollars on the art market, stored insecurely in their attic. We dropped it. When Ellen returned to Los Angeles to do the final edit and shorten the film, she hired a “Cadillac” to help. We had hoped to produce a strictly observational film, letting our interviewees and the visuals tell the story, but ended up having to add some narration to set the scene and provide historical context. Ellen placed a casting call with the Indian Actors Association and found a man who, although not Tlingit, had a pleasing voice quality. In the final film, while all traces of our physical presence were edited out, enough reflexivity remained in a few heard off-camera comments to remind future audiences that a film crew had been present. The film, A Matter of Respect: The Tlingit in a Modern Alaskan Town, became a portrait of Sitka’s Tlingit community as seen through the eyes

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of individuals working to keep their heritage alive. The title perfectly captured a core Tlingit attitude as well as the film’s content and intent. It was all about respect: respecting one’s past and traditions, one’s elders, each clan’s ownership and intellectual property rights, as well as nature and the animals that have sustained the Tlingit for centuries. Being an ethnographic filmmaker is not easy. Jay Ruby contends that it is seldom possible unless you have the institutional and financial support of an academic job. The time I spent on the project was essentially unpaid, and Ellen lived a very frugal existence. And unlike authors who give their completed book manuscript to a publisher for production and distribution, independent filmmakers and producers are responsible for the entire process. Consequently, our task was not finished, even once the film was. Ellen premiered A Matter of Respect in Sitka, found a distributor (New Day Films), and arranged for screenings at anthropology and education conferences, film festivals, colleges and high schools, libraries and museums, government agencies, and churches and community groups, both Native and non-Native. The film also aired on Alaskan and Seattle PBS television affiliates. She gave many free copies of it away in the interest of having it used. She also archived her footage at the University of Alaska’s Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, making it accessible for viewing and reference by other researchers. A Matter of Respect won a “Silver Apple” at the National Education Film and Video Festival and was selected for showing at a number of film festivals, including the Margaret Mead. But most gratifying to us, it found practical use in schools and with Native organizations.

irish travellers: the unsettled life The power of photographs to trigger memories and reflection first struck me while showing Bob Sam some of Merrill’s photographs. When I handed him an image of a Tlingit woman cleaning a stretched sealskin, he stared at it silently for a while and then told a powerful story about the grandmother who had raised him, which segued into

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his own feelings of alienation from and anger with white society. I was stunned. I had expected him to talk about sealing or the tanning process or to point out how few people still went to the trouble to hunt seals. Years later, on a return trip to Ireland in 2001, I was reminded of this experience. I had brought a batch of George’s photographs from our first fieldwork (chapter 2) to show to some of the families we had lived with at Holylands. During a slide show in one of their homes, the adults laughed at their appearance thirty years earlier and stood up frequently to point out relatives on the screen to their children and grandchildren. When the lights came back on, I noticed that one young man was sitting silently on the living room sofa with a furrowed brow and pensive expression. I asked what he thought. “Embarrassed,” he muttered. He was ashamed to see his family’s and other Travellers’ past poverty so evident in images of dirty faces and tattered clothes and tents, wagons, and battered trailers parked among piles of scrap metal and scattered debris. His reaction, more than anything, convinced me to return to Ireland someday and use our fieldwork photographs to elicit Travellers’ thoughts about their dramatically changed lives. Ten years later, in 2011, George and I did just that. Our decision to return was reinforced when we received word from Freda Bollard, a Dublin librarian, about Travellers’ reactions to an exhibition of George’s photographs. To the surprise of its organizers, enthusiastic crowds of Travellers had arrived, few of whom would have stepped foot in a library before. She described the scene in an e-mail: When the exhibition [photographs] arrived we picked a few to put in the local community magazine The Wag Mag. When the magazine was delivered to the Traveller sites in the area, the response was immediate. . . . Extended families contacted their extended families, and they traveled here from all parts of Ireland and one couple from England. . . . [They were] anxious to tell us their stories. Often these were the only images available of those who had died—often tragically. There were heartbreaking scenes, with grown men fighting back tears at seeing pictures of long dead relatives. Great elation at finding photographs of relatives now scattered. Many of the

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women in particular stayed to talk about . . . how much they appreciated having the images of that time. Which, despite the poverty, they looked back on fondly. . . .

Although photographs are intrinsically interesting to most people, they have a special significance for Irish Travellers. Most were poor and illiterate when we lived with them in the early 1970s. They had no cameras of their own and virtually no written history or literature. As nomads living on Ireland’s social and economic fringe, their lives had also been neglected in the history and literature of mainstream society. Although this is no longer the case, it does not change the fact that many pages of prior Traveller history are blank. Photographs like ours fill some of that void, providing evidence of their former nomadic way of life and history as a people.10 Shortly after arriving in Dublin in 2011, we drove to Holylands. In place of the open field where we and twenty families had once lived in tents, wagons, and trailers, eight bungalows now stood—a group-housing scheme built specifically for Travellers. No one we knew was home at the time, but we learned from others that tragic deaths had occurred in two families and that one had left the city. We asked neighboring families to tell people that we would return again later. The next morning, we left the city to begin tracking down some of the other families we knew. Before doing so, we stopped by filmmaker Liam McGrath’s office. He had used some of George’s photographs in prior documentaries about Travellers, most recently Blood of the Travellers, which explored what DNA research revealed about their origins. After a brief studio tour, we sat down to talk about our summer plans while Liam’s assistant made DVD copies of several films for us. Soon, we were back on the road, heading south to County Carlow to visit Josie and Francie O’Leary. Unmarried teenagers when we had known them during our first Traveller research, they had married, now had children and grandchildren, and lived in a large and well-appointed house on the edge of Tullow. We spent a pleasant afternoon and evening together, poring over photographs and recording their thoughts about living in a

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Figure 9-4. Interviewing the O’Leary and Connors family at their homes in Tullow, County Carlow.

house, the end of nomadism, and other changes in Travellers’ lives— one of the most significant being women’s access to birth control and desire for smaller families. While Josie’s mother, Lance, had had twentynine births and sixteen surviving children and Josie had had twelve children of her own, her daughters told us that they planned to have only five or six. The next morning, Liam called, wanting to know if we would consider letting him make a documentary about our summer’s research. He thought that using our early fieldwork photographs to prompt Travellers to talk about change would raise important issues that had been outside the scope of his previous Traveller films. Barely hesitating, George said, “Sure, why not?” The following day, we rendezvoused in Kilkenny, where Liam explained his observational approach; he would simply shadow us and film our conversations and interactions with Travellers, letting events unfold. Our own research plan was equally open-ended.

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A couple days later, Liam joined us in Cork, the next stop on our journey, with a three-person crew (sound, camera, and logistics coordinator), and that evening they filmed some typical if mundane research activities: George and I dictating field notes, and Carolyn and Aisling, our two student research assistants, transcribing interview tapes. The following morning, we all convoyed across the city to a group-housing scheme that had been built for two extended Traveller families, the Keenans and the O’Reillys. Although we were quite late, we were greeted warmly by the Cork Traveller Women’s Network representatives and two social workers. After describing our twin projects to the group—George and my photo-elicitation research and the crew’s filming of it—they generously offered to help. They already had several of George’s photographs hanging on the walls of their community center and had seen Liam’s documentaries on Travellers that were so unlike the then-popular and sensationalized U.K. “reality” television series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which they despised. From this point on, our time and activities were worked out in collaboration with the film crew. Being involved in a film production sped up the pace of our research and also created new opportunities. Liam had Traveller contacts from his earlier films and used them to arrange additional interviews. It was because of Liam that we ended up on a Traveller site in Cork called Spring Lane. The site had been built in an abandoned quarry as a temporary place for ten families to live. It now held thirty and looked it, with trailers, washrooms, sheds, and horse stables tightly jigsawed together. Filmmakers must think visually, and they work hard to get the broad range of images they will need to tell the story. For this reason alone, Spring Lane was a good choice. There was a lot of activity with people, horses, goats, and dogs wandering around. It was occupied by one large extended family—the McCarthys. Since Liam wanted to film our arrival, he had gone ahead to explain who we were and what we both hoped to do. Although we’d never met these families before, they agreed to the filming, and we soon found ourselves driving down

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the steep roadway into the site, parking, exiting our car, and then immediately walking off to find people to talk to while juggling a stack of photographs—all on camera. It felt very awkward, and on our own we would never have made an entrance in this way. But in the end, Spring Lane turned out well and was an experience we would not have had if not for the filming. The McCarthys were friendly, interested in our photographs from the 1970s, and surprised that we had once lived with Travellers, in a barrel-top wagon no less. Although most photographs were of other Travellers, occasionally someone would find a relative in an image, which caused great excitement. One of the men, Kieran McCarthy, invited us to stay on the site a few nights, offering us a small camping trailer parked in his yard. Liam thought this was a great idea, as it would enable him to film us doing things that approximated our original participant observation–based research. It would also give the crew more opportunities to capture scenes of everyday Traveller life and, he reasoned, create more opportunities for us to interact with Travellers privately, especially at the end of the day after the crew had left. Although we hadn’t planned on moving onto a site, especially among families with whom we had no prior connection, nor had we planned on sleeping like sardines in a tiny camping trailer with our two students, the move was a good decision. Waking to the sound of birdsong and the intermittent cries of children and then listening as the full chorus of chickens, dogs, horses, people, trucks, and general camp life chimed in brought back vivid memories of Holylands, as did other occurrences, including the police car that silently cruised through the site each day. We also had plenty of opportunities to talk to people. Staying at Spring Lane gave Carolyn and Aisling a taste of participant observation, including some uncomfortable moments. Carolyn, a Taiwanese American, wasn’t sure how to react to remarks made by some young men and boys who called her “Chinny” or asked, “How can you see out of those slanty eyes?” Were they intentionally mocking her or simply naïve? Both young women dealt with suggestive sexual

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Figure 9-5. Filming an interview with the McCarthys at the Spring Lane, Cork.

comments, which they did not always understand. One teenager grabbed Carolyn from behind and tried to lift up her skirt; another pinched her. Neither girl knew how indignant or angry they should be without spoiling the research we were all trying to do. Things became easier after Kieran’s daughters took them under their wings, advising them to avoid all boys and young men and to steer clear of the site’s campfire at night, which at Spring Lane was a male domain. Most women and girls stayed indoors after dark, performing domestic chores and watching television, although a few young unmarried women ventured into town in their own cars—such female autonomy was a dramatic change from the 1970s. From Cork, we headed toward Ennis in County Clare and from there to Galway City on Ireland’s west coast. George and I had a couple of free days away from the film crew and needed the respite from the

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Figure 9-6. Student research assistants Aisling Kearns (top) and Carolyn Hou in our shared camping trailer on the Spring Lane Traveller site.

fast pace and seemingly nonstop interaction. When on camera, I was aware of the need to be succinct and was overly conscious of what I thought might be boring or uninteresting to the general TV audience for whom the documentary was being produced. I was seldom as relaxed as I normally would have been and remained more cameraconscious than George throughout, always aware that whatever I said

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could be immortalized on film. Vanity also played its part. I hadn’t come to Ireland expecting to be filmed, especially not when wet, weary, and badly in need of grooming. We both enjoyed the film crew’s company, however. They were good companions, told interesting stories about their other projects, and got along well with Travellers. Watching them work was instructive. I’ll never again, for example, view a simple scene of people driving in a car the same way—not after having had a camera attached to the hood of ours, a cameraman hidden in the back seat, and driving back and forth over the same section of road a half dozen times just to catch a few seconds of a journey. On occasions, the crew got a taste of the hostility that still exists toward Travellers. After filming inside John Donoghue’s house in Galway City, they went outside to shoot its exterior and a portion of the street. Two neighbors confronted the crew, stating in no uncertain terms that they did not want their street identified on television with Travellers. When John learned of his neighbors’ actions, he recounted the threats he had received when he first moved in. The photographs often prompted insightful comments from Travellers. In response to an image of horses at Holylands, John talked about the discrimination and double standard that still exists with regard to Travellers. Back then [1970s] you were allowed to have your animals around the sites. Today you’re not. . . . They’ve [government] pushed us off the road and taken everything away. And now they have ads on television telling people in Britain and America, “Come visit Ireland.” And you see a wagon with a tourist in it going down the road . . . it’s okay for tourists to travel on the roads but not us who was born, bred, and raised there. They’ve taken away our travelling way of life, but it’s okay for them tourism companies to rent out horses and wagons and make money from it.

After several other stops, we returned to Dublin, where we had been invited to a wedding. We had known Martina Connors’s parents and had attended her half-brother Jim’s wedding on our first day of fieldwork in

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1971 (described in chapter 2). It hardly seemed possible that now, forty years later, we would be attending his half-sister’s marriage ceremony— to a young immigrant from Bangladesh no less. Although no single event can capture all the changes that have occurred in Travellers’ lives, Martina’s wedding highlighted several, including her family’s greater affluence, young Travellers’ changing aspirations, and women’s new freedoms. As the bride got ready, I showed some of our fieldwork photographs to gathered family members. Briddie Connors, who had lived with us at Holylands, took one showing a group of Connors men standing outside a church and pointed to all those who had died—testimony to the hardship of traveling life. Today, a new cause of death has emerged. In addition to accidents and illness, the stress of adjusting to settled life as well as the lack of meaningful work has been particularly hard on the men. Their suicide rate is seven times higher than that of men in the general population. Virtually every Travelling family we visited during the summer had tragic stories of suicide to tell. As is true of most documentary films, as well as written ethnographic accounts, a lot of interesting material gets left on the proverbial cutting-room floor. After viewing the footage, Liam decided to narrow the film’s focus to only those families we had known during our original fieldwork. This footage was more compelling than that which showed us talking to Travellers we had just met, including those on the Spring Lane site. According to Liam, focusing on this material also created “a more immediate ‘then and now’ comparison” and was “more poignant and insightful.” Once this decision was made, he asked us to return to Ireland in the fall so that he could film us visiting those Holylands families we had been unable to contact during the summer. Unsettled: From Tinker to Traveller was completed and broadcast in two parts on Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTE), Ireland’s national public broadcasting service, with a record audience share, in early 2012. (Two years later, our book Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life, based largely on photo elicitation, was published.11) It was gratifying to have played a part in

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bringing many of the issues that Travellers face today to the public’s attention. The documentary received an overwhelmingly positive response and was seen by a third of Ireland’s TV viewers during its first airing. As of this writing, it has been rebroadcast twice, and thousands of people worldwide have watched it on YouTube. Such is the power and reach of film.

10

Taking Students to the Field Barbados

The next three chapters look at the field experiences of student researchers, first in rural villages on the Caribbean island of Barbados, then while conducting urban fieldwork in Tasmania, Australia, and in the East African nation of Tanzania. In all three, the students are participants in an ethnographic “field school.” Field schools involve travel to another culture and, once there, total immersion in the life of a community. Typically, students live with homestay families and, in rural field schools, in separate communities apart from their fellow students. While students on conventional terms abroad spend their days in class on a campus, field-school students spend their days in the community, collecting field data by hanging out and interacting with locals, observing, interviewing, and writing up field notes. Field schools represent experiential learning at its best. While the subject matter acquired in a classroom is usually learned in isolation from real life, in the field, concepts such as kinship or community or religion are absorbed in the course of daily life. Students who learn a textbook definition of “community” in a class will never understand it as well as those who experience it firsthand by living in a village. As field-school directors, our role has always been less instructing than providing students with guidance 164

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and experiences that will help them learn, think, and see the world as anthropologists do—which is to see the world as the locals do. In graduate school, each of us participated in a field school. I went to Mexico, where I spent a summer in a mountain village; the following year, Sharon went to Ireland, where she lived in a small fishing and farming community.1 Our field-school experiences were challenging, with bouts of illness, loneliness, and culture shock, but they were also exhilarating adventures that played a significant role in transforming us into professional anthropologists. The field schools we later developed for our own students have unquestionably been the most rewarding form of teaching we do. It is the students from our field schools with whom we stay in touch, some as lifelong friends.

barbados The decision to do fieldwork and to develop a field school in the Caribbean grew out of research I had done on return migration, among people who were returning to their home societies after living and working abroad for many years. I had studied “returnees” in Ireland and Newfoundland when colleagues suggested that I compare my findings with a society in the Caribbean, where populations are among the most migratory in the world. I visited Jamaica and Trinidad as possible research sites before deciding on Barbados. The following winter, Sharon and I took three undergraduate students with us in a sort of trial field school. At the time, most field programs in cultural anthropology were designed for graduate students, but our students were quick learners and did well. One student, Polly Wheeler, later became an anthropologist and another, Ellen Frankenstein, became an ethnographic filmmaker. With the support of our department and Union College’s international programs office, our Barbados program became a full-fledged field school, an “anthropology term abroad.” A few years later, Union’s anthropology department added a second field program in Fiji and, later, others in Tasmania, Tanzania, and, most recently, India.

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Over the next two decades (1980s–1990s), we took students to Barbados every other year during Union’s ten-week winter trimester. We received playful ridicule from colleagues who accused us of just trying to escape the frigid Northeast, but Sharon would remind them that we had chosen to spend our sabbatical near the Arctic Circle in Alaska—in winter. Barbados is the easternmost of the Caribbean’s islands, lying just outside the great arc of islands that sweeps a thousand miles up from Trinidad in the south to the Virgin Islands in the north. Unlike its volcanic neighbors, which are steep and mountainous, it has a gentle terrain favorable to agriculture. When English settlers arrived in the 1600s, they quickly cultivated most of the island. As sugarcane plantations spread, African slaves were brought in to work them. Most Barbadians today (or Bajans, as they colloquially refer to themselves) are descendants of those Africans. Barbados is the only Caribbean nation to have had a single colonial master. The appellation “Little England,” now a hackneyed phrase of the tourist trade, has some legitimacy. Even today, more than a half century after independence in 1966, many Barbadians take pride in some things that were originally English, from cricket to Anglicanism, from place names to tea. Each year, however, British influences lose more ground to American tastes and popular culture. To most outsiders, Barbados is best known as a tourist destination. Its white sand beaches, tropical climate, and comfortable year-round breezes, combined with an English-speaking population and a reputation for political stability and safety, have made it popular. All this, and the purity of the island’s groundwater, led some nineteenth-century travelers to proclaim that Barbados was the healthiest place in the British Empire, which then included half the nations on earth.

settling in We usually lived in the parish of St. Lucy on the island’s north coast, with our students living with local families in small scattered villages,

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far enough apart to discourage them from visiting one another. In an article called “Lessons from the Field,”2 I described taking one group of students to their villages on move-in day: Sara, Eric, and Kirsten heave their backpacks and suitcases—all the gear they’ll need for the next ten weeks—into the back of our battered Toyota pick-up. Sara, a tense grin on her face, gets up front with me; the others climb in the back and try to make themselves comfortable on the luggage. Leaving Bellairs Research Institute on the west coast, we drive north past the island’s posh resorts. Their names—Cobblers Cove, Glitter Bay, and Coral Reef Club—evoke images of a tropical paradise. The scene changes abruptly once we leave the coast and move from tourist destinations to agricultural land. Here, amid the green and quiet of rolling sugar cane fields, white faces are rare. Graceful cabbage palms flank a large plantation house, one of the island’s former “great houses.” On the edge of its cane fields is a tenantry, a cluster of small board houses some of whose inhabitants are the descendants of the slaves who once worked the plantation. Two monkeys emerge from a gully and cross the road. I tell Sara that they came to Barbados aboard slave ships 300 years ago, but she is absorbed in her own thoughts and doesn’t seem to hear me. I’ve taken enough students to the field to have an idea of what’s on her mind. What will her village be like? The one we just passed through looked unusually poor. Will the family she is going to live with like her? Will she like them? Will she be up to the challenge? Many people are walking along the road; clusters of men sit outside a rum shop shouting loudly while slamming dominoes on a wobbly plywood table. Earlier in the day, Eric told me that many of the ten students on the field program thought they had made a mistake coming to Barbados. If they had chosen to go on the term abroad to Greece or England or even Japan, they mused, they would be together on a campus, among friends. They wouldn’t have to live in a village. They wouldn’t have to go out and meet people and try to make friends with all these strangers. To do it all alone now seemed more of a challenge than many wanted. We continue driving toward the northeastern edge of the island to the village of Pie Corner, where Sara will live. Several miles out, we can see huge swells rolling in off the Atlantic, beating against the cliffs. This is the unsheltered side of the island. The village only has a few hundred people, but six small churches. Marcus Hinds and his family all come out to the

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Figure 10-1. Student Sara Finnerty with her homestay family, Trevor, Judy, and Roosevelt Griffith, in the village of Josey Hill.

truck to welcome Sara. Mrs. Hinds gives her a big hug, as though she were a returning relative, and daughter Yvette takes her into the yard to show her the pigs and chickens, and then on a tour of the small house. The bedroom is smaller than Sara imagined, barely larger than the bed. She puzzles over where to put all her stuff, while I explain to the Hinds, again, the nature of the program. I tell them that Sara will be spending most of her time in the village talking to people and participating as much as possible in the life of the community, everything from attending church to working in the garden. My description doesn’t fit their conception of what a university education is all about. The everyday lives of people in their community is probably not something they think worthy of a university student’s attention. Back in the truck, Eric and Kirsten ask me anxiously how their villages compare to Sara’s. Kirsten begins to bite her nails.

The most immediate adjustment students must make is to living in the tropics. Because Barbados lies just thirteen degrees above the equator,

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the sun is intense, especially in the middle of the day. The saying “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” (based on a 1931 song by Noël Coward) is an apt warning. For the first few weeks, most are debilitated by the heat, from which there is little respite since village homes are not air-conditioned. Inevitably, some of the female students’ complexions break out, making them even more self-conscious. Like all people living in the tropics, Bajans start their days early; most are up by 5:00 a.m. to get their outdoor chores finished while the air is still cool. We always advise our students to get onto the local schedule—early to bed, early to rise—but after years of staying up late and getting up late, most find this a struggle. Female students usually adopt the local rhythm sooner than male students. While most students have their own bedrooms, they are afforded little privacy due to thin walls or, in some cases, partitions that may not even reach the ceiling, and curtains for doors. It is impossible to escape the sounds of television, radio, music, and conversation. The constant noise wears on some students’ nerves. “It seems like the TV hasn’t been turned off since I arrived here five weeks ago,” reported Sara. “Even at night, when I am alone in my bedroom, I can hear conversations in other parts of the house as though there wasn’t a wall between us,” complained Dan. The separation between the indoors and outdoors that is so characteristic of housing in northern climates is noticeably absent in the Caribbean. Windows that are usually open during the day to allow in the breeze also let in insects and small critters like green lizards, mice, or whistling frogs. Our home had four resident green lizards that we came to know well; each morning we awoke to find some portion of the group staring down at us from the wall above, heads cocked to the side, watching our every move. Living close to nature was fine, except for the centipedes, which sought refuge in village homes during the sugarcane harvest. They can be large and give a nasty bite, as Sharon discovered when one dropped from the ceiling onto her back one night.

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Figure 10-2. Homestay mother Valenza Griffith and family in Coles Cave, St. Lucy Parish.

What village homes may lack in comforts and privacy, families make up for in kindness and concern. Most go to great lengths to make students feel welcome, introducing them to friends, including them in family gatherings, and taking them to church and on outings to show them the island’s attractions. Homestay mothers even adjust their cooking to suit their student’s tastes. Students joke that they have to be careful about what foods they say they like because they could end up getting them every day. Just how concerned host families can be about their student’s welfare is illustrated by one unfortunate and extreme incident. Whenever Margaret left her home during the first few weeks, she was harassed by a neighbor’s large, ill-tempered dog, which would bark loudly and nip at her heels. She tried to sneak by him, but usually to no avail. One evening,

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her homestay father announced at the dinner table, “Don’t worry, Margaret, that dog no bother you no more.” She didn’t understand, until she later learned that he had poisoned it. Nearly all of our students grew up in suburbs or cities and, other than when on short vacations, had never lived in a rural area. Barbados was their first experience of living with people who are close to the land. Most host families raise animals, grow crops, and tend a “kitchen garden.” Each morning before dawn, students wake to the sounds of animals in the yard and soon learn about their behavior. They collect eggs and watch sheep giving birth and pigs being slaughtered. They see the satisfaction families derive from consuming food they have produced themselves. They are also struck by the darkness of the sky at night and the brilliance of the stars with no city lights to diminish their intensity. A student from Long Island, New York, described the experience of her village at night as “like living in a planetarium.”

culture shock Much has been written about culture shock, a concept coined by anthropologist Kalvero Oberg in 1960. It is a condition common to all fieldwork in unfamiliar cultures. Little in life is more unsettling than change, and few individuals experience more change and disorientation than an anthropologist taking up residence in a remote community in a distant culture. The challenge is compounded for students who typically rely on close friends or loved ones at home to make them feel secure and wanted. The adjustment to living and doing research in a Barbadian village challenges most students. During the first week, when they are all living together at a research institute, they are upbeat. After months of preparation, they have finally arrived and are excited to see the people and places about whom they have heard so much. Everything is new and fresh and, for the most part, “fun.” But their positive feelings often change quickly after they move into their homestays and face the

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daunting task of being entirely on their own in a strange community and having to go out and try to make friends with people with whom they have little in common. They are also anxious and uncertain about their ability to collect data. Suddenly, the novelty of being in a new, exciting culture wears off and no longer seems like fun. Being unsure about what behavior is appropriate makes them feel apart from everything and everybody. Some students become irritable, easily upset by things—the unfamiliar accent of the villagers’ speech, the critters indoors, the dim light bulbs, canned orange juice that tastes funny, and so on. When they venture out and walk through the village, they feel as if people are watching them—and they are probably right. They diagnose their unhappiness as “homesickness,” but the real cause is less missing home than not feeling “at home” in the village. In short, they are experiencing culture shock. A common student response is to withdraw, often escaping by reading novels or, today, by going on the Internet. After a few days, most students tire of being indoors and begin to feel guilty about not getting their work under way. To get them started, the first task we assign is to make a map of their village. This forces them outside. Mapping requires a slow reconnaissance of the village, and invariably some locals initiate conversations, and even offer to assist them. This interaction helps students discover that local people are friendly and generally welcoming. What they learn yields data that can be written up as field notes, which gives them the added satisfaction of having accomplished something in addition to their map. Students also find some solace in reading an assigned article that explains the underlying cause and symptoms of culture shock. We remind them over and over that the stress and anxiety that they feel is entirely normal—something experienced by most people who spend an extended period in another culture—and that they’ll all eventually get over it.3 It usually doesn’t take long before the depressed and unhappy students recover. Betsy and Greg are two good examples of students who experi-

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enced this phenomenon. For the first two days in her village of Cave Hill, Betsy was excited, glad to be able to unpack and get her stuff organized in her own room. A diligent student, she was eager to begin her research and get into a daily routine. But by the end of the week, she was in a deep funk, exhibiting many of the classic symptoms of culture shock. She was unnerved by a green lizard that lived behind the framed picture on the wall of her bedroom, by the cockroaches that skittered across the floor when she surprised them by turning on the light, and by mice, one of which awoke Betsy one night by scampering across her bed. Unlike most other homestay families, Betsy’s host was away a lot during the early weeks, leaving her alone when she most needed companionship. She began to hope she would have a small accident and get hurt just enough to be sent home. We counseled her, reminding her that her feelings were normal and that they would pass, that even veteran anthropologists were not immune to culture shock. She promised not to give in. She counted out seventy multivitamins, one for each day that she would be in the village, and put the bottle by her bedside so she could watch them diminish, knowing that when they were gone, she’d be on her way home. For the first two weeks, she forced herself out the door each day, often stopping at a small shop for a cola and a chat with its elderly proprietor, Mr. Sobers. He befriended her and introduced her to his friends in the district, some of whom later assisted Betsy with her fieldwork. By the third week, she had not only adjusted but was quite content with her new life and routine in Cave Hill. She put away the vitamin bottle. When the field school ended, Betsy stayed on with her family for an extra week. The following June, her homestay sister traveled to New York to attend Betsy’s graduation and to go to Vermont to spend a week at Betsy’s parents’ farm. Greg also had severe culture shock and was the only student we ever threatened to send home. Like Betsy, his depression began shortly after settling into his village of Six Men’s Bay. His response to culture shock was to drink. Getting drunk almost every night, he vomited twice on his homestay’s bathroom floor. They were concerned but patient with him. The third time, however, they telephoned and told us that Greg would

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Figure 10-3. Men clean flying fish, a staple of the Bajan diet, on the beach near Bathsheba on the island’s Atlantic coast.

have to leave. We drove to the village immediately, and after a long talk with them, they agreed to give Greg one last chance. We told Greg that if he was evicted, we would have to send him home. A day or two later, some fishermen, whom Greg had met at the village rum shop, invited him out fishing on their boat. Barbados’s bright blue and yellow, locally built, wooden boats leave their moorings around 4:00 a.m. and sail miles offshore to catch flying fish and dolphinfish (also known as mahi-mahi). Greg got along well with the fishermen, and they got an unusually large catch the day he was with them. The men thought Greg had brought them luck. They invited him out again the next day, and once again, they did well. Greg soon became a salaried member of the three-man crew of “The Poseidon.” He changed his research topic to study the occupation and the environmental knowledge of Barbadian fishermen.

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He went to sea with the crew nearly every day for the rest of the term. After the field school ended, Greg, like Betsy, stayed on in Barbados during his spring break and continued fishing with the crew.4

village life The social world of the village is also quite unlike the communities our students come from in the United States. They discover that people know almost everyone else in the village, and often in more than one context. They are not just neighbors but also members of their church or teammates on their village cricket or soccer team. Relationships are multi- not single-stranded as they often are in suburban America. Most students have never experienced such intimacy—where people have a shared history and where relationships have so many different meanings. In their journals, some reflect upon the warmth, friendliness, and frequent sharing of food and other resources that occur in the village and compare it to the impersonality, individualism, and detachment of suburban life at home. But they also learn about the drawbacks to this familiarity, especially the lack of anonymity. People seem nosy and unduly interested in the affairs of their neighbors. To their dismay, students discover that they, too, can be the subject of local gossip. Several female students learned that there were stories afoot that they were either mistresses to their host fathers or sleeping with their host brothers. Since students, like all anthropologists, work hard to gain acceptance, such gossip hurts. They worry about the damage such rumors can do to their reputations, relationships, and field research. The pace of life in Barbados, as in most tropical places, is much slower than at home, and that takes some adjustment. As one host mother explained to Susan, “There are only two speeds in Barbados: slow and dead stop.” Compared to Americans, Bajans are in less of a hurry to get things done. At the shop, customers wait to be served until the clerk finishes chatting with others. Bajans think little of being late for appointments. Accustomed to the punctuality and time-centeredness of North

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Figure 10-4. A typical street scene in the parish of St. Lucy; in this case, the village of Checker Hall.

American life, the students are often impatient and frustrated by the lack of urgency. Early in their stay, students have difficulty finding social diversions; there seems to be little to do besides their research or reading or listening to music. The entertainment they are accustomed to at home is usually absent. At times, they are bored, lonely, and desperate to escape and to meet up with their field-school classmates, but we allow them to leave their communities only on two designated days each week. Students initially hate this restriction, but they come to understand the benefits of it and, in an end-of-term survey, unanimously recommend that it be continued for the next group. This “isolation” forces them to satisfy their need for recreation and companionship within the village. By hanging out with local people, their friendships are strengthened and they informally learn a good deal about Bajan life.

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being a different color In their villages, students find that they are the only white persons. (All our students have been white Americans with two exceptions: one African American and one Japanese exchange student.) During their first few weeks in the field, they are acutely aware of their own “race” for the first time. Some villagers simply call them “white girl” or “white boy” until they get to know them. Barbadians speak more openly about racial difference than most people in the United States, which surprises our students. Village children sometimes ask to touch a student’s skin, marveling at the blue veins that show through it. Some have asked students with freckles if they have a skin disease; others want to feel their straight hair. Characteristically, one student during the second week wrote, “I have never been in a situation before where I was a minority purely due to the color of my skin, and treated differently because of it. When I approach people, I am very conscious of having white skin. Before I never thought of myself as having color.” A few students become overly sensitive to racial difference, especially when they leave their villages and travel on crowded buses, where they may be stared at. Sometimes as the bus fills up, the seat next to them is taken last. Returning home, passengers begin to noticeably worry, as the bus heads away from the coastal tourist belt, assuming the student has missed his or her stop or has taken the wrong bus. Students’ concerns about race, even their awareness of it, diminish as they make friends and become integrated into their communities. By the end of the term, most claim they rarely think about being white. Several students described incidents in which they had become so unaware of skin color that they were shocked when someone made a remark or did something to remind them that they were different. Kristin was startled when, after shaking her hand, an old woman remarked that she had never touched the hand of a white person before. Some reported being surprised whenever they walked by a mirror and got a glimpse of their white skin. One student wrote that although she knew she wasn’t black, she no longer felt white.

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gender differences Female students must learn how to deal with the frequent and overt sexual advances of Bajan men. “When I walk through the village, the guys who hang out at the rum shop yell comments,” wrote Betsy. “I have never heard men say some of the things they tell me here. My friend Andrew tells me that most of the comments are actually compliments. Yet I still feel weird. . . . I am merely an object that they would like to conquer. I hate that feeling, so I am trying to get to know these guys. I figure that if they know me as a person and a friend, they will stop with the demeaning comments. Maybe it’s a cultural thing they do to all women.” Indeed, many Bajan men feel it is perfectly acceptable to verbally accost women in public with hissing, appreciative remarks, and offers of sex. Sexual bantering is generally tolerated by Bajan women who studiously ignore the men’s comments. Most women consider it harmless, if annoying; some find it flattering. Students like Betsy, however, are not sure what to make of it. They do not know whether it is being directed at them because local men think that white girls are “loose” or if Bajan men behave in this fashion toward all women. Not wanting to be rude or culturally insensitive, most tolerate the remarks as best they can, while searching for a strategy to politely discourage them. One cultural difference that some female students never got used to is being told they have put on weight or are getting “fat.” The ideal Barbadian female body is heavier than the North American ideal. In fact, villagers find most of our students too skinny and will tell them that they have gained weight (even when they haven’t) as a way of saying they are looking good and as a compliment to the homestay mother who is feeding them.

understanding social class Over the years, we’ve found that American students, particularly in comparison to their European counterparts, have little understanding of social class. Even after several weeks in Barbados, most students are

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oblivious to status distinctions in their villages. The U.S. suburbs where most grew up are fairly homogenous in both their social composition and housing, with all homes falling into the same general price range. Moreover, students are steeped in a culture that stresses, at least rhetorically, equality. In contrast, Barbadian villages lack definite centers and contain a mix of people, from professionals who commute to work in the capital of Bridgetown to people who work in the fields and sell food from their homes. They also contain a broad spectrum of housing, from large, two-story masonry homes, often built by returning migrants, to small board houses whose owners eke out a living on tiny plots. Our students are slow to translate such material differences into social class. In contrast, Barbadians have a well-developed awareness of class, ingrained by British rule over three centuries. Students gradually become aware of status distinctions from the comments their host families make about other people. They also learn about class and status by making their own mistakes. After Sarah walked home through the village, balancing a bundle on her head, she learned that there are different standards of behavior. “Mrs. C. told me never to do that again, that only poor people carry things on their heads, and that my doing it reflected badly on her family.” In other cases, students violated local norms concerning with whom it was appropriate for them to be seen. As in most field situations, the first villagers to offer students friendship are often marginal members of the community. This creates special problems because our students are often guests in the homes of higher-status village families who have the room to house them. Host parents become upset when they discover their student has been hanging out with a disreputable man or woman. Occasionally, female students have gone out with lower-class “beach bums,” despite our warnings. They have entered these relationships oblivious to what the local reaction might be, and equally oblivious to how little privacy there is in a village. The most dramatic example of this kind was the experience of Hannah.5 Her story reveals much about a common mistake that students make in the field.

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“George, telephoooone,” called out our Barbadian neighbor from the house next door early one morning. “It’s Hannah, your student, she say it important.” Hannah’s voice was full of emotion. “I’m in trouble and I really need to talk to you.” I told her to start walking toward Josey Hill where I lived and that I would set out toward her village, and that we’d meet at the pasture where many families grazed their cattle and sheep and boys played cricket and soccer. When I arrived, Hannah—tall, green-eyed, and pretty—was already there. “They’ve turned against me. When I walk by, they turn their heads the other way. Someone in the rum shop called me the ‘devil’s child.’ ” Hannah, from a college town in upstate New York where her father taught theater and her mother taught English, had made many friends in her village. In fact, she was enjoying her time in Freeman Hill so much that she fantasized about settling there and teaching school at St. Margaret’s, the small elementary school where she had been doing research. Slowly, the story emerged. She revealed that she had been seeing a Rastafarian named Joseph and that some villagers had seen her walking with him into the hills beyond the village. A small group of Rastas lived in caves about an hour’s walk down the coast from Freeman Hill, where they wore not a stitch of clothing and subsisted off the land. That morning, Hannah’s homestay mother, Thelma, had entered her bedroom and shut the door tightly. Breathing heavily, she told Hannah that people in the village were saying that she was smoking marijuana and bathing naked with the Rastas. Some thought she must be a drug addict. “I had no idea people would react this way,” said Hannah defensively. “Joseph said he was a ‘bush doctor.’ He’s a nice guy, he wouldn’t harm anyone. Aren’t anthropologists supposed to be interested in everyone? Anthropologists don’t ignore people just because some people don’t like them. Right?” Hannah assured me that she hadn’t gone naked with the Rastas or become sexually involved. I thought this an unnecessary declaration, but then recalled the talk Sharon had with the female students about

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the problems created by romantic involvements with local men. With much anguish, Hannah recounted that Thelma wanted her to move out and leave the village. Hannah had only a few weeks left in Barbados. There wasn’t time for her to start over somewhere else, nor did I know of another family who had space to take her in. I told her to go back to the village and that I would call on her that evening. When I got home, I looked through our copy of Hannah’s field notes (our students turn in a copy of their notes every week). A reference to Rastas took on new meaning: [February 21] I went to Janice’s primary school today and on the way out I started talking to a Rastaish looking dude with leather Crocodile Dundee hat on just standing on the roadside. When Janice got home, she reprimanded me for talking to him. Janice: “We don’t live the way Rastas do. It’s not right just to go and talk to anyone you feel like. . . . Even teacher told me to tell you not to talk to him. And teachers know about these things.”

In a field note I had missed, Hannah described her encounters with the Rastas in more detail. After walking home from the school yard with Joseph, she had agreed to meet him the following week at the small village shop. It wasn’t a good choice since the shop is located where the village’s three roads meet, and its veranda is a social gathering place. There couldn’t have been a more conspicuous place in all of Freeman Hill. Hannah described what happened in her field notes: When I saw Joseph coming down the road, I hopped off the porch to go meet him, and every person within viewing distance did a double take. On the days that I’ve spent with Joseph, we meet at ten; arrive at his place in the later morning. . . . It’s set up on a ridge, and well hidden. You ascend a steep rock incline and step onto a ledge with a panoramic view of the Atlantic. On one side is a looming two-story rock with an opening in the center; this is Joseph’s bedroom. You step down in a dark, cool, homey cave, about 10 by 20 feet with smooth rocks on the floor, a slender little bed on one side, and a natural stone bench coming out of the wall. Joseph’s “dresser” is a jutting piece of rock where he rests his Bible, a fragment of a mirror, and his shell necklace. . . .

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Our usual response to the problems that students unwittingly create is to visit the parties involved first, to better understand the issue and then to try to resolve it by explaining each side’s customs to the other. I hoped Hannah’s situation would be no different. I was friendly with two respected elders in Freeman Hill, so I decided to go to them for advice. I went first to Ezra Cumberbatch, a Pentecostal preacher, whose daughters had befriended Hannah; and then to Randall Trotman, a return migrant who had recently resettled in Barbados after a dozen years in England. He was wise and had the perspective that comes with having lived in another society. Reverend Cumberbatch told me that the Rastas Hannah had been visiting were well known to the village and that most people, especially the old ones, viewed them as lazy layabouts, who smoked marijuana and stole fruit and vegetables from their gardens. Randall Trotman had a more balanced view. “Some are good and some are bad. Some of them steal your coconuts and aloe, but others are school teachers and craftsmen and good citizens.” He recognized that in rural places, like Freeman Hill, all Rastas were tarred with the same brush. Before I left the Trotman home, I asked about a rumored crime that I had learned of earlier but had found villagers unwilling to say much about. Apparently, a villager several years before had become furious about the theft of his crops (which could have been taken by monkeys as easily as Rastas) and had put rat poison in some cucumbers. Randall told me that two Rastas had died and that the police investigation was inconclusive. In the end, both preacher and returnee were sympathetic to Hannah’s plight, but neither had any practical advice on what she could do to repair her reputation and save her fieldwork. Thinking I should meet the Rastas themselves, I set out to visit them. With the vaguest of directions, I hiked down the steep and rugged coastline, looking for the area they called “Creation.” I lost the trail and worked my way through the dense brush on a steep hillside that rose directly from the sea. Remembering Hannah’s account, I climbed up several steep inclines to the openings in the rock wall, looking for

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the Rasta caves. The view was magnificent, down the green cliffs and out across the blue Atlantic, just as Hannah had described. I called out several times, but nothing came back. The place was eerily quiet, and I began to question what I was doing there. What was I going to say if I did find them? That I was here to check them out for the safety of my student? Feeling that I was intruding in their living space, I turned and trekked for home and went to Hannah’s homestay. Thelma, Hannah’s homestay mother, listened patiently to my explanations of what anthropologists do and of Hannah’s naïveté. I told her that students sometimes innocently violate local norms but that these misunderstandings were usually easily cleared up and that, in the end, no one is the worse for it. After sincere assurances from Hannah that she would stay away from the Rastas, Thelma agreed to let her stay. Although Hannah remained in Freeman’s Hill, most villagers had little to do with her during her last weeks there. “It’s like I have something contagious and they don’t want to get too close to me,” she wrote. In an assessment of her field experience, Hannah concluded, “I learned the power of a societal norm. Nice girls don’t talk to Rastas. Exceptions: none.”6 Reflecting on Hannah’s experience, it became clear that she had not fully appreciated the social-class distinctions in the village or the communal nature of village life in which people pay close attention to the actions of neighbors, where gossip is recreation (and enforces social norms), and where, with the slightest provocation, rumor can affect a family’s reputation. But the issue was not just a lack of awareness of status or social class; American students often operate on an assumption of personal autonomy. That is, if they can see “the truth” in a situation (or view their actions as harmless), they feel entitled to act that way without regard for what others might think. Such an attitude sometimes stems from what some anthropologists call naïve realism, the mistaken view that deep down, everyone perceives the world in basically the same way. Is it any surprise that our students think this way, since most were raised in fairly homogeneous suburbs? Even on their college campuses, they may have little contact with minorities or international students who might

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challenge their assumptions. For many students like Hannah, Barbados was the first time they had ever lived in another culture, and they arrive with their naïve realism fairly intact. Consider the words Hannah used to explain and defend her actions: “Joseph wouldn’t harm anyone. [The Rastas] just want to be left alone to do their own thing. Why can’t [the villagers] see that?” Typically, it takes our students some weeks before they begin to appreciate that they, like the Rastas, simply cannot always “do their own thing” without repercussions. In 2013, I asked Hannah about the lasting impact, if any, of her experience in Barbados. “At the time the blow-up happened,” she said, the only thing I cared about was what the villagers thought, and how my homestay mother felt . . . but now that time has gone by and I’ve learned that no long term damage was done, I realize that getting to know Joseph was the most important thing that happened to me in Barbados. I don’t regret it. You see, having been invited into Joseph’s world was mind blowing. His simple life—waking up every day to the sunrise, bathing in a beautiful waterfall, gathering fresh vegetables and herbs that he grew in his hillside garden, cooking on an outdoor fire, walking on the seashore, praying, reading his Bible, and meditating—was to encounter the polar opposite of what I knew at the time. In the crazy, hectic world we live in, where we no longer seem to have time for anything, Joseph had time for everything: time for conversation, time for singing, time for deep thought, time for appreciating nature, and time for praising his God.

We now use Hannah’s story as a lesson for other field-school students. Communities are never as homogeneous as they seem, so it’s important to be sensitive to social-class differences. Take time to think about how your actions and relationships might be viewed by others, because not everybody perceives the world the way you do. Sometimes, the “mistakes” we make can reveal a lot about a culture.

11

When the Field Is a City Hobart, Tasmania

After two decades of running field schools in Barbadian villages, we left the countryside and moved our program to town. First to Kilkenny, Ireland (population 27,350), then to the city of Hobart (population 205,000), the capital of the Australian island state of Tasmania, and most recently to Moshi (population 190,000) in the East African nation of Tanzania. The shift from rural to urban followed our own changing interests and that of many cultural anthropologists. Anthropology’s traditional emphasis on rural villages had evolved into a broader interest in cultures and subcultures in all settings, from street corners to the boardrooms of multinational corporations and even to dispersed cyber communities. We also had a practical reason for moving the field school. Over the years, many more Barbadians were leaving their small communities each day to work in town. As a result, fewer people were around during the day to speak with our students—to be their teachers and interviewees.1 With wage-paying jobs, local people also had less time for the farming, fishing, and other subsistence activities that made rural life so distinctive and interesting, especially from the perspective of American students from suburban and urban backgrounds. With the spread of cable television, improved telecommunications, and the Internet, even 185

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the most isolated parts of Barbados had been brought into the orbit of the modern world. And after spending ten semesters living in Barbadian villages, we personally felt the need for change. So while our earlier field-school students had conducted traditional “people and places” village ethnography, today our students are doing urban anthropology. But less anthropology of the city than anthropology in the city. That is, most are not studying uniquely urban issues like urbanism and urbanization but, rather, are doing fieldwork on a variety of topics in the city. That is, the city is the setting for the research and not the subject of it. This shift in field-school location highlighted some important differences between rural and urban fieldwork, which we explore here.

tasmania Like Barbados, Tasmania is an island, but with a landmass 147 times larger—roughly the size of Ireland. While Barbados is densely populated (1,692 people per square mile), Tasmania has barely 20 people per square mile. Tasmania is similar to Barbados, however, in also having been a British colony and having remained under British rule from colonization until independence. While the British established sugarcane plantations across Barbados and imported African slaves to work them, in Tasmania the economic mainstay was not sugarcane but convicts. Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was first known, became Britain’s newest penal colony in 1803. Its earliest residents, besides a small aboriginal population, were convicts and their military guards. Tasmania is similar to what Alaska is to the continental United States or Newfoundland to mainland Canada—a rugged and remote place with lots of wilderness, and one that has been slow to develop. At one time, mainlanders regarded Tasmanians as backward, and the jokes they told about them often conveyed an image of country bumpkins. Tasmania still ranks at or near the bottom among Australian states on virtually every economic and social indicator: highest unemployment,

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Figure 11-1. Aerial view of the city of Hobart, Tasmania.

lowest incomes and literacy, highest teenage pregnancy and likelihood to smoke, worst domestic violence, and lowest longevity. But it is also admired today for its beautiful beaches, clean air and water, “green” ethos, laid-back lifestyle, burgeoning food culture, and Hobart’s eclectic, new world-class art museum. Like Barbados, Tasmania today is a major tourist destination. With much of the island being World Heritage Wilderness, and being home of the exotic marsupials such as the Tasmanian devil, Tasmania attracts primarily eco- and adventure tourists in contrast to the conventional “sand, sun, and sea” visitors who travel to the Caribbean. Although Tasmania draws nearly a million visitors a year, it is still not well known to most Americans. Shortly before leaving for our field school, Katie was given The Lonely Planet Guide to Tanzania by her aunt. Similarly, our tax accountant sent us an e-mail that closed with, “Hope you’re enjoying your stay in Italy,” apparently confusing Tasmania with Tuscany. As in Barbados, Tasmania’s indigenous or aboriginal population was decimated by a combination of European diseases, violence, and

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resettlement. The absence of a full-blood and physically distinctive aboriginal population in Tasmania today can cause confusion for people who have a misguided and narrow view of what anthropologists do. Chelsea described a conversation she had with a cab driver: When I told him that I’d come to Tasmania to study anthropology, he replied, “Look, sweetheart, I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear. You came to a bad place to study. There are no more aboriginals here. They were all killed.” When I mentioned that I had heard otherwise, he simply shook his head, seemingly in pity that I had come this whole way for nothing.

The cabdriver both ignored the presence of many mixed-blood aboriginal Tasmanians and also assumed that anthropologists are interested only in indigenous populations.

finding informants In contrast to Barbados, where our students lived in villages, in Tasmania they lived in the city and suburbs of Hobart. While the city is a much more familiar environment for most students, it lacks the intimacy and sense of community that our students had experienced in Barbadian villages. Even though Hobart is a humanly scaled horizontal city, students never got to know their neighbors, and their neighbors didn’t know them. They did make friends with local people, but most were people they met through their internships (to be discussed later), while playing sports, or when out at night in clubs, bars, and cafés. This was totally unlike rural Barbados. In Hobart, the students had a difficult time identifying a “community” in a spatial or geographical sense, whereas in village Barbados there was never any confusion. The village was that nucleated cluster of houses, rum shops, and churches whose outer boundaries were demarcated by the surrounding fields of sugarcane. In Hobart, the sprawl of the city, as well as the diversity of its residents and their unfamiliarity with one another, created a social entity too large and complex for

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Figure 11-2. One of Union College’s anthropology field-school groups.

student fieldworkers to parse, or in which to identify a “unit of analysis.” Consequently, we dropped the holistic community study we used to require of the students in Barbados. Instead, the students in Hobart selected an urban subculture (for example, refugees, market vendors, cricket fans, environmentalists) or an issue (for example, the controversy over building a new pulp mill) to study and write about. Finding informants was also more difficult in the city than it had been in villages. In all field research, anthropologists must draw on their social and interpersonal skills to gain the cooperation of local people. They must find people who are willing to spend time with them and answer their questions. In Barbados, when student fieldworkers went out their doors in the morning, nearly every person they encountered lived in the village and, therefore, was a potential “informant.” When the Tasmanian fieldworkers left their suburban homes, they seldom encountered anyone. While nearly every Barbadian villager

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was aware of the newcomer in their midst, this was not the case in Hobart. Even by the end of the semester, most students still didn’t know the people who lived on either side of their host families. At the end of her second week in Hobart, Nashab admitted, “I’m still not sure how to find informants.” Another difficulty in the city was that it is less socially acceptable than it had been in rural Barbados to approach strangers and start talking to them. One exception in Hobart was the bar and nightclub scene, which is precisely where our students made many of their contacts with locals. Our Hobart fieldworkers had to track down potential research subjects and convince them to become informants. For each new person they met, they had to explain who they were and what they were doing in Hobart. It got tiresome. In village Barbados, students needed only to go for a walk or stop by the rum shop or sports ground to find people to talk to. In Hobart, student fieldworkers had to get on the telephone or use e-mail to arrange interviews. Their research subjects were also dispersed across the city, requiring them to spend valuable time making arrangements and then walking or taking buses to reach interviewees. In Barbados, our students’ subjects lived in close proximity, enabling them to spend much more time each day actually doing fieldwork—not just arranging to do it. In a questionnaire, we asked our students how many people they had gotten to know by name during the term. The average of eighteen for students in Hobart was half that reported by students in Barbados. In a study of American students studying abroad, psychologists A. Furnham and C. Bochner concluded that “learning another culture” is largely a function of the number of host-culture friends the overseas students make.2 This supports our own impression that our students in village Barbados learned far more about the local culture than did those in Hobart. We also asked students to write down the age and gender of their three “best informants.” Here, too, a significant difference emerged. In Hobart, their best informants were much younger than

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those of the students in Barbados. In the villages, students collected a lot of their data from elders who were often outside—in their gardens, sitting on the porch, or hanging out in the local rum shop—with time on their hands to talk. Many developed an appreciation for elderly people, discovering for the first time the knowledge and wisdom they have to offer. At home in the United States, they typically have very little contact with elders other than their own grandparents, and even they often live some distance away.

research internships: stumbling upon a solution The problems our Hobart students encountered in trying to do meaningful fieldwork in the city were mostly solved when we placed them in internships with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), government agencies, and social-service organizations that had an interest in having an anthropology student conduct a research project for them. These research internships gave students ready-made topics, a field supervisor from the host organization, and a set of local informants. We stumbled upon the “research internship” solution by accident. It began with an off hand remark by a host family father who was a researcher at Tasmania Parks and Wildlife. Before long, two of our students were engaged in designing a study of “bushwalkers” (backpackers and hikers) in a national park. The students gathered survey data and interviewed bushwalkers while camping next to a trail (The Overland Track) in a remote national park. The eighty-five–page report they produced was later used in the park’s development plan. The students’ foray into “applied anthropology” was so successful that it prompted us to ask other agencies and NGOs if they had research needs that might be tackled by visiting student fieldworkers. Subsequently, all of our students were placed in research internships in Hobart, to good effect. Here again, serendipity stepped in and offered a solution.

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finding community through sport Apart from the internships and the bar and nightclub scene, the other urban setting in which many students developed relationships and became part of a community was sport. They did this both by playing pickup games and by joining teams or clubs. Tasmanians, like mainland Australians, are fanatical about sports, and there were many opportunities for students to play in Hobart. Typically, about a third of our students joined local teams; others played soccer, cricket, and Frisbee informally. Alan and Pearl, who played on a Gaelic football team, even accompanied their team to mainland Australia for a tournament. The students often socialized with their teammates after matches. About her teammates, Pearl wrote, They’ve become my closest friends in Tassie [Tasmania] . . . I’ve already been invited to an engagement party, a wedding, and a Super Bowl party, and they’ve shown me the parts of Tassie that I would’ve never seen without them. They’ve helped me feel like I’ve really found a home for myself here.

After graduation, Pearl returned to Hobart to live, resuming friendship with some of her old teammates. About his participation with the Gaelic football team, Alan wrote, When you first come into a culture, you are sort of like a kid. You are unsure of yourself, you are hoping you can make friends but you don’t know exactly what you are doing. For me, getting involved with the team [Gaelic football] has been an easy way to meet people and make friends because sport puts everyone on the same level. The first practice, everyone came and introduced themselves, we talked some, and then we played. After practice or a game, you always seem to have more to talk about, and this can range from what happened in the game to all kinds of other things . . . Gaelic football has introduced me to all of my closest friends here in Tasmania.

On our Ireland field program it was student Ben Schwartz, now a Hollywood comedy writer and actor (for example, Parks and Recreation), who developed the most friendships and became the most deeply

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immersed in the community of all our students. He did so by joining the town’s basketball team. Playing sports with locals is such an effective strategy for gaining an entrée into a new community that we find it surprising it is rarely mentioned in the fieldwork literature. In the many books on field methods that we looked at, we could not find a single mention of the value of sport in gaining acceptance and developing rapport. Indeed, few anthropologists have noted playing sports with locals in accounts of their own fieldwork. Notable exceptions are Gregory Reck who, in his book In the Shadow of Tlaloc, describes playing village basketball in Mexico, and Susan Brownell, a star college decathlete, who conducted much of her research in China while competing on a Chinese university track team.

“it’s not what i expected” Urban fieldwork often turns out to be quite different from what students expected before arriving. Their notion of fieldwork comes predominantly from what they’ve read in their anthropology classes where the best, or at least the most memorable, accounts are often of anthropologists working in “tribal” settings, such as Bruce Knauft among the Gebusi and Annette Weiner among the Trobriand Islanders. With this model of fieldwork in mind, some of our students did not at first feel as if they were doing real anthropology in Hobart. As Susie wrote at the end of her first week in the field, “I’m desperately trying to feel like an anthropologist but I don’t at all. This is very different from what I had imagined anthropologists do.” We now address these feelings by making sure that students have read several accounts of urban fieldwork.3 Even with the “community” and opportunities that their internships provide, students in the city end up doing less participant observation than village fieldworkers. Instead, they conduct more formal interviews. Differences in the fieldwork of Steve and Elizabeth are illustrative. Both researched the same topic—the role of cricket in everyday life—but Elizabeth did her research in Hobart while Steve conducted his in the

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Barbadian village of Rock Dundo. Although Elizabeth worked with the Tasmanian Cricket Association and made some friends there, she still collected most of her data through arranged interviews with people scattered around the Hobart region. Steve, on the other hand, collected most of his data by hanging around the local cricket pitch and rum shop. Living in the village, he got to know his informants well and had multiple conversations about their involvement in cricket over the course of the semester. Most of Elizabeth’s data came from one-off interviews with people she had never met before and would never see again. Both projects were well executed and produced interesting findings, but Steve’s deeper immersion as a resident in his research setting yielded a more nuanced understanding of the place of cricket in the local culture. The best data usually come from personal relationships that are built up over time, which is much easier to achieve in the village than in the city. The heavy reliance on formal interviews among our urban fieldworkers meant they often didn’t see their subjects in natural social settings. This can be a considerable disadvantage, as Nashab discovered in her study of African refugees in Hobart who lived scattered across the city and never seemed to come together in one place. Nashab described her frustration: Because I’m never able to observe them outside of the interviews, I can’t tell if what my informants tell me is actually how they live their lives. I didn’t think this was a problem until I observed an African man on Australia Day [a national holiday] sitting by himself on a bench by the sea watching the boat race. There were people standing around him also watching the race but none sat down next to him. Another bench just two meters from him was filled with five people who could barely fit on it. This got me thinking about segregation in Hobart and I wondered what else I was missing out on because of my inability to observe them in daily life.

The fact that our urban fieldworkers do less participant observation than their village counterparts also means that they take fewer field notes. This was not something that we expected; in fact, we were quite surprised by their lower productivity in the city.4

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distractions The city can be a more difficult place for students to conduct research for other reasons as well. Hobart offers movie theaters, nightclubs and bars, museums, a university, a symphony orchestra, a weekly open-air craft and food market, and a pedestrian shopping precinct with many boutiques; and it is built around one of the world’s great natural harbors with a lively waterfront with outdoor cafés. There is also professional cricket to watch, and just a few miles away are beaches and hiking and biking trails. In Hobart, none of our students have claimed to be bored (not necessarily a good thing). In fact, there are so many entertainment possibilities that some students struggle to keep their focus on fieldwork. “When I want to step away from my host family or do something different I have so many options to take advantage of,” said Liz. “And there’s good public transportation here that can get me wherever I want to go.” In contrast, villages in Barbados, like small rural places everywhere, offered few options for leisure. Indeed, one of the challenges—and learning experiences—for student fieldworkers was finding ways to entertain themselves and stave off boredom. The attractiveness of rural places lies in their open spaces, connection to the land, strong community, tranquility, and unhurried pace of life. These are not qualities that many young people value or would trade for the excitement of the city, even a small city like Hobart. In Barbados, our students often filled their considerable “downtime” by hanging out with locals, thereby learning more about the culture and the topics they were researching. In effect, the absence of “attractions” or distractions caused them to do more fieldwork. Our Tasmania students tended to compartmentalize their days into “play” and “work,” with their internships, which are much like jobs or “real” work, being the place where they did their fieldwork. For the students doing research in Barbadian villages, fieldwork was seen as open-ended, as something that could occur at any time and in any place, and that encompassed both work and play.

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new rules for urban fieldwork We, too, had to make adjustments when we moved our field program to the city. Some of the practices and the style of supervision we had developed in Barbados no longer worked. In Barbados, we had restricted the students’ visiting one another to two prescribed days per week. We did this to encourage them to seek companionship and develop relationships within their villages. Our “no visiting” rule didn’t work in Hobart. With all the students living in the same city, and with good public transportation, they could easily meet up any time they wished. In Barbados it was difficult for students to leave their villages to meet one another without risking our seeing them (for example, bumping into them in nearby Speightstown) or learning of their forays from our village friends. It wasn’t until the second Hobart field program that we finally realized the futility of trying to keep students from meeting up. We dropped the rule in favor of merely advising them about the consequences of spending too much time together (that is, they would be less likely to make local friends; it would reduce their cultural immersion; it would detract from their research; and it would probably diminish the experience of being abroad). What happened? During the early weeks, when students were still unsure of themselves, they often got together in the evenings and looked forward to our group field trips. But as they became more acclimated to Hobart, began to make some local friends—especially true for those playing team sports—and became closer to their homestay families, they met up with one another less often. Of course, there is always individual variation. Some students cherish their independence, while others are never able to wean themselves from the group. On the end-of-term surveys, the Tasmania students reported going out together an average of three nights per week. (The surveys are anonymous; therefore, we believe that these self-reports are somewhat reliable.) Not surprisingly, those who went out together most often developed the fewest local friendships; they also tended to produce fewer field notes and write the weakest papers.

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Figure 11-3. Sharon talks to students during a field trip to Bruny Island, while an albino wallaby looks on.

Another rule—more an admonition—implemented during our village field schools in Barbados that didn’t work in Hobart was that students not become romantically involved with locals. This made sense in Barbados, where some of our early female students had developed relationships with “beach bums”—lower-class guys who hustled female tourists around the resorts. They had thought that dating a local guy would, if anything, be looked upon favorably in the village since it would show that they were not racist. But as they and we quickly learned, their homestay families were offended. They considered these young men to be lower class and disreputable, and our students’ dating reflected badly upon their homestay families. Some homestay parents were also concerned about our students’ safety and health (primarily sexually transmitted diseases).

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None of this pertained to life in Hobart. In fact, the “no dating rule” could actually work against students. The young local men that our female students met in pubs and through sports in Hobart generally came from the same class and educational backgrounds as our students and did not threaten their standing with their homestay families. Even if the young men or women the students had socialized with had come from a different class background or belonged to a minority, it wouldn’t have been an issue with their suburban and urban, mostly liberal host families. Having a local boyfriend or girlfriend also meant that our students had less need to hang out with one another. Far from being a “problem,” some students argued, going out with a local person was an advantage since it drew them into that person’s network of friends and, sometimes, family. Amanda defended dating a young man she had met in a Hobart nightclub: “What better way to get into this culture than to date a member of it.” She also claimed that her cousin while in the Peace Corps had been advised that getting a girlfriend was the best way to fit into the local community. While Amanda undoubtedly learned much about Tasmanian life and culture through her boyfriend, another student believed that having fallen in love in the field had gotten in the way of getting her work done. “Sexual attractions,” Nancy wrote, “can overpower what you know is right and what you know you should be or not be doing.” Another student, Katie, worried about the heartache she and her new boyfriend would experience when she returned to the United States: I have been struggling back and forth with the decision I made to go out with him and to get serious. . . . I hope, that as I develop as an anthropologist, I won’t fall into this trap again. This has been my first big challenge since I’ve been in the field and it sucks. It’s hard when you don’t know who is right and what the answer to all these questions should be.

Another adjustment we’ve had to make is getting accustomed to our students’ frequent contact with family and friends at home through e-mail, Skype, phone calls, texting, Facebook, and other social media.

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Admittedly, this is not exclusively an urban issue, since families in rural Barbados today are also fully connected. We came of age and began our field schools in the pre-Internet era when students on terms abroad had little contact with home. Postcards, letters, and occasional telephone calls were the principal means that we and they had of communicating with family and friends. We were taught that it wasn’t good to have a lot of contact with home because it would lessen the experience of being away. In Tasmania, however, some students claimed in one end-of-term survey that being in contact with friends and family had actually prevented or lessened their homesickness. “There was one time this week when I felt homesick and really missed my mom,” Hillary admitted. “So the next morning I called her, and talked to her for a few minutes and then everything was fine and well.” Some reported that hearing the news from campus made them realize they were not really missing very much. As Rob put it, “I can feel homesick when I get e-mails that say I’m missing a birthday party or family event, but most of the newsy e-mails about what’s happening on campus just make me realize how lucky I am to be here and that I’m the one having a much better time.” Despite such positive aspects, we remain convinced that minimizing students’ contact with home increases their engagement with the local culture, and we continue to advise them to do so while realizing it is difficult for them to resist the temptation. Whether in village or city, all students benefit immensely from living and conducting field research in another culture. Ethnographic field schools provide them with their first real understanding of what anthropological research is like, especially its around-the-clock and opportunistic nature. Many students have told us that they never fully grasped the meaning of basic concepts like culture, community, and values until they had grappled with them firsthand in the field. Students also acquire a more in-depth knowledge of another culture than they could ever gain on a conventional term abroad—one that merely replicates in another country the kind of education they are

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accustomed to at home (for example, dorm life, classroom instruction, university setting). The knowledge they acquire while conducting research abroad, through its various data-gathering techniques, also becomes a reference point later when learning new anthropological concepts and theory in the classroom.

12

In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro Students in Tanzania

In this chapter, we move to the developing world to describe the experiences of our students in the small East African city of Moshi, Tanzania. With a population of 185,000, Moshi is not quite as large as Hobart, Tasmania (chapter 11).1 Both cities share some features in addition to size, including a fair amount tourism, friendly people, and majestic mountain backdrops. Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa at over nineteen thousand feet, looms in the distance above Moshi; and while Mount Wellington in Tasmania is almost as impressive visually because of its close proximity to Hobart, it is much smaller in size. In other respects, the two cities are worlds apart. In the old terminology of development, Moshi is “Third World” while Hobart is decidedly “First World.” Moshi shows many signs of underdevelopment: an irregular electricity and water supply, patchy roads and hazardous sidewalks, and abundant litter, despite its reputation as the “cleanest city in East Africa.” It has restaurants, bars, and a few sporting facilities, but other forms of entertainment are scarce. In contrast, Hobart offer cinemas, a concert hall and symphony orchestra, museums and botanical garden, public parks and playgrounds, and many more sports and recreation facilities. This explains in part why Moshi’s residents spend most of their leisure time socializing at church, the market, or at home. 201

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tanzania In this chapter, I (George) frequently quote from student journals and other writings. But before describing the students’ experiences, a few words about Tanzania. Tanzania ranks 151 out of 187 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), which measures countries’ average achievements in longevity, education, and standard of living. Its low ranking should be surprising, given the country’s considerable mineral wealth; its flourishing tourism industry based on spectacular scenery, wildlife, and mountain climbing; its political stability; and the intelligence and industriousness of its population. Moshi itself is home to the Chagga tribe, a self-described business-savvy people. On closer inspection, one finds a country still coping with its colonial past—seventy years of German and British rule—and a fairly abrupt transition to independence in the early 1960s. As is typical of colonial administrations, the focus was on extracting resources in the quickest and cheapest way possible. Today, Tanzania and Moshi’s colonial infrastructure is crumbling, and there are entrenched governmental inefficiencies and corruption as well as an underfunded and restrictive educational system. Most Tanzanians live on less than two dollars a day. Most of the workforce outside the country’s cities is either engaged in subsistence farming or unemployed. What makes Tanzania a desirable place for a field program is its stability and lack of ethnic strife. The latter is remarkable given that there are 132 different tribes and ethnic groups in the country. Some, like the Maasai—the tall, lean pastoralists who wear distinctive red and blue plaid robes—are well-known to tourists and anthropology students. While each of Tanzania’s tribal groups has retained its own language, nearly all Tanzanians today speak Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa, and many people know at least some English. It is the official language of big business and higher education and the main language of tourism. Most Tanzanians identify themselves first as Tanzanians and only then by their tribe thanks in large part to the country’s first

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president, Julius Nyerere, a socialist who pushed for a strong, national identity above tribal affiliations and interests.

why africa? Why did our students choose to go on an anthropology field program in Africa, rather than a more comfortable and safer term abroad in Europe, or elsewhere in the developed world? Most said they were looking for a program that was “different,” “exotic,” “atypical,” or “more challenging.” Several added that they wanted to go to a place that they were unlikely to travel to on their own later in life. “I can always go to Europe,” explained Jason. Before leaving the United States, I asked our students what concerns they had about living in Tanzania. Most talked about the uncertainties of living with a homestay family and having to get along in Swahili. (They were required to take two semesters of Swahili: one before arriving, and one during the field program.) They also mentioned being afraid of getting sick, of having to adapt to new foods, and of living amidst poverty. “I’m guessing there will be some heart-breaking moments that will challenge some of my core beliefs about the world,” wrote Meredith. After months of anticipation and planning, and a week devoted to packing, the students arrived at Kilimanjaro International Airport on December 29, 2012. Excerpts from their journals capture their first reactions. As our plane hit the runway I peered out the window only to find darkness, with a few dots of light scattered in the distance. It was such a contrast to our arrival in Amsterdam where the city was illuminated from every corner. After deboarding the plane onto the warm and muggy tarmac on a dark runway, I looked at my fellow Union students and we all exclaimed, “We are in Africa!!!” But I think it was the moment we walked into the small airport building, smelling of sweat, that I began to comprehend that I had finally arrived in Tanzania. We had all been anticipating this for so

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long, and now we were finally breathing African air and standing on African ground. . . . Our van left the unlit, small airport parking lot and stopped at a small shop on the main road to Moshi so that we could buy bottled water. Men were sitting on makeshift benches in the dark around the shop. Several peered into our van; and said to the others still on the benches “Wazungu” [Swahili for “white person”].

For Meredith, the reality of being in Africa didn’t strike until she reached Moshi’s YMCA, where the students spent the first few nights before moving in with their homestay families. Upon opening the door to my assigned room, I saw two large mosquito nets hanging from the ceiling, and then it hit me that I really was in Africa. It was then that the fear, anxiousness, and shock of being here truly set in. I sent a text message to my mom, voicing my fears . . . and questioning WHY on earth I would have put myself up for something like this. I was wishing I could turn around and get on the next fl ight home.

first impressions When the students awoke the next morning, they went out together— all ten, as they found security in numbers—to explore the city that was to be their home for the next ten weeks. Moshi was larger and more urban than they had expected. The images some had in mind were of a quaint rural town with thatch-roofed huts. Their stereotypes seemed to have come largely from films; several mentioned Out of Africa. We wondered then if they had actually done the recommended reading or listened during orientations. The students quickly discovered that Moshi is hot, noisy, bustling, and not easy to walk around. Its sidewalks are uneven and broken. Gaping holes from missing concrete drain covers are especially treacherous at night since there are no streetlights. During the day, they encountered Maasai and Muslim herbalists selling colorful powdered medicines from glass jars, seamstresses and tailors sitting on the sidewalks creating clothing on foot-powered treadle sewing machines, and vendors selling all types of wares (secondhand

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Figure 12-1. A developed portion of downtown Moshi, Tanzania.

shoes, socks, underwear, sunglasses, DVDs, and magazines) spread out on the pavement. Some shopkeepers leave their portable generators— used for the daily power outages—on the sidewalks too. Crossing the street is perilous, since the traffic drives on the left, and there are no stoplights and few pedestrian crossings. Worse still, pedestrians have no right of way. Vehicles come first, with a pecking order that appears to be based on size: buses and trucks, followed by vans, cars, motorcycles and bicycles, and, finally, human beings on foot. The students soon adapted by avoiding intersections and crossing in the middle of the block, where they lined up next to locals and cautiously crossed with them. “The dangerous part of Moshi isn’t getting mugged,” wrote Shelby, “but being a pedestrian.” The students were mindful of the many warnings they had received about the danger of ending up in a Tanzanian hospital, where the care can be as bad as the accident. They soon learned to withhold comment on the state of Moshi’s infrastructure, however, since locals are generally proud of their city and sensitive to criticism from outsiders, which is interpreted as bragging about

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the superiority of their home country. Besides, the students had yet to fully experience the beauty of Moshi or the hospitality of its people. The upside of the students’ reconnaissance of the city was the overwhelming friendliness of the people they met along the way. Some warmly greeted them with Hujambo or Hamjambo, Swahili for “hello,” occasionally saying, “Mambo” or “Jambo” instead—the shortened slang and tourist forms of the greeting. Some shook their hands as well, which took some time since East African handshakes involve three different actions. When students rode the daladalas (private minivans), they were surprised at the feeling of community. “They hold the grocery bags or personal belongings, and even a purse of a fellow passenger who they didn’t know,” observed Joana. “No way in the world would anything like that ever happen on a New York bus.” But some of those who are so overtly friendly on the street are “flycatchers” or touts for local tour operators and curio shops. They regarded the students as tourists and, therefore, targets. In the beginning, students were defenseless against their persistent guile and often ended up purchasing trinkets at hugely inflated prices. The next day, feeling more confident about their safety, the students broke into smaller groups to continue exploring Moshi and to begin to collect their first field data at the local market. They had also discovered that moving in a large group drew undue attention and made it difficult for them to speak to people, to make decisions, or even to be served in a restaurant.

homestays On the fourth day, the students moved into their homestays. Although one student had a meltdown (a self-described “panic attack”) and insisted that she wasn’t ready to go out on her own, the others were eager to get settled. They wanted to have a space to spread out their stuff, get organized, and get their work under way. But even they were anxious about their new families and living conditions. As Keilah described in her journal,

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We drove forever down this dirt road dodging children, goats, and pikipiki (motorcycles). The drive reminded me that I am in Tanzania and of my soon-to-be isolation from the group. We pulled into an even narrower street where my host mama came out to greet us. . . . I had been warned that the home was very simple, so I had prepared myself for the worst. It was definitely small, but seemed clean and safe, so I was content. My mama was welcoming and happy to have me; our conversation that evening got on well enough with a mix of Kiswahili and English.

After Meredith was introduced to the ten members of her new extended family and congratulated on her Swahili, she was comforted by her new BiBi (grandmother), who “grabbed my hand, led me to her window, and said ‘See that? That’s my mountain, Kilimanjaro.’ Her pride in her mountain reminded me to be thankful to be here in the presence of such beauty.” Most of the homestay families were middle class, although none had hosted a foreign student before, particularly a mzungu. They turned out to be among the most caring hosts we have encountered in thirty-five years of taking students to the field. They taught the students a great deal about their culture. One family was Muslim, the rest were Christian, despite Moshi’s population being almost evenly divided. Although the city’s crime rate is not high, all of the families’ houses, except for Keilah’s very modest homestay, were set inside compounds with high walls, large metal gates, and several hefty locks to dissuade would-be burglars. Iron grilles covered all windows, and a watchdog was usually caged just inside the gate. Only the homes of the poor lacked such security, both because they had few valuables to protect and because security measures cost money. Most home compounds were spacious and contained a kitchen garden, a few papaya and mango trees, pens for animals, free-range chickens, and a courtyard of compacted dirt that was swept each morning. The interiors of the homes had cement or tile floors; shoes were always removed to avoid tracking in the ubiquitous dirt. Living room walls were usually bare, but the rooms were comfortable with plush, oversized sofas and armchairs pushed flush against the perimeter walls.

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All but one homestay had running water, but like the electricity, it was erratic. None of the families had hot water, so students got accustomed to cold showers, sometimes taken with a bucket. The toilets were mostly Indian-style “squat pots,” which were tricky to use at first. But these were relatively easy adjustments for the students to make compared to living with cockroaches and mosquitoes. The former inhabited most bathrooms and kitchens. Keilah described one encounter, which also reveals how comical the students’ squeamishness often appeared to locals. I went to brush my teeth and found a roach licking my toothbrush. I ran out and told my Baba [father], but he was confused and told me he was going to the shower. I then tried hand motions and he thought I needed a toilet plunger. Oh the miscommunications that occur here! Finally, they figured out it was a bug (the whole family was watching at this point) and Mama came in with a can of bug spray. She asked me why I was afraid. . . . Mama then picked up the dead bug and walked away leaving the bug spray with me. I heard the whole family laughing at me. I’m sure I looked the silly white girl. But oh well, at least I provided some entertainment! I really don’t know how I’m supposed to get used to all these bugs.

Far outnumbering cockroaches were mosquitoes, which carried the threat of malaria. Worldwide, 90 percent of malaria cases and 75 percent of malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, the disease kills over one hundred thousand people each year. The most vulnerable are the poor, whose housing provides less protection, who often understand less about prevention or cannot afford to purchase treated mosquito nets, and who once infected cannot afford to pay for medical care and are undernourished and more vulnerable to begin with. Malaria in turn contributes to poverty since its victims can become too debilitated to work. While our students took prophylactic “malaria pills” (usually malarone or doxycycline), these only reduce the severity of the illness should they get it. Consequently, they slept under mosquito nets, resulting in very hot and sticky nights. “At dawn, I untuck my mosquito net . . . and roll out of the sweat drenched sheets,” wrote Teddy. “Several mosquitoes fly around in the net, swollen and red with

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what is no doubt my own blood. I think back to the night before, did I swallow my malaria pill?” Most locals do without pills, instead watching for symptoms of infection and then quickly seeking medical treatment—if they can afford it. Students soon meet their neighbors on the street or while waiting for daladalas and are surprised at their friendliness. “Not only is everyone so friendly but they seem to genuinely care about what is happening in other people’s lives,” Kaitlyn wrote about her neighborhood: I told my host mom that I didn’t know most of my neighbors at home in America, and that I had never even said hello to most of them. She was shocked; she looked disgusted. She made me promise that when I returned home I would make an effort to greet them whenever I saw them.

dadas One of the anomalies of living in a poor country can be the presence of house servants, even in comparatively modest households. Called dadas (“sisters” in Swahili), the vast majority of those in Moshi were teenagers and young women who come to the city to make money for their parents, who were usually subsistence farmers in the rural areas surrounding Kilimanjaro. Although their pay is meager (about $1 per day), they are given their meals, a home, and a chance to experience life in the city. None of our students had maids at home in the United States, and they felt very uncomfortable being waited on. In some cases, however, it was the dadas with whom they developed the closest bonds.

noise A major difference between the students’ new environment and their U.S. homes was the noise. It was pervasive and came from many sources. At night, their sleep was disrupted by guard dogs that had finally been freed from their small daytime pens, with one dog’s barking setting off others in the neighborhood. Then, long before dawn, the roosters began

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to crow. A few hours later came the baying and bleating of hungry cows and goats. These are not sounds the students expect to hear in a city. Besides the animals, the local mosques called worshipers to prayer from loudspeakers atop minarets, beginning at five in the morning and repeating the process four more times during the day. Moshi apparently has no ordinances or restrictions concerning noise. Trucks and vans with loudspeakers on their roofs patrolled the streets, blaring announcements, such as reminders to pay one’s quarterly tax, calls to religious gatherings, and product advertisements. Inside most homestays, televisions and radios were left on, much as in Barbados, even when no one was watching or listening. During the four-day climb we made of 14,500-foot Mount Meru, some of the porters who were balancing heavy loads on their heads also carried portable radios in their free hand. During one rest break, while I was enjoying the view of the Arusha valley far below, one porter, in a friendly gesture, nudged his radio close to my ear, assuming I would prefer his music to the silence of the mountainside. Africans, one observer has noted, are often perplexed that Westerners, who can well afford the batteries to keep a radio playing day and night, often prefer silence instead.

heat Moshi is just three degrees south of the equator, so the sun is intense, having fewer atmospheric miles to burn through. Physiologically, it takes about two weeks for the body to adjust to a hotter climate, but the Tanzanian summer of 2012 was the hottest ever, with most days hitting 100° Fahrenheit. Even the locals complained about the sweltering heat. Everyone in Tanzania we queried said they were convinced that human actions were causing climate change. This is a huge injustice, since Africans contribute the least to global emissions yet suffer the most from increased temperatures and drought. Our students gradually adapted to the heat, but never to the point where they stopped being depleted by it. Most days in Moshi started out

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Figure 12-2. Swahili teacher Joyce Semiono (third from left), with friends and neighbors. All are members of a local “susu,” an informal savings club.

cool enough, and locals, like people in Barbados and tropical regions the world over, got up early in order to get their chores done before the day heated up. By late morning, the sun was strong enough to drive anyone who did not have to work outside indoors. Pedestrians, street vendors, and beggars moved into shade wherever possible; the tailors and seamstresses working on the sidewalks who lacked umbrellas, created cardboard awnings to try to shield themselves. The heat is made worse by the dress code. Men wear long pants; women keep shoulders and legs above the knee covered. Only children (and tourists) wear shorts. “When I’m home in the U.S. and it gets this hot,” noted Kaitlyn, “I can wear tank tops and shorts, but not here. I think it’s kind of crazy when custom prevents people from being comfortable. And think of the poor Muslim women who have to be all covered up.” By midterm, most students had begun ignoring the dress code and exposing more skin.

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time Student fieldworkers also had to get accustomed to a new sense of time, which locals referred to as “Tanzanian time” or “African time”—being late is fine. As one local noted, somewhat generously, “You Americans are always five minutes early. Europeans right on time. And we Tanzanians twenty minutes late.” Few people in Moshi wore watches, and compared to the West, there was much less concern about keeping track of time. Local businesses rarely posted hours of operation, preferring instead to be flexible about when they opened and closed. At Moshi’s big New Year’s Eve celebration, the students were surprised that there wasn’t the usual countdown. There was no clock, and nobody really knew or seemed to care exactly when midnight and the New Year arrived. But Tanzanian time is not just about timekeeping. It also refers to how Tanzanians use time. If Americans are not doing something with their time, they tend to think that they are wasting it, and furthermore, that it is important to do things efficiently. Tanzanians are comparatively unconcerned about wasting time, whether it’s their own or someone else’s. One guest speaker carried this too far, however, arriving ninety minutes late for her talk and thinking nothing of it. Polepole is a common Swahili expression used to remind people to take it easy, slow down, and not rush. It also describes an aspect of the Tanzanian disposition that is patient, calm, and unhurried, and the view that a hurried life is an unfulfilling one. “You Americans care too much about efficiency,” an Anglican minister said in the course of explaining why shopkeepers let their customers wait while they chat to others. “We Africans care about relationships.” The laid-back approach to time and the importance of relationships was also evident in lengthy greetings. Teddy described walking into town with his host brother Noah: He greets close to everyone he sees. He will often stop and have short conversations. The result is that it takes us a long time to get anywhere,

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especially when I think of the hurried rush I am usually in the U.S. where I don’t take the time to have conversations on the street.

At first, our students felt impatient and frustrated when their time was “wasted.” Kaitlyn, for example, had to wait an entire week before she could start work at her internship with an NGO that sought to discourage female genital mutilation. The office staff had just returned from their Christmas holidays and wanted a week to think about what they wanted her to do. This exasperated Kaitlyn: “. . . they expect me to sit around forever waiting for them to get good and ready.” In the same vein, Jan wrote, The taxis always arrive 20 minutes later than they say they’re going to. The daladalas never leave until they are squeezed to capacity. And everyone you greet wants to have a conversation with you. I constantly repeat in my head, ‘Patience is a virtue, patience is a virtue’ so that I don’t end up yelling at someone.

But within a few weeks, students had adjusted and lowered their expectations about how much they could get done. “You realize that you don’t have control,” explained Joana. “Things just don’t happen like you expect. At home you can plan your day but you can’t do that very well here. So you learn to go with the flow because if you don’t, it will drive you crazy.” Meshach adjusted by routinely telling his homestay family that he needed to be wherever he wanted to go a half hour before he really was supposed to arrive. This still wasn’t enough, however, to prevent him from missing his flight home. But by the end of the semester, most students had begun to appreciate the difference. Even Kaitlyn, who found it so frustrating at first, later remarked, I’ve gotten to love never having to worry about being late. . . . I have found that by no longer paying attention to what time it is, and by not having a strict schedule of things to do, I am living a more carefree life, and one that I have really learned to enjoy.

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men A feature of Tanzanian life that female students found particularly irksome, especially early on, was the presence of young men who persistently tried to pick them up. Keilah’s description of what happened as she walked to her first Swahili class is typical: I got stopped by so many guys asking me if I wanted a pikipiki [motorcycle] ride or if I wanted to be accompanied or if I would give them my number or if I would “give them a chance” and come hang out with them. It didn’t help that I was actually really lost, and had no idea where I was. I tried to appear confident, and really wanted to ask for directions, but didn’t trust any of these guys to help me. At first I found it comical and perhaps a bit flattering, but then I started to get really frustrated. All I wanted to do was to get to Swahili class and I was sick of being stopped by these young men. Some grabbed my hand, and one man literally tried to take me inside his house. . . . I just don’t understand it. Do they think all white women are loose? Do they genuinely want to get to know me and help me, or do they just see me as a lost mzungu that they can take advantage of? If I could speak more Swahili, I would have said, “Excuse me? What gives you the right to come up here, grab my hand, and say ‘hey baby’ and try to get my number? Do you think that just because I’m a mzungu, I’m loose? If you were a respectable man and actually worth my time, you wouldn’t approach me like this. Do you treat your Tanzanian sisters this way?”

Jen’s experience is perhaps the most revealing of the cultural difference in the treatment of women. Jen had planned to intern with a safari tour company in order to study trekking tourism. This is where she met Raheem, an employee at the company. Raheem persistently pursued her, making her uncomfortable, as described here by Jen: At first I thought he was just being friendly—suggesting bars and clubs that I could visit on the weekend because he knew I had only been in Moshi for a week. But, as the afternoon wore on, the questions became more pointed. He wanted to meet after Swahili class for drinks. He wanted me to come to his house on Sunday to visit. He wanted to go hiking to a waterfall.

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Unnerved by Raheem’s behavior and refusal to accept her refusals, Jen decided not to return to the safari company and found a different internship. But that was not the end of Raheem. He continued to call her many times each day. Her entreaties to stop had no effect. She asked a guest speaker on women’s issues what to do and was advised to ignore it, that “boys will be boys,” and that this was the state of gender relations in Tanzania. Our female students refused to accept this passive recommendation or the idea that such behavior should be tolerated as just a cultural difference. “It doesn’t make any difference to me that it’s a different culture,” asserted one, “it’s still not right that men treat women this way and get away with it and I wouldn’t put up with it.” As Raheem persisted in trying to reach Jen, I called him and explained how she and most American woman viewed such persistence. I told him it was inappropriate and said that if he didn’t stop, I would have to report him to his employer. Raheem was polite and apologetic on the phone and seemed to understand, but soon after he got off the line, he sent me the following text message: “Hi, I want to know what is problem if I call her. I just want to greet her! What is so bad I have done? Raheem.” He continued to call Jen and did not stop until the headmaster at the school where she was interning called him and, impersonating a Moshi police officer, told him that he would be arrested if he called one more time. The frequency with which young men in Moshi hit on our students and other white females is, in part, a consequence of tourism. It seems to occur rarely in Tanzanian towns with few tourists. Among the many European and American tourists who come to Moshi each year to work as volunteers in schools and orphanages or to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, some do become involved with local men. As anthropologist Rob Gordon has noted, for many travelers, sex with a local is the ultimate in adventure. To local men, foreign women are exotic and represent a potential goldmine: they have money, and there is the chance that a liaison may turn into something more permanent. Well-known examples exist in Moshi, as in Barbados, of local men traveling to Europe

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with a visitor, or of marrying a foreign woman and being supported by her. So the young men who hit on our students are playing the odds that they, too, might get lucky. While our female students rebuffed the offers of friendship and romance from the young men who approached them on the street, all eventually met local guys through their homestay families who became friends and whose company they enjoyed.

the daily routine of fieldwork The students’ days began not long after dawn when they got up, showered, ate, and put all the things they needed for the next eight to ten hours into their daypacks: cell phone, notebook and pen, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, bottled water, sunscreen, and a paperback book in case they were stranded. Then they walked to the nearest daladala stand to get a ride to their internship. Meredith’s description of getting to work is fairly typical: I jump into the van, climbing over people and bags to find a seat. The daladala is always cramped and hot—if I’m not sitting on someone’s lap, they are sitting on mine. By the time I get to town, I have a layer of sweat and dust on me, from ankles to forehead.

The students spend the day at their internships; most worked for local NGOs combating HIV/AIDS, teaching or caring for orphans, or promoting malaria eradication, women’s rights, or the prevention of female genital cutting. In Africa, NGOs promoting “development” are big business. In Moshi alone, there are over three hundred NGOs and forty orphanages (in part, the result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic). However, these vary in integrity and effectiveness. About one-third of Moshi’s NGOs are said to bring real benefits and to promote development, and it is generally thought that they do a better job than local government. The remaining two-thirds are roughly divided between those that are ineffective but harmless, and those that are corrupt “briefcase NGOs,” created primarily to enrich their directors.

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Figure 12-3. Student Jason Klusky relaxes with members of his internship NGO.

At the outset, students are idealistic and eager to make a contribution. They all brought materials from the States to donate locally: pens and pencils, art supplies, and books. Some NGOs put the students to good work right away; three students, for example, taught life skills, safe sex/HIV prevention, and English to underprivileged youth, and two others helped out in orphanages. But the other NGOs were slow to make any use of them. During the first few weeks, several students switched to new organizations to find a better fit and to feel they were doing something worthwhile. And one switiched to pursue a new research interest. At the end of the workday, they made their way into town for Swahili class, stopping by an Internet café to quickly check their e-mail. For safety, most returned to their homestays before dark. Evenings were a time to catch up with their homestay parents, play with the kids in the household, and carve out time to write in their journals and type up

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their field notes. Dinner was served late by American family standards—between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. Exhausted by the heat, travel, and work, most students retired soon after they ate.

lessons from the field Every field school or term abroad provides its own lessons. What students learn while on a semester in France is bound to be quite different from what they would have learned in Japan or from an anthropology term in Tanzania. After the field school ended, I asked the students to reflect on how their “thinking” or “lifestyle” had been changed by their experiences in Tanzania. While they wrote on a range of topics, some recurred. Most now viewed their own and other Americans’ comforts and materialism in a new way. “I had more possessions with me for my three-month stay,” noted Meredith, “than many of the people I met in Moshi own altogether.” Services like a clean, reliable water supply, uninterrupted electricity, and quality health care, which they had previously taken for granted, assumed new importance. Things they regarded as necessities like Internet access, iPhones, computers, air conditioning, and even hot showers, they now realized are luxuries in many parts of the world. More important, they realized that many of these material things, so-called “necessities” at home, are not necessary for happiness. Keilah, who lived in one of the most modest Tanzanian homes, wrote, One of the biggest lessons of this term was how little I need to survive and be happy. I’ve learned to wash my clothes in a bucket, take a quick—and cold—shower from a bucket, to get through an entire term with only four outfits, to live in a tiny house with little privacy, to shop in a store where there were maybe only two products to choose between, unlike America where the walls are lined with many, many different products all doing the same thing. . . . Yes, this simple Tanzanian way of life has taught me that I need very little to be happy.

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Figure 12-4. Students are instructed in bow hunting by Hadza men during an extended field trip, which involved stays with two tribal groups, the pastoralist Maasai and the hunter-gatherer Hadza.

Students also reported having a new appreciation for a slower pace of life and hoped to retain their polepole pace after returning home. When I surveyed them again, at the beginning of their second month back in the United States, most reported that they had had only limited success in changing their lives. “It’s really difficult to avoid being caught up in the rush,” reported Joana. “I loved that time and deadlines didn’t dictate people’s lives in Tanzania, but I’ve also discovered that it’s not easy for foreigners to make that switch,” noted Shelby. “I would love to say that I have taken all this to heart now that I’m home,” wrote Jen. “I’d love to say I’ve canceled my cable subscription and donated most of my clothes. I haven’t and don’t see it happening soon, but I can definitely say that I no longer place much significance on them. They are no longer important to my happiness.” The one way in which students felt they had been changed permanently by their Tanzanian experience was in becoming more adaptable. As some put it, they had “learned to go with the flow.” Kaitlin wrote:

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So much can and does go wrong [in Tanzania] that you just have to take a deep breath and take things as they come. Rhema [host sister] would constantly tell me “worry not, worry not.” . . . I now find myself less nervous or stressed out about things. When things aren’t going my way, I say to myself over and over “worry not, worry not.” Usually the reality of what I’m facing is trifl ing compared to what people in Moshi and around the world face every day. I now know that.

Meredith put it a little differently: When you get to know so many people who’ve had far more difficult things to deal with than I could ever imagine going through, yet who seem so happy, it gives you a new perspective. I think about the daladala patrons crammed so uncomfortably into those minivans, struggling to maintain their balance, sweating profusely and still you could count on them to return a smile or to laugh about my Swahili. I think of the Hadza, the hunter-gatherers that we spent time with, whose possessions are so few, limited to what they can carry. If they all could be so happy, what do I have to complain about?

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Fieldwork from Campus

While nothing can equal the experience of doing fieldwork in an unfamiliar culture, it is possible to approximate it close to home. Undertaking local fieldwork was first made popular by anthropologists James Spradley and David McCurdy in the early 1970s. In their introductory courses at Macalester College, they sent their students off campus to study various “cultural scenes” or microcultures—a neighborhood flower shop, tattoo parlor, firefighters, and even exotic dancers. The book they published, The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society, which included the best student papers, became a required text in many introductory cultural anthropology and research-methods courses and helped a generation of undergraduates discover the excitement of conducting fieldwork in their own backyard.1 Today, we also send students in our introductory anthropology classes out to do short stints of fieldwork. Two assignments have been particularly successful. One takes students off campus for a single evening of participant observation in local bingo halls; the other requires them to conduct a formal interview with an international student on campus. Our aim in both exercises is to give a taste for how anthropologists collect data in the most direct way possible—by doing it. The assignments also get students to interact with two populations 221

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they usually have little to do with or understand—the local working class and international students. Their research findings on the latter get particular attention in this chapter, but first a brief discussion of the bingo hall fieldwork.

the bingo hall: an urban cultural scene In the bingo project, students immerse themselves for one evening in the activities at a local bingo hall. The goal is to learn as much as they can about this cultural scene through participant observation, that is, by playing bingo, by observing and listening to the people around them, by asking questions, and by recording what they learn in field notes. Afterward, they write their data up as a brief ethnographic account. Observations can start in the parking lot where the better students take note of the makes and models of cars, their condition, and other details like bumper stickers, which can offer clues about social class and political attitudes. Inside the bingo hall, most students are surprised by all the specialized paraphernalia and technology associated with such a simple game, everything from the personalized bingo bags and colored “dabbers” that participants use to mark off the called numbers to the electronic display screens in front and fancy machinery that randomly selects each new bingo number. They discover, as well, the rich jargon used to describe different bingo games’ patterns: “12 pack,” “double postage stamp, ” “crazy T, ” “barbell,” and “picnic table, ” to name a few. They are even more surprised by the amount of ritual and superstition they find. Many players consider luck to be an important component of success and do their best to manipulate it. It begins for some when they arrive at the bingo hall and search for their lucky numbers in the serial numbers of the bingo cards they buy. They then make their way to their lucky seat, tape their cards to the table in the way they like, and arrange their lucky charms or “fetishes”—small ceramic elephants with upturned trunks, troll dolls, tiny Buddhas, teddy bears, rabbits’ feet, grandchildren’s photos—around them. During play, some players

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chant good-luck mantras like “Buddha, don’t fail me now,” shout out lucky numbers, or ring bells. Winners sometimes rub their winnings over their remaining bingo cards or on their arms and chest, and, if feeling generous, on their neighbors too. Occasionally, our students find themselves engaging in superstitious behavior of their own. “When I started to do well, I didn’t want my luck to change,” explained one, “so I knocked on wood, and did some of the same things I do when playing sports to give me luck. ” At the outset, most students are anxious about having to venture into an unfamiliar part of town. The largest and “best” bingo hall in Schenectady, New York (where Union College is located), is located in a rougher, working-class neighborhood that our students regard as “sketchy.” They worry about interacting with adult strangers with whom they have little in common. Most Union students grew up in affluent families and communities and arrive at the bingo hall with low expectations. On campus, some disparagingly refer to Schenectady’s largely blue-collar population as “Doids,” assume they are unfriendly, and suspect that they resent the students’ own privileged backgrounds. Some students procrastinate, waiting to the last minute to do the assignment, and then arrive late. A few talk a friend into going with them rather than venturing alone into such uncharted territory, as the assignment stipulates. Once there, they plant themselves at a bingo table and never get up, even during breaks, to explore other areas of the building or to talk to people. Most students, however, recover from their initial wariness and force themselves to begin interacting with the regulars. The bingo assignment changes students’ negative stereotypes and opinions. Most players are friendly and more than willing to show a college student the ropes. Some are flattered by the interest student fieldworkers’ show in them and what they are doing; others are puzzled by it. We advise students to explain to anyone who asks that they have come to bingo for an anthropology research assignment and that they have to write a paper about it. This usually inspires local players to be

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even more helpful. Some regulars have even given students their phone numbers and invited them to call if they needed more information or would like to come back to bingo on another evening. Our students are generally surprised at this receptiveness, which is so contrary to their expectations. During their evening at the bingo hall, they learn to listen, to ask questions, both to start conversations and to elicit information, and even to arrive at some preliminary generalizations. The research also leaves many students with a real sense of accomplishment in having ventured off-campus on their own to learn about an unknown subculture by observing and participating in it while interacting with strangers. Most also have fun. But after our students became such a familiar feature at local bingo halls that players began saying things like “Oh yes, you’re another Union College student wanting to learn about us,” we decided it was time to find a new assignment.

international students and american culture We replaced bingo with a research project that requires students to conduct a formal interview with an international student. As with the bingo assignment, the primary goal is to create a hands-on research experience. As preparation, we ask students to read some of the personalized narratives of internationals adjusting to life in America contained in Phil DeVita’s Distant Mirrors: America as a Foreign Culture. Then we ask students in small groups to reflect on their own experiences adjusting to college life as a first-year student.2 Following this, one class period is devoted to instruction on how to conduct an interview, with a lot of practical advice (for example, test your recording device beforehand, avoid interviewing in a noisy place, don’t ask more than one question at a time). Each student must develop his or her own interview guide and then arrange an interview with an international student that they do not personally know.

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Before conducting their interview, they are supposed to read about the student’s home country and search Google for images of their hometown. Once having completed the interview, they then transcribe it. They have four weeks to convert their transcript data into a ten-page narrative of the international student’s experiences and observations about American culture and campus life. In this assignment, students learn about American culture through the eyes of the international students they interview. In the field schools in Barbados, Tasmania, and Tanzania, in contrast, they learn about the local culture largely from their experiences and the constant comparisons they make between the new culture and home. From both, students learn a lot about what it means to be American. Some context about the two colleges where we teach and have used this assignment are in order before we discuss the students’ research and findings. Both Union College and the University of San Francisco are expensive private liberal arts colleges, but with a difference. Union, located in Schenectady, New York, is the oldest nondenominational college in the United States (founded in 1795) and has an undergraduate student body of 2,200. The University of San Francisco (USF) is a Jesuit university (founded in 1855) with about 6,200 undergraduates as well as 2,100 graduate students. Eight percent of Union’s student body come from abroad, while at USF the figure is 18 percent, among the highest of any U.S. college. International students come from nearly all parts of the world (forty-four countries for Union and eighty-one for USF), with the largest contingent on both campuses from Asia, particularly the People’s Republic of China. In 2015, China accounted for 38 percent of Union’s internationals and 61 percent of USF’s.3 Because so many of the international students on both campuses are from Asian countries, the following discussion sometimes privileges their experiences.

expectations One of the first questions our students ask when interviewing international students is why they chose to come to the United States to study

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and, secondarily, why they chose Union or USF. “The reason that I came to the U.S. can be summarized in one word. Education!” asserted a student from Pakistan emphatically, expressing a sentiment shared by many. Often it is the parents of the internationals who encourage them to apply to American schools, citing their resources, small classes, and quality of teaching as well as the prestige that comes with an American degree. Studying in the United States will also improve their English— the dominant language of global business and the Internet. Our American students, unless they had been on a term abroad, had never given much thought to the relative quality of an American college education. “I never really knew how our education compared to other countries,” said a student from New Hampshire, so I was very glad to hear her [Argentine interviewee] comments about classes at Union. It made me feel fortunate to be taught by people [professors] who really care about their jobs as educators, who sincerely care about their students, which I guess is not the case in many of the countries the internationals come from.

Other impressions are less flattering and sometimes take our students off guard. Many international students regard Americans as “friendly” but also “ignorant,” especially about events beyond U.S. borders. They also view America as a “violent” place, with lots of guns and “dangerous” cities. They know America is a “wealthy” society but after arrival are surprised to see so many poor and homeless people. Many of the questions our students ask internationals in their interviews have to do with what they find different about American culture and are having, or have had, difficulty adjusting to. Here are some of the things they discover.

friendliness vs. friendship Americans, internationals say, have a different conception of friendship. Internationals find the “friendliness” they encounter on campus difficult

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to interpret. “In China strangers don’t look at strangers,” remarked one student, “and people don’t hold the door open for one another like everyone does here.” Many report being confused when a passing American student greets them with, “How are you?” or “What’s up?” They may take these questions literally at first and attempt to answer, only to find that the student seldom slows down enough to hear their response. “At home,” explained an Indian student, “when someone asks you how you are doing, you must tell them. But then in India to say ‘Hi’ to random people, like here in the U.S., would be seen as weird and kind of creepy.” “It was a while,” a student from Nepal reported, “before I realized that it was just their way of saying hi, and nothing more. They didn’t really want to know how I was. Nobody wants a real response.” In many parts of the world, as we saw in Tanzania and Barbados, it is impolite not to take the time to stop to exchange pleasantries and even to inquire about a person’s family. The gradual realization that most American students’ initial friendliness is merely a ritualized greeting and not real friendliness causes many internationals to conclude that Americans are superficial and insincere. One of our students responded to the internationals’ confusion this way: When I first heard this, I found it amusing. “Well of course you don’t actually talk about how you are! Everybody knows that.” But when I really thought about it, I realized the absurdity of it. Why would someone ask a question and expect no response? This is an aspect of American culture that I had never thought twice about before doing my interview.

Our students are also surprised to learn that the internationals’ concepts of “friendship” are different from their own. Most American students claim to have many friends, but from the perspective of internationals, these friendships are not deep. A Vietnamese female said, I don’t feel like I belong [here]. At home [Vietnam] we have a special word for friendship that nearly translates to “soulmate.” I don’t see that here. American friends always act friendly and warm with one another, but I don’t think that many are really very close or really care about the other’s

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interest. [The difference] may be that in Vietnam you have only a few close friends while in the U.S. it’s common to have twenty or more friends.

Some internationals expressed amazement at the number of Facebook “friends” American students proudly collect. “Some of my classmates have more than a thousand friends,” proclaimed a skeptical Argentine. “American students are walking Facebook profiles,” asserted a disgruntled Nepalese. “Social media is so huge. They have an image of themselves and are concerned with how they look to other people. They’re focused on themselves. On the outside, almost everybody is friendly here, but it’s very difficult to find an actual, real friend.” A Chinese male described walking across Union’s campus with an American classmate, watching him say, “Hi” to many of the students they passed. He asked him if all these people were his “friends.” “Yes,” the American replied, “but we might never hang out or go out together.” To the Chinese student, this revealed a fundamental cultural difference. “In China, we don’t have so many friends. But the ones we do have are close, lifelong friends who you feel deeply obligated to and who will do anything for you. We don’t just collect friends the way you do.” A Russian student who had also attended high school in the United States claimed, “Many of what Americans call friends, I think of as acquaintances.” According to a student from Ecuador, “At home we have fewer friends but they are deeply obligated and you are friends for life.” “At home, friendship is a lifetime sentence,” explained a Palestinian. “It is a sacred duty.” When we talk about the students’ interview findings in class, some of our students are not just surprised about the criticisms of American friendship, but defensive. “I think personally that none of my friendships with people at school are superficial,” said a Union student. But other students found truth in the criticism: “I didn’t really expect the comments the internationals made about American friendship, but after reflecting on it I now feel that our culture places more emphasis on appearances than on being genuine. We want to appear friendly and as though we have a lot of friends.”

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parents: peers or authority figures? Another relationship that comes up in interviews is the one American students have with their parents. International students are surprised by its casual nature. Americans, they say, seem to treat their parents like they treat one another and sometimes worse.8 Many report being shocked when they overhear American students call their parents by their first names or, worse, argue with their mother or father on the phone or talk back to them when they visit. “Some of my American friends are rude [to their parents],” reported a female from Ghana. “I heard them . . . say ‘fuck’ and ‘what the hell, mom.’ Never in a million years would I raise my voice at my mom or say those things. In Ghana you don’t ever, ever swear at your mom.” The relationships don’t seem as respectful. Some internationals, especially those from Asia and South Asia, noted that American parents seem to have less influence or control over their kids compared to parents in their home countries, who frequently inform their sons and daughters what they will major in and what profession they will pursue. “In China, people care more about parents’ opinion,” commented one student. A Taiwanese student explained why in his case: “They [parents] know more about society and have experience in how it works, so it makes sense for them to tell me what I need to do.” Some American students challenge the characterization that they are disrespectful and not as close to their parents as are internationals. “I find it hard to believe that they [internationals] have closer ties with their families,” asserted one student. “I am very close to my parents and I have many friends who are very close with their families.” But other students see truth in the internationals’ observations. “I assumed that comfortable and intimate families were universal, based on my own experiences with my parents,” wrote a Union student, “and based on television shows like Gilmore Girls or Modern Family. But I can now see how the international students feel that American children are too

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comfortable with their parents—that we interact with them in the same way we interact with friends. I think this disrespect connects with American individualism.”

individualism? Some internationals also suggest that the kind of relationship American students have with their parents has a lot to do with the value they place on individualism, personal freedom, and autonomy. While individualism is usually thought to mean being independent and self-reliant, some international interviewees link it to a variety of other American attitudes and behaviors, not all of them positive. Many praise American campus life for its openness and tolerance of diversity—people’s ability to be themselves. But they are critical of behavior they regard as “selfish,” such as being loud in the dorms or on the street at night, not flushing shared toilets, or not cleaning a shared shower. A student from India described how “inconsiderate” it was of a friend’s American roommate to kick him out of their shared bedroom whenever his girlfriend came over, forcing his friend to sleep on a couch. “I think students here [USF],” said a Japanese male, “try too hard to achieve their own individual identity . . . and don’t think about community, don’t place value on what’s good for the collective. In Japan, people usually make decisions based on group interest and sometimes will sacrifice their own individual value to achieve group interest. I don’t see much of that here.” Some internationals also comment on what they regard as the contradiction between American students’ cherished individualism and their lack of well-defined personal beliefs. “Back home [Karachi] everyone is aware of events going on across the globe,” said a student about her college classmates in Pakistan. Everyone has a strong opinion on politics, religion, environment, sports. Students here are not as much interested in the world affairs. Their knowledge about the current world events starts and ends with football, with sports. Most of the students I met at the ISIS discussion were there only for

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[free] food. The only opinions that they had were what others were saying and they agreed on everything. . . . My [American] roommate cannot even have a conversation with me about U.S. politics.

In general, our students did not push back against the criticism that they know little about the world outside the United States.

drinking and getting drunk Drinking is the area of American campus life about which student interviewers hear the most criticism. More than any other behavior, binge drinking and drunkenness surprise and turn off many international students. Rather than moderate drinking with dinner and over conversation, as many internationals are accustomed to at home, they watch American students, men and women, drink large quantities of alcohol at parties with the intention of getting drunk. “My [Union] roommates start getting drunk right after the class on Friday,” an Indonesian told his interviewer. “[On weekends] I have never seen them doing anything interesting rather than partying. Back home, it is more ‘chill.’ We do drink and dance, but we go around to interesting places and talk.” “At home there’s never this idea of ‘let’s get messed up tonight,’ ” observed a student from Nepal, “which seems to be the common attitude here.” “I just don’t understand why so many American kids are crazy obsessed over wanting to get as drunk as possible,” mused an Afghani. “I don’t see how that’s enjoyable or fun to make yourself sick and not remember the things that happened from the night before.” Two female internationals told their interviewees that they are not interested in dating American guys because of the way they behave when they drink. While most internationals were shocked by and dislike the drinking scene on campus, to a few—like those from the United Kingdom and Australia—it is not altogether different from home. Many of the international students interpret the drinking behavior they observe as a sign of “immaturity,” which they speculate might be a result of the late legal drinking age of twenty-one. The internationals

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had usually learned to drink while still living at home, often at the dinner table and with parents and siblings. “I’m really amazed so many people here [USF] have never had a sip of alcohol with their parents,” remarked a Haitian student. “By the time we go off to college,” explained a German, “we have grown out of it. In Germany the drinking age is eighteen and minors under eighteen can legally drink alcohol with parents. By university, it’s no longer the forbidden fruit. It doesn’t have the same appeal that it does to American college kids.” “When they [authorities] say you can’t do something, that’s when you want to do it most,” explained an Iranian student. In our anthropology classes, most students accept the accuracy of the internationals’ descriptions of campus drinking, including the characterization that it is “immature.” A few, however, are genuinely surprised to learn that students in other cultures don’t drink the way they do. They had just assumed that college students everywhere in the world—at least the Western world—are like themselves. “For the first time I realized how stupid we act by trying to get as inebriated as possible,” wrote a Union College hockey player, “and a lot of it just to ‘open up’ and be able to converse with others. Jamaal [his Afghan interviewee] made me realize that if American college students could switch our social life to focus more on conversation and less on binge drinking how much better that would be.” The few students who resist the international students’ characterizations of campus drinking usually do so by pointing out that some internationals also binge drink. One Union student nonsensically retorted in class, “I think it’s very easy for them [internationals] to pick on Americans because we don’t know a lot and most of us only speak English.” Other students blame excessive drinking on the pressures of their academic work. “I really think a lot of it has to do with the stress levels that students are under,” reflected a freshman economics major. Still others attribute it to social pressure. “I think many students participate in binge drinking because they feel pressure from their peers,” explained a student from Los Angeles, “not because they enjoy the behavior.”

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casual dress, casual sex The casual way American students dress is another facet of campus life that many foreign students, particularly those from Asia and the Middle East, comment on in the interviews. It is also something that some of them find liberating and begin to adopt. “Coming to the U.S., I couldn’t imagine wearing a pair of leggings,” admitted an Indian female. “I thought, ‘Why would a person wear leggings when it lets people see your whole bum?’ But now I wear leggings all the time. But I won’t do it when I go home.” But most surprising to many internationals are the revealing outfits—short shorts and skirts and low-cut tops—female students often wear on campus and to class. Most, initially at least, regard this as inappropriate; some describe the extreme versions as “provocative,” if not “slutty.” “The girls here show a lot more skin than you’d ever see in my country,” said one student. “Even in warm weather,” explained a Chinese female, “we do not wear shorts or tank tops to class. When it is hot, we wear thinner materials, still covering up.” “At home in Japan,” said a female student from Tokyo, revealing an additional cultural difference, “girls want to appear cute and young. Here, they want to dress sexy and mature.” Ironically, wearing short skirts, low-cut or tight-fitting tops, and second-skin leggings or tights does not mean that American coeds are comfortable with nudity, as we have discovered when taking students on terms abroad to Europe. When they visit French beaches or East European spas where women publicly sunbathe or swim topless or in the nude, they are very reluctant to remove their own clothing and usually do not. One student expressed great surprise at seeing European women, even those who “did not have great bodies,” removing their clothes. Similarly, a Finnish student at USF reported that the American students in her dorm are shocked when she runs between her room and the bathroom wearing only a towel or leaves the shower area in the nude.

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“Hooking up” or casual sex between students who often barely know each other is another campus behavior that international students talk about. An Iranian student was aghast the first time he saw his American roommate openly having sex in their shared dorm room with a girl he had just picked up at a party. While alcohol and drugs can be found at parties in Tehran, he said, the idea of students having sex at parties, and even kissing in public, was totally foreign to him. “In China, if two people are having sex,” noted a male student from Shanghai, “they are in a relationship. Here, it seems like sex comes before relationships. In China there is no such thing as ‘one-night stand.’ ” A young woman from China observed that “American boys really like to ‘hook up’ ”; and according to her interviewer, “she was apprehensive about even uttering the phrase.” It is not only American students’ casual attitudes toward sex that astonishes many internationals, but also their willingness to talk about it. In the words of a Burmese student, “At home it’s not just that girls don’t have sex before they get married; if they do, it brings great shame on their family. So no girl or boy would ever talk in the open about having sex like they do here.” During class discussion about their research findings, our students are generally uncomfortable talking about the “hook-up” or “hooking up culture” on campus, other than saying that it is often associated with excessive drinking.4

food “Junrui came to life and showed the most emotion when I brought up the topic of food,” wrote Alex about her interview with a Chinese student. “I simply asked her, ‘Do you enjoy the food here?’ She wildly exclaimed ‘No, No, No!’ and went on to explain that at home the food is more tasteful, more flavorful, more colorful, and healthier.” International students frequently complain that American food is overly processed, “greasy” or “oily,” and bland. Even the rice, Asian students tell their interviewees, tastes different in the United States. “The dining hall rarely serves the type of rice that I have spent my entire life consuming,” lamented a

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Union student from Cambodia. Apparently, even when the internationals venture off campus to eat at an ethnic restaurant, they often find the dishes disappointing. “They don’t seem to have the same spices,” concluded an Indian student at USF about a restaurant she patronizes, although she still finds eating there better than eating on campus. Somewhat less surprising are comments about the size of portions served in the United States, whether in the dining hall or at a restaurant off campus. Invariably, they are larger than in other parts of the world. “Just look at this,” exclaimed a Londoner during his interview, pointing to the muffin he was eating. “It’s double the size of any muffin at home. It’s nearly the size of the average human stomach.” When eating out, one Chinese student said he ordered off the children’s menu whenever possible. “Everything here is one size larger than at home,” said a Peruvian. “It’s quantity versus quality,” summarized a Swiss student.

on being interviewed What did the international students think about being interviewed? Almost without exception, they enjoyed it.5 It’s the first time many had had an extended conversation with an American student. Some internationals agreed to be interviewed for this reason, pointing out that American students seldom show any interest in them. Several opined that the interview assignment should be required of every American student “to push them to learn something about the international students they live among and learn to feel more comfortable with people from other cultures.” Instead of interviewing a fellow international student, we encouraged an anthropology student from India to survey a sample of the international students her classmates had interviewed to get their reactions. She found that most “were surprised about how many of their feelings about American culture came out during the interview; sometimes thoughts they were not aware of beforehand.” She also reported that they were surprised and pleased at how receptive American

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students had been to the negative comments they made about American and campus culture. The positive opinions that internationals had of their interviewers, and of the interview experience, are in stark contrast to the fears many students have before conducting their interview. Some are apprehensive about getting enough information to write the required ten-page paper. But mostly, they are fearful that they will ask a question that will upset their interviewee or that will come across as naïve. “I am uncomfortable asking personal questions to a student I don’t know and then writing about it,” said Hayley. “I’m scared that I’ll ask a question that seems naïve or offensive.” Some other typical comments were: “I don’t like digging into someone’s life, putting them on the spot.” “I might make them nervous and maybe they will lie about their feelings. . . .” “I’m nervous that I won’t ask all the right questions, and I don’t like having to do this alone.” “I’m worried the person might be shy and not fully open to share.” Robert, who admitted being fearful of “awkward silences,” thought that allocating ninety minutes for the interview was far too much time. “In my opinion a 20-minute interview would be plenty to address these questions [his interview guide].” In the end, his interview lasted over an hour, and he wrote in his final paper that he wished he’d had time to conduct a follow-up interview to fill in the blanks. One of the rewards of this research assignment for us, as instructors and anthropologists, is that it makes students more aware of the international students in their midst and of the challenges they face in adjusting to a new culture. “It made me go outside of my comfort zone, and open my eyes to cultural differences,” wrote Adam. “I’ve only ever known America, specifically Massachusetts, so I loved learning about another way of life.” “There are several international students in my hallway that I’ve become friendly with,” Susan wrote, “but there was a side to them that I had not seen and was not familiar with before doing this interview. I’ve learned a lot about how they live and what they miss about home and how being here is different for them.” The interview

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assignment also gives international students a sense, even if temporary, of being appreciated. In some cases, it results in friendships across the cultural divide with lasting rewards for both parties. Gregory got along so well with his interviewee from Thailand that she invited him to her home in Chang Mai over the winter break. There she showed him around and introduced him to Thai culture up close. The interview assignment also gives students a better understanding of their own culture and makes them aware of their ethnocentrism. The assignment also teaches a valuable research and life skill—namely, how to interview and talk to people in depth. “I never realized how much information could be learned outside the classroom, from a single interview,” wrote Dylan. Best of all it also allows both interviewer and interviewee to look in the mirror and at least partially reassess their views of another culture.

14

The Changing Nature of Fieldwork

This final chapter pulls together some of the threads that run through the preceding narratives and looks at how fieldwork has changed, and continues to change. The most obvious difference concerns the settings in which anthropologists do research. Fifty years ago, most fieldwork still took place in tribal and peasant societies—the places where anthropology came of age and for which it was well known. The smallscale and comparative lack of complexity (that is, less intracultural variation) in these communities made studying them holistically feasible. Studying a traditional culture, especially one that had not been well described before, was regarded as having more value than conducting research in the West. And it was believed that the fieldworker would have more “objectivity” as an outside observer if he or she were working in an unfamiliar culture (most anthropologists were Westerners from North America or Europe). Back then, graduate students believed that studying a remote, traditional culture would enhance their prospects of getting an academic job. This belief was reinforced for us at UCSB when a bright and wellpublished assistant professor was passed over for promotion largely because he had done his field research in a California farming community, as opposed to an African, Latin American, or Asian village or on 238

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an American Indian reservation, like the other cultural anthropologists in the department. The research that we later did on tourism and baseball would have been unthinkable back then; even doing our dissertation research in Europe, among Irish Travellers, was deemed less anthropologically authentic than fieldwork conducted in a rural “Third World” setting. It was also deemed to be somewhat “soft” since, despite the physical hardships of spending a year in a six-foot-by-ten-foot horse-drawn covered wagon, we did not have to learn a foreign language, much less an unwritten one, or deal with isolation and health concerns like malaria and dysentery. Doing our doctoral fieldwork in Ireland, however, was still more deserving, in the eyes of our mentors, than studying an ethnic group in the United States (the traditional domain of sociologists) or, much worse, conducting doctoral research in an archive. Unlike today when many young American and European anthropologists work in developed societies, when we began, conducting research in a remote or difficult place was a major attraction of doing anthropology. Susan Sontag, writing in 1963 about Claude Lévi-Strauss’s studying tribes in Brazil, characterized anthropology as one of the rare intellectual vocations that required courage, love of adventure, and physical hardiness—as well as brains.1

the etiquette of fieldwork The ethics of field research have changed as well. As described in chapter 6 (Newfoundland), researchers today must obtain advance approval for their fieldwork from institutional review boards. And once in the field, they are also expected to acquire formal “informed consent” from their subjects. Earlier, most researchers gave little thought to requesting such permission. Often there were language barriers, but even where communication was not an issue, it could be difficult to explain the aims and methods of social research to people with little or no experience of it. An understanding of what the researcher was attempting to do came

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in the course of watching and being a participant in the anthropologist’s fieldwork. In the 1970s, it would have been challenging for us to explain our research intentions to Irish Travellers and obtain their permission in advance of being there. The vast majority were illiterate at the time, and there were no Traveller organizations or recognized leaders to consult. We could only explain that we wanted to live with Travellers in order to learn what their lives were like and planned to write a book. Generally, most anthropologists presumed that it would be okay to just show up and then ask on the spot if they could stay—and usually it was okay. Of course, the power differential between the typically white anthropologist who is college-educated and who comes from the same social class of those in authority or with power locally made refusals unlikely. It wasn’t until I (George) did a study for the National Park Service in Alaska that I traveled to a Tlingit village in advance to meet with elders and seek their consent. Similarly, Sharon met with Tlingit elders to present the idea of making an ethnographic film well before undertaking it. In the early days of anthropology, it was more important that fieldworkers “check in” with the other anthropologists who had worked in the region. A territorial and proprietorial “those are my people” attitude was not uncommon, and many anthropologists expected newcomers to consult with them. Today, we do sometimes hear from graduate students planning to do research among Irish Travellers or Barbadian villagers. But they are not seeking our approval, nor should they be; rather, they are interested in getting practical advice, literature suggestions, or the names of individuals they might contact who could be helpful. Increasingly, anthropologists today involve the people whom they study in their fieldwork. This helps to democratize fieldwork and distance anthropology from its colonial beginnings. As described in chapter 4 (Alaska), I stumbled upon the benefits of collaboration accidentally in Dry Bay when, to gain the cooperation of recalcitrant white fishermen, I promised to give each a draft of my report for their comments

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and to note any objections in the final version. It proved to be an enormously successful strategy, both in getting people’s cooperation and in producing a more accurate study. In all subsequent research, wherever possible we have given people transcripts of our tape-recorded interviews and encouraged them to make corrections or additions.

informant, teacher, interlocutor? In recent years, anthropologists have grown uncomfortable with the term “informant” to describe the people whom we interview and who help us in other ways in the field. The association of “informant” with law enforcement and FBI investigations can make fieldwork sound like a covert activity, which it isn’t and never should be. The term “informant” also implies a hierarchical relationship, which was often unintentionally true of early field research in colonial or former colonial settings. Most researchers were white and came from a politically dominant “First World” country, while their research subjects were often “Third World” peoples of color. Local regard for hierarchy could sometimes be seen in my Barbados research where a few village elders persisted in addressing me as “Mr.,” no matter how many times I insisted on their using my first name. Unfortunately, no one has yet come up with a generally accepted alternative to “informant.” Some use “interlocutor.” Others use “teacher,” as “in the words of my Gypsy teachers. . . ..” A few use “key cultural consultant” or merely “cultural consultant” or, in the case of coauthored publications, “collaborator.” Part of the problem is finding a single term that describes the different relationships that anthropologists have with the people they live among and study. Some people become real teachers or mentors, some work as research assistants or interpreters, while other people are consulted only occasionally or impart information casually as friends while hanging out with the anthropologist. None of the terms mentioned above work equally well for all these relationships.

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the tools of fieldwork The technology of fieldwork has also changed and, with it, how anthropologists acquire and record their data. Prior to the 1970s, most anthropologists wrote their field notes by hand in notebooks. Typewriters had been around for a long time, but not until they became lighter and more portable did they become common in the field. In 1969, I dragged along a Smith Corona electric typewriter to the highland Mexican village I would be living in, but there was no power in our dwelling, forcing me to write my notes by hand—and by candlelight. By the 1980s, typewriters were giving way to “word processors”—quasi-computers similar to typewriters but with a screen, a few formatting and printing options, and the ability to save documents on a memory card or diskette. For a decade, our field-school students in Barbados typed their field notes on word processors. These were superseded by personal computers. The Osborne and the Kaypro II were the first portables, more aptly described as “luggables.” Both machines had tiny monochromatic screens and only 64 kB of memory. Our first Kaypro, which we took to Alaska, was the size of a small suitcase and weighed twenty-nine pounds. The advantage of such machines was often compromised in the field by an irregular power supply—at times surging, at times sagging, and at other times down altogether. In Barbados, brownouts (voltage drops) often caused our computer to shut down and our lights to dim to candle strength.2 Compared to these early computers, today’s lightweight, reliable, lightning-speed PCs are a marvel. Of equal value to today’s fieldworkers is an incredible array of software that can manage, code, and organize one’s field notes.3 In a nanosecond the researcher can create a field note index, whereas when we returned from our Irish Traveller fieldwork in 1972 it took us two weeks to index our notes by hand. Today, software exists that can help a researcher analyze his or her data.4 Some argue that the way field data are recorded influences the information gathered, just as the way data are collected (for example, participant observation versus interviewing) can influence it. Research by psychol-

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ogists C. R. Brewin and H. Lennard has shown that different parts of the brain are used when typing versus when writing longhand.5 Apparently, “long handing” makes one write more purposefully, and when describing stressful experiences, it results in greater expression of negative feelings. The stylistic benefits of writing longhand have caused some writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, to abandon their computers and return to the pen. Anthropologist Charlotte Davies argues that, like everything else in ethnographic research, the use of computers should be thoroughly evaluated for their effect on the research.6 This seems like an admirable goal, although I wouldn’t have a clue how my own current use of a laptop and speech recognition software (Dragon) to dictate my field notes influences the data I end up with. As anthropologist M. D. Fischer has concluded, however, using computers increases efficiency in recording data, which enables fieldworkers to do better ethnography.7 The Internet now also provides fieldworkers with access to all manner of useful information while in the field: everything from blogs and newspaper accounts to scientific literature, from aerial photographs and Google maps to YouTube videos. This is quite unlike earlier anthropology, in which research was divided into two distinct phases. The first phase, the “lit review,” involved reading and mastering the literature on the society and topics to be studied before entering the field; the second was the fieldwork itself, that is, immersing yourself in the culture and collecting your own data. With access to the Internet today, the literature review often continues during fieldwork, and a significant amount of new data can be generated from it. Anthropologists are now discovering that even Facebook postings can be a valuable source of field data, offering access to everything from local gossip to field-site images. At the 2017 annual meetings of the Association of Social Anthropology of Oceania, an entire session, and one of the best attended, was devoted to discussions of how anthropologists were making use of Facebook postings. Facebook, as well as e-mail and Skype, also allow anthropologists to keep up on people’s lives after they leave the field.

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Many archives today have digitized their collections, making it possible for anthropologists to search for documents and images from the comfort of home or office, sometimes a continent away. Google images and maps also make it possible for anthropologists to examine potential field sites before ever setting foot in the country or region of interest. Images from Google Earth gave our field-school students in Tasmania and Tanzania a sense of the place and living conditions before they left the United States. In the words of anthropologists Gustaaf Houtman and David Zeitlyn, “information technology has collapsed the geographical divide between home and the field site.”8 The ability to communicate with family and friends while away through e-mail, social media, and Skype can reduce a fieldworker’s homesickness and culture shock. It also enables anthropologists to maintain contact with people in their field site after they leave. In the pre-Internet era, the only way to verify facts, to flesh out data, or to seek clarifications was to return to the field, which was often too timeconsuming or expensive to be practical. A colleague at McGill University lost his teaching position because he had so many gaps in his data that he was unable to complete his dissertation. Today, he might be able to gather enough of the missing information remotely. While working on this book, we’ve exchanged several dozen e-mails with former informants and colleagues in Ireland, Alaska, England, Japan, and Barbados to check facts or flesh out our recollections. We were also able to send drafts of chapters to be critiqued by people in our former field sites. In taking students to the field, however, we have discovered a significant downside to the Internet. It reduces the students’ immersion in the local culture. By maintaining regular contact with family and friends at home through social media and Skype, as well as cell phone calls, they have less need to seek out locals for companionship. During our last Barbados field program in 1999, when most of our students had Internet access in their homestays for the first time, there was a dramatic

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increase in the amount of contact they had with people back home and a disconcerting decline in the number and depth of friendships they developed with people in their host communities.9 In the pre-Internet era, when telephone calls were also expensive, the only way students communicated with home was through letters and postcards, which they did not do very often. The emergence of small, inexpensive audiotape recorders and the compact cassette in the 1950s and 1960s represented another technology breakthrough for anthropology, which prizes recording natives’ or insiders’ perspectives on life and culture and, of course, their language.10 We took tape recorders to our first research sites in Mexico and Ireland but made little use of them other than for local entertainment when children persistently begged us to record their voices and songs. But later, when conducting lengthy life-history interviews, they were essential. Still later, we learned to dictate our field notes into pocket tape recorders and have someone transcribe the tapes—which meant an enormous savings in time. It was possible to dictate notes at any time and in almost any place, even while lying on the grass or driving. Without a tape recorder, fieldworkers typically have time to write down only snippets of information as “jotted notes” while out and about, and then must wait until they return to their room to type them up as full field notes. Between the initial observations or interviews and the typing up, some details are invariably forgotten. Digital photography, which first became widely available in the early 1990s, now enables fieldworkers to record thousands of images (and video) of myriad aspects of community life and material culture at virtually no cost. This is an enormous advantage over the film cameras and expensive slide films commonly used in the predigital era. In the 1970s, the cost of a single roll of slide film and its processing was about $10 (about $70 at today’s prices), or about $2 per image. As a result, most fieldworkers were very selective and took far fewer images than today. Selfies were unheard of.

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paradigm shift The concept of culture that influenced most fieldwork when we started out stressed coherence and uniformity. It was assumed that people in the small, rural places that most anthropologists studied thought pretty much alike and viewed the world in much the same way. Hence, anthropologists expected to find a fair degree of homogeneity or internal consistency in the behavior and values of the people being studied. They were aware of variation, of course, as even small-scale societies, like those in Polynesia, could be hierarchical and ranked. Minority cultures or ethnic groups, like Irish Travellers, lived within larger societies that had social classes and marked rural-urban differences. One of the debates we had studied in graduate school was the Redfield-Lewis controversy over the fundamental nature of the Mexican village of Tepotzlan and its residents. Was it homogeneous and harmonious to the degree that Robert Redfield, as a single researcher, had found it? Or were there disharmony and significant internal variation as Oscar Lewis and his associates later found? This discrepancy had pointed out the effect that differences in an anthropologist’s perspective and the mode of research (for example, single researcher versus interdisciplinary team) can have on the data collected and how they are interpreted. In the 1970s, anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Paul Rabinow began to more fully discuss the ways that cultures, even so-called traditional ones, were not entirely homogeneous nor integrated wholes. In fact, they were often quite heterogeneous, messy, and emergent.11 Anthropologists have always sought to understand how different elements of a social system influence one another. In the 1960s, the paradigm of functionalism, despite its flaws, still influenced how most anthropologists tried to understand culture, and it shaped how they conducted their fieldwork.12 In the field, they sought not just to describe cultural behavior and beliefs but also to discern the connections or linkages between them. In my early research on the rural-urban migration of Irish Travellers and their settlement in the city, for example,

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I tried to connect changes in marriage patterns to the new social environment of large and more socially heterogeneous city camps. A graduate-school colleague, Jim Eder, remembered, “We learned to attend to the ‘interconnectedness of things’ in as open-minded and detailed a fashion as possible, without being pushed in any particular theoretical direction.” This attention to the interconnectedness of things also meant that fieldwork was more “holistic” than it is today. That is, anthropologists collected data on a wider range of cultural behaviors and beliefs. We took notes on everything, no matter how unrelated the subject might seem to our primary research interests. Among Irish Travellers, we gathered data and wrote field notes on everything from economics to religion to folk tales. Since Travellers had not been studied in-depth before, there was an added incentive to do so. The desire of most anthropologists at the time was to do good ethnography, regardless of their research problem or focus. In his memoir, David Brokensha, one of our mentors at UCSB, wrote about his graduate advisor E. E. EvansPritchard’s visit to his field site in Ghana. David was struggling to find a focus in his fieldwork when Evans-Pritchard admonished him, “David, you have taken up the time of many people here. They have been kind and welcoming. You owe it to them to write as full and as accurate an account as you can.”13 The emphasis on writing “full” accounts of the culture one was studying undoubtedly contributed to the importance of field notes, which had an almost sacred quality. They were believed to be an essential prerequisite to writing a dissertation or book. When we started, we were expected to regularly mail carbon copies of our field notes back to our dissertation advisors, both for feedback and safekeeping—God forbid anything happened to your field notes. Today, field notes are no longer the sine qua non of successful fieldwork. In fact, in his popular guide to doing fieldwork, The Professional Stranger, Michael Agar states that field notes are “the most overrated thing since the Edsel.” While most anthropologists would strongly disagree with Agar, it is clear that

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their importance has waned for a variety of reasons. A lot of modern research in anthropology is more narrowly focused, and often of an applied nature, in contrast to the early emphasis on holism. And as mentioned earlier, it is now much easier to fill in missing information via Skype and e-mail. The importance of theory in anthropology has fluctuated over time. It was paramount in the nineteenth century when the theory of “unilinear cultural evolution” posited a sequence of stages through which all cultures had evolved. As noted in chapter 1, this was the era of “armchair” anthropology and grand theorizing and speculation. Instead of conducting fieldwork, anthropologists relied upon the accounts of missionaries, explorers, and traders as “data.” The disconnect between evolutionary theory and the empirical reality of cultures on the ground, as well as its racist underpinning, led to its wholesale rejection and set the stage for long-term fieldwork, particularly participant observation, as the hallmark of cultural anthropology. Inspired by Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, cultural anthropologists now concentrated on doing solid ethnography instead and regarded theory with suspicion.14 By the time we entered the field in the 1970s, theory was respectable again but not considered more important than doing solid holistic fieldwork and writing good descriptive ethnography. In recent years, theory has regained its stature, to the point that there is now a rift in anthropology between theory and empirical investigation. “There is an intellectual division of labor,” notes Noel Dyck, “that often privileges those who concern themselves primarily with theory and dismisses fieldworkers who are primarily concerned with collecting and assembling social facts as ‘atheoretical empiricists.’ ”15 Certainly, anthropology has become much more diverse. The traditional four “subfields” (archaeology, biological, linguistic, and cultural anthropology) are now five, with the addition of applied anthropology, and each has spawned a host of smaller, and more specialized fields. In cultural anthropology alone, the American Anthropological Association now has thirty-eight sections or associations, including nutritional

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anthropology, urban and transnational anthropology, and even the anthropology of consciousness. There are also associations for each of the world’s major geographical regions—Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. Some associations are based in part on the identities of the anthropologists belonging to them, such as the Association of Black Anthropologists, the Association of Senior Anthropologists, and the Association for Queer Anthropology. Many of these organizations have their own annual meetings, newsletters, and often a journal. There are also “interest groups” on topics like tourism and sport. Not all anthropologists embrace this diversification. Some see it as “fragmentation” and worry about the long-term viability of anthropology and the commitment of its practitioners to the discipline.16 Some critics claim that anthropology has lost its “unity” and bemoan the lack of a “core” of anthropological knowledge that binds its practitioners. They say there are no figures like Franz Boas or Bronislaw Malinowski today that all anthropologists read. Some even claim anthropology has lost its intellectual vigor. Anthropologists like us who look favorably upon this proliferation of new interests, perspectives, and methods are inclined to view it as progress—the evolution of the field, rather than its fragmentation. We view it as an inevitable consequence of the world itself having become more complex: at once more fragmented and more interconnected, with the distinctions between cultures blurred. New media and communication technologies now enable people to maneuver between languages and cultures as part of their everyday lives. In response, anthropologists have developed new interests, are rethinking basic concepts such as kinship, society, and culture, and are evolving new methods for studying them.17 The need for anthropologists to help make sense of this new rapidly changing, complex, globalized world is greater than ever.

a ppendi x Discussion Questions

1: the fieldwork tradition 1. In what ways is fieldwork a rite of passage, turning graduate students into professional anthropologists? 2. How do anthropologists gather data? How is this different from other social scientists? 3. Why were anthropologists once reluctant to describe their fieldwork? 4. What can readers gain by learning about researchers’ field practice and experiences and their relationship to the people studied?

2: first fieldwork: irish travellers 1. What do you learn about field research from this account? 2. What does this chapter reveal about relationships created between anthropologists and the people they study and live among? 3. What kind of preparation did the anthropologists do before arriving in the field? 4. What were the benefits and/or the drawbacks of a couple doing field research together? 5. Was it appropriate for Sharon Gmelch to inform Traveller women about birth control when the government prohibited it and the Church regarded it as a sin?

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3: politics and fieldwork: nomads in english cities 1. How is applied research different from “pure” research? 2. How are prejudice and discrimination against Gypsies and Travellers in England manifested? 3. Why do you think settled society is often hostile toward nomadic groups like Gypsies? 4. How did politics influence this research? 5. Did the Department of the Environment have a right to rewrite and alter the findings of the anthropologists’ report in their “executive summary” document? Why or why not?

4: applying anthropology in an alaskan national park 1. How is the applied research described in this chapter different from that conducted among Gypsies in England? 2. Anthropologists involved in field research often face dilemmas. As social scientists, they try to be as “value-free” as possible. Yet as humanists they are concerned with the issues that affect the people they study. Can you find examples of this in the Alaskan research described in this chapter? 3. What were some of the real physical dangers in this fieldwork? Was the anthropologist unprepared for dealing with them? 4. What was the benefit of the anthropologist giving copies of his draft report to the fishermen in Dry Bay? Should this be done in all field settings? Can you think of situations where that would not be possible or advisable? 5. What was the turning point in the anthropologist’s relationship with the fishermen? Is there a lesson in this situation that could be applied to other field settings?

5: studying subsistence in sitka 1. What exactly is subsistence? 2. In what ways is the harvesting of wild foods important to the people of Sitka? What differences exist between Tlingit and non-Native harvesters in this regard?

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3. Why is survey (quantitative) data sometimes valued above qualitative data? 4. What were the advantages and limitations of the different datagathering techniques used in this study? How compatible were the quantitative and qualitative research methods described in this study? 5. Do you think that people who use a resource feel a greater responsibility for protecting it?

6: on the move: work and mobility in newfoundland 1. What is mobile work, and why is it so common in places like Newfoundland? 2. What are the benefits of the multidisciplinary research described in this chapter? What are its drawbacks? Would you personally rather work as a lone researcher or as part of a team? Why? 3. What term (for example, “informant”) would you favor to describe one’s interviewees and research subjects? Why? 4. Why were the researchers concerned about sharing their transcribed interviews with other members of the team? Do you think their concerns were legitimate? Does anyone other than the researcher have rights to see the field notes made in an anthropological study? 5. If you were studying the impact of mobile work on families and communities, what kinds of questions or issues would you want to explore?

7: native anthropology: studying the culture of baseball 1. What were the research benefits of the anthropologist once having been an insider, a professional baseball player himself? What were the drawbacks? 2. What aspect(s) of traditional field research was George Gmelch unable to do in this baseball setting? Why? 3. What role did serendipity play in this research?

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4. What are “gatekeepers,” and who played this role in this baseball setting? 5. What aspects of doing research among professional ballplayers and in ballparks did the author enjoy?

8: falling into fieldwork in japan 1. Judging from this account, how might being an anthropologist influence the way someone approaches living in another culture? Does anthropology give one a unique or different perspective on the world? If so, how? 2. What are the potential advantages and disadvantages for an anthropologist of taking along a child or children to the field? Imagine other cultural settings as well as Japan. 3. What did you learn about how Japanese culture differs from American culture from this chapter? Consider, for example, Japanese education and the role that mothers play in it. 4. What other settings or institutions might have worked just as well as the school and the basketball club in allowing outsiders like the authors to participate in this unfamiliar culture?

9: photography and film in ireland and alaska 1. What can be learned from examining historical photographs? Find a historical photograph of an unfamiliar place and people and make a list of all the topics/subjects it could, in an interview with someone from that culture, potentially provide information on. 2. Why are photographs of the past particularly meaningful to a population like Irish Travellers? 3. This chapter discusses the making of two documentary films: one in which the anthropologist was a coproducer, and the other in which the anthropologists became subjects. What did you learn about filmmaking from these discussions? 4. Compare the strengths and weaknesses of the written word with those of film and photography in their ability to communicate information about other cultures.

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5. Think about the possible uses of photography as a fieldwork or data-gathering technique. Describe a research project you might undertake in which photography would be a key element.

10: taking students to the field: barbados 1. What challenges did the students face in doing fieldwork for the first time? 2. How did you think the experiences of the student anthropologists differed from what they would have experienced had they studied and lived on the campus of a Barbadian university (that is, a traditional term abroad) as opposed to living and doing fieldwork in a village? 3. How would you feel about the isolation (that is, not being allowed to visit classmates) imposed upon the students in this field program? Should it have been a requirement? 4. How much contact with family and friends at home do you think students should be allowed when in the field? How might such contact interfere with their integration into the local culture? 5. What is your opinion of Hanna’s decision to hang out with Rastafarians? Should she have avoided them simply because others in her community regarded them as outcasts? 6. What aspects of living in a Barbadian village do you think you would have difficulty adjusting to?

11: when the field is a city: hobart, tasmania 1. Why did the anthropologists move their field program from villages in Barbados to a city in Tasmania? 2. What did you learn about the basic differences between doing field research in a village community compared to a city? 3. What are some of the advantages of doing fieldwork in the city? What are some of the disadvantages? 4. How much culture shock do you think the students in Tasmania experienced compared to those living in Barbadian villages? Have you ever experienced culture shock? If so, describe what you think caused it and how long it took you to get over it.

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5. How did the field school directors have to change their rural-based instructions and rules for students in the city?

12: in the shadow of kilimanjaro: students in tanzania 1. How were the students’ experiences in this small Tanzanian city different from the experiences of the students studying in Barbadian villages? 2. What were some of the benefits of students using their internships as field sites for their research? 3. What does this chapter suggest are the differences between doing field research in Moshi compared to visiting it as a tourist? 4. What would you have the most difficulty adjusting to if you were an anthropology student living and doing fieldwork in Moshi? 5. What problem(s) do foreign women have in Moshi that men do not? What lessons do you draw from the Jen and Raheem situation? 6. What did the anthropology students learn about Tanzanian culture that they wanted to bring home and incorporate into their own lives?

13: fieldwork from campus 1. What do you think is the biggest difference between students’ doing research in field schools like those described in the Barbados, Tasmania, and Tanzania chapters, compared to the local and oncampus research described in this chapter? 2. Given a choice between these two field projects—bingo hall versus international-student interview—which would you choose to do and why? 3. What are the challenges of trying to generalize and draw conclusions from these international-student interviews? 4. Anthropological descriptions can sometimes give the impression that everyone in a particular culture holds the same or a very similar set of cultural beliefs. In this account, how do the authors attempt to show the variation or diversity in opinion and beliefs of the international students interviewed?

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5. Did this chapter change your view of American culture in any way? Or your opinions of international students?

14: the changing nature of fieldwork 1. In what basic ways has fieldwork in anthropology changed over the years? 2. Can you think of ways in which the changes in how fieldwork is conducted reflect broader changes in cultural anthropology? 3. Has the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects also changed? If so, how? 4. How has the technology of fieldwork transformed over time? How do you think these changes have influenced data-gathering and publication?

notes

1. the fieldwork tradition 1. Often omitted from discussions of the pioneers of fieldwork in anthropology is Frank Hamilton Cushing, who lived among and did participantobservation research among the Zuni of New Mexico in the early 1880s. 2. Royal College of Surgeons of England 1874, 27.

2. first fieldwork: irish travellers 1. They also refer to themselves as the Travelling People, Pavees, and, less frequently, Minceir. The latter two terms are most often used by more politically minded individuals and organizations. 2. Travellers’ rural occupations became obsolete as a result of modernization. As farmers obtained cars and rural bus service was extended, for example, the need for itinerant peddlers disappeared. The availability of mass-produced plastic and enamelware eliminated much of the need for the tinsmith and his handmade wares. Farm mechanization—tractors, beet diggers, and the like—did away with much of the need for agricultural labor and draft animals, and so on. 3. The only social-science research on Irish Travellers at the time was a master’s thesis by Irish sociology student Patricia McCarthy (née Walsh) who lived with Travellers outside Galway City for a month. She went on to become

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a social worker with Travellers in Dublin and Bray and was a friend during our research. 4. After moving into Holylands, we retained a room where we had electricity and could use our electric typewriter and store books, field notes, and the like, which we did not have space for in the wagon. It was also a place to take much-needed baths, since Holylands had no toilet or bathing facilities. 5. “Knacker” comes from some Travellers’ former practice of knackering, or taking old horses to the abattoir for slaughter. 6. We also talked of writing about Travellers for a general audience once our dissertations were done in order to bring some comprehension of their way of life to a largely uninformed and unsympathetic Irish audience. I later did this in a book called Tinkers and Travellers, which used photographs by George and by Pat Langan, an Irish Times photographer. It received favorable attention and won the Irish Book Publishers’ Book of the Year Award in 1976. The media recognition also led to an invitation to appear on Ireland’s popular late-night talk show—The Gay Byrne Show. Two Travelling women went with me, Nan Donoghue and Nan Joyce, whose colorful anecdotes won over some hearts and minds. 7. Gmelch, S. B., 1986. 8. The first itinerant settlement committee was organized in Dublin in 1965 primarily by Victor Bewley, a Quaker businessman and philanthropist.

3. politics and fieldwork: nomads in english cities 1. During its early years, British social anthropology was used to enable better “colonial administration,” and during World War II, the U.S. Office of War Information hired anthropologists to help it understand the behavior of our adversaries. One of the studies produced was Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946). The Society for Applied Anthropology formed around the same time, in 1941, with its own journal, Human Organization. 2. Our research was funded by the Department of the Environment and by the Welsh Home Office, which had responsibility for Gypsy and Traveller affairs in Wales. In England, these matters are now handled by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). 3. Personal e-mail and Skype communications, 2017. “Pavee” and “Mincier” are terms for Irish Travellers most commonly used by Irish Traveller NGOs and politically active individuals.

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4. See Mendizabal, I., et al., 2012. At the time of writing, many wonder what the implications of the United Kingdom’s leaving the European Union (“Brexit”) will be for them. 5. Although the major migration of Irish Travellers to England and Wales was a post–WWII development, English “gypsiologists” and linguists noted the presence of Irish Travellers in Britain as early as the mid-1800s (see Borrow 1914; Leland 1874; and Sampson 1891). By 1900, some Irish Traveller families were migrating to Scotland and northern England seasonally as agricultural laborers. For a more detailed discussion, see Gmelch and Gmelch, 1985b, 287–96. 6. According to the National Gypsy Council (NGC), there were an estimated nine thousand Gypsy families living in England and Wales at the time (The National Gypsy Council Report 1981). 7. Adams, Okely, Morgan, and Smith 1975. 8. When that happened, we moved into the Resident Tutor’s apartment in an off-campus residential hall and took over the minimal duties required of that position. 9. At our first meeting with the project’s DOE steering committee, we feared that there might be objections to our inclusion of numerous openended questions and our use of an opportunistic sample. Instead, Roy Todd, a sociologist and methodologist from Leeds Polytechnic and one of the NGC’s two representatives on the committee, agreed that this was the right approach and encouraged us to collect as much commentary from Gypsies as possible. 10. The average eviction in 1980 cost more than US$1,600 (US$4,645 in 2016). In Wolverhampton, a single eviction of a large group of Irish Travellers cost the local authority US$10,000 (US$29,034 in 2016). Just two months later, authorities in nearby Dudley evicted the same group from a public park at a similar cost. 11. Smith et al., 1982. 12. For a discussion of the U.S. administration’s actions, written by the Union of Concerned Scientists, see http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/centerscience-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/climate-change. html#.Vz33kfkrLZ4. 13. Monbiot, 2003. 14. Cambridge Evening News, 2007. The European Committee against Racism and Intolerance reported that “Gypsies and Travellers are still among the most disadvantaged minority ethnic groups in the United Kingdom . . . and . . . experience some of the most severe levels of hostility and prejudice.” Council of Europe, 2010, 42–43.

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4. applying anthropology in an alaskan national park 1. The region is called Dry Bay after the large, shallow delta of the Alsek River. 2. I use the term “fishermen” rather than “fishers” in the rest of this chapter since all were men. Most Alaskan female fishers, in my experience, also prefer to be called fishermen. 3. In choosing a set, fishers look for a pool or eddy (a circular current in which the water reverses itself), where the salmon are resting from the current on their journey upstream. Finding fish in the murky Alsek River is more difficult. As in divining for underground water on land, intuition and years of experience help. 4. Sharon gave birth to a healthy 8 pound 5 ounce boy, whom we named Morgan, shortly after returning from Dry Bay. We speculate that her steady diet of sockeye salmon during the last two months of pregnancy—food that is at the top of the nutritional chart—contributed to his strong constitution.

5. studying subsistence in sitka 1. Most resource harvesting in Alaska is regulated with different categories of users—commercial, sport, personal, and subsistence—requiring the purchase of licenses or permits. These limit when, where, and how much of a particular species can be taken as well as the type of gear that can be used, with some additional restrictions. Subsistence permits typically allow harvesters to take more than sport licenses, although vastly smaller amounts than commercial harvesters. Subsistence users sometimes have access to species that are off-limits to other users. According to Thomas Thornton, “subsistence accounts for about 4 percent of total fish and wildlife harvest, while 95 percent goes to commercial harvesters and 1 percent to sport users” (1998, 31). 2. Fall, “Why There Is a Division of Subsistence at ADF&G,” 2008, 2. 3. In 1986, a rural preference was added to Alaska’s subsistence statute but was soon declared unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court, putting Alaska out of compliance with federal subsistence law. In 1990, a dual-management structure was implemented, with the federal government regulating subsistence activities on federal lands (about 60 percent of the state) and Alaska retaining authority over state and private lands (the remaining 40 percent). 4. Anthropologist Adrian Tanner (2016) uses the term “self-provisioning” because “subsistence production” wrongly implies a bare-bones existence— “an economic life without luxury.” A Tlingit informant in Sitka similarly

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disliked the word “subsistence” because it connoted “low income and welfare,” noting that the “ANB doesn’t care what income a person has. It’s simply part of the Native lifestyle to use natural resources; to be close to nature.” Many nonNative Alaskans who legally qualify as subsistence users also reject the “subsistence” label, preferring terms like “personal use.” 5. Sitka’s population in 1980 was officially recorded as 7,803, but the city planner thought it was closer to 8,200 since many people were missed in the census, including those living on boats. In 2016 Sitka had a population of 8,881, 28 percent Native—both Tlingit and other Alaskan Natives and Native Americans. 6. Resource Use in a Small Alaskan City: Sitka, George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch (with the assistance of Richard K. Nelson), Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, Technical Paper 90, 1985. 7. The surveys I had used in Ireland included one that was mailed to all 70 Itinerant Settlement Committees in the country; another was given to a convenience sample of 307 settled Irish to collect information on their interactions with and attitudes toward Travellers. 8. After determining how many households in each electoral district we needed to interview, I numbered that district’s streets (always ten or fewer) and then placed ten numbered paper squares in a bowl. If I knew we needed to interview twenty households in a particular electoral district and I drew out the number 5, I knew we needed to interview four households on each of five streets. To determine which streets to go to, I placed the same number of squares in the bowl as the number of streets in the district and drew out five. Each interviewer took a map of his or her district(s) with the selected streets and number of target households marked in red, a packet of fi fty numbered paper squares, and a large envelope. Arriving at a preselected street, he or she counted its houses, apartment units, and mobile homes or boats and placed that number of squares in the envelope, shook it, and drew out the needed number of households. If four households were needed and the numbers 4, 12, 20, and 25 were drawn, these were the homes the interviewer stopped at, walking down the right side of the street and then up the left. 9. Devil’s Club has proven medicinal qualities and is also used as a tea and made into a general-purpose ointment. 10. See Thornton 2007. 11. ADF&G research has found such a consistent pattern that they now refer to the “30-70 rule,” meaning that 30 percent of a community’s households produce 70 percent of the community’s harvest (as measured in usable pounds). See Fall 2008, 2.

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12. Michael Pollan has written many books including The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (also a documentary film). The documentary Food, Inc., by filmmaker Robert Kenner and featuring Pollan, was very influential in getting people to think about the quality of the food we eat and the impact commercial food production is having on the environment.

6. on the move: work and mobility in newfoundland 1. Quoted in Lassiter 2005, 16. 2. Although oil exploration began off the coast of Newfoundland in the late 1960s, the first commercial oilfield was discovered in 1979 on the Grand Banks—roughly two hundred miles off Newfoundland’s east coast. There are now three producing oilfields—Hibernia, Terra Nova, and White Rose— with a fourth oilfield soon to come into production. 3. Newfoundland hospitality is celebrated in the hugely popular Broadway musical Come from Away, a true story of the experiences of the air travelers who landed in Newfoundland on diverted planes during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 4. Altogether, the Newfoundland team has eleven faculty researchers and twelve graduate students. Everyone is Canadian except Diane and me. 5. Felson et al. 1986, 153–65. 6. The lockbox was a response to new privacy legislation in addition to IRB ethics requirements. Failure to protect so-called private information is illegal in Canada. Ultimately, the OTM project did not enforce a rigid protocol across the team but did propose guidelines as a reminder of the researchers’ legal obligations. 7. Over the past decade there has been an increase in the percentage of funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada, going to multidisciplinary projects.

7. native anthropology: studying the culture of baseball 1. Jones 1970, 255. 2. Somewhat related to native anthropology is “autoethnography,” a form of reflective self-narration that links personal experience to a broader social and cultural narrative. Autoethnography first appeared in the 1970s, referring

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to studies of a culture or group in which the researcher was a member. It was sometimes labeled “insider ethnography” (cf. Lee 2009).

8. falling into fieldwork in japan 1. Although we always felt personally welcome, having to go to the municipal government offices to register as a “foreign alien” and be fingerprinted (and always carry our photo Alien Registration Card or passport with us) certainly made us aware of our outsider status from the beginning. 2. Mandatory schooling in Japan begins at age six with the first grade, but most children have already attended two years of voluntary kindergarten. 3. See Allison 1991, 195–208. 4. G. Gmelch 1999, 24–29.

9. photography and film in ireland and alaska 1. Another use of photography to generate data was undertaken by Sol Worth, John Adair, and Richard Chalfen in the 1960s. They gave 16mm cameras to Navajo collaborators in order to capture “what the objective world that a person [from another culture] sees is ‘really’ like.” This resulted in seven short films and a book, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology (1972). A DVD of these films, Navajo Film Themselves, is available from Vision Maker Media. The first text in visual anthropology, John Collier’s Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method, was published in 1967. The SVA became a section of the American Anthropological Association in 1984. 2. Margaret Mead 1975, “Introduction: Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words.” In Paul Hockings (ed.) Visual Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975, pp. 3–10. 3. See Grimshaw 2001. 4. http://societyforvisualanthropology.org/. 5. It was called the “last potlatch” because the government had banned them as wasteful extravagances, not understanding the role they played in clan and moiety reciprocity. Potlatches did not disappear, however, they just went underground for a time. 6. For more information on Merrill, see S. Gmelch 1995. 7. “Visual Anthropology,” In Levinson and Ember 1996, 1345–51. 8. S. Gmelch 2008.

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9. “Eskimo” as a generic term for Alaska’s Inupiaq and Yupik people is widely used. Inuit is the term used in Canada. 10. In recent decades, Travellers have been the subjects of numerous social-science studies, journalistic accounts, government reports, films, and novels. A growing number of literate Travellers have also written personal memoirs. Many others share photographs and stories on Facebook and post videos on YouTube. This means that future generations will have a rich trove of material documenting Travellers’ more recent lives. At the conclusion of our research we donated our fieldwork photographs to University College Dublin’s National Folklore Collection. 11. Gmelch and Gmelch 2014a and 2014b.

10. taking students to the field: barbados 1. NSF support for field schools (1964–1970) was in response to many anthropology graduate students who had received NSF funding for their dissertation research having failed to complete their studies. It was hoped that field schools would better prepare students for the considerable challenges of going off to remote places to do independent field research away from the close supervision of a faculty mentor. 2. G. Gmelch 1994. 3. In the mid-1990s we became interested in knowing more about our students’ adjustment in the field and began to pay closer attention to what they were writing and saying about their emotional lives. Over the next three field seasons, we administered a questionnaire every week that tapped the students’ moods, feelings about their fieldwork, and interactions with locals. The data were gathered not only for our information but also to share with the students, to help them better understand their experiences. Briefly, the survey data showed that students are very “satisfied” during their first week in Barbados when they are all together, living at the research institute, but that once they move into their villages, during the second week, nearly three-quarters report symptoms of culture shock. The level of satisfaction with their lives, however, rises in the surveys each week, reaching the pinnacle at the end of week 7, when nearly all of the students report being satisfied most of the time. The level of satisfaction drops off in weeks 8–10, as the term draws to a close and the students worry about having enough data to write the research paper required of them. The problems and concerns they report shift from the classic symptoms of culture shock and loneliness in the early weeks to feeling overwhelmed by writing up their data in the last few weeks.

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4. Several years later, we met one of the fishermen at a local fish fry and learned from him that Greg had also been romantically involved with a local woman, a single mother with a young child to whom he sent money long after returning to the United States. He and the other fishermen still occasionally heard from Greg, and it was clear that they had liked and respected him. While we were glad to learn that they liked Greg and that he remained in contact and also had been helping a local women, we were uncomfortable learning about his secret romance. We strongly discouraged students from developing such relationships; they were fraught with potential difficulties, the least of which were hurt feelings and misunderstandings. 5. The names of the student and other persons and places in this anecdote have been changed. 6. Thelma, Hannah’s homestay mother, subsequently housed several other students. Hannah went on to graduate school and is now teaching theater at a small college in New England.

11. when the field is a city: hobart, tasmania 1. Two other Union College anthropologists, Karen Brison and Steve Leavitt, also moved their field school in Fiji to a city (Suva), but for slightly different reasons. “I thought Suva was more representative of contemporary Fiji as many Fijians live in the city for some of their lives, and then retire to the village,” explained Brison. “Fijian villages can be like retirement communities.” 2. Furnham and Bochner 1977. 3. See the essays in the fieldwork section in Gmelch and Kuppinger 2018. 4. Our students in Barbados each turned in about a dozen single-spaced, typed pages of field notes per week, about double that of the students in Kilkenny and Hobart. In fact, the students in Barbados produced so many pages of field notes, journal entries, field exercises, plus two research papers, that back on the Union College’s campus the field school was sometimes called the “Writing Term Abroad.”

12. in the shadow of kilimanjaro: students in tanzania 1. Moshi’s population in 2012 (the year of the field school and the most recent available statistic at the time of writing) was 184, 292; Hobart’s that year was 205,557.

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/ Notes

13. fieldwork from campus 1. Spradley and McCurdy’s book, with a second edition published in 2005, also instructed students on how to write up their field data. Macalester College anthropologists continue to have their students, not only those in the introductory course, conduct off-campus research. 2. DeVita 2016. 3. These figures pertain to the 2014–2015 academic year. Nationally, 31 percent of international students at American colleges and universities come from China. 4. The “hooking up” relationships referred to are heterosexual. None of the student papers, interview transcripts, or class discussions brought up homosexuality. 5. Our knowledge of the international students’ reactions to the assignment also comes from having informally asked many of them their opinions over the years.

14. the changing nature of fieldwork 1. Sontag 1963. 2. Many anthropologists working in developing countries took along a bulky “voltage stabilizer transformer” to protect their computers from power surges. 3. For example, SIL FLEX Fieldworks, DeDoose, and MaxODA. 4. For example, Ethnograph, Nudist, AtlasTi, and MaxQDA. 5. Brewin and Lennard 1999. 6. Davies 1999, 204. 7. M. D. Fischer quoted in Davies 1999, 204. 8. Houtman and Zeitlyn 1996, 1–3. 9. In the pre-Internet era, we asked students, on a questionnaire every other week, to rate their satisfaction with their lives in the village. The fewer the contacts the students had with home, the more satisfied they reported being. The number of phone calls, letters, and postcards students sent home also declined over time as they became better adjusted to their homestay families and village life. Students discovered that hearing the voice of a girlfriend or boyfriend or parent on the phone actually made them more homesick. Phone conversations could also be frustrating, “There is no way you can explain to them what you are going through,” said Kristin, “and besides they

Notes / 269

don’t really want to know a lot, just if you’re having a good time or not.” Also, because of the high cost of a phone call at the time, conversations were often hurried, which added to the dissatisfaction. 10. A primitive recording machine called the Ediphone had been in use from the late 1880s until the 1940s, mainly by folklorists and linguists, but it was large and heavy, with the sound being recorded on fragile “wax” (actually a synthetic product) cylinders. 11. Geertz 1973; Rabinow 1977. 12. In anthropology and sociology, functionalism was a theory that stressed the interdependence of all behavior patterns and institutions within a social system to ensure its long-term survival. Functionalism first gained popularity in the 1930s and was promoted initially in England. Bronislaw Malinowski, who also established the methodological foundations of ethnographic fieldwork, argued that cultural practices had psychological and physiological functions, such as the reduction of fear and anxiety. A variant of the functionalist paradigm is the structural-functionalism of anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and sociologist Talcott Parsons, which stressed that social institutions functioned to maintain the harmony of the social whole. Whatever the flavor of early functionalisms, the theory was always that cultural behaviors contributed to the smooth working of society. Functionalism ultimately lost its influence because it paid little attention to confl ict and change as essential features of social life. It celebrated the status quo and failed to give the individual enough agency in effecting culture change. 13. Brokensha 2007, 80. 14. In a 1939 article entitled “The Place of Theory in Anthropological Studies,” a prominent anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, claimed that most “contemporary American anthropologists feel that ‘theory’ is a dangerous kind of business that most anthropologists must be on guard against.” 15. Dyck 2012. 16. Murphy 2003, 170. 17. Moore 2012.

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index

A Matter of Respect, 152–153 Agar, Michael, 247 Alaska: Department of Fish and Game, 71, 75–76, 86, 263n11 Alsek River, Alaska, 57–61, 63–67, 60fig., 64fig., 262n1 anthropology: appeal of, 2; diversification of, 185, 249–250; four fields approach, 248; holism, 247 applied anthropology: in Alaska, 50–51, 71–72; in England, 36–37, 45–49; history of, 31–32; in Tasmania, 191 armchair anthropology, 3, 98, 248 Arnold’s Cove, Newfoundland, 91, 93–94

114; groupies, 116; interviewing players, 111, 115fig.; road trips, 110 Bay de Verde, Newfoundland, 91, 95fig., 96 bears, 57, 61; attacks by, 51–52, 56 bingo: jargon, 221; research on, 221–223; ritual and superstition 221–222; social class 222; technology 221 Birmingham Barons, 108–110 Blood of the Travellers, 155 Boas, Franz, 3, 87, 142, 248, 249 Bollard, Freda, 154–155 Brogel, Alex, 58–59, 68 Brokensha, David, 247 Brown, Zachary, 86 Brownell, Susan, 193

Barbados: development 185–186; field school in, 164–177; geography, 165; history of, 165; housing, 168; pace of life, 175–176; Rastafarians, 179–184; sexual harassment, 178; social class, 179, 183, 184; subsistence, 170; tourism in, 165; village life, 174–177 baseball, 105; ballpark as research setting, 114–115; ballparks, 117; changes in, 107, 109, 112; gatekeepers,

Chagga, 202 Chapman, John, 63 cod fishing, 89–91, 90fig.; moratorium, 90 Cohen, Kathryn, 51, 54, 56 collaborative research, 87–88, 95–97, 150–151, 240 courses on field methods, 4–5, 221 cultural revitalization, 149 cultural scenes, 221–222

277

278

culture concept, 246 culture shock, 171–173, 266n3; depression, 173; homesickness, 172 Davis, Albert, 152 DeVita, Phil, 224 drinking behavior, study of, 231–232 Dry Bay, Alaska, 87, 240, 262n1 Dyck, Noel, 248 East River, Alaska, 59 Ennis, Mervyn, 38 Erasmus, Charles, 5, 9 ethics, 99, 102–03, 239, 264n6 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 247 Facebook, 228 field notes, 20–27, 39–40, 52–53, 59, 66, 77, 93, 101–102, 112, 116, 140, 157, 164, 172, 181, 194, 196, 216–218, 222, 242–243, 245, 247–248, 267n4 field schools: 5–6, 164–168, 199–200; adjustments of students, 167; in Barbados 164–177; culture shock, 170–175; dating, 197–198, 267n4; finding community, 188, 192–193; friendships, 190; gender 178; homestays, 167–168, 169fig., 170–175; internships 191; isolation from other students, 176, 196; lessons learned, 218–220; race, 177; social class, 178–179; social media, 198–199; supervision of students, 196–197; in Tasmania, 186, 188–192, 189fig., 193–194, 196–199; in Tanzania, 203–204, 212–213, 214, 216–220, 219fig.; urban distractions, 195; versus terms abroad, 164 fieldwork: adjustments to, 25–26; attractions of, 2–3; beginning, 92–93, blunders, 93, 121; campus, 221; changes in, 238–239; children, impact of, 120, 122–123, 124fig., 135, 141; communication with home, 199, 244–245; commuting, 16; difficulties

/ Index

of, 14–15; disadvantages of, 18–19, 27; early accounts of, 3–4; emergent nature of, 98; ethics of, 240; etiquette of, 238–239; gatekeepers, 114; gender differences, 178; history of, 3–6; listening, role of, 40; literature review, 9, 243; loss of privacy, 25–26; married couple, advantages of, 24, 67; methods, 4–5; mistaken identity, 53; openendedness, 98, 156,195; permission for, 53, 108, 149, 238; personal life, impact on, 140–141; politics, influence of 46–48; preference for tribal cultures, 238; preparation for, 9–12; race, 177; rapport, 110; reciprocity, 102; as rite of passage, 2; romantic relationships during, 197–198; social class, 68, 178–179, 183, 184; sports, facilitation of, 19–20, 67, 139, 192–193; technology of field research, 242–243, 245; transformative experience, 2; typing versus writing longhand, 243; urban versus rural, 185–186, 189–191, 193–194, 195; violating local norms during, 180–181, 183 film, documentary, 142, 143, 149–153, 157–163 fish camps, 64, 64fig.4–3 fishing: 89–90, 89fig.; gillnets, use of, 60–61; permits, 62–63; subsistence, 78fig. food-getting strategies, 70. See also subsistence food security, 86 Frankenstein, Ellen, 148–149, 153 Gallalin, Dave, 150 ganbaru, 130 Glacier Bay National Park, 50, 53, 56 Goldstein, Warren, 118–119 Grimshaw, Anne, 242 Gypsies, 36; attitudes towards, 34–35, 40–41 44, 45–46, 48–49, 261n14;

Index

campsites, 33, 41–44, 48; economy 33, 45; evictions of, 33,34, 41–44, 42fig., 261n10; history in United Kingdom 32–33; laws affecting 33, 48; National Gypsy Council, 32, 36, 261n6; nomadism, 33–35, 34fig., 41–42, 45, 47fig.; nomenclature, 32; official sites for, 33–34; pollution beliefs 46; relationships with other Travellers; stereotypes of, 44 Hadza, 219fig., 220 Hastrup, Kristen, 112 Hammano, Sylvia, 132 Henley, Gail, 118 Highways Act, UK, 33 Hobart, Tasmania, 187fig., 188–191, 195, 201 homestay families, 167–168, 170–171, 170fig, 196, 203, 206–208, 217; privacy, 169 Hooper, Helen, 83 Horishima, Arhuko, 125–126; 130fig., 133 Hou, Carolyn, 158–159, 160fig. Howarth, Anthony, 32 Human Development Index, UN, 202 informants, terminology, 24–25, 241 informed consent, 99–101, 239 Inside Pitch, 105, 113 Institutional Review Boards, 99,102 interdisciplinary research, 97 international students in US: food and diet, 234–235; formal interviewing of, 38,39, 45,75, 77, 224–226; perceptions of American awareness of world events, 230–231; perceptions of American education 226; perceptions of American family life 229–230; perceptions of American friendship, 226–228; perceptions of American individualism, 230; perceptions of American sexual behavior, 233–234, 268n4; perceptions of American student dress, 233; perceptions of

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American student drinking, 231–232; perceptions of campus life, 226, 230; reactions to being interviewed, 235–236 internet and fieldwork, 244–245 internships, 191–192, 195 ,213, 216, 217fig., Irish Travellers: 7; archives, 29; birth control, 25; campsites, 11–13, 12fig.; complaints about, 41, 42fig.; developing rapport with, 14–15, 17–18, 19; dole, 18; domestic violence 17–18, 24; drinking, 26–27; Holylands, 14–19, 19fig, 20, 26, 29, 260n4; Itinerant Settlement Movement, 28–29, 260n8; marriage, 11; migration to United Kingdom 33; nomadism, 7–8, 9, 45; nomenclature, 8, 259n1; official sites, 13; photography, value of, 155; roadside camps, 33–35, 34fig., 39–40; rural to urban migration, 8, 246–247; Spring Lane site 157–158; stereotypes of, 10, 21; weddings 10, 161–162; work and occupations, 8, 259n2 Itinerant Settlement Movement, 28–29, 260n8 Janken (rock, paper, scissors), 137, 138 Japan: basketball, 135–140; contrasts with United States, 132, 134, 138, 140; impressions of, 120–121; kindergarten (yochien), 123–125, 124fig., 125fig., 127, 130, 265n2; marriage, 124–126; non-verbal communication, 127; safety, 134; salarymen, 125, 133; societal cohesion 134; Sports Day, 128–129, 129fig.; university clubs, 135; values, 130–131, 132, 134, 136–137, 138; women, 124–126, 127–128, 132–133 Kaypro computer, 74, 242 Kearns, Aisling, 158–159, 160fig. Kinoshita, Nobuko, 125, 130fig., 133

280

kitchen gardens, 89, 171, 207 Ku Klux Klan, 107 L.aanteech, Chief, 146, 146fig. Lassiter, Luke Eric, 87 literature review, 9; change in, 243 Lituya Bay, Alaska, 64 Macalester College, 221 malaria, 208–209 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 3, 249 McCurdy, David, 221 McGill University, 244 McGrath, Liam, 155–157, 162 Mead, Margaret, 142 Memorial University of Newfoundland, 92–93, 95 Merrill, Elbridge, 143–146, 145 fig. methodology. See fieldwork, participant observation, survey research Mexico, fieldwork, 9, 18–19, 139, 165, 193, 242, 246 mobile work, 88–89, 93, 95fig., 97. See also turnaround workers Moshi, Tanzania, 201, 204–206, 205fig., 207, 210, 267n1 mosquitos, 208–209 Mount Kilamanjaro, 201, 207 naive realism, 183–184 nakama 124, 126fig., 135 National Park Service, 50–51, 53, 56, 61, 69, 240 native anthropology, 106, 111–113 Neis, Barbara, 86, 88, 89, 93, 94 Nelson, Richard K., 73–74, 75, 81 Newfoundland, 89, 92–93; hospitality, 254n3; oil exploration, 264n2; outports, 89–90 nomadism, 8–9, 29, 32–35, 45. See also Gypsies and Irish Travellers Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 4 Oates, Joyce Carol, 243 obentos, 127–128

/ Index

Olberg, Kalvero, 170–171 O’Leary, Francie, 155, 156fig. O’Leary, Josie Connors, 155–156, 156fig. On the Move project, 88, 97–99, 103–104 participant observation, 12–13, 20–21, 74–75, 221, 222 photo-elicitation, 143, 153, 156fig., 159fig., 161–162 photography, in field research, 143, 153, 245; interpretation, difficulties of, 147–149; value to local subjects, 155 Pie Corner, Barbados, 167 Pollan, Michael, 86, 264n12 Powdermaker, Hortense, 3–4, 5 racism and segregation (in U.S. South), 107 Ramos, Judy, 54–55 Rastafarians, 179–184 Reck, Gregory 193 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, 9 resource sharing, 84–85 return migration, study of, 164–165 Roma. See Gypsies Roseman, Sharon, 88 Royal, Diane, 91, 93–98, 101–102, 104 ryosai kenbo, 126 Ruby, Jay, 147, 153 salmon, Alaskan, 59–61, 63, 72, 78fig., 79, 262n3 Sam, Bob, 150, 153–154 Schenectady, NY, 223 Schoenberg, Ken, 51–52, 57 senpai-kohai, 136, 138 sexual harassment, 214–216 Sitka: geography 72, 73fig., 142; population, 263n5; segregation, 144. See also resource sharing, subsistence harvesting Smith, David, 35–37, 40 Smith, Huey, 36–37

Index

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 89 social workers, 28 Society for Visual Anthropology, 142 Sontag, Susan, 239 sports, in American culture, 105; as microcosm of culture, 107; reluctance to study, 105, 117–118. See also fieldwork Spradley, James, 221 Steele, Richard, 65, 67 subsistence harvesting, 45, 51, 54, 70–72, 74–75, 77–86, 78fig., 99–100, 149–151, 202, 262nn1,3,4; laws, 71, 85–86 Summers, Clarence, 55–57 superstition, 29, 222–223 survey research, 22, 36, 39, 46, 53, 75–80,82, 84, 98, 263n, 266, 288 Sutton, Bob, 90–91 Sutton, Pauline, 90–91 Swahili, 202, 207, 211fig., 212, 217 Tanzania, 202–203, 227; Chagga people, 202; characteristics of Moshi, 201–202, 212fig.; colonial rule, 202; dadas (house servants), 209; daladala (minivan), 213, 216, 220; development, 202; field school student adjustments to, 203–211; first impressions of students, 203; Hadza 218, 219fig., 220; health, 207–208; heat, 209; homestays, 205–208; infrastructure, 205; inter-ethnic relations, 202; noise, 209–210; population of, 201; sexual harassment, 214–216; student daily field work routine, 216–218; Swahili, 202; “Third World,” 201; time, 211–213, 218

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Tasmania: aboriginals, 187–188; field school, 188–201; geography and history, 186–187; Hobart, 187, 187fig.; sports, 192; tourist destination, 187–188 tatemae-honne, 133 team research, 88. See also collaboration terms abroad versus field schools, 203 technology of field research: changes in 242–243, 245; digital cameras, 245; Google Earth, 244; internet, 243–245; personal computers and software, 23,74, 102, 242–243; Skype, 198, 243–244, 248; tape recorders 23, 111, 114, 245; typewriters 242; word processors, 102, 242 theory, in anthropology; 23, 247–248, 269n12 time, attitudes towards, 212–213 Tlingit, 52–67, 72–73, 78, 82–83, 85, 144, 240; confl ict with non-Natives, 62–65; documentary about, 149–153 The Tlingit Encounter with Photography, 147 Tongass National Forest, 72 turnaround workers, 88, 91 Union College, 223, 224, 225, 231, 232 University of California, Santa Barbara, 4–6, 9, 238, 247 University of San Francisco, 225, 233 U.S. Forest Service, 53, 61, 75 visual anthropology, 142, 143, 147 Yakutat, Alaska, 52, 54–55 yochien (kindergarten) 123–125, 124fig., 125fig., 127, 130, 265n2

about the authors

George Gmelch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco and at Union College. He was an undergraduate at Stanford and did his PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has done anthropological field research in Asia, East Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Alaska, and, currently, Newfoundland. He is the author or editor of twelve books, one of which (Tasting the Good Life: Wine Tourism in the Napa Valley, with Sharon Gmelch) won the Gourmand Book Prize, while two others were finalists for other book awards. He has also written widely for general audiences, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Psychology Today, Society, and Natural History. Sharon Bohn Gmelch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco and at Union College. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary interests today are visual anthropology and tourism. She has conducted research with Irish Travellers, English Gypsies, Barbadian villagers, the Tlingit, and tour guides in many countries. She is the author or editor of nine books, one of which won Ireland’s Book of the Year Award, and another (Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman) was a finalist for the Margaret Mead Award. She is also the coproducer of an ethnographic film on the Tlingit. 283