volume 4 • 2011
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COLLABORATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIES
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Edited by Luke Eric Lassiter and Samuel R. Cook
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published by the university of nebraska press
Collaborative Anthropologies is a forum for dialogue with a special focus on the complex collaborations between and among researchers and research participants/interlocutors. It features essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, from all subfields of anthropology and closely related disciplines, and that present a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research. Collaborative Anthropologies (ISSN 1943-2550) is published annually by the University of Nebraska Press. For current subscription rates please see our website: www .nebraskapress.unl.edu.
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If ordering by mail, please make checks payable to the University of Nebraska Press and send to The University of Nebraska Press 1111 Lincoln Mall Lincoln, NE 68588-0630 Telephone: 402-472-8536
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All inquiries on subscription, change of address, advertising, and other business communications should be sent to the University of Nebraska Press.
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Copyright © 2011 University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
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If you would like to reprint material from Collaborative Anthropologies, please query for permission using our online form that is located under the Journals menu heading on our Web site: www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.
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Collaborative Anthropologies is available online through Project MUSE at http://muse .jhu.edu.
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Cover and interior design by Shirley Thornton
editors Luke Eric Lassiter, Marshall University Samuel R. Cook, Virginia Tech
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editorial board Diane E. Austin, University of Arizona Linda Basch, National Council for Research on Women Michael L. Blakey, College of William and Mary Caroline B. Brettell, Southern Methodist University James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz Les W. Field, University of New Mexico Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge Sjoerd R. Jaarsma, Papua Heritage Foundation Junji Koizumi, Osaka University Smadar Lavie, University of Minnesota Dorothy Lippert, Smithsonian Institution George Marcus, University of California, Irvine Charles R. Menzies, University of British Columbia Yolanda Moses, University of California, Riverside James L. Peacock, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, University of Brasília Jean J. Schensul, Institute for Community Research Judith Stacey, New York University Paul Stoller, West Chester University Sandy Toussaint, University of Western Australia Alaka Wali, The Field Museum Larry J. Zimmerman, IUPUI/Eiteljorg Museum
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editorial assistant Kathryn Santiago, Marshall University
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EDITED BY MOIRA SMITH
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An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
The Journal of Folklore Research provides an international forum for current theory and research among scholars of traditional culture. Each issue includes articles of theoretical interest to folklore and ethnomusicology as international disciplines, as well as essays that address the fieldwork experience and the intellectual history of folklore. PUBLISHED TRIANNUALLY eISSN 1543-0413 pISSN 0737-7037 Available in electronic, combined electronic & print, and print formats
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Topical, incisive articles of current theoretical interest to folklore and ethnomusicology as international disciplines
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SUBSCRIBE http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress For more information on Indiana University Press http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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vii Editors’ Introduction luke eric lassiter and samuel r. cook
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Contents
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Special Issue: Collaborative Anthropologies in Latin America guest edited by joanne rappaport and les field
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3 Special Issue Introduction les field and joanne rappaport
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18 Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing luis guillermo vasco uribe
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67 Knowledge Transmission through the Renü pablo cañumil and ana ramos
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90 Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories: A Disruptive Collaboration jocelyn a. géliga vargas
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119 Walking and Doing: About Decolonial Practices xochitl leyva solano
139 The IDIEZ Project: A Model for Indigenous Language Revitalization in Higher Education john sullivan
interview 155 From Boy Scout to Hired Gun: An Interview with J. Anthony Paredes samuel r. cook
issues in student fieldwork 169 Collaborative Service Learning and Anthropology with Gitxaal-a Nation charles r. menzies and caroline f. butler
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252 Apprentice Ethnography and Service Learning Programs: Are They Compatible? tim wallace
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243 Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork: Responses to Menzies, Butler, and Their Students susan hyatt
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260 Butterflies, Anthropologies, and Ethnographic Field Schools: A Reply to Wallace and Hyatt charles r. menzies
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book reviews 267 George R. Lucas Jr. Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology robert albro
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270 Charles R. Hale, ed. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship josiah mcc. heyman
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276 George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, and Tobias Rees, eds. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary; George Marcus and James Faubion, eds. Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition douglas foley
286 Stephen W. Silliman, ed. Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology darby c. stapp and julia g. longenecker 293 Susan Sleeper-Smith, ed. Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives cécile r. ganteaume 299 Information for Contributors
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Editors’ Introduction
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Volume 4 of Collaborative Anthropologies features several new and engaging discussions of collaborative research and its many complications and complexities. The volume opens with a special issue on collaborative anthropologies in Latin America, guest edited by Editorial Board members Joanne Rappaport and Les Field. As they note in their introduction, collaborative researches have a long history in Latin America. Many in English-speaking North America, however, are unfamiliar with this past and, indeed, its ongoing developments. While these developments are in some ways shared with those working in other areas, the unique dimensions of Latin American collaborative anthropologies provide fresh and new insights into the larger work of democratizing research methodologies. Rappaport and Field invited several contributors to submit essays for review and to organize what we think is a particularly exciting and thought-provoking collection. We should note that several of the essays were originally written in Spanish, reviewed thus, and then translated into English for inclusion in this volume. With our ever-modest journal having no monies for translation, Joanne Rappaport donated her time and energies translating two of the essays as well as editing a previously translated one. We thus owe her a deep debt of thanks for helping to make this happen. This volume also contains an interview that we hope will be the first of a regular series featured in future volumes of Collaborative Anthropologies: interviews with anthropologists who have distinguished themselves as contributors to the development of and dialogue concerning collaborative anthropological endeavors. This first interview is with J. Anthony Paredes, past president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, American Indian studies scholar, and well-known advocate for Native American issues and peoples.
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We continue in volume 4 with exploration of issues in student fieldwork, which we began in volume 3. For the present volume, Editorial Board member Charles Menzies agreed to submit for review a set of essays originally written by a group of graduate students involved in doing collaborative service learning and anthropological research with members of Gitxaal-a Nation, an indigenous community of which Menzies is also a member. The students present a series of reflections that are both honest and candid, illustrating the joys and difficulties of doing work that is responsible and responsive to multiple constituencies. A commentary from Nees Ma’Outa (Clifford White)—a hereditary leader of the Laxgibou, Gitxaal-a, and former Chief Councilor Gitxaal-a Nation—ends the piece. In an effort to encourage dialogue about field schools, service learning, and student fieldwork, we invited two anthropologists well versed in these areas to comment on the essays: Susan Hyatt, of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis; and Tim Wallace, of North Carolina State University. Their responses are followed by a reply from Charles Menzies. Volume 4 concludes with reviews of several recently published books that, like the research articles herein, imagine and engage in various and contested articulations of collaborative and anthropological work today, whether it be with the military (as in Lucas’s Anthropologists in Arms); within shifting fields, methods, and pedagogies (as in Faubion and Marcus’s Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be); or between and among variously situated museum professionals and indigenous peoples (as in Sleeper-Smith’s Contesting Knowledge).
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Luke Eric Lassiter and Samuel R. Cook
viii • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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COLLABORATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIES
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special issue
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in Latin America
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Guest Edited by Joanne Rappaport and Les Field
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Special Issue Introduction
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les field, University of New Mexico joanne rappaport, Georgetown University
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Collaborative research methods have a long history in Latin America, one that is particularly oriented toward explicit, specific, and wideranging projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge. In pursuit of that end, the various Latin American authors whose work is showcased in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies develop and deploy collaborative research methods, epistemologies, and ontologies that to some degree resemble those of North American scholars and, to an important degree, break new ground in refashioning collaborative research as a decolonizing methodology. In order to comprehend what they are doing, we must begin with a consideration of the notions of colonialism, coloniality, and colonial difference. Coloniality, a concept recently developed by postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002: 61), drawing on the work of Aníbal Quijano (1997, 2000) and Enrique Dussel (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999), can be understood as the entire ensemble of conditions created by colonialism, itself the aggregate phenomenon of the consolidation of colonial regimes over the past five hundred years. In those areas of the world that experienced colonial regimes in the wake of European conquest, coloniality is an outcome that is coterminous with the nature of modernity: coloniality creates sharply perceptible divergences between modernities in those countries that were the colonizing powers and modernities in colonized areas of the world. Mignolo calls this “colonial difference” and argues that it has structured and shaped the creation, understanding, interpretation, and representation of knowledge about modernity worldwide (2002: 61–62). In a planetary geography shaped
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by colonialism, in which coloniality is pervasive, Mignolo discerns a “geopolitics of knowledge” that is always already unequal, because it is the outcome of colonialism and the condition of coloniality. Mignolo observes that just as the geopolitics of knowledge is the outcome of colonialism and coloniality, projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge are also enmeshed in large-scale processes of political, economic, and social change. For example, he cites dependency theory’s central role in defining national policies in Latin America in the aftermath of World War II up until the late 1970s and the corollary impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of knowledge during and following those decades (2002: 63–65). While each of the authors in this issue elaborates a particular concept of decolonization, drawing upon different literatures, they all acknowledge a common intellectual genealogy that ultimately goes back, at least in part, to the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda. In 1970 Fals Borda published an important volume titled Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (Our Science and Intellectual Colonialism), which echoes a widespread and ongoing critique of the colonizing countries’ monopoly control over the production of scientific knowledge among Asian, African, and Latin American scholars, and which ultimately inspired the methodology of participatory action research. The scenario Fals Borda lays out is simple: Western expansion takes place not only in the economic and political spheres but in the educational and intellectual arenas as well. The task of Latin American intellectuals, then, is to reframe theory and methodology so that they emanate from the colonial world, converting social research into a tool for liberation. In 1971, together with other politically committed Colombian scholars, Fals Borda made concrete proposals toward such ends in Causa popular, ciencia popular (Popular Cause, Popular Science), published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action), a network of Colombian social scientists and journalists advocating activist research alongside popular movements (Bonilla et al. 1971). La Rosca proposed inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and regional struggles, in order to establish research priorities in conjunction with local activists. Their collaborative work would focus on the identification of local cultural, social, and political forms that could prove useful in supporting organizations with whom La Rosca worked closely in indigenous regions of south-
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western highland Colombia and among peasants of Colombia’s Atlantic coast. In other words, Fals Borda and his associates developed a critique of the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge that would lead to its decolonization through an alliance of scholars and grassroots activists. Since the 1970s, Latin American scholars writing both from the global south and from universities in the United States and Europe have developed and expanded on Fals Borda’s critiques of the geopolitics of knowledge. The solution Fals Borda proposed—an alliance between scholars and “the people”—Mignolo argues, “would be difficult to sustain today” (2002: 73) for two reasons. Mignolo considers that to pursue their goals, social movements (Mignolo’s gloss of La Rosca’s term “the people”) do not require the intervention of intellectuals who are not organic to them. He also suggests that the domains in which social scientists can aid and abet the transformation of knowledge may neither coincide with the areas in which social movements are active, on the one hand, nor do they coincide with the interests of social movements, on the other. In other words, simply rejecting the complicity between the “Western” intellectuals and colonialism does not necessarily lead to decolonial collaboration between native and non-native intellectuals (Field 1999).
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Methodological Innovation through Collaborative Dialogue
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One of the authors in this collection, Colombian anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco, also grounds his strategy for the decolonization of knowledge in a resonant critique of Fals Borda. He argues that what is missing in Fals Borda’s proposal is a recognition of the fundamentally Western and colonial roots of social science research methodologies, which privilege the literate analytical approaches of academics and ignore the alternative routes to knowledge that grassroots activist-scholars might pose. Vasco asks a central question: How can we achieve a complete transformation of the anthropologist’s craft to reorient it toward the decolonization of knowledge? Vasco’s article is sweeping in its scope, engaging both global and Colombian histories of anthropology and related disciplines. He foregrounds the centrality of Marxism as a fundamental source of inspiration to Latin American fieldworkers and analysts, while injecting into his Marxism a Maoist appreciation of ethnographic methods deriving Field and Rappaport: Introduction • 5
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from his activist experience. Simultaneously, he poses a critique of postmodernism in North American anthropology that segues into a broader critical treatment of the hegemonic Malinowskian framework for ethnographic research. North American readers may find Vasco’s critique of postmodernism old news and perhaps even gratuitous; indeed we initially asked him whether we might not edit these passages, but in the end we agreed that they were textually necessary to develop his critique of Malinowskian ethnography, on the one hand, and the central importance of empowering indigenous peoples’ self-representation, on the other. In other words, it became clear to us that his critique of postmodernism differs from North American assessments in significant ways, revolving around a rejection of Malinowskian approaches to ethnography without discarding ethnography entirely.1 Vasco’s central argument revolves around a refutation of the Malinowskian model of fieldwork based on participant observation. He contends that there is an implicit spatial separation in Malinowskian ethnography between the domain of theorization, which occurs in the academy, and ethnographic work narrowly conceived as fieldwork, which takes place “out there” and facilitates the gathering of positivist forms of empirical data. This approach to fieldwork was linked in Malinowskian ethnography to generalizations about peoples and their classification into typologies and categories: “Trobriand Islanders,” “Andaman Islanders” (for Radcliffe-Brown), “Nuer” (for Evans-Pritchard), etc. Vasco embraces as an alternative the Marxian concept of “practice” or “praxis,” which for him involves fieldwork alongside indigenous people in support of their struggles. Vasco’s ethnographic praxis is shaped by a dialectical interaction between anthropologists and those with whom they work. Through this interaction, analysis takes place at the same time that ethnographic material is identified by researchers, breaking down the separation between “field” and “desk.” Marxism’s emphatic stress upon the centrality of relational concepts of personhood and materiality, as well as the importance of the researcher’s experience of everyday life, offer Vasco alternatives to the positivist taxonomies of culture he identifies as intrinsic to participant-observer ethnography. Vasco is specific about which Malinowskian research strategies must be rejected by a decolonized anthropology. He points, for example, to the interview as a conceptual space that is generally controlled by the ethnographer, who manages the roster of informants and con-
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ducts interviews according to a question-response format that precludes the exercise of interpretive faculties by respondents, confining them to the issues of interest to the ethnographer. Alternative venues, such as community-led workshops or walking local territories with grassroots guides, provide spaces for the decolonization of methodologies insofar as they cede control of the research process to non-academics, whose agendas and methods take precedence over those of professional anthropologists. But such spaces are only made possible by ethnographers who espouse certain fundamental principles, which Vasco situates at the center of his methodology: (1) local participants must assert control over the research, (2) the ethnographer’s opinion is but one of many, (3) the ethnographer’s opinion must be shared with local participants, (4) local participants must formulate their own research proposals, and (5) oral narratives must be accepted as truths, and not as mere discourses. While to some degree La Rosca espoused these very principles, in Vasco’s view the pervasive influence of conventional social science methods inhibited Fals Borda’s radical research collective from achieving its goals of creating a partnership between scholars and the grassroots. According to Vasco, participatory action researchers never fully understood that the academic methods they employed were far from neutral. They did not recognize that their methodology was imbued with class character and colonialist intentionalities that have long been employed to exploit people. La Rosca’s theory was good, he writes, but they neglected to revise their methods critically, which in the end replicated many aspects of Malinowskian participant observation. The grassroots, the “field” in ethnographers’ terminology was, for La Rosca, the space from which research results were collected and to which they were “returned.” Vasco proposes that in the “field,” as a result of dialectical relationships between ethnographer and the grassroots, theory and method emerge as a collectively experienced and shared ongoing effort. His work, in this article and elsewhere, subtantiates how he used this kind of dialectical methodology in his collaborative research. Vasco also contends that La Rosca researchers never achieved a critical perspective on epistemology, because they assumed that their indigenous and peasant subjects could not themselves create knowledge. It was by embracing a wholly revolutionary posture toward epistemology that Vasco’s collaboration with the indigenous authorities of Guambía
Field and Rappaport: Introduction • 7
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in the southern Colombian highlands created insightful and profoundly evocative representations of Guambiano lifeways and thoughtways, embodied in their conceptualizations of walking the territory, of the workings of time, and of the animate nature of things (Dagua Hurtado et al. 1998; Vasco Uribe et al. 1993). The writings of Vasco with the Guambiano History Committee are indeed experimental, in the sense that they foster dialogic exchange on the printed page, bringing to the fore the interpretive voices of Guambiano elders, whose analysis of local history is framed in theoretical vehicles emerging from dialogue with the anthropologist. In his article Vasco calls these “concept-things” and emphasizes that forms of conceptualization modeled after everyday life permit collaborative teams not only to construct their own theory but to engage in the process of theory building in the field, at the same time that they are gathering ethnographic and historical information. Thus Vasco comes to terms with significant ontological differences between orality’s immediacy and writing’s abstraction that have continued to shadow the production of anthropology in academic spheres. This is precisely where Vasco’s rejection of postmodernism becomes relevant. He sees a focus on the strategies and problems surrounding the writing of ethnography as secondary in significance to any project to transform anthropology. Focusing instead on why and for whom anthropologists should pursue ethnographic research, Vasco argues that “ethnographic work should support the interests of those social sectors who have traditionally constituted the objects of anthropological study, particularly indigenous peoples.” This goal can only be achieved via a decisive rejection of the participant-observer framework. For Vasco it is not so much experimental writing, the inclusion of a multiplicity of voices in the text, or the acknowledgment of the “complicity” of informants in ethnographic endeavors that will revitalize anthropology. He sees these as the continuation of a Malinowskian agenda. Instead, he proposes a radical revision of what happens in the field, demonstrating quite convincingly that collaborative methodologies can potentially revitalize and decolonize anthropology.
Collaborative Research and the Process of Identity Production Vasco’s project of decolonization of knowledge and the methodological, epistemological, and ontological contributions of his research in 8 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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Cauca serve as a useful backdrop for the articles by Géliga Vargas and by Cañumil and Ramos. These authors’ commitment to principles and the practice of decolonial and collaborative ethnography resonates strongly with what Vasco elaborated on multiple levels, although they were not aware of his work given the nature of publishing in Latin America, where one national anthropology is isolated from another. One obvious but important contrast bearing upon the practice of decolonial social science is that while Cañumil and Ramos worked in Argentina, an independent country, Géliga Vargas’s work takes place in Puerto Rico, a country that remains the colonial possession of the United States. In the lens of anthropology’s history, the contrast is additionally magnified by the fact that Cañumil and Ramos focus on aspects of indigenous culture, which has historically constituted the center of anthropological work for European and North American anthropologists, given the colonial division of the world, whereas Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean culture and history entered North American anthropology’s purview as a result of a decolonial and radical critique of anthropology’s complicity with colonialism, pioneered in the work of Steward (1956), Mintz (1960), and Wolf (1966). Finally, while the study of identity, as a part of both critical decolonial practice and collaborative research, constitutes the central motivation and focus of Géliga Vargas’s project, for Cañumil and Ramos identity may not have motivated their central objectives, but it had no less of an impact on the methods and epistemology the team developed. Cañumil and Ramos are concerned with an exceptional aspect of the cultural world of the indigenous Mapuche of Argentina, the salamancas (pu renü, in the Mapuche language), caves associated with the acquisition of knowledge. In the course of their research, they discover that salamancas are a means for the cross-generational transmission in Mapuche communities and lineages of epistemic principles. These principles emerge in the article through attention to Briggsian metanarrative (Bauman and Briggs 1990) in the interactions each had with different interlocutors and the shifting connotation/denotation network that calls up both Mapuche and Christian meanings for the same words. Their epistemological collaboration aims at creating conceptual devices that derive from the articulation of both Mapuche and academic concepts rather than residing exclusively in either—what Rappaport (2005), drawing on Vasco, refers to as co-theorization. At the
Field and Rappaport: Introduction • 9
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same time, their work is consistently oriented toward the priorities of indigenous struggle. That orientation is one way of destabilizing the normative assignment for anthropology among the social sciences, constituted by the colonized yet mysterious and unchanging Indian. Cañumil is an indigenous person, which decolonizes the timeworn division of labor in Americanist anthropology (North or South), whereby however intrinsic to an anthropologist’s project an indigenous person may have been, that individual was seldom considered a co-author (with Boas’s collaborative writing with George Hunt as one of the few exceptions; see Berman 1996). From a “Vascoian” perspective, the deepest decolonial move may be Cañumil and Ramos’s refusal to accept the Malinowskian urge to classify, categorize, and identify the indigenous Other with a boundary-setting ethnonym as well as their leaping over the dualistic essentialist vs. constructionist discourses of the 1980s and ’90s. Rather than call himself “Mapuche,” Cañumil chooses to use the term “Mapunche” to denote identity as a dynamic process that resists coloniality, rather than a trait-driven category that is the outcome of colonialism. The “Mapunche” position, the authors write, is about the distinction between “identity” and “identification,” and recalls Stuart Hall’s (1996) discussion of identification as a contingent modality of articulating imposed identities in which people inflect, stylize, produce, and perform subject positions, resulting in situational and individual approximations of identity. Ramos herself belongs to a broader research collective that in other publications (see Briones et al. 2007, cited by Cañumil and Ranos) has reflected on the complexities of identity production for all members of collaborative teams, arguing that reducing identification to ethnicity simplifies the multiple relationships emerging from differences in generation, place of birth, level of education, and ethnic identity that cross-cut collaborative research. Cañumil’s project of personal discovery is an integral component of their collaborative methodology and epistemology. Cañumil and Ramos’s article is therefore about Mapuche knowledge and worldview but through the lens of a decolonial unpacking of identity elucidated through a collaborative project. Géliga Vargas’s article is centrally focused on Afro-Puerto Rican identity. As noted, in the United States, Caribbeanist anthropology changed the taken-for-granted character of anthropology’s object as the indigenous and the non-Western. Because Puerto Rico remains a
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colonial possession of the United States, its anthropological history lies within the spheres of both Latin and North American scholarship, and in both academic realms the issue of African heritage in Puerto Rico has not remained unexamined in the last fifty years. While for example Mintz and Price (1992) in the United States, and Duany (2002, 2005) among many in Puerto Rico, have executed important scholarly interventions concerning this history, Géliga Vargas’s Puerto Rico project recreates an ethnographic approach resonant with Mintz’s (1960) older work but perhaps more so with Steward’s even older effort (1956). In Mintz’s classic ethnography, Worker in the Cane, the complex and multidimensional sociocultural world of the sugar cane industry is evoked through Mintz’s portrayal of his long-term intimate relationships with his main informant, Don Tacho, and his extended family. In Steward’s The People of Puerto Rico, a team of researchers gave voice to a kaleidoscope of different social sectors across the island in a virtually unprecedented multivocal ethnographic panorama that was motivated by a decolonial critique of Puerto Rican society. Similarly, Géliga works in a diverse research collective of nearly two dozen individuals, including academics; community leaders from the western Puerto Rican towns of Aguadilla and Hormigueros, where the oral history project was conducted; and students from the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez.2 Their goals center around recording the voices, memories, and histories of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in order to fertilize and democratize debates about racial constructions and discourses and to transform the representation of Afro-Puerto Rican history and identity. The researchers conceptualize these tasks as linked to a developed collaborative research methodology derived from oral history that aims to challenge the displacement, debasement, and dismissal of Afro-Puerto Ricanness and, in the process, chart a path for locally committed social science research. The structure of Géliga’s article clearly maps the complex conceptual terrain invoked by such ambitious goals. She frames her discussion with scholarly literatures, for the most part authored by Puerto Rican and other Caribbean scholars, reviewing the history of race formation in Puerto Rico (that over at least three centuries systematically denigrated and/or erased the African presence) and the Afro-Puerto Rican contribution, influence, and significance to Puerto Rican culture and society. After evaluating the disciplinary history of Afro-Puerto Ri-
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can studies through the prism of race, Géliga details the emergence of methods that shaped the testimonios collected by the research team: the interrogation of the categories of “researcher” and “researched” and the split or difference between them; the use of community forums to determine and shape research themes; and the debates that ensued in the processes of listening, transcribing, and interpreting interview materials. In Aguadilla the team developed a “ley de la inclusión” (rule of inclusion) through which they consistently attempted to select narrators who would represent a wide array of experiences (in terms of education and occupation, migration history, place of residence), identities (gender, class, sexual preference), ideological leanings (party and nonparty affiliations and political involvement), age, and personal and family phenotypical characteristics. Like Cañumil and Ramos, Géliga’s research team approached identity as a dynamic process rather than a classificatory project. Thus, while community researchers and narrators were firmly identified as Afro-Puerto Ricans, this did not result in essentialization or superficially romantic identifications. “Affirming blackness,” she writes, “is not equivalent to understanding it,” and the project participants admitted to and grappled with the instabilities of positioning. Thus this project fostered “a dialogical exchange that promoted identification and solidarity and opened a space for revelations and reflections that could hardly have been possible in a traditional academic research project.” Dialogue continuously challenged essentialism and focused on ruptures as being pivotal to the project of decolonizing Afro-Puerto Rican identities. This is, perhaps, a central difference between Géliga’a project and the academically based scholarship about Afro-Puerto Rican identity that preceded it: the decolonial impulse motivating the collaborative project is directed by and at the lived experience and daily realities of Afro-Puerto Rican identity much more than it is focused toward a textualized anthropology of those experiences and realities.
Institutionalizing Collaboration Vasco, Cañumil and Ramos, and Géliga all present refreshing alternative models that link collaborative methodologies to the explicit acknowledgment of multiple forms of knowledge as capable of guiding research. The last two contributions to this special issue turn more de12 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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cidedly to a consideration of the institutionalization of collaborative research. Leyva and Sullivan, both working in Mexico, share with readers the challenges they face as they and their collaborators endeavor to establish frameworks for collaborative research that destabilize academic conventions in the service of explicitly decolonial politics. Leyva’s focus on what constitutes a collaborative dialogue and Sullivan’s efforts at reconceptualizing higher education in an indigenous language point out the frequently ignored fact that collaborative research necessitates the construction of an alternative infrastructure in which the discourses, modes of transmission, hierarchies, and forms of accountability of the academic world are deliberately altered. An alternative indigenous structure—the cabildo, or the elected traditional authorities, of Guambía—made the pursuit of Vasco’s goals possible. In Leyva’s case, RACCACH, the Chiapan research team to which she belongs, is not a traditional indigenous structure but instead a multiethnic and supralocal novel form of organization that at once fosters horizontal dialogue and recognizes the value of what each participant has to contribute to the project. Sullivan, in contrast, works within a state university structure but is transforming the existing pedagogy directed toward indigenous students within that institution by radically shifting the language in which instruction occurs. In both cases we see Latin Americans generating initiatives for transforming who is to be a researcher, how research priorities will be generated, how research teams will be configured, and how they are to articulate with the ongoing work of other organizations. Xochitl Leyva’s contribution to this special issue originally formed part of a volume Sjalel kibeltik, which brought together in oral, visual, and written form and in multiple languages the results of a dialogic process of self-exploration by indigenous researchers and their non-indigenous collaborators. Thus, although her article is autobiographical, appearing to be a kind of testimony, it is actually part of a collaborative experiment, the long term of which is to forge a cohesive research team composed of participants who share common goals and, at the same time, can draw upon a diverse range of personal experiences. It is this collaborative experiment and its predecessors that are highlighted in Leyva’s article. By reflecting on her own experience she makes a cogent argument in favor of the need for collaborative research infrastructures to be anchored to the demands and functioning
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of political organizations, if they are to produce truly alternative forms of knowledge. She observes that previous collaborations in which she participated, organized along the lines of nongovernmental organizations, were ultimately paternalistic in nature, both limiting the participation of community members and denying them the conceptual tools they needed to make sense of why their research was so important. RACCACH, the organization of community researchers and anthropologists that produced Sjalel kibeltik, organized themselves differently from the earlier experiences Leyva narrates. Instead of growing out of a research agenda, which would automatically place the trained researchers in charge, it built an infrastructure for dialogue and selfexploration, in which all members could achieve an understanding of what they had to bring to the table. RACCACH, moreover, had in mind a project that would subvert the usual dominance of the written word in academic research. In contrast, the team sought to produce an audiobook with texts that could be read; a visual channel provides an impressive collection of photos; the chapters were recorded and are available for listening in three indigenous languages of Chiapas (Tsotsil, Tseltal, Tojolabal) or in Spanish. In the Spanish language version the contributors to Sjalel kibeltik also took great pains to use non-academic language in an effort to ensure the accessibility of their work. In effect, they transformed both the terms of collaboration and the vehicle of its transmission, which is what we refer to when we speak of “infrastructure” in this introduction. In some senses John Sullivan is working out of a more traditional academic structure, a research unit associated with the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. This research unit provides a Nahuatl-only “safe haven” where indigenous students can study and develop research techniques in their native tongue. But IDIEZ, the institute he founded, can also be understood as an autonomous space in which collaborative projects relating to language revitalization can be formulated and carried out without the institutional interference that generally characterizes the Mexican university system, on the one hand, and, on the other, the increasingly standardized international programmatics of language preservation, which in many cases are implemented without methodological or epistemological collaboration by indigenous communities (see Hinton 1994 for a critique of this nature among Native peoples in California).
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Sullivan does not share with us what specific topics are being developed at IDIEZ, nor the methodologies used to ensure that collaborative research is of a horizontal nature. However, the insistence on Nahuatl as the medium of communication has the potential to place indigenous researchers in the driver’s seat, as they are the ones who must create the conceptual vehicles that undergird the research, and presumably they are being trained to take charge of research activities eventually. In addition to the creation of a “safe space” for this process, IDIEZ is a center for the production of monolingual linguistic tools, like grammars and dictionaries, which must become part of the infrastructure of collaborative research. Sullivan’s article lies at the fuzzy boundary between what would be considered “applied research” in the United States and the more politically engaged activist anthropology of Latin America, the means of which involve innovative methodologies and the results of which are meant to serve alternative political ends (Field and Fox 2007). In Sullivan’s case, as he reports, this has meant steadily relinquishing control over those aspects of the IDIEZ project in which he is the most interested: in particular, over research activities. This perhaps encapsulates the most profound aspect of the decolonial aims of collaborative anthropology in Latin America: possibly even more than in collaborative efforts in North American anthropology, collaboration in Latin America involves the relinquishing of control over the methodologies and epistemologies of field research and analysis. As readers will see in the articles that follow, giving up the power to frame ethnography using academic models potentially creates the material conditions for novel forms of anthropology. If Mignolo is correct in tracking currents of change in politics, economics, and social movements alongside changes in intellectual production, then anthropology in Latin America will experience an increasingly profound transformation in the years to come and can play a role in the decolonization of knowledge among many historically disenfranchised social sectors. The point, however, will be for such anthropologies to come under the control of those sectors. The consequences of that change are difficult to predict. • • • • • les field’s research has focused upon the construction of indigenous identities in Nicaragua, California, Colombia, and Ecuador. In his ethnography-based publications he has explored historical relationships between indigenous identities,
Field and Rappaport: Introduction • 15
nation-building, capitalist economies, and local production systems, as these have been shaped by colonial and state forms of domination. He is professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and is currently working on a project that dissects complex relationships among archaeology, illicit forms of excavation, indigenous communities, and museums in Colombia.
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1. While it is true that a number of prominent Marxist anthropologists working in the United States also rejected Malinowskian ethnography—for example, Eric Wolf (1999, among many other publications), William Roseberry (1989), and Richard Fox (1991)—the North American critique of postmodernism revolved around a return to neo-Boasian historical methodologies, as opposed to a radical shift in how ethnographic research should be conducted, which is what Vasco proposes. We see these approaches as potentially complementary rather than necessarily conflicting. 2. In Spanish usage individuals carry two surnames, the first a patronymic and the second their mother’s surname. People can be referred to by a combination of their two surnames, as in Géliga Vargas, Fals Borda, or Vasco Uribe, or simply by their patronymic, as in Géliga, Fals, or Vasco.
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References
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Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Berman, Judith. 1996. “‘The Culture as It Appears to the Indian Himself ’: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Ethnography.” In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, 215–56, ed. George Stocking. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bonilla, Victor Daniel, Gonzalo Castillo, Orlando Fals Borda, and Augusto Libreros. 1971. Causa popular, ciencia popular: Una metodología del conocimiento científico a través de la acción. Bogotá: Publicaciones de La Rosca. Dagua Hurtado, Abelino, Misael Aranda, and Luis Guillermo Vasco. 1998. Guambianos: Hijos del aroiris y del agua. Bogotá: Los Cuatro Elementos. Duany, Jorge. 2002. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2005. “The Rough Edges of Puerto Rican Identities: Race, Gender, and Transnationalism,” Latin American Research Review 40 (3): 177–90. Dussel, Enrique. 1994. Historia de la filosofía latinoamericana y filosofía de la liberación. Bogotá: Nueva América.
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———. 1995. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” In The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, 65–76. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Appel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. ———. 1998. “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity.” In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 3–31. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 1999. Posmodernidad y transmodernidad: Diálogos con la filosofía de Gianni Vattimo. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana Plantel Golfo Centro. Fals Borda, Orlando. 1970. Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual. Mexico: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo. Field, Les. 1999. “Complicities and Collaborations: Anthropologists and the ‘Unacknowledged Tribes’ of California,” Current Anthropology 40 (2): 193–209. Field, Les, and Richard G. Fox, eds. 2007. Anthropology Put to Work. Oxford: Berg. Fox, Richard. 1991. “For a Nearly New Culture History,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard G. Fox, 93–114. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. Du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage Publications. Hinton, Leanne. 1994. Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Mignolo, Walter. 2002. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (1): 57–96. Mintz, Sidney. 1960. Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History. New Haven: Yale University Press Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price. 1992. The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. New York: Beacon Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 1997. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario Mariateguiano 9: 113–22. ———. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1: 533–80. Rappaport, Joanne. 2005. Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Columbia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roseberry, William. 1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Steward, Julian. 1956 The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vasco Uribe, Guillermo, Abelino Dagua Hurtado, and Misael Aranda. 1993. “En el segundo día, la Gente Grande (Numisak) sembró la autoridad y las plantas y, con su jugo, bebió el sentido.” In Encrucijadas de Colombia amerindia, ed. François Correa, 9–48. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología. Wolf, Eric. 1966. Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Field and Rappaport: Introduction • 17
Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing
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Article originally published as “Replanteamiento del trabajo de campo y la escritura etnográficos,” in Luis Guillermo Vasco’s Entre selva y páramo: Viviendo y pensando la lucha india, a book published in Bogotá by the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2002, 452–86. Translated by Joanne Rappaport and reprinted in Collaborative Anthropologies with the permission of the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia and the author. Colombian anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco participated in pathbreaking collaborative research with the History Committee of the traditional authorities (or cabildo) of the indigenous community of Guambía, in southwestern highland Colombia. The collaboration resulted in a series of publications, including the book, Guambianos: Hijos del aroiris y del agua (Bogotá: Los Cuatro Elementos, 1998), co-authored with Guambiano elder Abelino Dagua Hurtado and Guambiano researcher Misael Aranda. The research also made far-reaching contributions to the historical self-consciousness and the political agenda of the Guambiano community itself. In this article Vasco reflects on the nature of collaborative research methods.1
During the 1970s a broad-based questioning of ethnography and its purpose unfolded in Colombia. In part, the origins of this discussion came out of a group of anthropologists with whom I was affiliated, a current that has been somewhat inappropriately called the “anthropology of debate” (Arocha 1984: 90, 97–99). I see the label as inappropriate because there never was a true debate, and those who disagreed with our critique preferred, for the most part, to remain silent.
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Other academics emphasized in particular an important—but not fundamental—issue: our need to achieve wider dissemination of our research results and to ensure that a broader readership understood our writings, given that the language we used at the time was overly specialized, comprehensible exclusively to “initiates,” as well as heavy, flat, lifeless, and tiresome. This debate was also on the rise in other locations, especially in North America, but there are significant differences between what was occurring in Colombia and in the North. While in the United States the central thrust involved writing as a means of communicating research results, the growing presence of a strong indigenous movement in Colombia led us to question the very ways we engaged in research, above all in the field. For us, the key question was: How can we achieve a complete transformation of the anthropologist’s craft? We felt that writing was a secondary issue, although it did come up in our reflections. We focused on a broader and more important set of problems, given the conditions of our country: Why and for whom should we pursue anthropological research? We did not believe that rethinking the literary forms of communication of our research results was of the essence; instead we proposed a reconsideration of the very forms taken by our research as well as the objectives we hoped to fulfill through our work, a reconsideration that in itself would determine the final results, including the nature of our writing. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the indigenous people, blacks, and peasants to whom our work was directed were illiterate. Many Native people were monolingual in their own languages, which at the time lacked alphabets that could have made literacy possible; the few alphabets that existed were the products of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an unmistakable enemy of the indigenous struggle, and for this reason many indigenous people refused to use these writing systems.2 Our general position was to refuse to put the results of our work in writing. We believed that it was not possible to transform ethnographic writing in a substantial way, except by modifying field methodologies. That is to say, changes in writing only impact form, as we note in the postmodernist current that has been most closely concerned with this issue. It is clear today that the postmodernist rethinking of writing has basically remained at a theoretical level, without achieving the objec-
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tives it proposed. Hence some authors’ affirmation that postmodernists cannot move beyond a declaration of objectives; very few works have emerged from their central proposals.3 In contrast, we focused on the central principle that ethnographic work should support the interests of those social sectors who have traditionally constituted the objects of anthropological study, particularly indigenous peoples, who at that moment made up the most politically dynamic popular sector in Colombia. We wanted to support them through our research. This was not an entirely new affirmation. At the end of the 1960s a group of social scientists came together in the Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Research and Social Action), later known simply as La Rosca, a group led by Orlando Fals Borda and Victor Daniel Bonilla. La Rosca’s publications strongly criticized the existing orientation of social research in the Colombian intellectual environment and called for a social science at the service of Colombians, including peasants, indigenous people, and blacks. This group developed a new approach called participatory action research (PAR). Later, its members moved toward what they called activist research, an approach that was more committed to transforming social relations. They established research links with various social sectors in engaged in struggle, particularly with black groups on the Pacific coast, the indigenous people of Tolima and Cauca, and peasants on the Atlantic coast.4
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Such a proposition required that priority be given to the relationship between theory and practice, since La Rosca and our own collective saw practice as the fundamental objective of social research. We based ourselves on statements by Karl Marx, especially his thesis that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 2001: 170) which we saw as applicable to the social sciences, among them anthropology. Second, concerning how to achieve this change, we agreed that “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (Marx 2001: 168). In the same text, practice is called a sensory human activity. It was from there
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that the members of La Rosca derived the notion of activist research. It was evident to me that for the ethnographer, the space of such practice could not be located in the scholar’s office at academic headquarters but must be in the field, where the various social groups, in this case indigenous people, pursued their struggles to transform their basic living conditions. If, according to Marx, the field of practice was the only space in which it was possible to validate the knowledge emanating from research, then it would be essential for us to rethink fieldwork, a central facet of ethnography, and to examine the subject-object relationship, keeping in mind the fact that relations of power are established through ethnographic fieldwork. Although such relations develop between the researcher and those studied in the specific context of each investigation, they are framed and determined by much broader relations of power and domination between the national society and indigenous nationalities in Colombia. The members of La Rosca also posed the need to abandon the closed world of theory that reigned in academic spaces and move instead toward privileging practice. Some of them even abandoned the university for many years to live among the groups with whom they were working. This was the case with Fals Borda, who left the National University and established himself for years on the Atlantic coast, forging relations with peasants whose struggle was led by the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC). For many others, in contrast, practice is still understood simply as a set of material activities, conceived to some degree in isolation from theory. Alternatively, practice is viewed as a collection of purely individual actions, the transformative potential of which is almost nil. These notions are quite distinct from that of transformative practice in the Marxist sense—from what some call “praxis.” Based on an erroneous notion of practice, the problem of space is frequently hidden, inexplicit, and peculiarly managed. A specific form of territoriality is created for the purposes of ethnographic research, in which there is a space reserved for practice and a different one for theory. But this is not just a case of conceptual differentiation: it is a spatial and temporal separation between the two, with one following the other in time, reinforced by a mutual exteriority. One is the world of the “objects of study,” and the other is that of the researcher, the “subject.” The ethnographer moves in metropolitan urban space. The “other,”
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in classical anthropology, is a rural being who belongs to the colonial world; the colonized. A relationship between the two develops to facilitate the entry of the ethnographer into the process of knowing. This encounter begins when the anthropologist begins a journey to that other world, preceded by conquerors, colonizers, missionaries, traders, and travelers (all eyewitnesses), whose vast stores of information played a preliminary but essential role in the development of anthropology by constituting the raw material for the writings of many of the first anthropologists, those whom we call “armchair anthropologists.” Exteriority obliges the ethnographer to abandon the accustomed space of academic activity to travel to the space where the objects of interest reside. There is no other possible way to enter into contact with them through one’s sensory organs, which are the only mechanism for acquiring all the information needed for the work. It is not by accident that this mode of working in the field is known by the generic term “observation”: that is, the prioritizing of the visual to obtain sensory knowledge in a direct way, although surveys and interviews incorporate at a secondary level the work of the other senses, especially hearing, to acquire indirect information about things the ethnographer cannot witness personally. Thus there are differentiation and separation in the knowledge process, in both its spatial and its temporal dimensions, as a result of accepting knowledge as being merely sensory and of giving the highest priority to this form of knowledge. This may be a consequence of perceiving the relationship between sensory knowledge and rational knowledge as that of two successive and cumulative stages that unfold at different points in time and in different spaces, instead of paying attention to the dialectical relationship that unfolds, through practice, at each moment of the production of knowledge. If, on the contrary, both forms of knowledge are considered to interact dialectically, they should take place simultaneously in the field. In this way, fieldwork is transformed, its epistemological status altered: instead of being simply a technique for collecting information, it becomes a method of knowing, of “producing” knowledge. It is useful to remember that until the first decades of the twentieth century, observation meant, above all, direct observation, the ethnographer as an eyewitness. Participant observation only emerged and acquired significance later on, some time after Malinowski; in his view,
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participant observation is secondary and consists of what he calls “submerging” oneself in native life. In this way fieldwork was “invented” as an approach that has characterized anthropology during the last century and has become the framework defining anthropology and differentiating it from the other social sciences.
The Foundations of Empiricism
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In this sense field research emerged out of the growing dominance of positivism in the social sciences, giving primacy to sensory knowledge or, in extreme cases, to the notion that this is the only kind of knowledge that exists and consequently the only kind of knowledge that can be acquired. Such an approach gave rise to an empiricism in which observation was the only source of facts, constituting the totality of knowledge. For knowledge to be complete, we had only to organize the data once we were back home, employing concepts derived from various theories that functioned, for the most part, not as categories of analysis but as principles, the role of which was merely to organize and classify information. The use of categories generally sought to establish the commonalities among the various elements of a society or between societies, with an emphasis on categories derived from empirical observation. Later fieldwork would be oriented exclusively toward verifying the presence of these same aspects in other societies, also through observation. This is how “participant-observation guides” and “guides for classifying cultural data” functioned and operated. Despite his declared intentions, Malinowski was not able to abstract himself from concrete reality or transcend it. His concepts are empirical, mere generalizations. Even his theoretical essay “A Scientific Theory of Culture” (Malinowski 1990) is not truly theoretical, since he limits himself to a handful of generalizations regarding the human compulsion to satisfy biological needs. For Malinowski, at one level data must be constructed through observation. At a second level, the anthropologist must scrutinize and seek out those realities that are invisible to simple observation, those that are impossible to grasp directly in the field through the use of the senses; his tools included charts and diagrams. Then there is a third level of penetration: the rigorous synthesis that seeks out broader sets of relationships in order to evaluate their
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weight within the cultural context. At this level, which has nothing to do with fieldwork, Malinowski appears to distance himself from empiricism. But this is not really the case, since his work advances by establishing relationships among empirical data so that he can establish empirical relationships and generalizations of a similar nature. At the first level, one obtains immediate factual information. At the second, one generalizes, drawing broader assertions through the comparison of distinct cases; these assertions derive directly from fieldwork. At the third level, greater generalization is achieved by establishing correlations among earlier assertions. In this way a network of relationships emerges, organized at the empirical level through the immediate and tangible manipulation of information, a network in which and for which writing serves to shape knowledge into a totality. According to Malinowski, the observer constructs the facts, which are “invisible” realities. Malinowski does just this in his study of land tenure in the Trobriand Islands, a system in which significance derives from the relationship of tenure to agriculture. He begins with statistical documentation based on concrete cases, a method that consists of collecting information on all those instances relevant to the topic, real or hypothetical; he is not using statistics in a literal sense, since he does not work with samples but with the totality of the cultural universe, nor does he treat his information quantitatively. Malinowski did not believe in reducing the process of synthesis to a single occasion at the end of the research project but considered that there should be intermediate steps at which partial synthesis was carried out. However, he always maintained that in order to synthesize, the researcher had to distance himself from the field, in spite of the fact that these were the moments when theory and material reality should confront one another. One of the unintended results was that at the moment that the definitive synthesis pointed out gaps in the data, the gaps could not be filled because the researcher was once again at home with scant possibility of interacting directly with the group under study. We can only emphasize the fact that Malinowski never achieved this last level of synthesis in his work on the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands. In truth, Malinowski’s synthesis does not involve abstraction but generalization. To abstract is to rise to a level above the concrete facts; it is the capacity to compare and relate that which is not comparable because it is different. Marx accomplishes this in his analysis of com-
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modities. He compares all the different forms that commodities assume in the capitalist system, placed before his eyes by the market, each empirically distinct. Such a methodological comparison is possible only when it is founded on the assumption that the everyday process of exchange involves an implicit comparison of distinct commodities, since no one exchanges one good for another similar one. What commodities have in common cannot be perceived by the senses but only by the mind, through theoretical reflection. Thus Marx carries out a reductive process, moving from one reality to another, since in order to acquire knowledge of the essence of commodities—an essence that is invisible to the senses—it is necessary to go beyond empirical facts, beyond visible form, transcending it to move toward the higher level of value, the abstract quantity of labor that is necessary to produce commodities. Nevertheless, the validity of this knowledge is always confirmed by concrete empirical reality. In contrast, Malinowski inquired in immediate and practical terms into the function of those institutions that formed the focus of his research, institutions for which the basis was biological and not social; here, the social is secondary in relation to the biological. Marx wrote that to speak of a person’s need for food, clothing, etc., was a truism, and this is precisely what Malinowski offers in his theory. Leach (1974) believes he discovered the “epistemological basis of Malinowski’s empiricism” in William James’s pragmatism more than in C. S. Peirce. But Malinowski is not the only scholar to have developed an empiricist approach to anthropology. So has Lévi-Strauss, who might be thought of as the antithesis of empiricism. His work is essentially formalist, in permanent movement, his attention centered on phenomena and not essences. For this reason, for Lévi-Strauss the senses do not matter, given that they only describe and do not explain. He illustrates how structures undergo transformations, according to formal theoretical laws, but he cannot explain the real, material, causes of these transformations. He can confirm that any given element is present in different societies, but he cannot explain why.
Are Ethnographic Methods Neutral? One of the central dilemmas La Rosca faced was how to return the results of the process of acquiring knowledge to the groups to whom it Vasco Uribe: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing • 25
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should have belonged, who were its beneficiaries. The fact that this was a fundamental problem, the solution to which absorbed a significant share of La Rosca’s efforts, indicates that in spite of the important transformations that participatory action research injected into research methodologies—despite the group’s creation of relationships with members of the social sectors with whom they were working and the high level of participation that these sectors achieved in the research process—in the final analysis the results still remained in the hands of the researchers, just as had always been the case. This provoked unease and concern among La Rosca members, who felt it was necessary to engage in extensive reflection and to give priority to the search for new ways of returning knowledge to those who should control and use it in their struggle to transform reality. In my opinion, the members of La Rosca were unable to solve this problem satisfactorily, despite their well-known achievements in creation of tools for communicating results to social sectors that were, for the most part, illiterate. An analysis of La Rosca’s practice, a close critical reading of their publications, and my own experience with indigenous peoples lead me to conclude that the contradictory results La Rosca obtained derive from the fact that they did not engage in a deep and critical evaluation of the research methods used by social scientists, something that they did accomplish with respect to theory and research agendas. As a consequence, they recognized the anti-popular character of theory and agendas but considered that existing research methods were neutral, without class character, and for this reason could be employed by anyone without generating any negative effects, although in their writings La Rosca did affirm the need to create new tools that complemented their theoretical and political proposals. I concluded the opposite. These research techniques had been developed by social scientists working in the service of the enemies of the people, to reinforce domination and exploitation. In addition, these methods were intimately associated with the theories underlying the work of these scholars, which is why they fit together. It was through the use of such methods that relations of power between the subject and object of research were reproduced in the field. Despite the fact that they introduced new methodologies, when participatory action researchers grounded their work in these standard techniques they became, against their better judgment, the true subjects of the research process. For this reason, in the end the knowledge that had been gen-
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erated remained in their control, in their heads, and not in the hands of the peasants, blacks, and indigenous peoples with whom and for whom they had worked. In reality, these groups never surrendered their status as objects of research, remaining just as they had always been. Consequently, if it was essential for La Rosca to abandon the social theory that was in vogue at the time in favor of participatory action research, then it was also necessary for them to apply the same approach to their research methodology: engage in a critique that exposed its character, how it operated in the field, the mark it left on the process of generating knowledge and in the final research results, and, of course, its consequences in terms of the usefulness of their research for achieving the objectives of grassroots organizations. It was necessary to create new methodologies, in accordance with the theories that had been adopted to replace those of the social sciences. The authoritarian character of methods like interviewing is clearly manifested in the fact that it is the ethnographers who ask questions about issues that are of interest to them, without leaving openings for the informants, in turn, to inquire into those topics of interest to them. We can also add the fact that researchers choose their informants according to their own selection criteria; it is generally unthinkable for the authorities of the group being studied to designate which people should work with an ethnographer. There is the additional issue of the nature of the questions being asked and the conditions and place and time of fieldwork, which are freely decided by the subject of the research. Clearly, such arrangements are an imposition that places informants in an unmistakable relation of subordination. Furthermore, this mode of operating inevitably introduces an ethnocentric quality to the research results, negating the basic criteria and the perspectives of the society being studied concerning the research topic.
The Separation of Intellectual from Material Labor A second element in this discussion is the very character of knowledge and its sources. In spite of the fact that La Rosca’s members broke with earlier social scientific tradition to validate the central position of the learning and experience of the people, they did not go far enough, and because they thought it was common sense, they relegated this knowledge to a subordinated position, theoretically and practically. While not Vasco Uribe: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing • 27
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all popular knowledge and experience is true, and not all of it must be accepted, La Rosca erred when members used their own criteria as a filter to evaluate the validity of popular learning. That is why when the time came to return the results, as occurred in Historia doble de la Costa (Fals Borda 1979: 11), the book had an analytical, theoretical, and methodological channel that was generalizing and written in an academic language meant for researchers and advanced grassroots cadres, and another descriptive channel, which was concrete and anecdotal, composed in the language of storytelling, with many photographs, meant for common folk to read.5 There is yet an even more important backdrop to this story, one that reveals the real, objective, and decisive architecture of the division between the subject and the object of knowledge. I am referring to a form of the social division of labor characteristic of class-based societies: the separation of intellectual labor from manual or material labor. In these societies intellectual work is a process reserved for one class sector, the intellectuals, who belong to the petty bourgeoisie. That is what we must try to rupture, instead of accepting it as valid or unchangeable and adapting ourselves to it. Deep down, most of the researchers who subscribe to participatory action research presuppose that popular sectors are incapable of creating valid scientific knowledge, despite the fact that many PAR practitioners would consciously reject such an assertion. It is for this reason that they do not appropriate theoretical constructs or methodologies from popular sectors. And this is why it is not strange that in the end, knowledge winds up in the hands of the researchers. Furthermore, many PAR attempts at “returning information” are no more than simple processes of vulgarizing knowledge produced by others without breaking down the division between manual and intellectual labor.
Confrontation and Knowledge In my opinion, to break with this state of affairs, which impedes the possibility of making room for the knowledge and ways of knowing of popular sectors, we must build upon the act of confrontation (which can also be called dialogue) in the creation of new research techniques and methodologies.6 The development of these methods must be nourished by the forms of knowledge and theorizing of popular sectors. It is in confron-
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tation with people that both our knowledge and theirs will be validated, refined, and combined to produce concepts, methods, and procedures for activist research (investigación-acción), ways of knowing and doing that are novel, creative, and, above all, transformative of reality. From the moment I began to participate in the struggles of indigenous peoples of the Colombian departments of Cauca and Nariño in mid-1972, my attention was drawn to how Native people functioned in their assemblies, encounters, and other large meetings. They operated according to a system of “break-out groups” (comisiones), an obvious borrowing of terminology used to designate procedures that are in vogue among many sectors of national society, particularly among academics, trade unionists, and students. But on closer examination I soon realized that there were significant differences from these other contexts. Usually, the activity begins with a general meeting in which all the participants present the necessary reports and establish the central agenda items to be considered. Then participants are distributed in “comisiones,” the nature of which depends on who is participating; in some instances, people join one break-out group or another for linguistic or ethnic reasons: Guambianos, Nasas, Pastos, solidarity workers (solidarios), etc.7 There are no secretaries or note takers, although frequently one of the members is chosen to moderate. During all the time that the group meets, the different participants intervene to present their ideas and points of view, leading frequently to broad and sometimes very heated arguments; some speak over and over again, others intervene less frequently, and there are very few who do not participate. At the end of the time allotted to the group meetings—which in my experience may go on for two or three days—all members rejoin the general meeting, without having come up with explicit conclusions or a prepared report for the plenary session. Once everyone comes together, the topics are revisited, and the various participants intervene afresh with their ideas, generating an ongoing discussion. Finally, the group analyzes what has to be done and how, and the meeting ends after agreement is reached. The fact that the break-out group meetings I observed did not reach conclusions, and did not present reports to the plenary, and that everyone took part in the follow-up general meeting as though they had never worked in comisiones, was inexplicable to me. I tried to com-
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pare it to what occurred in a text by Mao Tse-tung, “Oppose Book Worship,” which proposes a research technique that involves “hold[ing] fact-finding meetings and undertak[ing] investigation through discussions.” Mao adds that “this is the only way to get near the truth, the only way to draw conclusions” (Mao 1930). This means we must begin with the premise that it is the people of a place who know, and for this reason, the leadership must meet with groups of twenty to thirty people to discuss problems; each one contributes, and the solution is constructed collectively. What is different is that for Mao, the organization itself and its leadership analyze the results of discussion and select the appropriate conclusions, in order to arrive at decisions and return them to the people in the form of directives for action. In the indigenous meetings, decisions are made by all, based on an exchange of ideas that takes place through conversation; governors, cabildos, and leaders do not make the decisions, but they do put them into action.8 I came to understand that the break-out groups of indigenous meetings were, clearly, research encounters, where knowledge of a problem was generated through discussion. In the course of this dialogue each participant confronted the knowledge of others, in order to arrive ultimately at a broad conclusion. Later, one of the members of the History Committee with whom I worked told me that everyone has the right to participate in the generation of knowledge, everyone knows his or her part, and collective discussion can lead to a group conclusion. I was wrong when I surmised that these meetings did not reach conclusions. They did, although the conclusions did not take the same form as those with which I was familiar, nor were they recorded in writing. Later it became clear to me that at the small-group meetings and in the multiple discussions that developed there, conclusions emerged in the minds of all the participants: they came to acquire a greater knowledge of the problem than they had had before the meeting, since it was no longer personal knowledge but that of the entire group and validated through debate. This knowledge was expanded yet further in plenary sessions, where shared conclusions emerged out of an even larger group. Final decisions were thus supported by the shared conviction that they had been arrived at through collective discussion. It became evident to me that this was a clearly intellectual activity and that what people were engaged in was “research mingas,” “knowledge mingas,”
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the result of which transformed individual knowledge into collective knowledge, although it continued to exist individually in the minds of all of the participants.9 Our field methodology in Guambía was structured around the centrality of such research meetings: we understood that knowledge could not be generated individually, through the use of informants who recount their experiences to a researcher, but needed to happen in collective form, with the intervention of the greatest possible number of members of Guambiano society.
Ethnography and Power
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Some ethnographers, including the postmodernists, identify the problem in terms of the power relations inherent in ethnographic research and propose to resolve it by identifying the written text as the space in which these relationships unfold, ignoring their presence in the material realities of fieldwork. In contrast, my objective was to transcend these power relations in the field. To achieve this, it would be necessary to comprehend and reconsider the field as a space of practice, a space dedicated to the production of knowledge and the use of this knowledge to transform reality, thus validating this knowledge. But two indispensible conditions were necessary: research activities must be guided by a theory that is developed simultaneously with the fieldwork, and research should be a collective practice, not individual and isolated. This was made possible in our case by an organic relationship to the struggles of the indigenous movement. It ensured that our research objectives would be defined in light of the needs of the struggle, guided by a broad discussion organized by the cabildo council. Intent upon modifying the relations of power inherent in the ethnographic text, various anthropologists have identified the problem as one of ethnographic authority, which, they observe, has been squarely in the ethnographer’s hands. It is time to transfer authority to those who are the subject of the writing. But how can we truly transform power relations in the text if they have not been modified in the field, where they originate (not to mention in social conditions that the ethnographer is powerless to transform)? Geertz (1989) conceptualizes the author in two senses: as the author
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of a text and as the authority who makes decisions about the text. But it is possible to add a third sense, one who does something oneself; in other words, we can consider the problem of autonomy in ethnographic writing. By questioning authority in this final instance, we not only consider the author as an authority but also raise the possibility that writing can fill the role of a spokesperson, as something that speaks for another. Geertz himself (1989) has characterized ethnographic research in terms of “being there and writing here.” That is, the information is collected “there,” but “here” is where it is worked and analyzed, knowledge is produced, and writing takes place. This statement implies that the author accepts traditional ethnographic writing practice, and it assumes that researchers and their own society, on the one hand, and the societies they study, on the other, are completely separate. Consequently, fieldwork is understood strictly as a stage of collecting information, as sensory knowledge “out there,” in the space of those who are studied. Analysis and organization of this information happens in the space of the researchers, which is found “here.” In the face of this, the authority and power of the ethnographer are only broken when certain central assumptions are accepted and acted upon in the field:
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As a result, the authority of the ethnographer should be equal—and on some occasions even subordinated—to that of local people. In this way joint action and a true dialogue characterized by the confrontation of perspectives will transform previous relations of domination. An example of this might be what occurred during the first six months of my work in the indigenous community of Guambía. We had adopted as our primary strategy a methodology centered on picture-maps (mapas parlantes), but we abandoned it following a decision by the cabildo.11 The council felt the method would create problems, given the political situation at the time (the permanent presence of the M-19 guerrillas
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and the Colombian army in Guambiano territory) and cabildo relationships with religious institutions (pressures by nuns to influence the new governor, who was closely allied with the convent). It was precisely the dimensions of armed conflict and religion that were emphasized during this phase of research. But it is not only when local authorities set research objectives and guidelines that ethnographic authority is decentered, nor does it occur exclusively through the introduction of local knowledge forms, like the reflexive-investigative meetings that were central to our research technique. It comes with a new recognition of the status of the wisdom and knowledge of Native peoples. Much of this knowledge is contained in historical narratives, which anthropologists have called “myths,” and which give concrete form to personages, relationships among them, activities, and events. Many ethnographers—Lévi-Strauss among them—have erroneously proposed these should be considered metaphors or symbols that ethnographers must interpret in order to determine what they are really expressing. Such an approach implies that there is a separation between the material world and the world of ideas that does not exist in these societies or, at least, is not completely developed there. In my opinion, this owes to the fact that we are not dealing with contemplative knowledge but with knowledge that seeks to produce acts, as Marx suggests: a knowledge-act (un saber-hacer) embedded in daily life. In Guambiano thought the world of ideas and the material world are one, so that what might be called “material culture” is also part of an ideological constellation, as I have argued elsewhere.12 This is the inverse of what occurs in structuralism, which argues for the independence of symbols from everyday life and defines humans as the producers of symbols and not as beings who work. The Guambianos do not make this separation between object and idea, since none of them lives without both. To know is to travel the topography, because culture is imprinted in territory. To know is to grasp not only in the mind but also in the body: knowledge is not only thought but felt. Therefore theory and practice are not separate, and it is possible to think through things. As a result, their conceptual forms are different from ours. For Guambianos, abstractions are expressed through concrete forms, through concept-things (cosas-conceptos). For example, time is a snail that walks, as the Guambianos say. These con-
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cept-things are built out of concrete material elements that exist in everyday life. Out of this arose our methodology of seeking concepts in everyday life. Marx argued that the relationship between material reality and forms of consciousness among the earliest forms of society is different from that which exists in class society:
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The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. (Marx 2001: 68)
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That is to say, given that material work and intellectual work are not separate, material and ideas are not separate either; this does not mean that they are not differentiated or that it is impossible to locate material activities, on the one hand, and the constellation of ideas, on the other. Put another way, in this type of society ideas remain amply loaded with material things, and at the same time material activity is loaded with ideas. This, of course, radically contradicts the arguments of symbolic anthropology and even those of the broader current of thought from which they derive: structuralism, particularly in its Lévi-Straussian variety. Consequently, when we refer to these societies it is impossible to argue for the existence of possible worlds that are not at the same time lived worlds. This notion of things was noted by Lévy-Bruhl (1966: 113), who thought that “the antithesis of matter and spirit, so familiar to us as to appear almost natural, does not exist in primitive mentality—or, at any rate, it interprets it differently from ourselves.” As would be supposed, Lévy-Bruhl, who was not a materialist, interpreted mentality differently from Marx, especially in regard to how it originates. Elsdon Best (Best 1924: I, in Lévy-Bruhl 1966: 114) clearly expressed his thoughts on “primitive” concepts and the effects they produce in the minds of ethnographers: “Confusion is caused in our minds by the native terms denoting both material representations of immaterial qualities and immaterial representations of material objects.” This helps us to understand why, for the Guambianos, knowledge exists objectively, outside of individuals. Consequently, what we must do is to observe knowledge and relate to it through the senses and the mind. This is what leads
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shamans to use sight or vision as an essential tool for knowing, while in our society knowledge is a human creation.13 Nonetheless, not all Western theories of knowledge are contrary to indigenous ones. The Marxist thought of Frederick Engels (1940) argues for the existence of a dialectics of nature. Others, however, affirm that the dialectic is a creation of human thought and that Engels’s vision is mechanistic; so, they would argue, we impose the dialectic on nature through our thought, given that it is not otherwise present there: nature in itself would not be dialectic. In any event, if knowledge is embedded in things, it exists objectively there, in material reality, and can only be verified through practice—which is precisely what Marxism argues. This is contrary to the theories produced by the social sciences, which leave the application of knowledge to public servants, despite the fact that anthropology, particularly North American anthropology since the 1950s, has emphasized this in development programs that the United States introduces in the countries it controls or seeks to control, generating currents like that of directed cultural change, proposed by Willems (1964), and Foster’s applied anthropology (1969). Posing the problem as one of the relationship between the subject and object of investigation obscures the crux of the problem: the existence and exercise of social relations, not just those that occur between the dominant society to which the researcher belongs and the dominated or colonized societies under study but those that operate within the dominant society itself, and which involve, shape, and determine the behavior of the ethnographer. In reality, since people are social beings, the individual is not in reality individual but is a space in which multiple social relations intersect; the individual is the collection of social relations that converge in and determine that person. Malinowski is credited with the creation of the ethnographic subject and, consequently, of the subject-object relationship.14 The ethnographic subject is the materialization of the individual in the concrete field of ethnography and, as such, is a creation of bourgeois society, the product of private property and capitalism. Marx considered that the individual did not exist in primitive society, although of course individual people did, differing one from the other. That is to say, the individual did not exist as a social category, as a social subject counterposed to society.15
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A person is a physical being and a social being, the product of society. As a social category, the individual is that person plus the constellation of social relations to which the person belongs. Hence it is possible to say that one is not one but all of the others. That is why Malinowski’s notion of the ethnographer or the native as a personal subject is a fiction. To the contrary, Marx considers capitalists as the incarnation, the materialization, of social relations, in some cases to their detriment. The fact that they are so says nothing about individuals, nor does it imply that from this point of view they are monsters. As a consequence, it is impossible to sustain the notion of the ethnographer as an individual; that is, as the personal subject of research. What I am as an individual is determined outside of me, by society. That is why the process of transformation can and should only begin outside. Going against popular notions in contemporary anthropology and in modern society, my subjectivity is objectively given outside of me. This breaks with the false contrast between subjectivity and objectivity posed by those systems of thought that seek to create—in order to manipulate—the fiction of an identity between the person and the individual, beginning with the incorrect assertion that the individual is natural and has always existed. To the contrary, the individual is a historical and social construct that develops alongside the appearance of the first class societies, during the process of decomposition of the primitive community; in that community the individual did not exist, only the collectivity, although it was made up of people, the raw material from which the community was made. Posing an opposition between subject and object becomes a problem that is constructed on the foundations of the fiction of the identity between the person and the individual, and in this way it is transformed into a tool for domination. According to these criteria, the unequal relation between researcher and researched, between subject and object, appears as a voluntary question and, consequently, one that can disappear thanks to a voluntary act of the ethnographer, as if it were not founded in objective reality. Malinowski himself does not deny subjectivity but isolates it by giving it a channel of expression in personal everyday life; he distinguishes this from science, where free reign cannot be given to the imagination or the sentiments of native people, and there is no place for the emotions. His methodology acknowledges the duality of human nature, of
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sentiment and reason. Thus, both aspects must be taken into account in the process of data collection. In order to approach the natives’ sentiments, Malinowski proposes use of the corpus inscriptionem as a tool. That is, it is necessary to record people’s sentiments, to grasp their point of view and their explanations of things, as he did with the Trobriand Islanders when they navigated the Bay of Kiriwina. But for him, this is not part of knowledge; it is only the raw material with which the ethnographer will produce knowledge. A distinct way of approaching this would transcend individuality, break with the fiction of the subject, and eliminate the notion that the subject of knowledge is the ethnographer. In reality the subject is the group, made up of both the ethnographer—who carries as baggage the identity-determining relations of another society—and the natives. The field should become the space of encounter between subjectivity and objectivity, producing conditions under which their confrontation contributes to constructing a true ethnographic subject. As this practice unfolds it comes to demonstrate its validity, becoming the real and not simply the declared space for the encounter between objectivity and subjectivity. This involves generating knowledge during the process of change itself, since practice is the principal generator of knowledge. It does not involve first knowing and later applying this knowledge.
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In order to comprehend the epistemological proposal regarding fieldwork specified in my methodology of “collecting concepts from life,” I must now examine the relationship between life and knowledge. I call attention to two central elements. The first is that knowledge exists objectively in things; it is not a human construct, as is believed in the West. The second is that knowledge is expressed through conceptthings, material elements that are part of everyday life. For this reason, gaining access to them—“recognizing” them—can only occur in the course of everyday life, which entails living with the societies one studies as an essential element in the process of creating knowledge. Anthropology envisions the contrary. For Lévi-Strauss, for example, everyday life has no explanatory value, and one needs to transcend it to be able to know, to gain access to a hidden reality; for Lévi-Strauss one must move from everyday life to reality—which is invisible—through a Vasco Uribe: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing • 37
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reductive process. This involves reducing life to reality, forms to content, in a process built upon theoretical models or matrices. Although everyday life is his point of departure, it plays no further role in LéviStraussian thought. From that point on, theoretical thought is the only instrument that can generate knowledge. Fieldwork provides the entryway into knowing reality, at the same time that it is an obstacle to that knowledge. This is why everyday life and the elements it comprises are set aside, having no meaning in and of themselves but only when encompassed within a structure. This is what constitutes the relationship among elements, which are generally constant; what is modified are the relations among them, their combinations, although this occurs according to universal laws. Another important aspect in Lévi-Straussian thought is the attribution to human beings of the characteristic of working at the unconscious level to produce the social world. For this reason, it is clear that humankind is not conceived of as a subject of our own history but rather as a passive object of circumstance, the determining factors being fundamentally biological; this makes this theory anti-human. At first, disillusioned as he was with his own society, Lévi-Strauss sought indigenous people as sources of an alternative way of life. But he concluded that there is no perfect society and that there was no reason to tolerate among indigenous peoples that which he would not tolerate in his own society. His idea was that the anthropologist would construct a model of society, but it would be the task of others to use this model to achieve a better life in his society. He constructed his model by taking elements from all societies, decontextualizing them in time and in space; that is, uprooting them from the everyday life in which they were embedded. This allowed the model to be applicable to any society in any time and place, a clear process of “dehistorization.” That is to say, since structuralism does not transform, it does not return to reality. This is what happens with Lévi-Strauss himself, who never returned to ethnographic fieldwork of the sort that produced his book, Tristes Tropiques (1992). In contrast, for Marx, life both conceals reality and at the same time manifests it, although not presenting reality as it actually is. In his method one moves from the real and concrete to the “thought-of concrete” through a reductive process that is entirely different from that of Lévi-Strauss. If for Marx real life is not an explanation, it is what
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must be explained. There is thus a formal similarity between the two authors, but not a methodological one, despite Lévi-Strauss’s affirmation that one of the sources of his thought, together with geology and Freudian psychoanalysis, is Marx. The Guambianos lend importance to life by affirming that knowing is walking (recorrer). But there are two ways to do this: first, as in the walking needed to complete the tasks of everyday life; second, as a research methodology. Walking the territory is a form of knowledge, whether this be accomplished bodily or through thought, although the two cannot be separated. This is what occurs when the Arhuacos of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta weave: men sit to weave at their looms, and while their fingers weave their lives, their minds travel in order to learn the sources of life. Walking as a way of knowing among the Guambianos is also based on the fact that history is imprinted in space and is a way of collecting concepts in life. As Marx argued, there is no separation between the process of living and that of thinking or knowing life, although there are differences between them. When the ethnographer is the knowing subject but does not live the life of the society being studied, the process of research and knowledge building is isolated from life, when it should be part of life. In Guambía, research and knowledge are part of life and they both serve the struggle. In general, it is possible to affirm that in indigenous societies learning occurs while living in the everyday world. Knowledge is a creation; you learn to think about things by doing them. Postmodernist anthropology, especially Tyler (1986), takes the antivitalist position of structuralist formalism to an extreme and speaks not of knowledge, but of evocation, arguing that there is no objective referent in a text’s past because it is a mere creation. For him, we are speaking of a kind of nostalgia; this is a process of creation in which what matters are the ethnographer’s sentiments—the facts are only a pretext. For this reason, he refers to the proximity of ethnography to poetry. Under such conditions, ethnography is more an art than the production of scientific knowledge. Going against the pretentions of a Malinowskian ethnography that proposes to recreate reality in a text by positing its truth-value, Tyler emphatically declares that evocation does not bring reality to the here and now. For him, reality is, at best, a representation, not a presenta-
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tion, and no representation poses problems of trustworthiness or reliability (confiabilidad). Thus ethnography does not allow us to know, nor is that its objective: what ethnography makes possible is the construction of an image of its object. Tyler quite rightly rejects the possibility that this representation can have political objectives; that is, that its objective is transformative. To the contrary, in my work I am guided by the notion that there is no discontinuity between life and reality, although they are not the same; reality only exists as life and can only be experienced legitimately by living it. Life is experienced only through the senses: sight, smell, touch, etc., although if we stay at this level we will not comprehend it. In order to know what moves life, it is necessary to think it as well as to live it. Otherwise it is impossible to explain why it is how it is. Lévi-Strauss is correct when he states that life itself does not contain its own explanation, something he shares with Marx. Life is incomprehensible in and of itself, and for this reason we must go further, in search of what reveals at the same time that it conceals. On this basis it is possible to begin to see life through other eyes, illuminated by knowledge, but we must return again to life to transform it, since if we only have thought, we change nothing. This implies that the process of fetishizing reality is not merely a mental process or, as some have argued, a false consciousness. Instead, the process means a fact exists in everyday life and has its counterpart in consciousness, in the universe of ideas. For this reason traditional ethnography’s principle of observing “over there” and knowing “here” is invalid, because life itself is the beginning, middle, and end of knowledge.
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Indigenous Struggle, Territory, and Knowing In my book on the jaibanás (shamans) among the Embera people (Vasco 1985), I proposed that there was an indissoluble relationship between space and time in this indigenous nationality, in which the category of time does not have its own independent expression, being formed instead in relation to the category of space, which occupies the preponderant position. Later, when I joined the indigenous movement of southwestern Colombia, I realized that this association of space and time also existed
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there and that it was expressed in the notion that history is imprinted in the territory: this is why you must walk territory to gain knowledge of it. In order to accumulate the knowledge necessary to participate effectively in support of the land-claims struggles in the resguardos, I had to walk through different spaces continuously, in particular those located along community boundaries.16 This also happened when I visited the Pastos in the department of Nariño, where we made a long voyage that began in the resguardo of Males and extended to the warm lands that border on the Kwaiker. This occurred in Guambía, where I experienced exhausting treks along the mountaintops of the páramo and climbs to the highest peaks.17 When I arrived in Guambía to participate in a project of revitalizing historical memory (recuperación de la historia), an elderly woman asked about the objectives of my stay and felt sorry for me because she said I would surely tire myself.18 When I asked her what she meant, she responded, “Knowing involves a lot of walking.” As the project developed, it was clear that she had hit the nail on the head, pinpointing the crux of what is involved in a Guambiano method of acquiring knowledge, and something that is surely also present in other indigenous groups. In Guambía, walking not only allows one to know—to listen to—the territory, but at the same time provides the central axis of how territory is constructed. Some time later some Guambiano elders explained to me in further depth how I should understand this process. They concluded by affirming that the loss of traditional knowledge and of Guambiano lifeways was due to the fact that people no longer walk but prefer to move around in vehicles. This breaks the lines of communication with the land, one of the essential sources of knowledge. A central facet of our research in Guambía, introduced at the beginning of the project, was the active recollection (recuperación) of the toponymy, the place-names in the Wam (Guambiano) language. When I arrived in August 1987 this work had already begun with activities coordinated by the History Committee in resguardo schools, where teachers, students, and parents walked the lands of their districts (veredas) and drew maps, recording place-names in Guambiano. These maps were presented to the public at assemblies and, later, were exhibited at the Museum-House of Culture (Museo-Casa de la Cultura). I noticed the maps when we began our task of historical reconstruc-
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tion in the “office” the cabildo assigned us next to the museum. During a coffee break on one of my first days there, I looked at the maps and noted the name given in Spanish to a hill: Los Tres Jóvenes (the Three Youngsters), Maatseretun in Wam. I asked the committee members about the history of this mountain, and they said there was no history. I assured them—an oddity of my profession?—that there had to be one. One day, some three weeks later, one of the committee members arrived with the news that there was a story explaining the mountain’s name. He told us that the night before, on his way home, he had met an elder on the road and they had continued together, talking. They were well on their way when in the distance, a bright sunset exposed the profile of Los Tres Jóvenes against the sky, and the elder told him that it had a history. From there on in, we discovered that it was not sufficient to record place-names in the vernacular, although this was important because many of them had fallen into disuse and were no longer remembered, particularly by the youth. We also had to learn the histories associated with these place-names, stories that were at the same time part of Guambiano history and of its construction of territory. But there was more: these stories established the foundations of the role of each place in Guambiano life. Thus Maatseretun was traditionally a site that young people visited when they reached a certain age in order to learn what lay before them in life; this was a custom that few now followed, which some elders felt contributed to the disorientation experienced by today’s youth. On the basis of this information, we planned a variety of walks covering all of the resguardo lands, one of our objectives being the recovery (recuperación) of the names associated with various places. The members of the research group participated in these walks, accompanied by elders who lived on or worked those lands and knew them well; sometimes we were accompanied by other Guambianos and Guambianas who wanted to get to know their territory. As we walked, the elders recounted the place-names and their histories, sometimes differing on them, because not all elders agreed on the names or on the stories behind the names. All of this was recorded in maps and notes so that it could later be taken up in larger groups in order to produce, ultimately, a map of the entire resguardo, with its associated stories. The map would focus on the creation of Guambiano territory through
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the history of the actions of its inhabitants and the ways that they have used the territory in their daily lives, historically and in the present.
Collecting Concepts in Everyday Life
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On one occasion I asked some Guambianos with whom I was talking what would be the best route to arrive at the house of a compañero in another district. One of them explained to me that I should take the road down to the “Virgin’s Fork” (La Horqueta de la Virgen) and then take the path up to the right. I remembered a crossroads not far away, and where the roads met there was a statue of the Virgin Mary, probably put there by the Missionary Sisters of Mother Laura. I thought I understood the directions. But to my surprise, the other Guambianos found the instructions hilarious: over and over they repeated, in Wam and in Spanish, “la horqueta de la virgen,” and each time their laughter grew stronger and more prolonged. I could not understand what was so funny about the expression. When I recounted my experience to the committee members, they likewise could not contain their laughter. They finally explained to me the meaning of utik, or “fork,” which signifies generation or procreation. When an unmarried daughter leaves her home and returns with a child on her back, her parents say utikmisra arrinkon, that she left by one branch of the fork and returned by the other: she left on her own and she branched out, she lost her virginity. When the nuns placed a statue of the Virgin at the meeting of these two roads, they probably did not know they were making a joke, not through speech but with things. Some time later on one of our walks, we crossed the lands reclaimed (recuperadas) from the large landowner Suszman, on our way to La Clara. Standing on level ground, we noted a number of snails in the black and humid soil. One of my Guambiano companions told me that this place was called Srurrapu, “snail,” which I attributed to the presence of land snails there. But as we proceeded up the plain we turned onto a road that ran through a fallow lot that was covered with grass. The compañeros cut down the grasses with their machetes and a large and almost flat rock appeared, its surface completely covered with spiral petroglyphs: “Srurrapu,” they said, pointing them out. And one person added: “This is history: a snail that walks.” It all became even clearer when we met an elderly woman on the road,
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her head covered with a traditional Guambiano hat, a kuarimpøtø, woven in a spiral. The Guambianos call the hat a snail, a long braided ribbon made of reeds. The same compañero who had designated the snail petroglyph as history now explained that in this hat “you can read history.” These elements kept appearing in everyday life and in relationships. I have called them “concept-things,” through which the Guambianos think and talk about their world, as they do in stories: through abstractions that condense their thoughts, their theories. In the process of detecting, or “discovering” and appropriating this concept, we investigated and discussed the other contexts in Guambiano life in which it appeared and their different meanings, in order to comprehend what knowledge they contained. We found that we required a conceptual framework to guide our analysis and to structure the knowledge emerging in the course of our research. The Guambiano concept-things—the utik, srurrapu, and kuarimpøtø already mentioned as well as others that were discovered in similar circumstances, such as mayaelø, lata-lata, linchap, and kantø— furnished the theoretical foundations of our analysis.19 This led to an arduous process in which these concepts were compared with my own theoretical ideas and with others that came out of our readings. When we were well advanced in the process, we held a workshop with government employees who work with the Guambianos. Some of them asked about relations between Guambía and Colombian society and about how Guambianos understood the concept of community. The next day one of the Guambianos asked to respond to the questions posed the night before. He expanded upon the principles that orient Guambiano life and what has happened to them under the system of exploitation by the dominant classes in Colombia. He took the example of the Gran Flota Mercante o Flota Mercante Grancolombiana (the Colombian merchant fleet), which had been in the news the night before, and he converted it into a theoretical tool that allowed him to analyze the relationship between Guambiano society and Colombian society. He used the concept of market as the foundation of the relations of control and exploitation of the Guambianos by Colombian society. Thus the Flota Mercante Grancolombiana took form as the exemplification of merchant capital, which is predominant in a region like Cauca, where the level of industrial development is extremely low and, of course, so is the movement of financial capital.
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The compañero explained, moreover, that his analysis had taken form the night before in his kitchen, as he talked with his family about what had transpired that day in the workshop.20 To our surprise, the compañero created and used one of these concept-things that characterize Guambiano thought, as they do among other indigenous people. Everyday life is highly variable, but its structural elements are not invisible. There are things that are repeated, over and over, with little variation, and they provide us with a key. We must search out those elements in which they are lodged, in everyday life, where they can be experienced. They are the true “processors” of social life. The collection of concepts from life does not refer to thoughts encapsulated in language but instead to practical thought that can only be partially grasped through words, as in surveys, interviews, and the like. It is necessary to live everyday life, to share activities and work, because that is where thought is lodged (that which some mistakenly call “ethnic thought”), and it is there that we can complement it with observation. Thought emerges as actions and objects in everyday activities, tied to them by “uses and customs” that lend them permanence and continuity. The word is not separate from thought. When you live this life, with all its difficulties and problems, and work side by side with people in search of a solution to their problems, you note that they recognize these concepts and compare them to Western ones. We carry the latter in our heads and we cannot leave them behind when we go to the field, even though ethnographers have recommended that we arrive with a “blank slate.” In the process, however, one’s own notions are modified, one’s mode of thought is transformed and, of course, so is one’s mode of action. In other words, as you collect these concepts from everyday life, you begin to live differently and you begin, deliberately, to think differently, experiencing a methodological process in which many elements of indigenous thought become your own. This implies that you become more like the people involved, and it could not be any other way, but those with whom you live and work also become more like you. Without fear of exaggerating, you can state that after working with people, if you leave just as you arrived, you have missed the most important point in your research. It is obvious that this process of conceptualization and abstraction springs from and is nourished directly by community lifeways. This means that in the course of a project focused on knowledge creation it
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is necessary to participate in daily life and, consequently, to experience its difficulties and hopes so that they become one’s own. This is different from the participant observation of ethnographers, which is only a tactic for collecting information more efficiently, for winning people’s confidence, and for verifying in the most tangible sense the material that has been collected. It is also different from what has been called “accompaniment” (Andrade 1993: 2–3), because that involves accompanying the lives of others during a discrete period of time, without their problems becoming those of the researcher. Collecting concepts embedded in everyday life refers not only to how Guambiano knowledge might be described from an external perspective. It is also related to other facets of this knowledge. For example, what we call nature, of which the Guambianos feel they are a part, was explained on one occasion by taita Lorenzo Muelas as follows: “Nature doesn’t belong to us. To the contrary, we belong to nature.”21 For the Guambianos all of the elements that make up nature are animate beings who are alive, as are people. That is why one must relate directly to these beings—to the páramo, to rain, to the wind, etc.—in order to understand Guambiano lifeways. For this reason, a short time after we began our project we went to the páramo so that it could become acquainted with us. That day the páramo, clouds, and wind received us with great force, lashing at us during the trip. When we returned that night the compañeros decided that “the páramo didn’t recognize us,” although they promised that once it knew us, the next time it would treat us better. We had similar experiences with lakes, mountains, and other beings, whom we had to consult and interview several times, and from whom we received “signs” in distinct forms in different parts of our bodies, each one meaning that they were telling us something. For this reason, when the Guambianos refer to certain important mountains in their territory, they say that “those mountains speak about many things.” The highest mountains, with their tremors and strong quakes, announce what is coming. It is necessary to learn to listen to all of this, sometimes with the body and not with the ears, although on other occasions these beings connect directly with our minds by way of dreams and other forms of communication.
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Writing Ethnography
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I have already argued that for the postmodernists the essence of ethnographic practice is in writing. Postmodernism overvalues the text in comparison to fieldwork and even analysis, to the point of proposing that societies or cultures can be read like texts. In general, postmodernism reconsiders writing without raising anew the question of its contents or of power relations. That is to say, this is a kind of formalism that is not transformative, nor does it seek to be so. For postmodernists, authority is decentered in the text but not in the world. This implies that the authors use their authority to deauthorize themselves in a clearly ideological move that is, basically, a ploy. The dialogue the postmodernists proposed is only a monologue of the ethnographer with himself, in which the “native” is an intermediary, a pretext. Duvignaud (1973) has shown how guerrilla struggles that commenced in the 1950s in indigenous and peasant societies—once seen as traditional and conservative societies impervious to change—allowed them to become the subjects of their own history. He argues that these struggles called into question the notion of culture and demonstrated the fictive quality of the objects of anthropological knowledge, obliterating their semblance as exotic and strange. Since then, anthropology can no longer base itself in the stability of the culture concept but instead is based in change. Decolonization obliges us to reconsider the relationship between the observer and the observed. Even if it has always been valid (although not explicitly accepted or taken into account), we now face the reality that our objects of study cannot be separated from our own reality, nor should they be viewed as standing outside it, even though they are described without giving them a voice. In my opinion, the postmodernist ethnographers (and even some who are not postmodernist or not entirely postmodernist) have sought refuge in writing in the face of their discomfort over the mutiny of the colonized, their objects of study, who have stood up and begun to walk by themselves, becoming subjects. Now, as in The Leopard by Giuseppe Thomasi di Lampedusa, they want to change everything so that nothing changes. “Being there,” in the field, has been transformed by decolonization. The very basis of doing ethnography is eroded by the unprecedented question, “Who do we think we are to seek to describe them?” The very
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possibility of being in the field is placed in doubt, and even when this is possible, it is no longer feasible to continue working under the conditions and according to the criteria and interests of the ethnographer. But the stage that comes after fieldwork has also been clouded by doubts over the validity of written representation, with the very epistemological foundations of ethnography being challenged. If for Malinowski knowing the other was knowing the self, then culture is a conscious product to the extent that consciousness is achieved when one comes to know the other. Today, some postmodernists argue, anthropology does not involve knowledge of the real Other but only of a creation of ethnographers, who remake the other according to the terms of the society to which they belong. An earlier anthropology says more about ethnographers and their society than about the other. This might possibly be true if one accepts that rather than being scientific knowledge, all previous ethnography is the alienated thought of the West about the non-Western other, just as Marx argues happens with religious discourse about the gods, which is really a discourse about capitalism.
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In effect, writing is socially determined, in terms of both what is said and how it is said. In anthropology, Western society has produced an image of the Other that satisfies its own needs. The ethnographer’s Indian is not a real Indian but the image of an Indian that capital needs to infuse and spread at a particular moment in order to exert dominion. For this reason it is ever-changing. Some ethnographers recognize this, and for them the Other is not the Other but an image, a representation of ourselves. These are pragmatic virtual images that have real effects. Even today, there are ethnographic descriptions produced by indigenous people with the aim of capturing resources, such as that of the “perfect ecological Indian.” From this point of view ethnography is a system of production of images, of representations of reality; consequently, its products are not reality but images of it, not simple portraits. But postmodernists go further and assure us that representation is a free and subjective discourse, with no relationship to reality: it is a simple pretext. In contrast, for most Native societies there is no separation between representation and reality; discourse and image are reality, since, as we have
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seen, there is no separation between reality and thought, between reality and discourse. Scientific knowledge, for its part, seeks a concordance between knowledge and reality. Thus distinct criteria for the epistemological character of ethnographic representation appear to confront one another, questioning whether one creates knowledge about reality and, if so, what the relationship between them is. For the most radical of the postmodernists, however, this dilemma is meaningless, as there is no pretense of doing science. When they postulate that we are not dealing with texts, but with discourses, interpretation abandons all intent of explication, detaching reality from knowledge by arguing that all knowledge is valid, since knowing is completely subjective. That is to say, the objectivity that for years was pursued by anthropologists is abandoned. For this very reason, some now place anthropology within the humanities, given that it does not seek to show things as they are but instead uses reality as a starting point for creating a subjective image of how anthropologist-artists see the world, each one with his or her own style. In short, the images that are produced are not meant to be representations. One of the strongest arguments in favor of this position derives from the fact that reality is chaotic, that there are no structural relations and all elements are unmoored, all congruence among parts merely invented, a construction; this occurred with the classical anthropological concept of culture. What exists is not a community or a society but chaos. It is useful to remember that Marx (1973) had already argued that such chaotic visions of reality are the result of a focus on the superficial relationships among external elements, a conception that surely characterizes formalism. Supposing that postmodernist ethnography is correct in that it only creates images of reality and not knowledge, we must still consider the problem of what kinds of images it creates and what their effects are. Various authors, including Vine Deloria (1988) and Stanislav Andreski (1972), have extensively analyzed the power of manipulation inherent in ethnographic description, which creates images that are not in accord with reality. But it does produce change in communities, who seek to accommodate to these descriptions in order to benefit from them, with the aim of being recognized as indigenous. All of this is the consequence of the relations of power and domination exerted over them.
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The dominant classes only recognize the Native who resembles the existing imaginary created by anthropologists. In Colombia the indigenous struggle has included the demand to be recognized as Indians according to their own criteria and not those of the office of Indigenous Affairs, which are based on the images and concepts of anthropologists; in recent years this office established new teams made up of anthropologists and lawyers, who would certify the nature of Indianness in some communities of the Putumayo. There is a close relationship between this and the processes of reindianization and cultural recovery, which sometimes follow external criteria, but which the state seeks to impede or reverse because, as they say, “there are too many Indians in Colombia.” Such images are, nevertheless, neither pure nor isolated. To the contrary, there is a mutual contamination between internal and external images through the mass media and the direct action of ethnographers. There is also the possibility that the ethnographic image does not coincide with reality in the moment it is produced—but that it will in the future, thanks to its effects on communities. These external visions coexist with internal ones. For example, at a celebration in Guambía children under the guidance of their teachers (some of them nuns) abandoned their traditional costume to don feathers and loincloths so that they looked like Indians. But the written image also has effects on the dominant party making the description. This occurred in the nineteenth century, with implications that continue to the present, with the discourse of Western charitable civilizing actions directed at savages. It functioned as a moral argument among the colonizers to justify the colonization of aboriginal populations.
©
What Should We Do with the Research Results? In my opinion the divorce between reality and knowledge arises out of the great spatial and temporal gaps that anthropology has placed between fieldwork, analysis, and writing. Indeed, the extreme postmodernists reduce ethnography to the moment of writing, deleting the analysis of data, given that it is no longer necessary since they no longer think of this as a process of knowledge production; others confine themselves to presenting their data directly, with only a slight ordering
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of it, if any, to allow readers—they allege—to form their own representations or evocations. According to my analysis and a rethinking of the epistemology of fieldwork that converts it from a simple technique to a methodology that joins my research experience to that of the Guambianos, what I propose is to bring together the two levels (no longer stages) in a single plane, at the moment of fieldwork. This does not imply that there will be no distinction between these activities, since each has its specific characteristics. Of course, this contradicts the arguments of the postmodernists, since for me ethnography is not writing: writing is not fundamental. What is essential is fieldwork, with which both analysis and writing are inextricably entwined. This implies that the questions of why, for whom, and how to conduct fieldwork must also be asked of writing, which would then play a role in the knowledge process and would not be limited to reporting research results. In this sense, writing would no longer be a communicative tool but, instead, would become part of the research methodology; it would also be epistemologically transformed. In Guambía our research was based on a fundamental question: How should the Guambianos administer reclaimed lands in a specifically Guambiano manner, different from that of private property under capitalism? This question contained two other questions or problems: how to distribute reclaimed land, and how to work the land. The distribution solution proposed at the time by external agents, particularly by the Colombian agrarian reform agency then called INCORA, was to award individual plots or to create cooperatives or community enterprises. The Guambiano perspective was based on the idea that “everyone has a right” and that it was necessary to grant land rights even to children. Initially, the Guambianos proposed a way of solving both problems together. First, to walk the land to see how the Guambianos cultivated it, participating in agricultural labor, and to see how they worked on the haciendas, by looking at material remains of the past (the remnants of ancient furrows, for example). Second, to talk with people, especially with elders, about how they remembered the relationships Guambianos had with the soil and with the territory, including their ways of cultivating it. But there remained the problem of what we were to do with this material. Would we convert orality into writing by means of our field dia-
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ries and notes? At the outset we made posters, because the original idea was to create picture-maps. Finally, as explained earlier, the cabildo did not allow us to continue working in this way and requested a series of pamphlets for the general public and for teachers and schools, some written in Guambiano and others in Spanish. This was a difficult problem for us to resolve. The passage from orality to writing involves a process of translation from the local person to the ethnographer, which is mediated by the field diary. When one tapes, one obtains a comprehensive record, but transcription is also writing. Thematically organized field notes are an intermediate step between the diary and writing, breaking the groupings of information in everyday life that are partially recorded in the field diary and introducing a new set of associations based on the ethnographer’s conceptual scheme or on interpretation of the contents of the diary. This is not necessarily or exclusively a translation of meaning; it is a translation from one code to another, something that implies elaboration. Orality contains a series of elements that are not directly related to words: intonation, posture, facial and corporal expression, etc. Signs like quotation marks, question marks, and exclamation points that are employed in writing are an attempt at addressing such missing elements but can never completely achieve it. Orality also involves a cumulative process that requires paying attention in ways that differ between societies that privilege orality and those that privilege writing; the listener and the reader differ, in this sense. There is a certain flexibility in orality that contrasts with the fixity and permanence of writing. This gives orality a character marked by a permanent process of updating, modification, and change of contents within the dynamics of each context. In contrast, writing persists without alteration while reality changes, although of course how readers receive and interpret texts does change. Journal articles are somewhat more flexible in this sense, because there is a brief temporal distance between issues of the periodical, allowing us to recognize to some extent the changes taking place. Written texts do not contain the background information that is implicit in orality. Who is being addressed? When? These elements are known, for example, in the case of a life experience shared between a speaker and a listener. In contrast, writing must explicitly contain all the elements needed for it to be comprehended, since it does not know
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who its readers are and assumes that the author has no previous relationship with them, even though generally we write for those whom we want to reach; but when a text is prepared for a specific public, it is very difficult for others to understand it.
The Field Diary
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The confrontation between orality and literacy is part of a wider divergence founded on relations of domination between societies and, consequently, dominance of writing over orality. In ethnography such conditions created the need to establish mechanisms for converting orality into writing, accomplished through the mediation of the field diary, through which indigenous lives are made into texts that are halfway between orality and writing. A second moment of writing—of rewriting—is then required to produce a definitive written product. This process occurs “here,” distant from indigenous lives, in the ethnographer’s own society. Given that the movement from oral societies to ethnographic writing is mediated by the field diary, the following questions must be asked: What kind of writing is contained in the field diary? What is its relationship to fieldwork? One generally thinks of the diary as an indispensible tool for collecting, saving, and remembering information arising out of fieldwork. But in reality, it is a much more complex part of the process of objectification that leads from orality to literacy. The field diary constitutes the first step in this process, because it shapes and fixes ideas, discourses, customs, and actions in the material space of the page. It is assumed that in the process of writing a diary, ethnographers set aside their own subjectivity to objectively record information that has passed through two filters, the sensory organs and the brain; that is, they engage in interpretation. The difference between a field diary and a personal diary is that the ethnographer can separate objectivity from subjectivity, although in either case this involves a process of elaboration, given that the two coexist in the ethnographer’s personal life, where feeling and knowledge or reason are never separated. Writing fosters that separation; it enables a critical revision of the influence of subjectivity over objective knowledge. For this reason personal diaries are rarely published by their authors unless in exceptional
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cases, as occurred with the personal diaries of Malinowski. On occasion an author may quote some excerpts from the contents of a personal diary, but usually as an anecdote or illustration. All of this has been neglected. The questioning of ethnographic writing has been limited to the final written text and not the field diary. This may be due to the fact that the field diary is never complete, but we can ask ourselves why not. Its peculiar ambiguous status derives from that fact that it is not considered a written work, although it is written. Its purpose is to indicate the personal relationship of the ethnographer with the moment, because it is closer to the subjects, to orality; its structure is not analytical. It is organized according to the flow of everyday life, which is not textual but lived, unconnected or incongruent if read in this way. It does not contain explicit theorizing, although the ethnographer’s ideas guide the pen. Nevertheless, some recommend that it be read at night to encourage reflection and, building upon it, to create an explicitly written ordering. Nor has the essential character of the field diary been discussed. That is, we have not reflected on the question of whether the movement from orality to writing requires this “semi-written” text. It may be that poor memory makes it necessary, although the fleeting nature of memory is one of the consequences of writing. Sound recordings, which some use in place of the diary, are themselves a form of writing because in and of themselves they are not usable and require transcription. Without the diary, it would be necessary to develop other tools of memory, like those that exist in oral societies who remember through lived actions and events. Living with people helps to activate these mechanisms, in which case we cannot properly speak of memories but need to speak of tools employed in the course of living; when we leave, these tools begin to recede, until they eventually disappear. If we accept the viewpoint of extreme postmodernism, the only truly ethnographic document would be the personal diary, or even better, the personal response of ethnographers to their relationship with the Other, their feelings about this relationship. Geertz (1989) thinks Malinowski was the first to achieve objectivity by separating knowledge from subjective impressions, which he obtained by using two separate diaries. Thus it might appear that there is a simple process of translation from an oral to a written code, but it is also a process of individualization, of the predominance of the individual over the communal. To that we might add a process of objectification, because ethnographic writing is
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supposed to lend an objective character to this knowledge, which, once written, achieves an objective existence external to that of its author. Orality, in and of itself, is never objective but becomes so when recorded in writing and displaced from the self, independent of the subject. The oral code is more subjective and corresponds to societies that are more communitarian in nature. The written code has a more individualist character, accommodated to class societies where writing sets in motion objectifying processes by separating words from their authors and lending them permanence. The materiality of the oral text is more transitory: it lasts only so long as the air is in motion, although it can endure imprinted on the brain, in memory. The objective character of the written text in relation to its author has been taken up by the postmodernists as the basis of their act of deconstruction. Each reader can rewrite the text according to his or her own interests, independently of the person who wrote it. According to the postmodernists, the text only says what it says according to the personal criteria of the reader. Nevertheless, this is a condition of all writing; the process of interpretation mediates between author and reader. But orality also involves interpretation, for example, in relation to the context. The materiality of writing creates a permanent process of interpretation of the text, while interpretation of orality occurs more immediately. Texts have a broader and more global character because their interpretation can also be converted into a text, as occurs with reviews and critiques, and it is possible to form discussion groups to interpret them.
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Museums: The Path to Writing
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The transition from orality to writing in the process of generating knowledge has been up to now the task of anthropologists, which has required that they experience through fieldwork the lives of the societies studied. In the early years of anthropology the relationship with the object of study was indirect, mediated by colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, who lacked preparation and training; an example of this is the work of someone like Frazer. Later, informants became intermediaries. One would not plunge into native life but would be led by the hand by informants, complemented by direct observation. But it was with the introduction of participant observation that it became possible Vasco Uribe: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing • 55
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to move from orality and everyday life to writing, with life obscured by the decontextualization of information, which is abstracted out by way of field notes. This is how the notion of “living there and writing here” emerged. Orality, in contrast, cannot abstract out of daily life, which furnishes it a context; without daily life, orality would make no sense. In the move from orality to ethnographic writing, museums played an intermediary role. At first, museum collections were accumulated directly, through colonial looting and later by ethnographers. Meaning was lodged in the objects, which were neither contextualized nor accompanied by discourse or writing. Today museum exhibits are based upon previously composed scripts, and their exhibit cases are filled with writing. When the Guambianos assembled their museum, the guide to how to locate and exhibit objects was provided by the structure of the Guambiano house, the central axis of social life; the script was only written much later, to be able to recount what was on exhibit, why, and how it was organized. In the early period, research results were presented exclusively through objects, but the reordering of the museum made the known unrecognizable, producing the effect of alienation, what is now called the “museum effect,” in which the exotic appears unreal. Native people do not recognize themselves in such museums, just as later they would not recognize themselves in texts. Ethnography makes the self strange, abstracting and decontextualizing it. Later, relationships began to be drawn between museum objects, something that also became a characteristic of written ethnography. In this order of ideas the first museums constitute a form of ethnography prior to the ethnographic monograph. They were very close to aboriginality, because the objects directly communicated their contents. That is to say, in the process of movement from abstraction to writing there was an initial inability to separate the material world of the societies studied, their objects, from what was plucked from them by the anthropologist, who took these things away to place in museums. In this way the results of knowledge were presented through things, as among indigenous peoples.
Power and Writing But written expression has other consequences. Until now it has been a historical coincidence that oral societies are those that are dominat56 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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ed, while societies characterized by writing have been the dominators, despite the fact that we cannot draw a direct cause-effect relationship between one condition and the other. Such relations of domination have meant that orality is translated into writing and not the reverse, a fact that is strengthened by the ethnographer’s belonging to the dominant society. But if ownership of writing was not the cause of domination, it has played a role in the process of subordinating oral societies. Some authors have noted the coincidence between the introduction of writing and that of class society and have observed that writing arises among the dominant classes. The first things that were written, as far as we know, were inventories of goods from the stores or warehouses of kings; that is, inventories of products accumulated through exploitation. I have already argued that the introduction of intellectual work, as a specialized activity separate from manual labor, corresponds to the social formation of class society. Writing played an important role in this process, making possible a distancing between materiality and ideas when the ideas were put in writing. The confrontation between orality and writing is not abstract but driven by politics and presented in the broader context of social relations. In indigenous societies, as also occurred in the dominant classes of our society, many adhere to the belief that learning to read and write creates, in and of itself, the conditions for demolishing relations of domination by unmasking deception. Thus the appropriation of foreign forms of knowledge is accepted as plausible. The focus, contents, and even the form of the written text are not entirely the product of the author. This is a tenet of trendy currents of anthropology, which in turn arise out of specific social conditions; if this is not the case, the monologic postmodernists must respond. This state of affairs fragments, dilutes, and deauthorizes the author’s practice. The author is, then, not an author(ity), as is illustrated by the fact that diverse authors coincide in drawing a common image of Indians, depending upon the era in which they are writing, in spite of differences of personality, historical period, and other such things. The ethnographic monograph, for example, is a standardized model of writing that has been maintained for decades and is still the rule in academic circles. If it really had an author, why is it always written in
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the same style? Perhaps authors are not very authorial and are limited by narrow social frameworks. Models of scientific writing, including the ethnography, create certain limits and adhere to them by asserting a prior definition of contents and objectives, by defining the principal theme and reorganizing social relations around a broad thematic plan, with a set order and a preestablished set of relations among topics. This implies that before writing begins it is known what the text will say. If ethnography is ideologically premised on the existence of the ethnographic subject in the field, the mechanisms I have described will convince ethnographers of their own importance and obscure their role as social agents, just as they are invested with an authorial identity that they really do not have. The vision of the “anthropologist as author” is the fundamental axis that reinforces their importance. That is to say, there is a consistency in the double illusion of the ethnographer: the illusion of the field and that of the text. This impacts directly on the possibility of knowing by learning from indigenous people. The Yaqui shaman Don Juan realized, as Carlos Castañeda’s books convey (1991 and especially 1998), that the loss of personal importance is a requisite for beginning to learn.
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Maintaining Concepts in Everyday Life
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In order to confront all that goes into the writing of ethnography, one of our tasks is to attempt to recover, in writing, that which has been annulled, excluded: in other words, daily life. One path points toward challenging the abrupt separation between daily life and the field diary as well as between the diary and the definitive text. This is made possible through co-writing with indigenous people, something that cannot arise out of the goodwill of the ethnographer but must emerge out of a particular framework of social relations and solidarity, as part of their struggle. In terms of translation, the field diary is not univocal but can take two forms: one in which facts are translated, according to my ideas and vocabulary, into something for my ends; and another in which there is almost no translation, but instead the Native vocabulary, context, intonation, body language, and emphases of utterances are all recorded. In order for the field diary—which is a first instance of writing—to fulfill its role in this second diary format, one must be able to hear in one’s
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head as one reads the voice of the speaker and to see in the mind’s eye the image and actions of the actor. The word is more than a spoken discourse in oral societies; more fundamentally, it is life. When the Guambianos say that “the words of the elders were silenced,” they refer to the fact that in past generations people no longer lived as Guambianos, not that the elders were mute. Autonomous thought (pensamiento propio) had ceased; it was no longer in motion because people began to lead their lives without heeding the elders’ advice, without tradition. For this reason, indigenous processes of cultural recovery (recuperación) require something new, the making explicit of thought in a novel format, such as concept-words instead of concept-things, in order to promote a critical appreciation of the new form. In order to achieve this, it was necessary for the Guambianos to write, making way for a new and needed critical perspective. Earlier forms were oriented toward lending permanence to Guambiano thought, to conserve it as a way of life, but they did not contribute to its recovery, which at the moment was their primary necessity. When thought is life and is lived, recovery implies beginning to live it again after it has been lost. But the reappropriation of past lifeways, recuperated in their former state, is impossible, because these uses and customs, this tradition, no longer conforms to the conditions of the present; no one wants to live that way; it is impossible. Guambiano lifeways as they once existed are no longer; today it is necessary to create new lifeways built on the foundations provided by a search for the roots of culture and thought. One of the ways of accomplishing this is to work with elders, but also with mediating institutions like the Museum-House of Culture, the role of which, as defined by the Guambianos, is precisely to give life. That is why cultural heritage is life, is alive, and is not a dead past, as it is for us. This need for explicitness also arises from the fact that many aspects of Guambiano material culture, where thought was once lodged, are no longer a part of everyday life; they have been lost. It was necessary to remember them through alternate strategies, such as through the words and memories of the elders and through walking the territory. Here archaeology, ethnohistory, and the search for objects that are no longer in use all played a role. The elders recounted their uses and customs. Guambianos began to make objects that were no longer uti-
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lized, as samples for archaeological research. But memories recuperated in this manner still remained in the past: this is how it was, and it is over. They did not attempt to return to ancient lifeways. What they wanted was to resolve today’s problems in their own way, as Guambianos. For this reason they needed to be explicit about cultural forms. And it was necessary to accomplish this through a body of abstract ideas, and through expressing these ideas—which had always existed as activities, as lifeways, as objects—in words, developing new forms of thought that had not existed before among the Guambianos. For example, traditionally the Guambiano hat embodied a complex conceptual model, transmitted through its manufacture and use. Today, however, this is insufficient, although of course it is possible to begin to remake these hats based on surviving examples and the memory of the elders. But it has now, instead, become necessary to talk about hats, to write and to abstract the conceptual contents from this object of everyday use. The act of explicating produces a conceptualization that did not exist before, it creates knowledge and does not simply communicate it, and it makes possible the drawing of new types of relationships between concepts and an array of forms of thought. This obliged us to write texts—in Spanish for the moment, as writing in the vernacular develops—in which the words expressing key concepts appear in Wam. Even so, we sought whenever possible to maintain concept-things and concepts in their practical dimensions—lodged in the activities of everyday life—and to construct the organization of the written text upon the foundations of Guambiano thought and oral discourse. We found support in a form that is intermediate between orality and writing, but which many Guambianos—including those with whom I was working—consider to be an indigenous form of writing: petroglyphs, in which snails, hats, and spirals appear, referencing the form of expression as well as the existence of conceptual categories. The presence in the text of more abstract concepts, such as mayelø, linchap, and lata-lata, was never abstracted from mingas and communal meals, the activities and lifeways in which they function. In Guambiano writings, words in Wam are always attached to the realities to which they refer. Picture-maps also played a role in mediating between the word and the text. The second step in the recovery process was to conserve these concepts as everyday lifeways. For that reason there was a need to discover
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ways to create new activities and lifeways that were in accord with these “recovered” concepts but that also accommodated to current conditions. People did not want to become living museums. The MuseumHouse of Culture was built to embody the word of the elders, a space in which this word can live as though it were a house. But children do not live there; they visit it. The objective is to allow thought to speak once again through objects. There are, nevertheless, many difficulties inherent in the task of creating new lifeways. This cannot be a spontaneous process: it requires orientation and authority. This is the role assumed by the cabildo, whose members nowadays are functionally literate and whose command of literacy is growing, to the point that it is impossible to exercise authority without writing. For this reason the cabildo has a new role, which it did not have before, in the process of converting orality into writing, into literate thought. Continually forced to turn outward as a consequence of the process of national integration that was fortified by the 1991 constitution, the cabildo has in its practice become a basic obstacle to the work of forging new Guambiano ways of resolving problems and of living. Little by little they have abandoned the role of tata (elder), of someone who advises the community and orients it in daily life. As a Guambiano woman so clearly expressed it to me: “Counsel is like food; without it you die.”
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In any event, when writing is reconsidered as it was in Guambía, it becomes an essential component of a process of generating knowledge by fulfilling the dual goals of separating and conjoining. In this sense it is possible to consider, explicate, and systematically use writing as part of a methodology for generating knowledge. As I have already stated, one of the fundamental characteristics of writing is that it necessarily abstracts. Oral discourses are essentially concrete, while by its very nature writing is an abstract form. To the extent that it generalizes, writing at the same time decontextualizes, replacing the context it eliminates with specific discursive forms that serve as referents for the reader. Given that oral language implies a direct and personal relationship between speaker and interlocutors, they all share a series of contextual elements: they live at the same point in time and Vasco Uribe: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing • 61
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they probably belong to the same social group or to related groups and consequently share worldviews, all elements that orality assumes as given; for this reason, there is no need for them to be foregrounded or even explicitly noted. In this sense orality restricts itself to a spatial, temporal, and social context that makes it specifically concrete. Writing, with its possibility of broader coverage, eliminates such concrete contexts, creating abstractions out of the spacial, temporal, cultural, and situational contexts. Consequently, it permits access and comprehension to people of different conditions by adopting discursive forms that replace these contexts with other referents. Precisely for this reason, writing developed as a specific form of language, corresponding to other social conditions and situations of development. There are moments during fieldwork or research when one cannot write up a report because “one has not been able to clarify things.” In reality, I have never understood the clarifying role of writing, nor which things are clarified only at the moment of writing. For that reason the introduction to a book is the last thing you write, since you do not know beforehand what you are going to write, even if we sometimes believe we do. We might have a certain idea of what we will do, but when we begin to write, things begin to change, to be transformed, clarified, entering into new relationships, and therefore the final result is never what we intended at the outset. Empirical reality cannot be transcended simply by thinking. Thinking does not help us to go beyond the information we have collected, to comprehend it conceptually. Comprehension is not limited to forming a theoretical framework out of a body of concepts, which can be borrowed, or stolen, from books. Instead, it implies understanding the conceptual relationships among all of the elements collected during field research or in interviews and surveys. None of this is possible unless you write. Some people experience writer’s block and never complete their monograph or report, because they are waiting for everything to be clarified; they hope to analyze and comprehend things before writing. That is impossible, unless it consists of a simple repetition of the factual material, organized according to different formats or grouped in a new way but without advancing in the process of understanding, in discovering the essence of things. One has to compel the brain to think; and writing pressures the brain to think abstractly. To abstract is a form of thought, but writing forces or facilitates it. Nevertheless, written language is not the only way to achieve abstraction.
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Abstraction is a mental operation. When one writes, the process of abstracting is not achieved by writing. To the contrary, one must abstract in order to write, although it is also possible to develop the capacity of abstraction by exercising the mind. This means that at times we can achieve abstractions for which there are no words to say or to write, which obliges us to use archaic terms, transforming their meaning. Another peculiarity of writing is its linear, progressive character, which also tends toward abstraction. If one does not write in a linear format the reader will experience problems of comprehension. As a result of its linear nature, writing requires the abstract organization of ideas. In social sectors such as ours, this effect is so strong that even orality has a written support in our minds, where we have a written outline that provides oral discourse with a linear organization: statement of argument, development of points, conclusions, for example. The opposite occurs when writing is introduced into oral societies. At first, writing is orality in writing. In order to be able to write texts that have been thought through, one must pass through an intermediate stage. This was the path we followed in Guambía, to conduct research together and for writing to play an integral role in processes of creating knowledge. This occurred in the field, with the participation of the Guambianos, based on two criteria: everyone had the right to participate in writing, but everything is not equal, and for this reason, each one would participate according to that individual’s own capacities and conditions. • • • • •
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luis guillermo vasco uribe is professor emeritus of anthropology at the National University of Colombia. During almost forty years of work with Embera and Guambiano indigenous peoples he has developed an innovative field methodology and ethnographic research techniques called “collecting concepts in life” (recoger los conceptos en la vida), which he employed in collaborative research with the Movement of Indigenous Authorities of Colombia. He is author or co-author of numerous books, including Entre selva y páramo: Viviendo y pensando la lucha india (2002), Guambianos: Hijos del aroiris y del agua (1998), Jaibanás: Los verdaderos hombres (1985), and Notas de viaje: Acerca de Marx y la antropología (2003), texts of which many are available at his website, .
Notes 1. We thank Professor Vasco for giving Collaborative Anthropologies permission to translate and publish his work. 2. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, also known as the Wycliffe Bible TranslaVasco Uribe: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing • 63
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tors, is an evangelical missionary organization dedicated to translating the Bible into native vernaculars to spearhead religious conversion. For years there has been broadbased opposition to the SIL among indigenous organizations, because of both its missionary agenda and its support of conservative politics.—Trans. 3. Reynoso (1992), for example. 4. For an extensive explanation of La Rosca’s principles, see Bonilla et al. (1972). 5. Historia doble de la Costa (Double History of the Coast) resulted from the work done by La Rosca with peasant organizations on the Atlantic coast. It is a two-channeled publication that caters to a distinct readership for each channel, as Vasco describes, or invites readers to move back and forth between channels in a kind of dialogic movement between theory and ethnography.—Trans. 6. See Vasco (2002: 434–41. 7. These are the major indigenous groups of southwestern highland Colombia. Solidarios were non-Native activists organized in support of indigenous struggles.—Trans. 8. Colombian indigenous communities are led by annually elected councils called cabildos, headed by a governor.—Trans. 9. A minga is an Andean form of labor exchange, a collective work party. The notion has been extended by the indigenous movement to encompass political activities as well as subsistence labor.—Trans. 10. In this and the following section, Vasco uses the term indígena or “indigenous person” in statements where in English it would be more appropriate to use “local” or to identify groups by their ethnonym, like Guambiano.—Trans. 11. Introduced in the late 1970s by researcher-activists working in solidarity with neighboring Nasa cabildos, picture-maps provided a context for remembering indigenous history by condensing historical referents drawn from oral narratives into the local topography, fostering a participatory recounting of the past that privileged the indigenous memory and modes of storytelling; see Bonilla (1982). 12. See “The Notion of Indigenous Cultural Production,” in Vasco (2002: 402–10). 13. A broader explication of this indigenous concept and its implications for processes of knowledge creation can be found in Vasco (1985: 131–37). 14. For example, see Clifford (1988: chap. 3) and, from a different perspective, Geertz (1989: chap. 4). 15. I take this up in “Indigenous Telluric Thought” (Vasco 2002: 196–202). 16. A resguardo is an indigenous corporation, frequently validated by colonial title, that administers communal landholdings in Colombia. It is governed by an elected council, the cabildo.—Trans. 17. The páramo is the humid plain at the top of the cordillera in the northern Andes.—Trans. 18. Vasco uses the term recuperación to describe the history project. This is the word used to refer to the process of occupying usurped lands to reintegrate them into the communal resguardo structure. When the study of oral history is referred to as a process of recuperación, it is linked into this political struggle.—Trans. 19. Vasco defines some of these concepts earlier in the book in which this article appears (2002: 297). He glosses mayelø using Guambiano quotations: “There is enough for everyone” and “All of the members of this household, this great Guambiano household [that is] our territory, we share everything.” Mayelø provides the foundations for the others, including lata-lata, which denotes “equality,” in terms of access to rights and
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to things. Linchap, which means “accompaniment,” is the basis for Guambiano unity. Kantø is a communal work party common throughout the Andes (known in Spanish by the Quechua term, minga).—Trans. 20. See Dagua (1991). 21. Lorenzo Muelas is called taita as a term of respect, related to the word tata (elder). He was governor of Guambía on several occasions. He was a member of the Colombian Constituent Assembly that wrote the 1991 constitution recognizing Colombia as a multicultural and pluriethnic nation, and he subsequently served in the Colombian Senate. He is also a well-known environmental activist.—Trans.
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References
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Andrade Medina, Lucía Helena. 1993. Recorriendo nuestro territorio: La tradición oral y la lucha guambiana. Trabajo de Grado, Departamento de Antropología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. Andreski, Stanislav. 1972. Social Sciences as Sorcery. London: Deutsch. Arocha Rodríguez, Jaime. 1984. “Antropología en la historia de Colombia: Una visión.” In Un siglo de investigación social: Antropología en Colombia, ed. Jaime Arocha Rodríguez and Nina S. De Friedemann, 27–130. Bogotá: Etno. Best, Elsdon. 1924. The Maori. 2 vols. Wellington: Board of Maori Ethnological Research. Bonilla, Víctor Daniel. 1982. “Algunas experiencias del proyecto ‘Mapas Parlantes.’” In Alfabetización y educación de adultos en la región andina, ed. Juan Eduardo García Huidobro, 145–61. Pátzcuaro, Mexico: UNESCO. Bonilla, Víctor Daniel, Gonzalo Castillo, Orlando Fals Borda, and Augusto Libreros. 1972. Causa popular, ciencia popular: Una metodología del conocimiento científico a través de la acción. Bogotá: La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social. Castañeda, Carlos. 1991. A Separate Reality. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. 1998. Journey to Ixtlán. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dagua Hurtado, Abelino. 1991. “Para que los guambianos podamos vivir y crecer.” In Colombia multiétnica y pluricultural: Memorias del Seminario Taller sobre Reforma descentralista y minorías étnicas en Colombia, 157–161. Bogotá: Escuela Superior de Administración Pública, Documentos ESAP. Deloria, Vine Jr. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Duvignaud, Jean. 1973. Le langage perdu: Essai sur la différence anthropologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Engels, Friedrich. 1940. Dialectics of Nature. New York: International Publishers. Fals Borda, Orlando. 1979. Historia doble de la Costa. Tomo 1: Mompox y Loba. Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores. Foster, George M. 1969. Applied Anthropology. Boston: Little, Brown. Geertz, Clifford. 1989. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leach, Edmund R. 1974. Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Connected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1992. Tristes Tropiques. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1966. The “Soul” of the Primitive. New York: Praeger. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1990. A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mao, Tse-tung. 1930. “Oppose Book Worship.” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 6. Secunderabad, India: Kranti Publications. http://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage. ———. 2001. The German Ideology. London: Electric Book Company. Reynoso, Carlos, ed. 1992. El surgimiento de la antropología posmoderna. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Gedisa. Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. “Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus, 122–40. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vasco Uribe, Luis Guillermo. 1985. Jaibanás: Los verdaderos hombres. Bogotá: Banco Popular, Textos Universitarios. ———. 2002. Entre selva y páramo: Viviendo y pensando la lucha indígena. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Vasco Uribe, Guillermo, Abelino Dagua Hurtado, and Misael Aranda. 1993. “En el segundo día, la Gente Grande (Numisak) sembró la autoridad y las plantas y, con su jugo, bebió el sentido.” In Encrucijadas de Colombia amerindia, ed. François Correa, 9–48. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología. Willems, Emilio. 1964. El cambio cultural dirigido. Serie Latinoamericana, no. 4. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Sociología.
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PABLO:
Chem amta renü? (What is the renü?)
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LAUREANO: Renü muten ( Just renü). [Silence.] Salamanca.
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The baroque literature of the seventeenth century recounts in wellknown works the Hispanic legend about salamancas (a preliminary gloss could be caves or underground places where special skills are acquired), which always evoke a sense of magic, learning, and pacts with the devil (Farberman 2005: 145). In Argentina, as in neighboring countries, stories about salamancas and the people who visit them (salamanqueros) have been passed down since the early period of European colonization. While these folktales have their own regional peculiarities, they exhibit similarities in how they define this magical space where the initiate learns a definite art (taming animals, dancing, playing the guitar, curing, and cursing, among others) by making a pact with the devil, from whom the lessons are learned (Farberman 2005: 145). In Argentine Patagonia the figure of the salamanca marks a narrative genre that often circulates in the privacy of the home or at evening parties around the campfire; in these or other private situations, the interlocutors reveal in whispers that someone is a salamanquero or has had certain experiences with a salamanca. However, we believe that behind these apparent accusations of witchcraft and pacts with the devil, the Mapuche have maintained and redefined a philosophy of being, centering on their relationship with the environment and with the act of
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knowing. Although this article concerns stories about salamancas, our aim is to reflect specifically on the process of transmission and acquisition of culturally significant knowledge among the Mapuche living to the east of the Andes. The essay was written as a collaboration between an anthropologist, Ana, and a mapunche, Pablo, who is interested in reflecting on his history. Pablo replaces the ethnic category of Mapuche with the adjective mapunche to shine a spotlight on the process of identification as something that is ongoing. While Mapuche embodies a position of attachment, of belonging to a people, mapunche refers to an individual involved in a personal search to discover his or her subjectivity as a Mapuche. Our work emerges out of a dialogue between the distinct questions each of us posed. To demonstrate how we attempted to interpret what at first glance seems a matter of magic and witchcraft, we present here the reflections one of us (Pablo) wrote that were subsequently shared during the course of analysis:
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Since I was a child I heard my parents, neighbors, brothers and some strangers talking about the salamanca. Since then, I’ve heard some stories in which it was said, for instance, “He must be a salamanquero because he never loses at jackstones,” “He went to the make a pact: that is why he never loses,” “He is a good horseman because his grandfather was a salamanquero and left him the gift,” or “That guy has livestock because his family made a pact.”1 That is why, some years ago, when I started to search for my identity as a mapunche, some questions arose: What is it like? What is it for? Did it exist? Does it exist now? How does Western culture understand the idea of the salamanca and how does Mapuche culture understand it? Starting with these questions, I will try to shape what is present today among many of the people living in both the town and the countryside of this region. In this search, I found the name of salamanca in Chezüngun (the Mapuche language): “Renü.”
The word renü in Chezüngun corresponds to the Spanish salamanca but at the same time transforms it and situates it in local and historically complex frames of interpretation. Through the analysis of this tension, which we call renü/salamanca, we intend to reflect on two different but closely related issues. We examine how different epistemologies (some of Hispanic origin and others Mapuche) are articulated through 68 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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the work of selecting, transferring, and acquiring significant knowledge to define a way of knowing as “truly Mapuche.” We also focus on the decisions and methodological approaches that are foregrounded in collaborative work, where anthropological forms of interpretive distancing overlap with those approaches that emerge when the experience of knowing is aimed at finding oneself as a Mapuche person. By way of introduction, we present the questions that guided our reflections on each of these levels of analysis. First, the field encounters from which the stories we analyze emerged consist of conversations between one of us and a Mapuche interlocutor whom we already knew, having established a long-term relationship of learning and exchanging ideas. It is important to clarify this point, since not only do we incorporate our interlocutors’ words as citations of authority, but also—as frequently occurs in a relationship with a master—our interlocutors challenged us to identify questions and think beyond their apparent meanings. Consequently, during conversations with them the meanings of words such as “gift,” “special person,” “cave,” or “underground place” were constantly changing in relation to their interpretive frameworks and connections between these frameworks (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Attention to these shifts in meaning, which were more or less apparent, led us to identify a tension between renü and salamanca. The word renü, as mentioned, is associated in Chezüngun with the term salamanca and is used in restricted contexts to refer to something that is ancestrally powerful and respected (yam).2 On the other hand, beyond their more quotidien and public use, terms such as salamanca or witchcraft also evoke other knowledge networks, where the divisions between right and wrong, between what is permissible and what is forbidden, can sometimes become prevailing frames of interpretation. These internal and external senses of the words renü and salamanca are not opposed poles of meaning but are closely linked in a continuous chain of associations (Morphy 1991: 80). We focus here on the images evoked in stories and reflections on the linked concepts of renü and salamanca. Renü/salamanca can be the cave-shaped portal through which one enters into negotiation with the devil to acquire extraordinary knowledge in exchange for one’s own soul or the soul of loved ones; it is the gate to the parallel worlds in which ancestral Mapuche knowledge is located. The cave connects with an underground world, the underworld, which sometimes takes
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on the characteristics of Hell in the Christian sense and at other times takes on the characteristics of a parallel world of wealth and ancestral knowledge about life and the environment. External understandings of salamanca are associated with Christian ideas and frameworks of interpretation, where Hell, witchcraft, and the dichotomy between right and wrong predominate. Internal meanings replace the Christian model with other implied scenarios concerning ways of living and interacting with the environment; from this perspective, the knowledge inherited from the ancestors defines both “Mapuche culture” through the experience of an “inside” and the paths to “becoming” part of it. Second, from the moment we approached this research as a collaborative work, we directed our questions and thoughts toward a space of enunciation that is clearly neither the indigenous organization nor the anthropological academy. The effort was planned as a collaborative work and a co-theorization among people with different types of training, whereby we aim to develop conceptual tools arising both out of the articulation of interpretations embedded in Mapuche culture and history and out of the academy. In this sense, following the approach of Joanne Rappaport and Abelardo Ramos Pacho (2005), this mode of producing knowledge is part of a political project of rebuilding alternative conceptual frameworks that provide new interpretations consonant with the epistemologies and political priorities of indigenous struggles. Both of us agree that the Mapuche language is the point of departure from which to begin to develop these conceptual tools; such tools should be culturally significant for individuals, organizations, and communities who are searching for intrinsically Mapuche ways of interpreting experience and acting on social reality (and they should also be critical of dominant canons). We also believe that in the collaborative process, the analytical categories arising out of anthropology will be “refined” (Geertz 1987), acquiring nuances in their uses and definitions.
“We” and Its Distances When we moved from being informal interlocutors to become coauthors of a written work, we discovered that it would be necessary to explain the methodological agreements we had made. When we introduce ourselves in the text, for instance, we seek to avoid hierarchies or assuming stereotypes like anthropologist and Mapuche as well 70 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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as avoiding the separation of the roles of academic and activist, roles we believe overlap.3 We have opted to introduce ourselves as a worker in the field of anthropology and as a person searching for his identity (mapunche rather than Mapuche), since we want to identify ourselves with the actions that led us to think about this collaborative work from the vantage points of our different social trajectories. In particular the fact that Pablo, after much reflection, decided to identify himself as mapunche and not as Mapuche defined our reciprocal collaboration. This distinction refers indirectly and only partially to anthropological discussions that replace the concept of “identity” with “identification.” From the standpoint of Stuart Hall (1996), identification is a contingent way of articulating imposed identities in which people modulate, stylize, produce, or perform the subject positions that appeal to them. In the same line of thought, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) understand identification and self-understanding as a situational and individual approach to identity. These authors begin by critiquing the concept of “fundamental sameness.” This is also present in the uses of the native category of mapunche. However, Pablo’s attempt at replacing his introduction as a Mapuche with his search for an identity (as a mapunche), does not so much appeal to the joint articulation of ambiguous cohabitations that alternate the self as it proposes a revitalization of social networks, of the act of listening, of the process of transmission of knowledge and its socialization among those who are its very agents. Being a Mapuche is a goal, no matter whether it is achievable or not. What is interesting here is that Pablo’s position as mapunche serves as a guide to the process of the reorganization of social networks, dialogue, and transmission of knowledge, in which what is inherited from the ancestors is articulated within the daily experiences (of struggle, of loss, of crisis and encounter) of the most recent generations. Based on her experience among Nasa intellectuals of Colombia, Joanne Rappaport (2006) points out how spatial metaphors of “inside” and “outside” organize a conceptual topography that mediates between cultural attachment and foreign influence. We adopt this conceptualization to frame our thoughts on the evolution of Mapuche knowledge in the context of their political projects of self-determination. In other words, the aim of these pages is to talk about Mapuche culture from the standpoint of an insider. Therefore, we must first define the in-
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side, or the site at which Mapuche culture is usually located, in order to think of how a collaborative anthropology, in which the authors are not always equally “inside,” questions or participates in these topologies. In Patagonia the criteria of belonging and exclusion usually refer to the ethnic dichotomy Mapuche/wingka (wingka being a Mapuche term that refers to Euroargentines), in which both terms acquire a polyphony as complex as the one that Rappaport finds among the Nasa of Colombia. We do not discuss the concept of wingka here. Mapuche identity depends on various criteria, which involve agreements, collaborations, and different forms of participation that are highly contextual. We explore this as we interpret our own experiences. Pablo was born and raised in a place called Pantanoso, along the southern boundary of the province of Rio Negro. When he was twentythree years old he moved from the countryside to the provincial capital of Bariloche in search of work and educational opportunities. He currently earns his living as a craftsman producing leather goods. He is also attending university to obtain an associate’s degree in humanities and social studies at the National University of Rio Negro. Although he lives in the city, he still takes part in the ceremonies and meetings held in his community. In recent years he has become involved in Mapuche organizations and has begun to learn Chezüngun. Ana is a researcher and professor of anthropology. Since 1995 she has worked with Mapuche communities and organizations in Patagonia. She moved from Buenos Aires to Bariloche two years ago to work as a professor at the National University of Rio Negro. We met formally several years ago at a workshop for indigenous linguists, where Pablo was involved as a Mapuche activist and Ana worked, along with other anthropologists, as a lecturer on the subject of ethnography. Our relationship began when we opened a dialogue about a number of complex figures in Mapuche culture and the pillañ (the spirit of the ancestors, associated with volcanoes). Since then our discussions and exchanges of readings have focused on the possibility of connecting seemingly unrelated topics (such as initiations in caves, Mapuche knowledge, the ability to understand the messages of birds, and stories about government genocide, to name a few) as a means of stimulating us to think inside and outside of standard explanations; in the conventional wisdom, for example, certain practices are explained entirely through reference to the machi (shamans), the practice of
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witchcraft, or the devil. This was how we arrived at such a crosscutting and polemical topic as the salamanca, seemingly external to the Mapuche culture. Our collaborative work was initiated on an afternoon we spent drinking mate and sharing some stories we had heard from our Mapuche acquaintances. These narratives seemed puzzling or dull from the standpoint of our everyday ways of knowing and understanding. In these stories, images of ancestors danced atop a volcano, women lived underground, and ñankitos (local birds) that could speak came together with people with extraordinary skills. We began to realize that each of these narratives was connected to other discourses and practices, creating interpretive frameworks in which words acquired new and sometimes challenging meanings. Shortly afterward we read travel accounts, looking for mentions of the salamanca, and we began conducting interviews. In our regular meetings over the past year our work has focused on identifying questions and possible connections, culminating in the decision to attempt a preliminary explanation in writing. Even though our work grew out of a common intellectual agenda, it is also lodged in a specific political project. As has occurred in other countries, the “inside” is often associated—by indigenous people and government officials, NGOs or academics—with rural areas, with recognized indigenous communities, and in the particular case of the Mapuche with Wulumapu (the modern nation of Chile). Young Mapuches who live in urban centers in Argentina usually travel to Temuco and surrounding areas in neighboring Chile, where Chezüngun is still spoken on the street, or to rural areas farther from Puelmapu (Argentina) to commence their pursuit of a Mapuche identity. However, in recent years some Mapuche activists and intellectuals, who live either in cities or in the countryside, have begun to appreciate their own collectives, families, and personal experiences in a different way. By empowering family and local knowledge, not only do they concern themselves with a critique of hegemonic discourses about “the loss of the Mapuche culture” to the east of the Andes and in urban areas, but they have also become extremely creative in using tools to search for and interpret their own cultural heritage, whether it be inherited or acquired through research (Kropff 2010). We participate in these same initiatives. Certain discursive and nondiscursive images, among which we include those evoked silently or
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implicitly, continue to be passed down from generation to generation among relatives and neighbors, even in urban settings. According to Eduardo Kohn (2002), when an image is transmitted as valued knowledge, even when it is not fully understood, it often transmits signs of its potential links with the past and present. Interpretations made about Mapuche culture by new generations (among which we include ourselves) emerge out of the present, at a specific time and place, but they never completely abandon their links with the past. We believe, then, that this is a critical moment, politically and anthropologically, at which potential meanings that are transmitted as part of an “inside” can be interpreted anew within a specific political project, illuminating aspects that were not visible until now and connecting what did not previously appear to be naturally linked or related. As we developed this mode of understanding and reflecting on culture alongside our common political position, our perception of inside and outside was oriented toward the people with whom each of us was engaged in dialogue. For one of us, the reception of our work among family members or other members of the Mapuche community became important, particularly because we were working on a sensitive issue that aroused suspicion; for the other, academic evaluation was fundamental, particularly as regards the use of authorized quotations and the recognition of previous discussions on the subject. Without prioritizing either in advance, we agreed on an intermediate point of enunciation (“we”), in which we were both partly inside and partly outside. This decision became explicit on several occasions in the course of our work, and as we progressed we took shared responsibility for what had been said. However, during certain stages of our work, one of us might begin to feel somewhat divorced from this collective author. Such moments forced us to refocus the agreement on the “we-author.” These experiences were related to forms of distancing that we had not been aware of before. Pablo found academic writing and the use of anthropological categories to be a challenge, but he was also forced to confront the conceptual distance he needed to create in order to engage in debate. Therefore, every concept was discussed and agreed upon, as was the place of citations of authority in our work. Ethnographic “being-looked-atness” (Chow 1995, in Rappaport 2006) resulted in a paradox: on the one hand, it enabled the “we” to emerge as a reflexive subject, with the
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methodological advantage of denaturalizing that which we routinely ignore. On the other hand, it also evoked an external point of perception associated with a history of power and asymmetry. The matter then resided in evaluating every academic category that we were to use and discarding suspect ones. For Ana the challenge came from the opposite direction; that is, when anthropological distancing narrowed to the point of becoming almost invisible. This happened when the “we” became a competent speaker in Chezüngun, enabled to connect, interpret, and make associations based on experience, intuition, memories, tales, stories, or pieces of advice. At some point during our work, each of us recognized being simultaneously inside and outside by noting that “they will say I did not do this because I do not write well” or “I feel I am not authorized to assert that a word in Chezüngun has such and such a meaning, without quoting anyone.” One of our aims is to critique the notion that the outside must be separated from the inside in order for the informant to inform properly and for the anthropologist to interpret properly. Instead, we create a “we” in which our proficiencies and weaknesses are combined. This “we” is an expositive strategy through which we account for the methodological freedom we have enjoyed in our written work; it has allowed us to range beyond the inside and the outside in our conversations. The mutual transference of knowledge, skills, and forms of distancing allowed both of us to view things from an unusual perspective. Thus Pablo attempted to distance himself ethnographically when he interviewed his parents about the stories he had been told at home since his childhood. However, his conversation with Laureano, an elderly friend with whom Pablo often “talks about ancient subjects” (ngütramkam), quickly shifted from an interview into a communicative event through which Laureano instructed Pablo and gave him advice as a young Mapuche with whom Laureano shares the same attachment to the culture of their ancestors (i.e., the “inside”). The conversation between Ana and Fermín forms part of other communicative networks. Fermín’s stories, narrated by a person more than eighty years old and living in a community near the mountains, were told in a context of confidence. However, his ultimate aim was that these stories, told from the “inside” about “what really happened in the past,” would become publicly known. Each of these distances was a subject of reflection. Our joint research was enriching precisely because our autobiogra-
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phies and our experiences of Mapuche culture, in particular of the reñü/ salamanca, are different. In this respect our methodology involved dialogue and the exchange of explanations to translate jointly the categories that were commonplace to one of us but not to both.
Layers of Meaning Sedimented in History
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Delivering layers of meaning sedimented in the course of history, the words renü and salamanca evoke fields of signification in which the connections between sentient beings and the past are not always the same. Renü/salamanca is a semantic field bringing together different interpretive frameworks about the world and its beings, the sacred, the relationship between nature and culture, and knowledge. In Mapuche territory this semantic field has its own history. It begins to take shape as a place of tension and dispute in the mid-sixteenth century, when the word pillañ caught the attention of the first Spanish soldiers and missionaries.4 Chilean poet Pedro de Oña (1917 [1596]) translates the figure of the pillañ as an “evil spirit.” From early on, chroniclers associated it with the devil and called those who interacted with its forces “soothsayers” (sorcerers or witches). This early reading—Pedro de Oña is just one of its representatives—marks the beginning of a long process of mimesis and appropriation concerning Mapuche sacred beings. Settlers turned to the magic of mimesis, replicating in their imaginary the figure of the pillañ and attempting to appropriate the powers of the original (Taussig 1993). However, it would be anachronistic to argue that the connections they drew between the pillañ and the realm of evil were merely strategies of persuasion and domination. As Fabián Campagne (2002) argues, when authors like Pedro de Oña spoke of phenomena like the pillañ, evil spirits, and the devil’s possession of individuals, he was reproducing a natural philosophy grounded in the principles governing the ontologies of the period. In these descriptions of nature, both colonizer and colonized exchange their notions of what was possible and what was impossible. The divorce between nature and society that is characteristic of late modernity prevents us from comprehending that the humanists, missionaries, and chroniclers of that time could actually see the power of the devil in the pillañ: “The devil deceives your old men, saying its name is Pillán, and Huecuvoe” (Valdivia 1887 [1606]: trans.
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n2) and “They do not worship anything; speak to the devil, to whom they call Pillán. They say they obey him so they do not get hurt” (Lizárraga 1968 [1609]: 283). An interconnection emerges in these accounts between the field of signification of pillañ and that of demonic pacts. In this region and in this particular encounter, those who came across the sea seized the pillañ as their new gloss for referring to evil spells and the machi, who were perceived as sorcerers and the devil’s followers.5 In 1806 Father Melchor Martínez reflected on the “religion of the Mapuche” in order to decipher, within the limits of his own ontology, whether the pillañ was indeed the devil—a question introducing the possibility that the devil exists: “Some missionaries believe that this Pillán is the devil, with whose opinion I am inclined to agree although I cannot prove it.” Martínez believed in the power of “sorcerers” but distrusted their intentions when they claimed they went to a “mountain or cave, to xantucar or ask the Pillán” (Böning 1974: 32). Reading between the lines of the traveler and missionary chronicles of the early twentieth century, we are able to reconstruct different scenarios of dialogue between colonizers and the Mapuche. It is clear that the asymmetric distribution of the power to fix meaning had already established an outside limit to the discourse. For example, when Father Félix José de Augusta (1916: 144) asked his informants, “Is God the Pillán?” he discovered that they “feared affirming it” or he “had to coax them to get the story out of them.” Finally, at the insistence of the interrogators, the informants responded: “Pillanes are volcanoes; the sorcerers, the witches, and the evil ones are inside.” The association of the pillañ and the renü with the earth’s surface, caves, volcanoes, and the underworld, coupled with European beliefs in their evil powers, combined to foster the emergence of the Western notion of the salamanca as a gloss for them. The devil or wekufe and his followers, the sorcerers or machi, became a definitive part of this world of caves and places lying below or above the surface of the land that were called salamancas. In sum, the figure of the salamanca became the synthesis of all these connections. Once it was firmly rooted in popular culture, this synthesis acted as confirmation of the notion of a pact between certain people and the devil.6 Thus the renü, which at certain moments became unmentionable, shifted into the realm of stories about the salamanca. We began our research by reflecting on this secret and unmention-
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able space. While our reflections are based on a series of conversations, we focus here on an extended dialogue between Pablo and Laureano, an elder from Bariloche. This conversation, which functions as a “synthetic corpus” (Rockwell 1987), begins when Pablo introduces the subject of the salamanca. What we find enlightening is the way Laureano proceeds to establish relationships among diverse narrative performances that directly or indirectly revolve around the topic. In this series of stories we believe Laureano was removing layers of meaning, arriving by the end of the conversation at a network of connections among those things that both Pablo and Laureano perceived as being more “internal,” personal, and key to their own subjectivities as Mapuches. Such stories are the result of interactions between European beliefs and local knowledge. Nevertheless, we found similarities between Laureano’s early narratives and stories about salamancas recorded in other regions (see Farberman 2005): (a) the salamanca as a place for relaxation, where you can play cards, dance, play the guitar or the accordion, where beautiful women live—“like a bar,” as Laureano explained it—and (b) as a place where wealth or skills can be obtained, for which the devil will exact a charge—for instance, the lives of loved ones. We will not dwell here on the first group of stories; they fulfill a ludic or playful function for Laureano. In contrast, the stories in the second group embody a series of interpretive frameworks that focus on knowledge and its forms of transmission. One point of departure is to argue that European meanings silence inherited knowledge, the renü, which even today remains highly valued. As the epigraph to this essay demonstrates, talking about the renü implies whispering and evoking a context of privacy and respect.
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The Salamanca and Contexts of Knowledge Transmission The art of storytelling, according to Benjamin (1991), lies precisely in narrating a story free of explanations. Laureano was a practitioner of this art in his conversation with Pablo: “That is why I am telling you this, eymi ta füta wentruaymi (and when you grow up), you will be telling it yourself. It never ends; it is a chain.” Because for Pablo the research process was also a personal search for identity (in which the collection of information merged with the creation of relations of shared affinity with our interlocutors), we were able
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to redirect our initial questions about the salamanca toward questions of its transmission. Laureano invited Pablo to take part in a chain of conversations in which talk about the mysteries of the salamanca not only functioned as information but, above all, served to advise and guide the younger man in his quest to be mapunche. Laureano grounded his exchange with Pablo in an “inside” when he began to replace definitions and straightforward explanations with highly poetic and enigmatic indirect accounts. By resorting to this kind of narrative art, Laureano not only identified Pablo as a young man who valued his culture but also included him in a chain of transmission and shared belonging. This style of transmission has a performative outcome, so that while he listened to Laureano, Pablo was being trained through good words and pieces of advice that would guide his efforts at “becoming” mapunche. Following the interpretive framework Laureano established, we do not explain what the renü is but instead think through how Laureano invited his interlocutor to build upon one of the more constitutive practices of the meaning of being Mapuche; that is, the practice of knowing.
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Laureano narrated one of his first stories using the poetic form of an ayekan. This genre is characterized by a humorous interplay between reality and fiction. When an anecdote becomes an ayekan, the truth about what occurred no longer matters; what is central is the knowledge it transmits. The subject Laureano introduces in this ayekan is how to value ancient knowledge. The event he narrates takes place during the journey of a man who was transporting wool in oxcarts, intending to sell it. The narrative begins when he and his companions arrive at a resting place:
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laureano: What is it? There is name for when they come to stay? It has a meaning. How do you say it? pablo: Künitu. l: That’s right. Resting place. They met, precisely, in the densest part of the mountains, a beautiful spot. They decided to rest and make a fire there. One of them was there, another there, another over here. Well, there they were, yerbeando [drinking maté around the campfire], others were singing, having some drinks. Some were singing in their Cañumil and Ramos: Knowledge Transmission • 79
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language [in Chezüngun]. Food was served; they were about to eat. All of a sudden, they say the earth moved. And some bugs they had never seen before appeared. Then one of them shouted, “Renü mew ta muleiñ pin” [We are on the renü]. Pah! They rushed off [ran away]. And it turns out they were wrong! It was turtles buried below, who sensed the heat of the campfire and came out [he laughs]. How they ran into the night, the poor fellows! No one knew what they were and they all came to look at them. Ugh!!! Pülli tati chipay wezake pülli [Spirits outside, evil spirits; he laughs]. It’s funny, you see? p: Ayekan tati? l: Ayekan may, may.7 . . . Feymu ta renü mew ta ngütramkeafuy ñi fütachaw [My dad used to tell me this]. It really scared him. He was a kid. That time he really got scared. That is why he used to tell me, “Don’t make a fire without first asking if you can or cannot. Ask the place, in case it’s a renü.” How ignorant, huh? He’s still afraid. Dad was already old then. But it was nothing: they were turtles! He told a man that it was not a salamanca but a turtle’s nest that was just below where they made the fire. So that’s what he remembered about the renü.
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The story grows out of mistaking a turtle nest for a renü, highlighting the inappropriate behavior of the characters, who thought the place they had chosen to rest was a renü. Laureano points out their mistake of “still being frightened” and describes the fear of this seeming-renü as ignorance. The appropriate alternative behavior was to “ask the place” and see “if you can or cannot” rest there. The correct approach was not fear but respect. One word that describes these attitudes toward knowledge is the term yewen. In some translations yewen is rendered in Spanish as “shame” or “fear,” but our interlocutors refer instead to “respect” or “knowledge.” The confusion that provokes laughter in this ayekan belongs in the same mode: the travelers, in their ignorance, were afraid of what they should have known and respected. Similarly, the longko (chief ) Maripan, who defined the salamanca as the place “where the devil and other stuff are,” when he was asked specifically about the renü, added: “It’s like a school. He who arrives thinking in one way leaves in good shape. He who arrives with two types of thought goes wrong: you have to enter with yewen.” In an informal chat with a Mapuche friend, Pablo mentioned that we were
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doing a piece on salamancas, and the friend described having talked about it with his grandfather. The grandfather recalled that during a trip with his own father, they spied a large fire where some people were gathered. His father said there was a meeting taking place there and that they had to make a detour, since it was “a very important meeting” and you could not enter “just like that.” Based on these and other conversations, we understand the yewen to comprise a particular attitude toward knowledge that is free of doubt, fear, or hesitation. That is, with kiñe rakizuam (only one thought), or having feyentun (belief ).8 Yewen meant one would kiñe piwke, nor piwke nien küme amun ñi amual (act correctly to be well), or kiñe ka küme züngu nentuy, ñi kimual, ñi lonkoal, ñi ngütramkawual, ñi küme feleal (say a good word to be able to learn, think, converse, to be well). knowledge as a gift
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Behind the notion of a pact underlying the meanings that in the course of our conversations came to be associated with the salamanca, the “gift” that is to be discovered in these caves is associated with witchcraft. While such meanings are evident in many of the stories we heard, receipt of a gift does not always imply skills in witchcraft, nor does it necessarily require a contractual relationship with evil spirits. Widening our perspective, Laureano declared renü to be ubiquitous: “El renü dicen que está en todos lados, donde usted pueda” (It is said the renü is everywhere, wherever you can [find it]). We believe Laureano presented his ayekan about the turtles in order to prepare the conversational ground to shift his interpretive framework and introduce Pablo to deeper knowledge about the renü. This was when Laureano departed from his first accounts of salamanca (not transcribed in this paper), which recounted pacts with the devil and gifts one could acquire to inflict harm. In the next story we recount, once the necessary respect and terms of belief were established between the two, Laureano calls upon Pablo as a special person who is receiving the gifts associated with the renü at the same time that he is listening to the narration. Special people, those who have acquired a gift, are also individuals who possess the ability to interpret the signs through which knowledge about life is transferred. The last part of the conversation between Laureano and Pablo, which was framed as a deeper and more complex “inside,” introduces another notion of the gift. In this story, Laureano Cañumil and Ramos: Knowledge Transmission • 81
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thinks of Pablo as someone who is able to interpret the messages properly. He goes on to advise Pablo on the correct way to treat the “messenger,” represented in the story by skunks. Even though messengers or spirits can interfere negatively with the fate of families, those who possess the gift of interpretation can also intervene positively in their own future. The proper way to interact with messengers is by treating them well, without challenging, hurting, or killing them, since they will report to the sender or “owner,” according to Laureano, about the treatment received during their mission. To convey this advice Laureano uses a true story about a man who acted in fear and ignorance after a visit from two skunks associated with a renü near his home, thus causing a harmful outcome for his own family:
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p: And did your mother have the gift? l: No, we have the gift right now. Because if tomorrow or the day after tomorrow you see [a messenger] in your house, you will not remain silent. Because you already have the gift to tell it something. Tell it to leave, just as it came. Tell it not to leave bad things. And that’s why I’m telling you this: it’s not a good idea to challenge them, you have to treat them well, so they will go away. So, when the messenger returns in one piece, then it will surely say to the owner, “I was treated well there. They told me to go, not to return anymore.” Then, the chief [the owner], seeing the messenger is in good shape and has not been challenged, will no longer pursue you. What happened to a neighbor some time ago? There, in that same house, I told you there was a salamanca. Those people lived very well, it was a beautiful family. They had two children, two grown children: one was sixteen and the other one eighteen. He said his mother looked out the window and saw two skunks coming. Over there, they came down that way (the path). p: Epu zañi? [Two skunks?] l: Epu zañi ta inainawingu [Two skunks, coming one behind the other]. They came up to their plantings [la chacra], and the renü was there, as always, right around there [he points]. Well, when the woman looked again, the skunks were passing by the house-garden, but they came directly to the house. Well, after that, she felt something was wrong; she felt a bit upset. When she looked again, the skunks were already at the gate. She closed the door. She says the skunks made like this [he scratches the chair to demonstrate the sound the skunks made
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when trying to enter the house]. They wanted to come in. Soon after, the dogs started barking. The neighbor was coming, the woman’s husband. And then she told him that two skunks wanted to come into the house. The neighbor, who was ignorant, of course, and doesn’t talk much, he unleashed the dogs and burned the skunks alive, throwing them into the fire. It wasn’t even a week, when one of their boys gets sick. Look, isn’t that ignorance? I always say, you should never kill a spider that comes into your house. Go away, far away, because they are all spirits. If a lizard comes in, don’t kill it, no, no: let it go, it can come as a werken [messenger]. Let it go away. Well, do you see how it works? If they had not killed them, they would have been saved forever. Look at how it works, right? That’s why I am telling you this: it’s a gift. So remember it as a reminder of what we’re dealing with. You can’t see the spirit. It’s inside the skunk, and it comes out from that little body that it’s taken over, from the skunk, and it will tell [its owner], “They hurt me badly, they burned me.” The other one [the owner] gets angry and he sends a legion, an unknown creature, a bird, many times it is a bird, perhaps. That is why you have to say good words: Amungue amungue tufameu mulelay tami zuam amutunge muten, inche chem sume ta zewmayu [Go away, there is nothing for you here; just go away, I will not hurt you]. That’s all. The owner understands Chezüngun and Spanish. He knows everything. That’s how it happened. We have a gift when we are able to hear well.
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The skunks associated with the renü came to the neighbor’s house with a message. Laureano defines the gift as the ability to hear and interpret this sign and respond appropriately to the messengers. In this narrative Laureano emphasizes the importance of ngülantuwun, or the sharing of knowledge. For example, when he tells Pablo that they have the gift “right now,” it is because he is transmitting his knowledge and experience to Pablo. Or, as he later explains, “That’s why I am telling you this: it’s a gift. So remember it as a reminder of what we’re dealing with.” He closes his narrative by returning to this same idea: “We have a gift when we are able to hear well,” thus explaining the gift as an ability to hear. In this sense kimun, or knowledge, cannot be comprehended outside the context of transmission from which it emerges and is shared. We believe that when Laureano says the renü is everywhere and Cañumil and Ramos: Knowledge Transmission • 83
“wherever you can [find it],” he is situating knowledge in the place where a person has acquired kimlu, the ability to receive knowledge from the environment. A special person, then, is one who in the process of his or her own attainment of knowledge acquires the gift of relating to others (people, ancestors, spirits, or forces of nature).
Special People and the Acquisition of Knowledge
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Laureano situates the renü everywhere, wherever you can find it, and at the same time defines Pablo as someone who is on the way to becoming a special person. On the basis of these key readings by Laureano, we began to think about the connections between being a salamanquero, being a special person, and having acquired knowledge and particular gifts at the renü. Reflecting on the meanings of these expressions, Pablo remembered the stories he had heard at home and then offered to interview his parents, Celia and Segundo. They associate the salamanca with their childhood, when people were more knowledgeable, more supportive of one another, and above all, everybody was a “special person.” Celia said her mother knew that if they buried the remains of sheep they had butchered, they would always “have work and everything they needed.” Segundo remembered that he had buried the eggs of ñankitos (birds) in the ground and had always done very well. A ñanko looked after Celia’s mother’s animals: “If she noticed an animal was missing, she knew it was in the corral.” On the heels of these personal memories, Celia and Segundo reminisced about a neighbor who was a salamanquero and was very wealthy. Both made it clear that “people had wealth because they believed in it, but that it was to have more wealth, not to harm another person.” Celia’s mother always said they were successful at raising capital because “she had a gift she had inherited from her late father.” Similarly, with reference to other neighbors whom “the old men” also called salamanqueros, Celia reported that when the older community members died, all their animals died too, because none of their children had inherited that power. In these narratives Pablo’s parents emphasize the importance of the act of sharing and transmitting (ngülantuwun) skills and expertise in interacting with the environment (kimlu) within families. Those who have acquired this knowledge or gift are to be named or remembered as spe-
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cial people. The fact that their parents foregrounded the intergenerational transmission of this knowledge, from grandparents to parents and from parents to children, defines Pablo as a participant in a network of relationships and legacies; the stories are thought of as a domestic mandate. Based on these conversations, we reread some of Ana’s dialogues with local residents of the town of Cushamen in the province of Chubut. A conversation that particularly caught our attention was between Ana and the elderly Mapuche man Fermín regarding the return of Mapuches from the concentration camps in which the Argentine military had imprisoned them in the late nineteenth century. Comparing this exchange with the preceding ones in which Laureano and Pablo’s parents drew Pablo into a learning process as a young mapunche, we ask what Fermín’s intentions were in telling his side of the story, an act that revealed deep meanings from the “inside” that Ana did not understand at the time. Fermín’s story was about an old woman who returned, along with her husband, from the place where she had been imprisoned for over a year. These were times of hunger and sadness. One day her husband found her covering a pot in which she was cooking a child. She escaped him and dug into the earth, and the “people from below,” the ancestors, came for her. After spending half a year underground she returned, wiser and with agricultural skills, which she shared with her close friends. This underground place, where “the other people from below” live, is also associated with the renü.9 Laureano believes this is “where the dead are”; and in Chezüngun, where the küyfikecheyem or the most ancient ancestors are.10 The history of relations with the state, of violence and the destructuring of society, has, as its agents of change, those special people who acquired the gift to intervene in forging the future of the group through the renü. The old woman inherited from her ancestors the knowledge of an ontology she had lost, and in this dual return, as she returns both to her family and to Mapuche knowledge, Fermín recounts the history of violence, beginning with social reorganization and Mapuche agency. We believe that in this exchange Fermín talked with Ana about ways of interpreting the past, the meaning of history, and what official narratives silenced; he concluded, “This is what is not told”. Once we associated the stories Laureano told with those narrated by Pablo’s parents and Fermín, we began to identify an interpretive framework in which the renü is no longer related to the cave or salamanca
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where knowledge about witchcraft is acquired. On the contrary, it is an epistemological principle concerning the transmission of knowledge: knowledge is experienced as though it were one’s own, inherited from one’s ancestors. Kimun (knowledge) and kimlu (the gift) are the result of perceiving, speaking, and thinking about “everything that exists” in contexts of transmission of knowledge. As a result, a special person is one who has the ability to handle certain energies or forces that shape the universe. We believe Laureano’s affirmation that the renü is everywhere, wherever you can find it, is a deep and complex philosophical principle referring to notions of relationality. The renü, associated with the place where knowledge and gifts are acquired, implies a relationship with “what is there” (mapuzüngun). This is achieved through socialization and transmission, through a subjective engagement with the physical universe, and through the interpretive agency of people. In other words, knowledge exists everywhere in the universe, but it depends on our ability to perceive it, talk about it, teach it, and integrate it into our subjectivity.
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Knowledge as a “Gift of Relationality” (A Conclusion)
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Our thoughts originate in the personal experiences of one of us and, at the same time, out of extended conversations between us. We do not talk about knowledge (or ontology) as something equally experienced and felt by all Mapuches, but as a conceptual framework containing ideas that are diverse and in circulation, through which we seek to identify theoretical connections in order to speak of knowledge as a “gift of relationality.” We understand this as the knowledge and ability to interact with the environment. We also consider that by mining this knowledge, relationships and links among people in the world can be framed. When our interlocutors talk about the renü, they define their own epistemologies about what it means to know. During our collaborative work we discovered that the ways we introduced ourselves (as a worker in the field of anthropology, as a mapunche person searching for his identity) guided our work more than we had assumed at the outset. We discovered in the renü possible answers to the questions that Pablo voiced in his ongoing process of dialogue and listening and in Ana’s intentions of identifying less ethnocentric frameworks for comprehending memory and its process of
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transmission (not as a loss of culture or assimilation but as the reorganization of knowledge). In collaboration, we were able to expand the dialogic contexts in which words acquire their meanings. Some interviews became pieces of advice or mandates, while others served as guides to reinterpreting official history, depending on whether Pablo or Ana carried them out. However, in both cases, we were able to share the senses of the renü from an “inside,” where it was possible to perceive the clues or traces of a Mapuche epistemology of social relationships, knowledge, and its transmission. We believe these reflections are important in understanding processes of remembering and forgetting, because when knowledge is understood as a relationship—with the environment, among living people, among those who have begun to live in other, connected, worlds—the course of history is no longer controlled by the linearity of official narratives of the past, oriented toward progress, loss, assimilation, or reemergence, but instead by creative reencounter and the reconstitution of relationships. This search for heretofore-silenced interpretive frameworks is part of a broader political project, now widespread among different Mapuche organizations and communities, that seeks to discover other senses of history and other criteria for imagining policies. Such alternate senses of history include, for instance, agents as unthinkable as the ancestors living underground; and alternate kinds of policy criteria include, for instance, spirituality, special powers, and the ability to read the messages of nature or receive statements from the ancestors in a conversation. pablo cañumil, mapunche, is a leather craftsman. Since he arrived in Bariloche,
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Argentina, some years ago he has taken part in the activities and discussions coordinated by Mapuche organizations and communities. The learning process of Chezüngun, the Mapuche language, has led him to visit different neighborhoods and places as well as into exchange with scholars in diverse disciplines, such as history, literature, and anthropology. In 2010 he began to attend the National University of Rio Negro to obtain an associate degree in humanities and social studies. He is currently a researcher on the project “The Dialectics between Geographical and Social Spaces” at the same university.
ana ramos has worked with Mapuche and Tehuelche communities and organizations in Argentina since 1995. She holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology and is associate professor and coordinator of the School of Anthropology at the National University of Rio Negro (UNRN). A researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), she works at the Instituto de Investigaciones Cañumil and Ramos: Knowledge Transmission • 87
en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de Cambio (IIDYPCA/CONICET/UNRN). She currently manages several research projects on matters related to subaltern memories, territoriality, and alternative frameworks of interpretation in which Mapuche and non-Mapuche researchers take part.
Notes
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1. A gambling game widely played in rural areas of Argentina and Uruguay, jackstones consists of throwing an anklebone (usually from a lamb), winning from one to four bets if the projecting parts of the bone remain upward and losing the bet if the broad parts of the bone remain upward. 2. We use the word yam to refer to something that does not have an ordinary or common meaning but for which meaning derives from narratives and knowledge shared in special contexts, where elements of the environment are also involved. 3. In this respect we agree with the approach presented in Briones et al. (2007: 72), who explain in their proposal for collaborative work between anthropologists and Mapuche activists: “We wanted to avoid formats in which the ‘indigenous voice’ would appear as an ethnographic record in the service of ‘anthropological writing.’” 4. The technical translation of pillañ is “volcano.” However, like the word renü, in its more internal sense it is associated with the spirits of the ancestors and is one of the principal sacred sites of ritual initiation. 5. A machi is a Mapuche shaman who mediates among people, the ancestors, and the forces of nature. The form of this mediation, specifically through the use by machis of paradoxical discourses about male and female and what is right and wrong, has been extensively studied in the ethnographies of Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (2007). 6. The early notion of a pact, understood simply as giving something in exchange (a gift) to create a moral obligation, is one of the earliest meanings of contract in Roman law. According to Henry Maine (1861), these legal contractual concepts operated as a terminology that was plastic and recyclable in almost the totality of the Western thought but that specifically influenced forms of reasoning and the technical discourses of theology and metaphysics. The salamanca became, then, not only a discursive complex through which certain entities were related to evil but also the scenario in which relations with the sacred acquired a contractual framework. 7. Pablo asks if the story is an ayekan (a specific discursive genre), and Laureano assents. 8. Having only one thought system is positively valued as a way of acting in a respectful, safe, and honest manner. We use the word belief here to refer to those situations when you are convinced that what you are doing is right. It is about getting carried away by the situation where you are, whether it is kamarikün, nguillipun (both are rituals), or taking part in a renü. 9. On the basis of his knowledge of the Mapuche language, Pablo noted that the root of the word renü is also present in expressions like “to dig a hole,” “to dig,” and “ditch.” 10. The use of the suffix “-em” (loved ones) expresses a deeper feeling of love, lending the ancestors a larger importance in people’s lives.
References Augusta, F. F. J. 1916. Diccionario araucano-español y español-araucano I y II. Santiago. Bacigalupo, A. M. 2007. Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Benjamin, W. 1991. El Narrador. Madrid: Taurus. Böning, E. 1974. El concepto de Pillán entre los Mapuches. Buenos Aires: Colección Mankacén. Briones, C., L. Cañuqueo, L. Kropff, and M. Leuman. 2007. “Assessing the Effects of Multicultural Neoliberalism: A Perspective from the South of the South (Patagonia, Argentina).” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1 (2): 69–91. Brubaker, R., and F. Cooper. 2000. “Beyond Identity.” Theory and Society 29: 1–47. Campagne, F. 2002. Homo catholicus, homo superstitiosus: El discurso antisupersticioso de la España de los siglos XV y XVIII. Madrid: Miño y Dávila editores. Chow, R. 1995. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Coña, P. 1985 [1930]. Testimonio de un cacique mapuche. Ed. Fr. E. Wilheim de Moesbach. Santiago: Pehuén Editores. Farberman, J. 2005. Las salamancas de Lorenza: Magia, hechicería y curanderismo en el Tucumán colonial. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Geertz, C. 1987. “Descripción densa: Hacia una teoría interpretativa de la cultura.” In La interpretación de las culturas, 19–40. Mexico City: Gedisa. Hall, S. 1996. “Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. Du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage. Kohn, E. 2002. “Infidels, Virgins and the Black-Robed Priest: A Back Woods History of Ecuador’s Montaña Region,” Ethnohistory 49 (3): 545–82. Kropff, L., ed. 2010. Teatro mapuche: Sueños, memoria y política. Cuadernos de Acción Cultural 4. Buenos Aires: Ediciones ArtesEscénicas. Lizárraga, F. R. 1968 [1609]. Descripción breve de toda la tierra del Perú, Tucumán, Río de la Plata y Chile. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. Maine, H.S. 1861. El derecho antiguo: Considerado en sus relaciones con la historia de la sociedad primitiva y con las ideas modernas. Parte General. Madrid: Escuela Tipográfica del Hospicio. Morphy, H. 1991. Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oña, P. de. 1917 [1596]. Arauco domado. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, Escritores Coloniales de Chile. Rappaport, J. 2006. “El espacio y los discursos culturalistas del movimiento indígena caucano.” In (Des)territorialidades y (no)lugares: Procesos de configuración y transformación social del espacio, ed. Diego Herrera Gómez and Carlo Emilio Piazzini S., 247–59. Medellín: La Carreta Social/Instituto de Estudios Regionales, Universidad de Antioquia. Rappaport, J., and A. Ramos Pacho. 2005. “Una historia colaborativa: Retos para el diálogo indígena-académico.” Historia Critica (Bogotá, Universidad de los Andes) 29: 39–62. Rockwell, E. 1987. Notas sobre el proceso etnográfico (1982–1985). Mexico City: Departamento e Investigaciones Educativas, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Valdivia, P. L. De. 1887 [1606]. Arte y gramática general de la lengua que corresponde en todo el reyno de Chile, con un vocabulario y confesionario. Leipzig and Lima: Ed. Facsimilar “Plaßmann.”
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Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories A Disruptive Collaboration
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We are a Western people in the manner of our own roots. We are Americans of the United States and Americans of America and Westerners of the West. And we are all this as Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico.
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Puerto Rico is a work in progress where the wealth of our history does not dictate our fate, the strength of our roots does not tie us to the past and the affirmation of our Hispanicity goes hand in hand with our participation in a nation [United States] whose multicultural vocation increases daily.
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Testimonios afropuertorriqueños: Un proyecto de historia oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico (Afro-Puerto Rican testimonies: An oral history project in western Puerto Rico) is a collaborative research project launched in September 2006. Its purpose is recording the voices, memories, and histories of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in order to fertilize debates about racial constructions and discourses in Puerto Rico and democratize the forum of discussion, representation, and analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican history and identities. In its first year the project was funded by the Otros Saberes Initiative of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), which supported five other Latin American col-
laborative research initiatives focused on either Afro-descendents or indigenous communities. During the course of that year we composed a diverse research collective of nearly two dozen members, including academics; community members from the western towns of Aguadilla and Hormigueros, where the oral history project was conducted; and students from the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez. At the onset of the project we were guided by the following objectives:
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1. To employ oral history to ignite profound and self-reflective discussions about contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican identity and experience. 2. To carve out a space for the production and circulation of AfroPuerto Rican self-representations. 3. To debunk prevalent myths and stereotypes about Afro-Puerto Ricans and the “African heritage” in Puerto Rico. 4. To challenge the circumscription of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, history, and experience to ever-shrinking regions in the east and south of Puerto Rico. 5. To record the life stories of local actors in order to challenge the reduction of Afro-Puerto Rican history to chapters on eminent blacks or “mulattos” or on particular, marginal “communities” so as to demonstrate that this history is written, narrated, and constructed “from below” in everyday struggles to define, negotiate, and assert individual and collective identities. 6. To develop a collaborative research methodology that contributes to building a diverse project community dedicated to research and education about the Afro-Puerto Rican experience in Puerto Rico.
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By the end of the first year the project had generated an unprecedented Afro-Puerto Rican oral history collection that included thirtythree interviews and a parallel archive of photographic and video material. Thereafter a smaller but equally diverse collective has continued collaborating in the dissemination of the project in publications and presentations as well as in the analysis of the testimonial material collected. In this essay I reflect on the first year of the project, which I have coordinated since its inception, focusing primarily on its evolution in the town of Aguadilla, to argue that the collaborative oral history methodology employed forcefully disrupts the tenets of racial discourse in Puerto Rico as well as dominant saberes (lore) about Géliga Vargas: Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories • 91
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contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican subjectivities.1 To contextualize my argument I begin with a necessarily abridged discussion of race and identity in Puerto Rico, followed by a characterization of the field of Afro-Puerto Rican studies, which provided the point of departure for our project. Against these backdrops I discuss how the conjunction of intimacy and identity in the search for alternative saberes about AfroPuerto Ricanness enabled our collaborative research project to transcend firmly entrenched confines in both social science research and race and identity discourses in Puerto Rico.
Race and Identity in Puerto Rico
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Identity debates in the Caribbean country of Puerto Rico, the history of which has been forged and funneled under colonial rule, have been the crucible of public, political, and academic discourses since the late nineteenth century. Unlike most of its geographically and historically contiguous Caribbean and Latin American countries, Puerto Rico has never attained the status of a sovereign nation state, and in legal terms its people have been citizens of the United States since 1917. In this context, nationalist discourses have more often than not been predicated on cultural rather than political grounds. Needless to say, the parameters that have been set to define the boundaries of cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico have been neither monolithic nor static. Yet they have tended to ensconce themselves on a similar foundation. As the selection of epigraphs exemplifies, notions of race, ethnicity, culture, history, and politics have clashed and collided in efforts to characterize and plot the path of the Puerto Rican pueblo. However, while there is no single narrative of la puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Ricanness), there has been a steady tendency to project the Puerto Rican in terms that either downplay discussions about race or enact them in order to gloss over the centrality and persistence of racialization projects in the definition and construction of “the nation.”2 From the second decade of the twentieth century and especially since the 1940s, when the first elected governor of Puerto Rico spearheaded the institutionalization of culture (Marsh Kennerly 2009), the official discourse about race in Puerto Rico has vehemently attempted to mute the voices and disavow the experiences that challenge the myth of a unitary national identity. La puertorriqueñidad is thus defined in
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essentialist terms and becomes a suffocating canopy for those who cannot easily or willingly shelter themselves under it. The official dogma regarding Puerto Rican national identity is, as in most of Latin America (Davis 2007), the ideology of mestizaje or the racial mixing of indigenous, European, and African traits and legacies. As Torres and Whitten argue, this ideology “is an explicit master symbol” in the region (1998: 7). However, as a symbol, it has been open to various interpretations and representations in particular national narratives (Bonfil Batalla 1992; Grimson 2000). In the case of Puerto Rico this symbol is invariably depicted as the gradual, progressive, and absolute fusion of three signs: Taínos (regarded as the original inhabitants of Borikén, today Puerto Rico), Spanish (a synecdoche for European colonizers and settlers), and Africans (generally represented as slaves bereft of any history prior to their arrival in the New World and belonging to a homogeneous “national” group). Redolent with scientistic rhetoric, this additive logic refers to these groups as the three “elements” or “roots” that converged in the formation of the Puerto Rican character. The enthusiastic stirring of this melting pot, however, stems from the attribution of particular flavors to each of the “formative” groups. These attributes have been historically and strategically ordered in a value-laden hierarchy that tends to romanticize Taíno ancestry, enshrine Spanish genealogy, and debase African heritage (Dávila 1997; Guerra 1998; Jiménez Román 2001; Géliga Vargas et al. 2007–2008; Godreau et al. 2008).3 Moreover, this logic veers off from any consideration of the intersections of race and gender, advancing a patriarchal historical narrative that eclipses the fact that the “making of the Puerto Rican nation” has been historically predicated on efforts to possess, control, and subjugate women (Acosta Belén 1986; Ostolaza Bey 1989; Suárez Findlay 1999; Roy-Féquière 2004). As numerous scholars have observed (Bonfil Batalla 1992; Torres and Whitten 1998; Andrews 2004; Davis 2007), the reification of European ancestry and the ejection of African ancestry are firmly entrenched edicts in Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean nation-building projects. In Puerto Rico the tenor of this discourse reverberates in the present and is almost invariably intoned by our cultural patriarchs (as demonstrated by the epigraphs) and institutions.4 A recent example should suffice to illustrate this point. Just four years ago, the founder of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and one of the most renowned and re-
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vered scholars and cultural workers in Puerto Rico, Dr. Ricardo Alegría (1921–2011), summoned his compatriots to commemorate the Spanish conquest and celebrate the birth of our nation:
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The year 2008 marks the 500th anniversary of our nationality: the union of the three great human races here in Puerto Rico. The conquerors bonded with the indigenous population and years later with the Africans and we came out of this union. This is the time to speak about the unjust treatment that our Indians received and to speak about the African and Hispanic heritages. This commemoration is more important than 1992. It’s also the time to write essays about the indigenous population and its mistreatment in the present, in the twenty-first century. (Rodríguez 2007)
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By conceding that the “union” was marked by the “mistreatment” of the natives, Alegría tacitly betrayed the myth of our “harmonious” mestizaje. Yet his silence about the institution of slavery and its vile legacy for contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans echoes the refusal of the official discourse to engage with and embrace our Afro-diasporic past and present. Moreover, Alegría’s well-received initiative reproduced the spatial and temporal displacement of blackness that characterizes discourses about cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico. This displacement of African ancestry in spatial and temporal planes and its concomitant denial of the power dynamics that gave rise to African presence in the national territory have attempted to block consciousness and mute discussions about contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican subjectivities and experiences. The hegemonic sway of this ideology in Puerto Rico has had detrimental consequences for our scholarship, our understanding of our so-called national culture, and our sociopolitical struggles for collective self-definition, self-formation, and self-affirmation. However, as Juan Giusti Cordero (1996) demonstrates in his groundbreaking essay “Afro-Puerto Rican Cultural Studies,” this dominant narrative has not remained unchallenged. He credits the contributions to the cultura negroide and antillanismo literary movements, spanning the period from the 1920s through the 1980s, but also charges that “a more concrete and historical sense of afropuertorriqueña culture” is needed (Giusti Cordero 1996: 71).5 To be sure, some progress has been made in this direction by writers, scholars, and cultural workers who have sought to ferret out “Other” sources of evidence and to unearth
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divergent and diverse modes of imagining the nation. In the following section I discuss contributions to debates about Puerto Rican history and culture that explicitly or implicitly challenge the myth of mestizaje by engaging with questions of race with particular reference to Afro-descendants.
Afro-Puerto Rican Studies and Racial Analyses in Puerto Rico
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Giusti Cordero’s essay was a seminal contribution to tracing the genealogy of Afro-Puerto Rican studies, a term that has not gained the currency it deserves but one that I draw on in an attempt to discuss efforts to unveil and problematize the hispanophilia of the myth of racial democracy in Puerto Rico. Building upon his initial attempt and expanding his purview to include not just literary texts but other areas of scholarly and artistic production, I devote this section to characterizing the incipient field of Afro-Puerto Rican studies to which Testimonios afropuertorriqueños aims to contribute, as discussed in the final section of this essay. My objective is neither to provide a comprehensive literature review nor (like Giusti Cordero) to attempt to periodize the “evolution” of the field but to propose a thematic classification, organized around six areas of inquiry, that provides a context for gauging the contributions of our collaborative project. In the intricately interwoven terrain of scholarly and cultural production, there are often overlaps and syntheses of several of the categories identified; nonetheless, this classificatory exercise provides a useful tentative framework to apprehend and comprehend this growing field. First, a comparatively prolific corpus of historiographies draws from readings and interpretations of historical archives to analyze the African slave experience in Puerto Rico, variably emphasizing the slaves’ subordination, resistance, or contributions to the Spanish colonial regime in the archipelago or in particular regions of the country. A second group of essayists, chroniclers, cultural critics, and scholars has set out to question canonical historical tenets and to ferret out alternative bodies of historical evidence to redefine the character of Puerto Rican identity and culture. They challenge the hispanophilia of the “national master narrative,” underscoring the so-called “African roots” and/or “mulatto” identity of the Puerto Rican national body in order
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to question the alleged blanqueamiento (whitening) of the Puerto Rican people. The third current includes works that document and attempt to preserve the legado Africano (African legacy) in Puerto Rican culture. These include discussions of folklore and music as well as less commonly accepted areas of Afro-Puerto Rican cultural production, such as literature, language, and education. The fourth area of inquiry is similarly vindicatory but focuses on documenting the lives and contributions of prominent Afro-descendents who have been admitted in the pantheon of “official” Puerto Rican history, even if this inclusion often entails dispensing with their racialized experience. On the other hand, an eclectic group of scholars has set out to study racial representations and discourses in Puerto Rico to disentangle the matrix of racial prejudice and discrimination against Afro-descendents. Despite the fact that their objects of study, methods of analysis and conclusions are often divergent, contributors to this line of inquiry have made important inroads in the questioning of dominant tenets of cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico.6 Finally, following Giusti Cordero, I include in the sixth category the growing body of literary and creative work that has addressed the history, experience, and cultural contributions of Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico. This includes the cultural projects of cultura negroide and antillanismo discussed by the author as well as numerous literary and artistic productions circulated since the 1980s, which have often had a more lasting impact on public sphere debates about race and national identity than has the scholarly work identified above.7
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The tenor of the debates that have been orchestrated by these initiatives for over fifty years reverberates in the Afro-Puerto Rican oral history project we launched in 2006. However, Testimonios afropuertorriqueños did not set out to follow in the tracks of any of these particular research programs. We hoped instead to carve out alternative venues for the study of afropuertorriqueñidad based on a participatory and collaborative research agenda. In this sense our project makes inroads in the direction set by recent ethnographic work on the study of race, racial categories, and racialized experiences and how these are narrated and interpreted by social actors in situated processes.8
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To illustrate how we sought to create and enact an alternative methodology for the study of race in Puerto Rico it seems pertinent to reconstruct the genesis of our project. Unlike the other projects funded by LASA’s Otros Saberes Initiative, ours was not a preexisting collaborative organization. My first task as the principal investigator was thus to assemble a research team and begin to build a project community, a step I had initiated several months earlier in conversations with community leaders from Aguadilla and Hormigueros. At the time I had been back in my native Puerto Rico for a year after an eighteen-year absence. Due to my sense of estrangement in my homeland, I had temporarily abandoned the participatory and collaborative research line of work that I had previously pursued in the United States and Argentina and had turned to film studies, specifically the analysis of the representation of Afro-Puerto Rican subjects in Puerto Rican cinema. Frustrated by the reductionism and exoticism—if not outright racism—of these texts and by the fact that Afro-Puerto Rican self-representations were practically absent, I had begun conceptualizing a future project devoted to generating Afro-Puerto Rican self-representations. As a first step in that direction I met with two community leaders from Aguadilla in February and March 2006: Carlos Delgado, a retired social worker and community activist, and Raymond Gómez, a university professor and local radio host. Several years earlier, both had partaken in an unsuccessful initiative to found a museum intended to honor the history of black people from Aguadilla. We brainstormed the initial idea of an oral history project about afroaguadillanos and agreed to continue conversations in order to address shared concerns with the silencing and marginalization of Afro-Puerto Rican history and experience.9 Around the same time but in more fortuitous circumstances I met Luis García, a popular musician and small businessman, in his store in Hormigueros. Over the course of several conversations, Luis vividly shared with me his story of the defunct Eureka Sugar Mill in Hormigueros, a scantly studied chapter of Puerto Rico’s socioeconomic history. After hearing his stories about “the Eureka family,” as he called it, and about their eventual marginal fate in Hormigueros following the closing of the sugar mill in the 1970s, I bluntly confronted Luis with the generally repressed race question: “So tell me, were the eurekeños black like us?” His complicit laughter and welcoming embrace, as well as those of the patrons he quickly summoned into the conversation, cer-
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tainly crumbled my outsider status in this local joint but, more important, gave way to an impassioned exchange that revealed to all of us the importance of documenting the life stories of “los negros de la Eureka” (the black people from the Eureka Sugar Mill) as a way of accounting for their marginalized and silenced contributions and histories in Hormigueros (generally considered a “white town”) and in the western region and Puerto Rico in general. Thus, several months later, when the possibility of conducting the Afro-Puerto Rican oral history project in western Puerto Rico materialized thanks to the LASA grant, I had already identified a small group of community collaborators in both towns as well as an academic collaborator, Dr. José Irizarry, who had lived consistently in the western part of Puerto Rico for over a decade and whose teaching and research explored questions of race and representation in literature. Because of their entrenched local ties, the community collaborators were instrumental in the first stage of the research project, which consisted of a series of community forums to: (1) discuss the proposed oral history project; (2) recruit other community members to participate in the project as co-researchers; and (3) engage in a discussion of racialized and Afro-Puerto Rican experiences in each locality in order to elicit generative themes for the oral history projects. The community forum in Aguadilla in September 2006 admittedly surpassed our expectations. Close to thirty people showed up, among them workers, students, professionals, retired people, writers, athletes, and even a musician who entertained with his popular music repertoire. The testimonies that were publicly articulated that evening, in the first and third person and some for the first time, tacitly validated the importance of the project; motivated a dozen participants to join it; and provided the basis for the first “working documents” of the oral history project in Aguadilla, a thematic catalogue derived from the transcripts of the forum. Thereafter, from October 2006 through January 2007, a group of ten to twelve community members met regularly with the two academic co-researchers and a student co-researcher to design the Afro-Puerto Rican oral history project in Aguadilla.10 Guided by the objectives discussed in the introduction (a collaborative revision of the preliminary objectives listed in the LASA grant proposal), we appealed to a prolific though undervalued archive: the individual and collective memories of popular actors who have been
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systematically silenced, marginalized, or stereotyped in the “official” master narrative of the “nation.” We turned to oral history as an alternative venue to generate “Other” types of historical evidence from sources that have scarcely been accounted for in our contemporary cultural, educational, academic, and political debates. True, oral history is not necessarily transformative, but as Thompson contends, it “can be used to change the focus of history itself, and open up new areas of inquiry” in ways that “can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place” (2006: 26). We thus anticipated that the testimonies of contemporary AfroPuerto Ricans would shed light on how race is lived in Puerto Rico and would challenge us to debate collectively the established lores of national identity, culture, and history. Moreover, we hoped that the recording and dissemination of these oral histories would play a part in the legitimizing of the narrators and in their (self-)recognition as knowledge producers and history makers. In his seminal essay about oral history in Puerto Rico, Antonio Díaz Royo (1986) contends that in the Puerto Rican colonial context, oral history is a praxis that spurs the knowledge and transformation of our society and advances democratic prospects. For Díaz Royo, oral history is not merely a research technique but a way of channeling the search for truth that “shakes traditional social science and breaks the interpretive confines that it represents in the colony” (Díaz Royo 1986: 126). I argue that the collaborative oral history project we developed transcends these confines by collectively creating knowledge or saberes that can confront firmly entrenched notions about racial and cultural identity in Puerto Rico and by forefronting the complex and diverse nature of Afro-Puerto Rican experience. To illustrate this point I proceed to characterize the methodology employed to then discuss three main ruptures effected by our project in debates about race, identity, and Afro-Puerto Ricanness in contemporary Puerto Rico.
Building Research Communities through Collaborative Oral History At the center of the collaborative oral history methodology we crafted in Aguadilla was the ongoing interrogation of the researcher (subject) and researched (object) categories, gradually but persistently breaking the Géliga Vargas: Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories • 99
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boundaries that tend to disjoin these figures—cleavages that deprive us from mining the potential of research committed to social change. The seeds of our project were sown in exchanges between academic researchers and community members who shared, or in some cases developed, an interest in recording and understanding the racialized histories—las luchas, as the community members were prone to saying—of their peers. This reciprocity was initially rehearsed in the community forums in both towns, which, as already mentioned, were organized by community leaders with a history of activism in their localities. Their sense of belongingness in these communities and their profound knowledge of them lent credibility to the collaborative research effort in ways that could hardly have been attained by a strictly academic initiative. In the case of Aguadilla, the fact that Carlos Delgado had previously spearheaded initiatives that sought to break the silence about race in the town meant that he had already identified community members who were likely to share these views and commitments or, as became evident in the first forum, were at least not vocally against them. Moreover, as he is a widely known aguadillano because of his long-term involvement in local and national political, social, and sports initiatives, Carlos’s invitation surely appealed to those who shared his pride in the history of Aguadilla in general, and so they came to the forum eager to demonstrate their knowledge and debate their ideas about their hometown and their own histories in it. The exchange thus became an opportunity to articulate and validate their saberes in ways that challenged the conventional dynamics of social science research, in which academics are generally cast as the subjects of knowledge. The stories and reflections pertaining to the experience and history of aguadillanos in general, and afroaguadillanos in particular, discussed in the forum were recorded in video and audio. This common documentation strategy was interpreted by the participants as a legitimizing act that rendered their reflections valuable in historical and pedagogical terms. Moreover, it facilitated the process of developing organic, situated research materials (the working documents mentioned earlier) to delve into the situated study of Afro-Puerto Rican history.11 The generative themes of the oral history project, then, were not dictated by the established research agendas of the incipient field of Afro-Puerto Rican studies but by a collaborative and ongoing exchange of experiences, memories, reflections, and concerns.
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The process of generating and updating working documents to develop the oral history project in Aguadilla was greatly enriched and challenged by the heterogeneity of the research team members who committed to the project after the community forum. In addition to Carlos Delgado the community participants included Rubén Arcelay, a self-employed artisan and writer from a neighboring town; Tania Delgado, an office assistant and Carlos’s daughter; Alfredo González, a retired university professor; Ángel Liciaga, a retired boxer and trainer; Edwin Matos, a retired electrical worker; René Molinary, a retired public worker; Brunilda Rosa, a retired clerical worker who is also an artisan and a volunteer teacher; Luis Soto, an accountant; and Vicente Yambot, a veteran and local fiction writer. They represented a wide array of educational levels, work and professional experiences, political affiliations, age groups, and, importantly, racial self-definitions (initially from those who self-identified as black to those who dismissed the importance of this racial identification in Puerto Rico). The academic collaborators included José Irizarry, a U.S.-born and raised Puerto Rican and a professor of English with expertise in “minority” literatures in the United States but with no prior experience in collaborative research; Thea L. Mateu, a graduate student in English education who had prior community organizing experience around issues of gender and immigration and was also a writer; and myself, currently a professor of English but with academic training in cultural studies in communication and prior experience in collaborative research in the United States and Argentina on issues of gender, ethnicity, race, and migration. Fueled by our diverse experiences, the first collaborative phase of the research team (from October 2006 through January 2007) was characterized by strenuous and stimulating discussions during which co-researchers partook in intense debates about personal and collective experiences of racialization ignited by the working document developed after the community forums. These symbiotic processes of attentive listening, transcription, and interpretation of experience opened a space for discovering and uncovering Afro-Puerto Rican histories and experiences from a situated perspective. More important from a methodological stance was the fact that as collaborators took stock of these (lived, remembered, suppressed, reconstructed, perceived, and perhaps even imagined) experiences, we gained consciousness of their epistemo-
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logical and political weight: the fact that they are funds of knowledge, saberes, that deserve to be recorded, disseminated, legitimated, and, most certainly, openly debated. Our initial group meetings were often sites of conflict marked by two dynamics that needed to be addressed and negotiated. On one hand, we had the internal hierarchies of the group, which initially positioned the older men with higher formal education levels and a history of community leadership as the source of privileged, explanatory knowledge of the experiential knowledge contributed by others. On the other, we had the reactive, if not vindicatory, impulse of many community participants to turn the project into a sort of “tribute” to “successful” black aguadillanos. Over time, however, the very same process of documenting, in writing, the diversity of experiences, testimonies, memories, and reflections of the team members and of those they knew, lived with, or talked to disrupted the silencing of voices that were not originally considered “worthy” of attention and documentation. Tania’s charismatic plea in one of our early meetings that we avoid creating “the Who’s Who of los negros aguadillanos” has been long remembered as a crucial turning point in the evolution of the oral history project and in our collaboration. Drawing from the aforementioned working documents, we collectively developed the thematic guidelines for the oral history project as well as the criteria for the selection of narrators. The eventual identification of narrators was the second stage in the project’s first phase. Community collaborators identified and pre-interviewed dozens of aguadillanos to develop what we called the “profiles” of potential narrators, following what Carlos dubbed “la ley de la inclusión” (the rule of inclusion). That is, we set out to identify narrators who could represent a wide array of experiences, identities, ideological leanings, generations, and phenotypes, and who could thus contribute to composing a portrait of contemporary afroaguadillanos. Thirty potential narrators were contacted and pre-interviewed by the research team in this process. In most cases these were friends, relatives, neighbors, or acquaintances of research team participants, but they also included people who were understood as capable of narrating chapters of Afro-Puerto Rican experience that had not been recorded and could soon be lost (such as the life story of one of the first female black teacher in Aguadilla). Each pre-interview was informally presented and discussed in our
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research meetings in order to develop profiles of the prospective narrators that included information such as age, gender, educational level, occupation or former occupation, and place of residence; family composition, with emphasis on whether they came from what according to local standards would be considered a “black,” “mixed,” or predominantly “white” family; migration history, whether they had lived outside Aguadilla and/or Puerto Rico; racial self-identification, whether they considered themselves “black” and whether they were vocal about it; and poignant anecdotes about racialized experiences that emerged from the brief interviews. The concerted discussion of each of these profiles provided a forum for our ongoing reflections on the lived experience of race in Puerto Rico, including our own, which fortified and enriched our collaboration in this initial phase of the project. Considering the profiles, and following the aforementioned “law of inclusion,” we spent several meetings between December 2006 and January 2007 selecting the narrators for the project. Against my initial recommendation of choosing a set number of narrators (fifteen) to make the project feasible in the time allotted, the collective decided to organize the thirty potential narrators into three categories: priority 1, priority 2, and priority 3. The first list included four women and eleven men, whose ages ranged from twenty-one to ninety-two. Some occupied or had occupied positions traditionally associated with “black” Puerto Ricans, such as athletes, fishermen, and domestic workers. But we also selected educators, veterans, a hair stylist, a doctor, a college student, clerical workers, and even the town’s mayor. Consideration was also given to place of residence and migration history: thus the selection included two afroguadillanos residing in the United States and several others who had lived in the United States and/or abroad during part of their lives mostly while serving in the US military. Eventually the original list was slightly revised to include two additional women, the daughters of two elder female narrators who originally partook in the interviews to help their aging mothers remember their life stories and who eventually contributed their own valuable testimonies. The group welcomed this inclusion as a way of rendering a more balanced portrait in the oral history project. Before beginning the interview process, we entered a second phase in the project with the objective of training collaborators in oral history methods and in the use of recording equipment. Academic members of
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the team and a consultant with expertise in oral history research conducted training workshops in Aguadilla from February through March 2007. The last session was devoted to “rehearsing” the oral history interview process, employing the thematically organized interview guide that I had initially elaborated based on the working documents and that we had collectively revised in previous meetings. The document consisted of eighty guiding questions organized in thematic units that ranged from childhood and biological family origins, the barrio, and schooling and working experiences to religious preferences, migration and relocation histories, relationships, marriage and childrearing, and reflections on race in Aguadilla and in Puerto Rico. Subsequently, from April through August 2007, our team worked collaboratively in the recording of the oral history interviews and the compilation of a parallel photographic/videographic archive. Project participants chose among ourselves whom to interview; most interviews were conducted by teams of two to three co-researchers in an effort to “learn from our respective strengths,” as Luis Soto, a collaborator from Aguadilla, put it. The duration of the interviews ranged from two to six hours; most were conducted over two sessions, but some required additional sessions. The vast majority of the interviews were carried out in the narrators’ homes in Aguadilla. However, due to the noise levels in some of the households, which affected the recording of the interviews, some interviews were partly or completely conducted in the residences of research team participants, who made quarters available even if they were not at home. As mentioned, two of the narrators resided in the United States; I conducted these interviews in New York and Massachusetts, respectively. The first one was eventually followed up by a second session in the narrator’s second home in Aguadilla. Throughout the interviewing phase the research team met regularly to discuss and reflect on the interviews in progress and, based on these exchanges, to revise the interview guide collectively. Hence this collaborative initiative was incubated by multidirectional dialogues allowing us to apprehend the historical, social, cultural, and psychological processes that can facilitate or block racial consciousness in Puerto Rico as well as to articulate critiques of the conspicuous ideological triad of whitening, racial democracy, and national identity. The collective consideration of racialization experiences (including prejudice and discrimination as well as self-affirmation and resistance) gradually resulted in the firm identification of the commu-
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nity co-researchers and narrators as blacks or Afro-Puerto Ricans. This signaled a transcendental step for some, such as Alfredo, who at the beginning of the project thought of himself as a “shaded white” but eventually found himself “traversing toward blackness” in a “gradual process from having been made [by my family] to believe that I was white and over time recognizing myself as black.” On the other hand, our auto-ethnographic dialogues allowed us, including those who already affirmed our blackness, to adopt a more inquisitive posture, realizing that affirming blackness is not equivalent to understanding it. Understanding blackness in Puerto Rico entails apprehending what is affirmed, but also, with devoted effort, what has been denied, silenced, masked. Moreover, we came to terms with the fact that what Alfredo calls in his narrative “the ‘racial problem’ of marginality that has affected us” is not resolved by individual or collective affirmations of blackness. What this transgression enunciates is not a fait accompli but a “positioning” (Hall 1994), an unstable point of identification or suture that is perpetually under construction in the fray of material and symbolic relations with others. Indeed, one of the stirring forces of the project in Aguadilla was the journey to self-affirmation we jointly traversed. The intellectual debates that we ignited in the process of coming together as a collaborative team impelled us to continue and expand the dialogue with the project narrators. In this sense, when we proceeded to begin recording oral histories, we did not intend, as Carlos put it, to “celebrate la negrada de Aguadilla.”12 Our purpose was to record the voices of those who have witnessed the complex racialization practices and processes that mark the history of Aguadilla and who, from different and conflicting positionings, contribute to “writing” Afro-Puerto Rican histories in the present. One research team member’s difficulty with this conceptualization of the project became a source of tension during the interviewing phase. While the decision to include the town’s mayor in the list of priority 1 narrators had been unanimous, the team member’s interest in conducting a “different kind” of interview with this source was not well-received by the other collaborators, who felt that the purpose of the project was neither to reproduce existing social hierarchies nor to celebrate tokenism (considering that the mayor is one of the few black public officials in contemporary Puerto Rico). Despite consistent efforts to mediate this conflict, it was not resolved, and the co-researcher in question opted to abandon
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the project. The interview with the mayor was eventually conducted by three other group members (myself included), following the same guide used in the other Aguadilla interviews. Our journey as a research team, including the tensions and complications, demonstrates that personal narrative research allows for emancipatory transformations as it challenges us to transcend our habitual and socially condoned “comfort zone” (Wolgemuth and Donahue 2006). This point was vividly articulated by Tania after the first year of the project:
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The months we have spent collaborating on this project have been, without a doubt, a decisive period in our lives. Our view of ourselves (as individuals and as a group), our understanding of our history, our society, our place in it have changed. We have gained consciousness of our reality and now share an immense desire to improve it. . . . The main contribution of this work to our lives is that it has enabled us to appreciate collaborative work as a venue for change, as a way of advancing our struggles, of making ourselves heard, of making our history count as part of the true history of our country. After this experience we know that we can, that we can be successful in our collective endeavors.
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For Luis Soto, on the other hand, the significance and transformative potential of the project lay in its ability to unearth, construct, and validate otros saberes. Reflecting on his feelings of estrangement at the community forum a year later, he remarked:
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Up until that moment I wasn’t attuned to the objectives of the project, I didn’t feel identified with its agenda but noted that somebody, Cao [Carlos Delgado], had identified me as someone who belonged in this conversation. I stayed because I thought there must be a reason for that. . . . Now oral history matters to me and I want to defend it and the way to do it is by defending our project.
Breaking Boundaries through Afro-Puerto Rican Oral History Aligning with Díaz Royo’s view of oral history as a strategy for breaking the interpretive confines of (colonial) social science and national dis106 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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course in Puerto Rico, I would like to conclude by discussing some preliminary results of our project, which point to three main ruptures in established lore and (most) previous research about racial and cultural identity in Puerto Rico: (1) collective affirmations of negritud and critical examinations of the processes and forces that both block and breed this consciousness; (2) self-reflexive (re)considerations and interrogations of la puertorriqueñidad as a meta-narrative of the nation and a fait accompli of harmonious mestizaje; and (3) testimonial articulations of the conflicting strategies that contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans enact to face, interpret, and occasionally confront the hegemonic discourses and practices that insist on ejecting them, discursively and materially, from the national body. In the first place it is noteworthy that, contrary to the researchers’ expectations and to prior research on racial identification in Puerto Rico, during the interviews almost all the narrators self-identified as black or in a semantic continuum that sought distance from white (employing terms that are considered more socially acceptable to identify as nonwhite, such as prieto, negrito, trigueño, etc.).13 They also narrated with critical eloquence the experiences, relations, and conflicts through which they gained consciousness of a black (or non-white) identity and molded it throughout their lives in complex processes that countervail internal and external forces (the family, school, barrio, workplace, mass media). This comparatively affirmative identification is compelling, considering the heterogeneity of the narrators due to our “rule of inclusion” and the hegemonic status of the ideology of mestizaje, which has conditioned Puerto Ricans to deny or displace blackness at the personal and collective levels (Torres 1998; Guerra 1998; Godreau 2002; Godreau et al. 2008).14 In fact, whitening policies and practices have been commonplace in Latin America and the Caribbean for over two centuries (Andrews 2004; Davis 2007), and Puerto Rico is hardly the exception (Jiménez Román 2001; Duany 2002; Loveman 2007). From the mid-nineteenth century through 2000 the segment of the population identified as “white” increased steadily, with the exception of the 1899 census. Loveman’s explanation for why this happened in the particular decade she studied, 1920–30, offers a plausible explanation for what might have happened since: the whitening of the population is not attributable to population changes per se but to redefinitions of racial categories. These resignifications have been
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forged in the crucible of dominant institutions that brandish “the great Puerto Rican family” as the symbol of our collective character and the emblem of our fait accompli mestizaje, but as we have seen, they simultaneously deny, marginalize, and/or displace African ancestry and thus blackness. The echoes of this discourse are heard in many of the life stories we collected. Luz Esther, a displaced factory worker who now works as a maid, speaks with ancestral pride about “los Pellot,” her extensive and legendary black family from Aguadilla, and thanks God for having made her black. However, she equally relishes the much-deserved punishment “God” delivered to her ex-husband, who left her because “he liked white women” but then “ended up” with a woman who was “darker than me and with kinkier hair.” In contrast, Irma, a retired factory worker, recalled with palpable distress the sense of impotence and inferiority that marked her youth and early adulthood when she had to visit government offices and face “blanquitas” (white professional women) who were “well-prepared” and “well-dressed.” Later in life, Irma recounts, she got over those feelings and overcame her subordination due to race and class differences. However, her strong and passionate self-affirmation is not at odds with her valuation of “lo blanco” (whiteness):
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Not anymore; that’s over! I’m not better than anybody but nobody is better than me. Nobody intimidates me because we are human people, be they what they are and me being what I am. The best thing in the world is to walk down the straight path and do things right because, for me, if you do things right nobody is better than anybody. . . . Nowadays any black, I’m telling you, any black is equal to a white person because you might be black and still have a white soul.
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Similar constructions of whiteness as an aesthetic, ethical, and social ideal are iterated in many of the testimonies. However, they coexist with the narration of family lessons in self-denial and self-devaluation. As community collaborator Rubén Arcelay put it, “from childhood we are taught to lower our heads. . . . Because they love us, because they want to protect us, our parents tell us, ‘no, you are not black.’” Evidently, the whitening ideology has had deep repercussions in the psyches and discourses of the narrators. In light of this, their almost universal inclination to self-identify as black, even if appealing to terms
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that other researchers have associated with its negation (Guerra 1998), and their readiness to reflect critically on the process that led them to gain consciousness of this identity, are indeed intriguing. In the case of Aguadilla, I argue that this was at least partly facilitated by the collaborative methodological approach we employed. It is clear that the fact that the researchers, with two exceptions, were townspeople who self-identified or in the process of partaking in the research project began to identify as Afro-Puerto Ricans and had assumed the commitment to advance our collective struggles “leaving out our own prejudices,” as Tania put it, had important consequences for the kinds of exchanges that developed during the interview process. Our internal process of racial consciousness development, as well as the subsequent process of training in oral history methodologies, allowed us to become facilitators of a dialogical exchange that promoted identification and solidarity and opened a space for revelations and reflections that could hardly have been possible in a traditional academic research project. The interviews were a forum for the development of complicit pacts, mutual responsibility, and a shared commitment to unearth, and sometimes to discover, “the history that binds us,” as narrator Zayda put it. In addition to carving out a space for the narration of racial constructions and identifications that rip apart the national master narrative, this collaborative project laid the ground for critical reconsiderations of the collective “ethnic” identity embodied in the figure of la puertorriqueñidad. This process unfolded on the landscape of personal testimonies interwoven in a dialogical, intimate, and engaged encounter that implicated not just the narrators but also the “investigators.” As our objectives suggest, members of the Testimonios collective were well aware that discussions about racialized experiences are disconcerting in Puerto Rico because of our tendency to ensconce ourselves under the canopy of our essential puertorriqueñidad. However, despite the establishment’s efforts to the contrary, the popular projection of the “national” body neither obeys nor fits within the strict ideological model of “the great Puerto Rican family.” The testimonies we recovered demonstrate that identities (individual and collective, ethnic and racial, etc.) evolve in fluctuating, complex, contradictory, and continuous ways. The memory work that conjoined narrators and co-researchers unleashed experiences of discrimination and acceptance, self-negation
Géliga Vargas: Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories • 109
and self-affirmation, marginality and empowerment that bring into sharp relief the partiality of la puertorriqueñidad. As Portelli (2006) contends, memory is not a static repository of facts but an active process of meaning-making, and oral histories say less about the events that they recount than about the meanings that they had for those who remember them. This creative and interactive process resulted, for those involved in this collaborative project, in a collective questioning of essentialist ethnic identities, a point eloquently articulated by Tania:
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We all got here with different interests and goals; we conducted our interviews differently, each finding his own style, but nobody leaves without an interest in making things happen, in ending the prejudice, discrimination and denial that we have been talking about and listening to. The perception of blacks in Puerto Rico has to change, and also the way in which what it is to be Puerto Rican is going to be studied in the future. For us it is no longer feasible or acceptable to leave out blacks or the poor. This is a triumph! . . . People do want to know, they want to leave behind fear and claim their identities [as black].
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As Tania’s observations suggest, the collaborative oral history methodology employed occasioned discussions about the taboo subject of race and in so doing unveiled the exclusions and the often self-imposed silences that uphold the myth of Puerto Rico’s alleged (singular) national identity. The third and final rupture I would like to discuss pertains to how this collaborative oral history project enabled us to take stock of the complex, conflicting, and continuous strategies developed by contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in situated and everyday practices to face the myth of racial democracy. As noted, these constructions have been persuasively challenged in academic platforms; however, these critiques have scarcely infiltrated the institutions entrusted to teach Puerto Rican history, safeguard Puerto Rican culture, and disseminate Puerto Rican tradition—the school system, mass media, and state and community cultural organizations. The corollary of the mestizaje ideology espoused by our cultural institutions and established lore is the enshrinement of the jíbaro, or late nineteenth–early twentieth century rural peasant, as the poster child of Puerto Rican identity. The criollo nation-building project of the early twentieth century created this trope to abate the Americanization process launched by the United States after
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the military invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898. Anachronistically, the consecration of the jíbaro has persisted for over a century. Each year public and private school students celebrate “Puerto Rican week” singing “autochthonous” songs, the meanings of which they cannot discern, and substituting, temporarily and perhaps reluctantly, their videogames and I-pods for a plastic machete, their baseball caps for a “traditional” pava (straw hat) purchased at Walmart or K-mart, and their jeans and polo shirts for white-cuffed, brand-new pants and cotton shirts that most will never wear again. This atavistic symbolism reveals pernicious racial constructions. As Torres (1998) eloquently argues, the jíbaro is figured as the “native” white dweller of the interior region of the country. His counterpart is, of course, black, and perfunctorily construed as a slave from the coastal region. Thus the reification of the jíbaro as the archetype of the national body works once again to distance and displace the so-called “African element” in our officially postulated national amalgam. Our testimonial collection demonstrates that in their daily practices, Afro-Puerto Ricans have confronted the myth of racial democracy and the atavism of the jíbaro symbol in multifarious and complex ways and in situated practices that have as much to do with the symbolic as with the material elements of culture. I offer a poignant example, extracted from the testimony of Ché, a retired fisherman in his late sixties, and his recollection of his childhood participation in local carnivals:
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I dressed up as los negritos de la Perlina [the Perlina black boys], who were two black boys on the box of the detergents of that time. My brother and I painted ourselves as negritos de la Perlina. Since my brother is darker than me, I painted myself all over, my ass and all, and we took off to dance in the town’s carnivals, to panhandle—a handful of pennies but back then a penny was two bucks now.15
Testimonios afropuertorriqueños contributed to building alternative research communities that interrogate “national” constructs; challenge the displacement, debasement, and dismissal of Afro-Puerto Ricanness; and in the process chart a path for locally committed social science research. In light of the ruptures effected by the project and noted earlier, I close with a reflection on what might have made these ruptures possible so as to contribute to debates about collaborative methodologies as strategies for transcending established saberes and, Géliga Vargas: Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories • 111
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in the Latin American context, questioning official national lore based on variable notions of mestizaje. One central aspect that contributed to the aforementioned ruptures is the fact that our project design was not dictated by academically established hypotheses or lines of inquiry but was molded and steered by saberes recuperated, constructed, and questioned in situated exchanges and encounters. Eschewing disciplinary boundaries and preestablished lines of inquiry allowed us to capture a more extensive and profound but by no means complete or cohesive portrait of contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican history. We did not isolate economic, cultural, psychological, or sociological aspects but set out to unveil and examine how these are interwoven in the memories of Afro-Puerto Ricans in the process of narrating their lives. Thus we developed research “instruments” and “protocols” on the basis of popular and locally constructed saberes. This entailed not just forming different research teams and developing different research protocols for each community but also modeling our relationships with the narrators on the type of dialogical exchange that had been developed in the community forums, which had fomented a collective process of racial consciousness-raising. As collaborative researchers we formed our roles not on the figure of “observer” but on the figure of “witness,” committed both to translating what we saw and heard for an audience and to “calling up a broken humanity to redeem it” (Gordon 1995: 383). In this way the processes of mutual discovery, joint production of knowledge, and interpretation of lived experience that evolved in the interviews engendered the revelations of (private, partial, probable, plural) “truths” that Afro-Puerto Ricans have been conditioned to conceal and negate. As Ernesto, a narrator from Aguadilla, put it at the end of his interview: “This was not an interview, this was a confession; I now understand so many things about my life and that of my family.” Concurrently, the strenuous process of collective self-reflection that preceded the interviews warned us about how complex it would be— and is—to narrate Afro-Puerto Rican history in our national context and thus predisposed us to be receptive to its multiple and conflictive texts. Emboldened by our intellectual and political audacity, we faced the fact that recording Afro-Puerto Rican history entails documenting acceptance, negation, contradiction, and fluctuation as well as vigilance against any attempt to consecrate a singular notion of Afro-Puer-
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to Ricanness, for this would be just as mythical and exclusionary as the master narrative of the nation. This way, we conceived Afro-Puerto Rican testimonies as historias de vidas (life histories) that reflect our diversity as well as the inequalities that tear and stain the national fabric. In turn, we managed to document the wide range of strategies developed by Afro-Puerto Ricans, individually and collectively, self-consciously and unself-consciously, materially and symbolically, to inscribe themselves, ourselves, in the life story of the “nation.” • • • • •
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jocelyn a. géliga vargas has a PhD in communication from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez, where she also teaches in the film studies and comparative literature programs. She has taught in universities in New York and Argentina. Her publications focus on racial, ethnic, and gender identities and their representations; oral history; film studies; and ethnographic, participatory, and collaborative methodologies, drawing from research conducted in the United States, Argentina, and Puerto Rico.
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1. Space limitations preclude me from engaging in a comparative analysis of the collaborative research projects carried out in each town. I focus primarily on the Aguadilla experience because it evolved into a long-term collaboration that transcended the limits of the LASA funding period. However, occasional references to the development of the parallel project in Hormigueros are offered when they are considered necessary to characterize faithfully the genesis and evolution of Testimonios afropuertoriqueños. 2. In his comprehensive study Afro-Latin America: 1800–2000 Andrews notes that by the late nineteenth century “caste legislation had lasted 70 to 80 years longer in Cuba and Puerto Rico than in the rest of Spanish America and had left a powerful legacy that would not be easily overcome” (2004: 114). On the historical perspective of racial prejudice against Afro-descendents in Puerto Rico see Kinsbruner 1996; González 1989; Torres 1998. 3. The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Institute of Puerto Rican Culture) has been a central force in the construction and circulation of this foundational national myth. It was founded in 1955, three years after the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico under the administration and paternalistic guidance of Luis Muñoz Marín, the first elected governor of the archipelago. The attributes discursively granted to each of the “constitutive elements” of the Puerto Rican character are sharply articulated in the institute’s foundational rhetoric (see Instituto de Cultura 2003a and 2003b). For a thorough discussion of the institute’s preeminent role in defining cultural policy and cultural discourse in Puerto Rico see Dávila 1997. 4. A recent ethnographic study (Godreau et. al. 2008) documents the endurance of this discourse in textbooks and teaching materials used in elementary schools in Puerto Rico. 5. Giusti Cordero employs the term cultura negroide to refer to a cultural movement Géliga Vargas: Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories • 113
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in the first half of the twentieth century that sought to identify and preserve, most notably in poetry, allegedly “pure” African expressions and traits surviving among Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico and in the Antilles. Antillanismo, for Giusti Cordero, names the more influential cultural and intellectual currents that succeeded the cultura negroide paradigm in the 1960s. He claims that antillanismo is deeply rooted in historical interrogations and explorations (in literature, music and other genres) that seek to (re)locate Puerto Rico in the larger Caribbean context and explore the region’s African dimensions. 6. On subordination, resistance, and contributions to the Spanish colonial regime in the archipelago, see Díaz Soler 1953; Morales Carrión 1978; Baralt 1981; Sued Badillo and López Cantos 1986; for the same in particular regions, see Scarano 1984; Baralt 1988; Figueroa 2005; Negrón Portillo and Mayo Santana 2007. Scholars seeking to redefine Puerto Rican history, identity, and culture include Rodríguez Juliá 1985; González 1989; Palés Matos 1993; Torres 1998. Works seeking to preserve the African legacy in Puerto Rican include, for folklore, Alegría 1974 (although not dedicated exclusively to African folklore); Ortiz Lugo 1995, 2004; Ungerleider Kepler 2000; for music, Quintero Rivera 2009; and for literature and language, Álvarez Nazario 1974; Zenón Cruz 1975; Ortiz García 2006; Ramos-Perea 2009. On contributions of prominent Afro-descendents, see Piñeiro de Rivera 1989; Alegría 1990; Jiménez Román 1996; Rivera Hernández 2001. And for racial prejudice and discrimination, see Kinsbruner 1996; Ramos Rosado 1999; Blanco 2003; Merino Falú 2004; López Ruyol 2005; Rivero 2005. 7. For a thorough introduction to the cultura negroide and antillanista traditions, see Giusti Cordero 1996. For a discussion of musical productions emphasizing the Afro-Puerto Rican/Afro-Caribbean experience, see Otero Garabís 2000 (especially chap. 2) and Quintero Rivera 2009. More recent examples of this literary and filmic production include Vega and Suau 2001, Santos Febres 2006, 2009; Dariel Ortiz 2007; Denis Rosario 2009. 8. See, for example, Godreau 2002, 2008; Hernández Hiraldo 2006. 9. Raymond Gómez was unable to participate in the project when it was eventually launched in September 2006 but was one of the narrators interviewed for the Aguadilla oral history project. 10. The student, Thea L. Mateu, initially entered the project as a “research assistant” I was able to hire with a grant from the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez. However, over the course of the first year, as was recurrently noted by the community collaborators, she became an integral member of the research team. Although the evolution of the collaborative project in Hormigueros is not discussed here, I want to acknowledge the contribution of Edwin Albino, an eurekeño historian, musician, and cultural worker who was instrumental in the development of the Hormigueros’ component of the project. 11. The audio recording of the forum was transcribed; based on the transcript I developed an initial catalogue of generative themes that emerged as central to documenting Afro–Puerto Rican experience from a situated perspective that considered the specific locality of Aguadilla, a coastal town in western Puerto Rico with a long history of U.S. military presence. This catalogue became the first working document of the Aguadilla research team. During the first phase of the project the document was revised and expanded after each research team meeting to incorporate the themes that emerged in the group discussions, as recorded in the meeting transcripts. The final working document of this phase was a thematic outline that was used as the basis for developing the oral history interview questions for the Aguadilla project. 12. Today negrada, an uncommon term, refers to black folk. In the past the term referred specifically to black slaves. 13. Godreau (2008) offers a thorough review of scholarship on racial terminology
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in Puerto Rico as well as an insightful analysis, based on her ethnographic research, of discursive practices pertaining to racial classifications. 14. To offer an additional glimpse of the context it is worth mentioning that in the 2000 census, 81 percent of the population of Puerto Rico identified as “white” while only 8 percent identified as “black or African American,” an issue that has garnered significant attention over the past decade (see Duany 2005). 15. Elsewhere (Géliga Vargas et al., forthcoming) I have discussed the complex significations of Che’s childhood diversion in the context of both local and national cultures intent on denying or minimizing the “African presence” in their collective body. In this context, the problematic practice of “blackface” has been and continues to be used to ennegrecer or darken faces that are not necessarily “white.” However, in this essay what I wanted to emphasize was Che’s contemporary reinterpretation of his childhood profitable pastime as a carnivalesque affirmation of his black identity before the “blanquitos” (upper class white people) of Aguadilla.
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Fires of the Past.” In Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, vol. 2, ed. A. Torres and N. E. Whitten Jr., 3–33. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ungerleider Kepler, D. 2000. Las fiestas de Santiago Apóstol en Loíza. San Juan, PR: Isla Negra Editores. Vega, L., producer, and P. Suau, director and screenwriter. 2001. Raíces (film). Available from Banco Popular de Puerto Rico. Wolgemuth, J. R., and R. Donohue. 2006. “Toward an Inquiry of Discomfort: Guiding Transformation in ‘Emancipatory’ narrative research.” Qualitative Inquiry 12: 1012–21. Zenón Cruz, I. 1975. Narciso descubre su trasero, 2nd edition. Humacao, PR: Editorial Furidi.
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Walking and Doing About Decolonial Practices xochitl leyva solano, Center for Higher Research in
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translated by joanne rappaport,
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Georgetown University
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The essay that follows is an English language version of chapter 10 of the book Sjalel kibeltik, Sts’isjel ja kechtiki’, Tejiendo nuestras raíces (Köhler et al. 2010).1 Sjalel kibeltik (Interweaving our roots) is a co-authored book in four languages—Tsotsil, Tseltal, Tojolabal, and Spanish—and in three codes of representation: writing, oral, and visual.2 The co-authors call it an (audio) book because of the weight we give to orality and visuality. The (audio) book was collaboratively assembled by a team of two Maya painters, four Maya community communicators, a Japanese violinist, a German visual anthropologist, and me, a woman with Mixtec roots and a Maya heart, who is also an anthropologist.3 Some of the Maya co-authors are members of peasant and indigenous organizations, others belong to artistic or musical groups, and yet others are associated with transnational networks. All of us are members of the Red de Artistas, Comunicadores Comunitarios y Antropólogos/-as de Chiapas (RACCACH, Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists).4 In the collectively written introduction to our (audio) book we explain that Sjalel kibeltik was not an end in itself, nor did it originate in an academic research project. Rather, it arose out of a convergence of our own life projects and struggles and, above all, out of the need we all felt to engage in closer communication with the youth and women of rural and urban indigenous communities, from which seven of the ten authors come; we also felt the need to work more closely as a collective (Leyva et al. 2010). Once we agreed on this objective at RACCACH meetings, we decided on long-term, medium-term, and short-term plans of action. In the medium term we proposed to develop the book Sjalel kibeltik and began to set out a dialogical and collective method for working together and for writing and taping our contributions. Our methodology drew upon the ways in which indigenous communities and organizations create consensus, but we were
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also influenced by dialogical strategies in the social sciences, including anthropology, and by the forms of transmitting indigenous knowledge used by the Maya co-authors of Sjalel kibeltik. This collective method provided us with a guide for organizing the content and arriving at a narrative style; contributions were written individually by each of the ten RACCACH members but then discussed in pairs and at RACCACH meetings. In this way, we set about co-producing oral, visual, and written narratives that responded to three basic questions: Where do I come from—what are my roots? What kind of work am I doing in my organization and my community? Where are we now and in what direction are we advancing as a community, collective, group, or organization? These questions—which were drawn up collectively—guided preparation of our collective-individual stories. Our aim was to reconstruct our wanderings, our encounters, and the challenges we face. The narrative texture was influenced by biweekly meetings at which we read chapters aloud and shared commentaries that were then incorporated into our writing or audio taping. We feel that the way contributions were developed both reflects our methodology and deepens our engagement with our communities. We also feel that it allows us to achieve the same goals in our communities as we do in a classroom. Despite age differences, the co-authors of Sjalel kibeltik share the experience of being cultural activists, but six of us also studied in university and two of us are academic researchers.5 In my case, in addition to lecturing at CIESAS Sureste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social del Sureste) in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, I am involved in academic networks focused on the challenge of an epistemic struggle to decolonize ourselves, the social sciences, and anthropology.6 This struggle includes a search for cognitive justice and epistemic democracy (Sousa Santos 2009) and has sought, from the standpoint of our concrete experiences, to build knowledge from and for feminist and altermundista networks, anti-systemic movements, anti-capitalist organizations, and indigenous collectives and organizations in struggle.7 In other words, Sjalel kibeltik is part of an effort to contribute, in concrete and tangible ways, to creating knowledges that encourage transformations of the system in order to afford all of us a more just and dignified life, not only for academics but for all of those with whom we work and alongside whom we struggle—people who are usually invisible, impoverished, excluded, and dispossessed but “not defeated,” as the Aymara-Mestiza sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui asserts (2010 [1984]). One can read/listen to/look at Sjalel kibeltik in its totality at http://jkopkutik.org/ sjalelkibeltik/ for a better understanding of this essay and its context. I am conscious of the risks of decontextualizing material by extracting it from the larger work, but I also believe that including it in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies allows dialogue between different geo-historical locations and exchange of experiences, knowledge, and concerns that we might call our theoretical-methodological-epistemic-ethical-political wagers.8 I hope this text will not be seen as a simple “testimony.” Sjalel kibeltik is not a collection of testimonies in the sense of “empirical narratives” gathered by a social scientist (Vergara 1999). The introduction explains in detail how each of us wrote our distinct his-
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tories alone and collectively. These histories are not “raw material” to be interpreted by an “expert”; they are part of a broader search for co-understanding, co-interpreting, coproducing, and co-theorizing with and alongside indigenous people, organizations, and movements.9 The interweaving of our roots, histories, and struggles in Sjalel kibeltik has permitted us to create knowledge from the interstices of indigenous art, community media, and anthropology with a commitment to the organized groups who live and struggle in Abya Yala.10
Where Do I Come From?
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From a very young age I learned that in our society, skin color is of the first order and classifies people. No one taught me this explicitly, but in Mexico City I experienced this in kindergarten and part of grade school. It was there that some of my classmates called me “black” for the first time and others, in a somewhat gentler manner, nicknamed me “Negrita Cucurumbé” (Little Black Cucurumbé).11 I remember that when I was five, I did not totally comprehend why the copper tone that was the color of my skin should be equated with black. Thirty years would have to pass, and there would have to be an armed rebellion led by Maya Zapatistas in Chiapas, before copper-toned skin was described poetically and accepted socially as “the color of the earth.” We would have to move from a post-revolutionary assimilationist indigenism to neoliberal multiculturalism before an Englishwoman in London would ask me in a completely friendly and cordial tone: “Are you a Mexican Aborigine?” With her words, that anonymous woman made a positive value judgment not only on my skin color but on what she presupposed were my racial and ethnic origins. Curiously, my immediate reaction was to explain to her that I was a “Mestiza” and to add that in Mexico, calling a person an “Aborigine” or “Indian” was insulting and that what to her was admiration could quickly turn into discrimination. The woman gave me an astonished look, shrugged her shoulders, and turned away without responding to my explanation. I was left thinking. Why had I identified myself as a Mestiza if I had never done so in Mexico? I was doubly preoccupied because at the time I was writing about the ideology of mestizaje (miscegenation) promoted by the Mexican state. This national ideology led us to believe that the future of our country lay in the “cosmic race” (in the “Mestizo”) that arose from the mixture of Indian and Spaniard. I closed the episode in my mind by arguing that the discursive lapse that led me to self-identify
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as a Mestiza was a clear indication of the power of the dominant ideology, which penetrates everywhere, into all of us. Ten years before the incident in London, the issue of my identity and origins had already led me to self-reflection in anthropology classes. After poking around my family tree, I wrote an essay about how I was the child of Oaxacan migrants to Mexico City, specifically migrants from the Lower Mixteca who reached the national capital in the mid1940s, in search of a better life. Like many other young people in their generation, my parents met at one of the Oaxacan social clubs in Mexico City. After my mother married, she maintained links to her family for many years; we, her children, would go with our cousins to Huajuapan de León in Uncle Raúl and Aunt Beba’s van to attend relatives’ quinceaños (lavish fifteenth-birthday coming-out parties), weddings, or funerals—events for people whom we barely knew. I remember Aunt Rosario’s old house, with its row of rooms around a central patio, the huge bougainvillea at its center, and the crickets and frogs that sang a chorus on those star-filled nights when we played outside with the daughters of Cousin Evaluz. By the end of 1960 Evaluz had left to work in the yunaites, the United States of America. Anyone would have thought that with such a background, my parents would have given me a Mixtec name, perhaps Yuusavi or Yade’e, but my grandmother decided they would baptize me with the name Xochitl, which in the Nahuatl language means “flower” or “queen of the flowers.” Surely the name was added to the birth registry without an accent on the o because the clerk forgot it. I think the name they gave me was an expression of nationalist pride in the “glorious Aztec past” that public-school teachers and textbooks spoke of so often. This was a sentiment that in my case would be reined in by fate, as I was very young when I left the great Tenochtitlán (the Aztec name for the historic city that is today Mexico City) and lived in many places, ending up in the Maya region, where I have been for thirty years, or two-thirds of my life. So as a woman with a Nahuatl name, a Maya heart, and scarcely explored Mixtec roots, over time I have built my multiple identities.
From Social Commitment to Political Commitment12 There was never any doubt that I would go to university. What was not clear was what I would study. For me, it was clear that I wanted to study 122 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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something that would help me to work with the people and for the people. It could have been law or sociology, except that I quickly realized the former was conducive to corruption and the latter was too urban and too abstract. I think it was the air of the Mayab (Maya lands) in Yucatán that led me to anthropology. I was a dancer in the Provincial Ballet Company, where the maestro Víctor Salas, its founder and director, introduced me to the prima ballerina, Eglé López Mendiburu. From her I learned that anthropologists worked with the people and were concerned with culture and history: two things that at the time seemed to me important aspects of my wandering life. I also remember that thanks to my work with the maestro Víctor Salas and his company, I began, little by little, to learn what discipline, creativity, and critical thinking were. Now, thirty years later, I still believe this is the way we should go, a way that was reinforced through my work with the peasants of Yucatán, Michoacán, and Chiapas. So in the mid-1980s, together with my friends Gaby Cervera and Tete Cuevas, I joined a project to work with Yucatec Maya peasants and agronomist disciples of Efraim Hernández Xolocotzin.13 The project’s goal was to use Maya thought to counteract the progress of the “modern technological package” of improved seeds, agrochemicals, and heavy machinery. We hoped to stimulate better and more appropriate technological and cultural changes in traditional milpa (cornfield) cultivation. Later, in 1988, I saw how in north-central Michoacán, the Neocardenista social movement was able to remove the party bosses of the PRI who had long controlled the entire region.14 Before my eyes, peasants, who had always been co-opted, were now rebelling and organizing, so that I began to appreciate fully the importance of grassroots organization and its potential for social transformation. I had read about it in classes with our teacher Jorge “Doc” Alonso and drew upon it to continue to walk the path of political anthropology. But it was not until I arrived in Chiapas that I stopped being a student of politics and engaged in concrete work with a group that was organized in struggle: la Unión de Uniones Ejidales y Grupos Campesinos Solidarios de Chiapas (Union of Ejido Unions and Peasant Solidarity Groups of Chiapas). When the small plane left me in the heart of the Lacandón Forest, in a village full of guanos (palms) on the Cristalino River, my social commitment began to be transformed into a complex
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political commitment that I am still nurturing, taking delight in, and suffering from twenty-four years later.
First Movement: The Armed Uprising of 1994
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We would have stayed in Las Cañadas in the Lacandon Forest and missed the uprising of January 1, 1994, if the neighboring villagers had not come a few days before Christmas to ask us—almost in code—if “we didn’t want to buy a parakeet,” at the same time insistently inviting us to leave the forest to visit our families. We were surprised by their persistence and by the unusual number of mules and horses loaded with maize that were arriving in the villages instead of staying for a time, as they usually did, in the cornfields. It all began to make sense on January 1, when we watched on Yucatec television pictures of the taking of the city of San Cristóbal. At that moment, I instinctively packed what I could and boarded a plane for Chiapas. I remember that we were stuck in the capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, for two days, because the roads to San Cristóbal and Ocosingo were closed. As is well known, the declaration of war on the Mexican government by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) challenged the official discourse that announced our entry into the First World via the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, the EZLN denounced the discrimination and marginalization that many native peoples suffer. Today a body of literature analyzes how Neozapatismo contributed to a questioning of the state’s one-party system and its ever-present electoral democracy. The armed movement opened a new phase for social movements in Chiapas by attracting international supporters who embraced the Zapatista political principles of autonomy and resistance—principles that became central to the creation and development of altermundista and anti-capitalist movements. The armed uprising of 1994, the war, and the political-military conflict—which still has not been resolved—led us to question our own certainties, our four and a half years of honest and arduous work in the Las Cañadas area, and, of course, our way of living and doing anthropology. In the heat of the bombings of the southern neighborhoods of San Cristóbal, the crossfire in Rancho Nuevo, and the massacre in the marketplace of Ocosingo, in the face of the growing emergence of military checkpoints, the construction of a huge army headquarters in the
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heart of the forest, the emergence of paramilitary groups, the massacre at Acteal, and the development of counterinsurgency policies by the government, at the least we had to ask ourselves: Why and for whom are we writing and doing research? How have we been working and functioning up to now? Answers became clear when the people of Las Cañadas, by then in arms, evaluated the regional development program fostered by their own organization, the Union of Unions, and found that it was not sufficient. This program had been intimately tied to funding from then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and to his neoliberal policies, which continued to reduce peasants to simple producers of calves, pigs, and coffee. But it seems that it was not enough, either, to be a part of the organization’s “technical team” (which was what the Las Cañadas peasants called us), nor to reconstruct and co-produce with the communities the history of their colonization of the forest and a study of local religious traditions. Undoubtedly, when the Maya peasants of Las Cañadas made an evaluation in 1993, they discovered that many things had failed abysmally, and for this reason they decided to dedicate their lives and those of their families to armed struggle. That is what I thought and wrote about, contradicting the discourse of the government and of some journalists and academics who preached to the media that the rebels were “a mass of Indians manipulated by foreigners, by the bishop of San Cristóbal, and by lay missionaries.” And since I was intimately familiar with the capacity of the rebels for organizing and for hard work, from the very start I took them seriously and participated in the various political proposals they were placing on the table. So after January 1, 1994, we began to participate in very concrete activities, ranging from confirming and denouncing the existence of missiles fired at the southern part of the city of San Cristóbal to becoming involved in the creation—and not just the academic study— of Neozapatista networks (see Leyva 2006). What we were doing—as many others have done in other times and other places—was challenging in practice the principles of neutrality, objectivity, and distance that for positivist, neopositivist, and modern scholars constitute the pillars of the “production of scientific knowledge.”15 Without the Zapatista uprising, no doubt many of us would never have come to rethink our goals, our present, and our personal and col-
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lective histories, nor to create a new radical practice. By moving in the direction of what we have called decolonial practices the autonomous Zapatista municipalities and the Councils of Good Government have come to play an important role.16 Also important has been our participation in La Otra Campaña (The Other Campaign), the Wallerstein Seminar, CIDECI Las Casas/UNITIERRA-Chiapas, the Collective La Otra Historia, Los Otros Saberes . . . (Another History, Other Knowledges. . .), the 99.1 Frecuencia Libre Radio Collective, and of course RACCACH and the collective projects of Governing (in) Diversity and the Indigenous Videomakers of the Southern Border Project (PVIFS). I will speak briefly about these last two projects in order to explain more clearly how decolonial practices are always in continuous construction, based in collective practice, emerging from below, from the personal, the spiritual, the subjective, and the intersubjective spheres.
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Second Movement: An Other Language, the Audiovisual
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In the period after 1997—that is, after the Acteal massacre and the dismantling of the Zapatista autonomous municipalities—came another key moment in our voyage in search of what Latin American thinkers have called the decoloniality of power, knowledge, being, and gender (e.g., Aníbal Quijano 1993; Arturo Escobar 2003; Walter Mignolo 2006; María Lugones 2008). As I have already mentioned, for many of us this search began thanks to the armed uprising of the EZLN, and it continued to be constructed and deepened through our concrete practice as we started to work in a language different from writing, an audiovisual language. In order to explain better what I mean by decolonial knowledge and practice I look at some concrete experiences that I hope will help me communicate more clearly with everyone, and not just with the “experts.” As many are aware, what “counts” in academic institutions and communities is writing texts and publishing them. That is what gives meaning to homo academicus (see Bourdieu 2009 [1984]). This is not by chance; it is a response to many historical factors, such as the origins of the Academy and the social sciences as hierarchical, institutionalized, and systematic spaces of power, born of the West and of modernity.17 In the academic world, written language is expressed in colonial/ imperial tongues—English, French, German, Spanish—which in a
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play of power and hierarchy leave behind the colonized languages— for example, Maya languages. In the face of colonial/imperial written language, any oral, visual, or audiovisual expression is seen as inferior; it is depreciated, undervalued, made invisible. In the academic world, video, photo, and radio production is labeled as simple “popularizing material,” occupying a secondary status, a “gesture” that researchers make (note: optionally) when they have already filled their quotas of single-authored books, articles, papers, reviews, etc. Many colleagues follow these rules of the game (sometimes without really being conscious of them), and few dare to delve seriously into the audiovisual sphere; to do that would place your time, your merit review, your salary, your status, and your prestige at risk—besides which it means learning to express yourself in a language different from writing, to use a different technology, and to be interested in reaching a different public and not just students and colleagues. But please do not get me wrong or get angry with me, because I do not mean to say that all academics “should” make audiovisual material but simply that the subordinate status of audiovisual material in the academic world is the result of a deep systemic logic that reproduces the coloniality of knowledge.18 I also want to emphasize that written language, privileged in the Academy, has its own very long colonial history and severely limits our achievement of a real, horizontal, and fluid dialogue with the members of the communities and indigenous nations with whom we work, whose tradition and lived reality (especially in the rural world) continues to be mostly oral. So let us return to the story I was telling. As we began reflecting on all this, we were once again shaken by reality. In various parts of Chiapas, paramilitary groups were attacking the Zapatistas and some peasant and indigenous organizations. On December 22, 1997, nineteen women, fourteen girls, four boys, eight men, and four unborn children of the organization Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (The Bees Civil Society), who had taken refuge in the Los Naranjos camp, were massacred by paramilitaries in the village of Acteal, in the municipality of Chenalhó. This was at precisely the same time as the autonomous municipalities were being violently dismantled by order of the PRI government.19 The massacre occurred at a moment when the militarization of the state had reached its most critical point. Without doubt, the context required immediate action by a committed and creative civil society.
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It was in that context of militarization and paramilitarization that I and my partner, the visual anthropologist Axel Köhler, organized a diplomado (workshop) that would be the seed of what would later become the Indigenous Videomakers of the Southern Border Project (PVIFS 2007).20 This project responded to young indigenous members of rural and urban organizations in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Guatemala who were already producing their own videos or were interested in beginning to do so. Perhaps the most important contribution of the PVIFS was to facilitate the video making of young Tsotsils, Tseltals, and Ch’ols inside their own organizational frameworks in the city of San Cristóbal and in some indigenous communities in northern Chiapas, in the Lacandón Forest, and in the Highlands region. This not only meant contributing to the creation of the material conditions for training in camerawork, editing, and postproduction, but also involved a discussion of contents and meanings. For the past seven years, all the project members have fostered the production and distribution of indigenous videos in Native communities as well as in national and international film and video festivals. We have all sought to make what we have produced together as meaningful and useful to a midwife in the community as to a student or scholar at the university. Although we did accomplish a great deal in the project, I should also mention what we did not achieve: we were not able to stimulate interest in social research among all of the indigenous video makers of the PVIFS; that is, the goal of placing research at the service of their organizations, groups, and collectives.21 Perhaps this was not possible due to the colonial and extractive nature of research itself, which for many automatically brings forth a reaction of suspicion and denial. Perhaps it was not possible because we still were not clear on how to achieve it, and so it was easier to subordinate our agenda to that of the groups and the young people with whom we were working. In short, it was only at another moment and in another context that we began to construct another agenda, which we call a “shared agenda.”22
Third Movement: Another Agenda, a Shared One It was 2003. The creation of the Zapatista Councils of Good Government marked a watershed in the history of the struggle for autonomy, 128 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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now operating on a regional level. Their founding also confirmed the fact that the Zapatista struggle was ultimately one of political and civilian resistance. On the Latin American stage, other movements of Native peoples were beginning to articulate anti-neoliberal demands and to work toward the reconstruction of their peoplehood. For example, the Mapuches in southern Chile fought fiercely against the lumber and mining companies that were advancing on their communities. Members of the indigenous nationalities of Ecuador took over the streets of the capital to oppose the government’s neoliberal plans and to bring down politicians. In Bolivia, Native people from rural and urban areas began to fight against the privatization of water, at the same time that Miskitos, Mayangnas, and Sumus on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua demanded a true autonomy that went beyond the constitutional statute achieved under the Sandinistas. Various wings of the Maya movement in Guatemala, less spectacularly but just as importantly, demanded compensation for the surviving relatives of the victims of thirty-six years of ethnocidal war, at the same time promoting Maya spirituality. The project we finally decided to call Governing (in) Diversity was set in motion that same year, with the participation of indigenous intellectuals from many of these movements, including five indigenous organizations in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Milpa Alta, and thirteen academics. A goal for many of us was to begin to operate within the framework provided by feminist notions of positionality. That is, from the start we hoped to recognize openly the spaces from which we were co-producing knowledge, and for whom. But what was central was the fact of having indigenous intellectuals and organizations interested in research as our counterparts; this was key to building a shared agenda for collaborating and co-researching.23 This is easily enough said but very difficult to achieve, since each of the groups involved—the academics, the indigenous intellectuals, and their organizations—had its own rhythms, priorities, and interests. The challenge we faced was how to create a substantial space of overlapping interests where we could collectively decide on what we would study and identify the uses this dialogically produced knowledge arising out of collaboration would have for all the parties involved. The Governing (in) Diversity project was important in terms of what its collaborative methodology contributed in practice. Also significant
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was the process of joint analysis of different governing experiences and of policies of governance that indigenous organizations had implemented in different places and times. It is also important to emphasize the one-on-one dialogues we held to exchange different kinds of knowledge: the knowledge of the Native peoples and of the academics.24 In spite of all our time and effort—indeed, five years of our lives—it is important to engage in self-criticism and to point out that our writings were produced in an academic jargon that overshadowed other forms of knowledge. Moreover, the final results of our collective endeavor were published as a book that came out only in Spanish and never achieved wide distribution among the grassroots organizations of our counterparts. This led us, once again, to reflect on our work and seek out other pathways and strategies.
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Fourth Movement: Beyond a Shared Agenda, Engaging Our Roots, Idioms, and Languages25
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As we explain in our introduction to Sjalel kibeltik, this work did not arise out of an academic research project or even out of an academic project with nonacademic partners. The (audio) book emerged out of our life-projects and, more concretely, out of a collective need to transcend the limitations that we experienced building an agenda.26 It also came out of the need to build relations among us and with our indigenous, artistic, political communities. In January of 2008 we founded the Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists (RACCACH), each of us aware of our own experience and our own reasons for committing to this new intertwined path.27 For me in particular, this was the beginning of a seventh attempt to find a better path in life that promised the possibility of pursuing my own autonomous course interlinked with the other members of the network and with their communities of origin and their organizations. Rethinking our roots and reassessing their value constituted a process that helped us to relate to one another as a network and gave life to our (audio) book. The reevaluation of our ancestral roots is not something that only occurred in the RACCACH network; indeed, it lies at the heart of the ethno-political struggles, organizations, and movements across our continent that are working toward the reconstitution of
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First Nations. We suggest our small contribution be read within this framework. The notion of “undressing” ourselves—as RACCACH member Damián Guadalupe Martínez Martínez (2010) called it—through the exposition of our personal histories never had egotistical purposes (“me here, me there, me everywhere”) but was meant to draw us closer to larger collective processes.28 We could even say that the very process of preparing an (audio) book has been a way of practicing decolonial knowledge, by moving against a coloniality of knowledge that tends to recreate the Other as exotic, primitive, and traditional. The Other for whom one speaks, the Other one interprets—the very act of doing so turns the person into a thing and is dehumanizing. In contrast, what each of us was exploring was how to speak for ourselves; constructing ourselves in conversation with others who, while different, were equal at a basic human level. As we all know, Otherness intensifies difference, accentuating it, reproducing it. It is not by accident that producing Others, Otherism, is the privilege of colonial/imperial difference. And I do not say that in order to repeat fancy theories; I say it thinking especially of our experiences in the RACCACH network. While I as the anthropologist emphasized the indigenous and Maya dimensions of the network members, my counterparts emphatically pointed out that there were also a German man and a Japanese woman in the network; which is to say, they emphasized the interculturality that was unfolding. Juan Chawuk (2010) titled his chapter “A Universal Being,” not “A Tojolabal Being.” In one part of his text, Chawuk declared that “in the first place we are human beings and deserve respect.” I think these simple words constitute a stirring call to the West and to humanity, reminding us of the arguments made by defenders of First Peoples in colonial times. However, we are not living in the sixteenth century but at the dawn of the twenty-first century. And I ask myself: Why would an artist of Tojolabal roots, with his oeuvre and his writings, have to remind us of his humanity? My only possible response is that it is because we live in a society that is still not capable of dignifying him with that recognition. A similar plea can be heard and read in all of the spoken and written chapters of Sjalel kibeltik. We also did not want the (audio) book to be trapped in Spanish. To the contrary, we have sought to give equal weight to Tsotsil, Tseltal,
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and Tojolabal in the written and spoken versions. This has presented a series of ample challenges to each of us and to RACCACH as a whole, which we point out in detail in the introduction to Sjalel kibeltik (Leyva et al. 2010). Here I will add only that we cannot achieve a true and deep intercultural dialogue if all the conversations take place only in Spanish and if one does not speak and understand the mother tongue of those with whom one is working. I am sure that if our discussions had taken place exclusively in Tsotsil, Tseltal, or Tojolabal, we would have produced something quite different, because our intersubjective dialogues would have been different. The same goes for the writing of the chapters; if they had first been written in the authors’ mother tongues, the results would surely have been different. This leaves many of the coauthors of this (audio) book with the urgent task of learning to read, write, or speak well in our respective languages.
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What Next?
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This (audio) book was not born of the cold calculations of an academic seated at her desk speculating (in other words, producing something out of nothing). Therefore, it is not an end in itself, but instead, as we all affirmed at our January 2008 meeting, we hope that our (audio) book will become a medium, a tool, that will help us to develop a concrete collaboration with the indigenous, artistic, academic, and political communities to which we belong, and with the Native youth of the countryside and the city. I believe that if this (audio) book does not arrive in the hands of the members of those communities, if it does not address them and move them, we have merely produced more of the same, and the thirty-six months of hard, voluntary, and self-directed work by each of us will have little value. I want to close by emphasizing the importance of this (audio) book in bringing together people who work in the arts, in community media, and in committed research. It seems to me to be appropriate to look at Sjalel kibeltik as a small grain of sand in a continental process that is on the move, in which men and women of Native communities and various organizations and movements of Abya Yala are taking the lead in social research with the aim of allowing their cosmovisión (worldview) and culture to contribute to a just life in plenitude, not of the few but of humanity in general.29
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I hope that in our community spaces, in our organizations, and in our artistic, political, and academic activities we will be able to nurture creatively and collectively the co-creation/co-production of knowledge of the peoples—communities, organizations, and movements—involved. Or, to put it another way, it is our right to stop being raw material for others, but it is above all a weighty responsibility. Let us assume it together! •• • • •
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xochitl leyva solano is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Center for Higher Research in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) and an active member of the University of the Earth–Chiapas. She has worked since 1987 in Chiapas, Mexico. In 2010 with Mayan artists, community communicators, and a visual anthropologist, she co-authored the book Sjalel kibeltik. In 2008 with indigenous organizations of Abya Yala and committed anthropologists, she co-authored the book Gobernar en la diversidad: Experiencias indígenas desde América Latina. In 2000 she co-founded Proyecto Videoastas Indígenas de la Frontera Sur. Leyva has contributed to the development “co-labor research” (investigación de co-labor) and research with “roots, heart, and co-reason” (investigación con raíz, corazón y co-razón).
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1. I thank Joanne Rappaport for her invitation to publish my reflections in English in this journal, and for her translation of chapter 10 of Sjalel kibeltik, as well as for sharing her thoughts in our Methodology II course in the graduate program in social anthropology at the CIESAS Sureste, Chiapas, Mexico. I also thank Axel Köhler for his comments and assistance in the editing of this text, and I thank the copyeditor for massaging my prose. 2. The entire (audio) book Sjalel kibeltik, Sts’isjel ja kechtiki’, Tejiendo nuestras raíces can be accessed at http://jkopkutik.org/sjalelkibeltik/. 3. Two of the four community communicators have university degrees; one is a sociologist, the other an anthropologist. 4. Three are young members of independent indigenous peasant organizations that have been engaged in struggle since the 1990s; another four are youth who are pioneering pintura con raíz (painting that draws on the artists’ indigenous roots), indigenous video and photography, and bats’i rock (a fusion of rock and traditional music with lyrics in Tsotsil). 5. The youngest RACCACH member is a twenty-year-old Tsotsil painter, followed by seven members in their thirties, and two of us who are forty-eight and fifty-four years of age. 6. For an idea of the academic networks, note the contributors to the two-volume collective book Reflexiones desde nuestras prácticas políticas y de conocimiento situado (Reflections from our political practice and situated knowledge; Leyva et al. 2011): they come from Central America (Guatemala), the Caribbean (Cuba), South America (Colombia, Argentina, the Mapuche Nation, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil), Mexico (Chiapas, Guadalajara, Xalapa, Mexico City, and Yucatán), the United States (North CaroliLeyva Solano: Walking and Doing • 133
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na, Austin, Washington, D.C.), Canada, and five European countries (Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Portugal, and Germany). The central concerns they address are: From what subject positions do we produce knowledge? For what purpose? For whom, with whom, and how? How can we build a social science grounded in transformative, liberatory, and emancipatory commitment, from our various sites of enunciation, our distinct positionalities, and our concrete activities? The decolonial knowledge practices of First Nations in struggle, resisting and organizing in different ways since colonial times, have inspired, guided, and motivated us in producing Sjalel kibeltik. The quest for decolonization of anthropology and the social sciences also has a long history, some of it partially or completely unknown. Sjalel kibeltik is part of this history. Among its points of reference are Maya art and indigenous community media but also anthropology and sociology, in which four of the ten co-authors have degrees. On a personal note, debates on academic politics have been of great importance for my own engagement in various collectives and the quest for decolonizing power, knowledge, being, and gender. Seminal contributors to these debates have included French Caribbean and African authors who were part of the liberation struggles against colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century—Fanon, Césaire, and Cabral—and postcolonial and decolonial feminists like Mohanty, Haraway, Rivera Cusicanqui, Lugones, Hernández Castillo, Suárez, Marcos, and Waller, to name but a few. Other significant influences have been Fals Borda, Bonilla, and Castillo of Colombia’s La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action); Quijano, Escobar, Dussel, Mignolo, and other members of the research program on modernity/coloniality and decolonial thought (MCD); the driving forces of the World Anthropologies Network (WAN); activist researchers like Hale, Greenwood, Gordon, and Speed; collaborative ethnographers, in particular Lassiter and Rappaport, as well as the pioneer work of shared or collaborative research being advanced in Abya Yala by the likes of Tibán, Marimán, Hernández Ixcoy, Aguilar, Gómez, Köhler, Burguete, Díaz Polanco, Speed, Sánchez, Aylwin, Gutiérrez, Bastos, and García. 7. For more on this alternative form of producing knowledge, see the Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla (Kaqla Maya Women’s Group) and the Maya Association UK’u’x B’e, both in Guatemala; the Indigenous Videomakers of the Southern Border Project in Chiapas, Mexico; the Nociones Comunes (Common Notions) and Traficantes de Sueños (Dream Dealers) projects in Spain; the work of the Argentinean Colectivo Situaciones (Situations Collective); the Investigadores Descalzos (Barefoot Researchers) in Oaxaca, Mexico; the seminars and fora held at CIDECI Las Casas/Unitierra–Chiapas in Mexico; El Colectivo (The Collective) in Bolivia; and the Programa Democracia y Transformación Global (Democracy and Global Transformation Program) in Peru. 8. “A dialogue between different geo-historical locations, with the conviction that the future can no longer be imagined from one single and overarching perspective.” See Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: A Web Dossier, http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/ dossier2.1archive.php. 9. Regarding the hierarchy/discrimination of scientific knowledge toward other ways of knowing/knowledge, see e.g., Sousa Santos 2009 (chap. 1). On co-interpreting see Lassiter et al. 2004; Lassiter 2005; on co-producing knowledge see Casas et al. 2008; and co-theorizing see Bertely 2011; Köhler 2011; Rappaport 2008. 10. The meaning of Abya Yala is “ripe land,” “land in flower,” or “living land” in the Kuna language of Panama. It is what the Kuna and other First Peoples called the American continent before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Today, members of ethno-
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political movements use the term in an effort to distance themselves from the colonial/ imperial categories imposed by Europeans. 11. This nickname was taken from a popular song about a little black girl by the Mexican singer and songwriter Cri-Cri. 12. Although I do not mention it in the original Spanish text, it seems to me that it is important to point out that in my case, this concern with “knowing and interpreting in order to transform” has its roots in Marxism. But as many postcolonial theorists have noted, it is time to go beyond Marx, who advocated representing subjects as if they were not able to represent themselves (Mohanty 2003: 42), and beyond a Marxism that sees European history as the legitimate norm for all societies; as such, Marxism is incapable of adequately theorizing the phenomenon of modern colonialism (Castro-Gómez, Guardiola, and Millán 1999: 10–11). For that reason, it seemed crucial to counterpose my Marxist heritage with that of the original decolonizers of this continent: the First Peoples. It is from their history and their resistance today, that (we) derive the notion of how to think and act in the direction of decolonial practice. I emphasize practice, so that we do not remain at the level of attractive discourses and complex narratives that could end up reinforcing the global system of power/knowledge. 13. Efraim Hernández Xolocotzin was a pioneer in the study of traditional agricultural systems and Mexican ethnobotany. 14. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party) controlled Mexican politics for most of the twentieth century. 15. See, for example, the authors referred to in notes 6, 7, and 10–12. 16. The Zapatista Councils of Good Government exist within the Zapatista Caracoles (Snails), consisting of elected representatives from each of the autonomous municipal councils. Their goal is to coordinate autonomy, resistance, and good local and regional government. 17. The Academy (capitalized) signifies a scientific, literary, or artistic society functioning in an institutionalized form—generally in educational institutions—with public or private funding. Its origin lies in ancient Greece, where in 384 BC Plato founded the first Academy to teach mathematics, dialectics, and natural sciences. The West is used as a counterpoint to the East, and both of these terms have been coined to orient the European gaze and the form in which history is written there. The West is used as a synonym for Western culture, the Western world, and Western civilization, but in all cases it harks back to Greco-Roman and medieval European cultures that expanded over the world through conquest and war. Enrique Dussel (2005: 45) points out that what today we call modernity should be understood as “an emancipation, an exit from immaturity through the use of reason as a critical process, which opens humanity to a new development of the human being.” Dussel cautions that this is the dominant and accepted definition of modernity, which has at its center Europe and intra-European experiences. To counter this perception, he appeals to a vision of modernity that has a global scope. As he shows convincingly, since 1492 modern Europe has constituted all other cultures as its colonial periphery through the use of violence. 18. Clearly, it is not that simple. There are also researchers who produce audiovisual materials that reproduce the coloniality of knowledge. 19. See the chapter by José Alfredo Jiménez Pérez (2010) in Sjalel kibeltik. 20. Indigenous video emerged in Chiapas at the beginning of the 1990s among organized indigenous peasants from the Selva Norte (Northern Forest) region of Chiapas (see Estrada 2010). The work of indigenous video makers expanded in 1995 and was
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included within the autonomous Zapatista municipalities that arose after the armed uprising of 1994. The Proyecto de Medios de Comunicación Comunitaria, A.C. (Chiapas Media Project, now better known as Promedios) played an important role in articulating indigenous video with resistance and de facto autonomy. Before the founding of the PVIFS in 2000, two nongovernmental organizations, the Civil Association Melel Xojobal, A.C., and the Red de Comunicadores Boca de Polen (Pollen Mouth Communicators’ Network), promoted community media in Chiapas. 21. On the achievements and challenges of the PVIFS, see the 2007 multimedia series and web page http://sureste.ciesas.edu.mx/Proyectos/PVIFS/pagina_principal.html. 22. About the concept of a “shared agenda,” see Fals Borda (1985), Rouch (2003 [1973]), Hale (2008), and Leyva, Burguete, and Speed (2008). 23. The original Spanish version of this text uses “co-labor” instead of “collaborating” or “collaboration” in this and the following sentences.—Trans. 24. See the introductory sections at the beginning of each of the ten chapters in Leyva, Burguete, and Speed (2008). See also the methodological chapter by Leyva and Speed (2008). 25. The original Spanish uses the constructed expression, en-red-ándonos, a pun on “getting ourselves entangled” that simultaneously signifies “interweaving ourselves” and “walking together in a network,” more intricate than the English gloss of “engaging.”—Trans. 26. I am referring to an agenda that we produced with the participation of Maya artists and video makers and that was published by the CIESAS in 2008. 27. “Intertwined” is en-red-ados in the original Spanish, a play between “entangled,” “interlinked,” and “networked.”—Trans. 28. “Egotistical purposes” is given as yoísmo in the original Spanish.—Trans. 29. A preliminary bibliography of indigenous intellectuals and professionals working from their own roots and culture can be found in Sjalel kibeltik, 370–85, or on its website.
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References
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 2009 [1984]. Homo Academicus. México D.F.: Siglo XXI. Bertely Busquets, María. 2011. “De la antropología convencional a una praxis comprometida: Colaboración entre indígenas y no indígenas en un proyecto educativo para construir un mundo alterno desde Chiapas, México.” In Leyva et al., Reflexiones desde nuestras prácticas políticas y de conocimiento situado (see Leyva). Casas Cortés, M. Isabel, Michal Osterweill, and Dana E. Powell. 2008. “Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (1): 17–58. Chawuk, Juan. 2010. “Un ser universal.” In Köhler et al., Sjalel kibeltik, 280–86 (see Köhler). Dussel, Enrique. 2005. “Europa, modernidad y eurocentrismo.” In La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, perspectivas latinoamericanas, ed. Edgardo Lander, 41–53. Buenos Aires: CLACSO y Unidad Regional de Ciencias Sociales para América Latina y el Caribe. Escobar, Arturo. 2003. “Mundos y conocimientos de otros modo: El programa de investigación modernidad/colonialidad latinoamericano.” Tabula Rasa 1: 51–86, http:// www.unc.edu/~aescobar/text/esp/escobar-tabula-rasa.pdf.
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Estrada Aguilar, Mariano. 2010. “Dignidad indígena.” In Köhler et al., Sjalel kibeltik, 273–79 (see Köhler). Fals Borda, Orlando. 1985. Conocimiento y poder popular: Lecciones con campesinos de Nicaragua, México y Bogotá. Bogotá: Siglo XXI. Gómez-Castro, Santiago, Oscar Guardiola, and Carmen Millán, eds. 1999. Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría y práctica de la crítica poscolonial. Bogotá: Pensar, Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Hale, Charles R. 2008. “Reflexiones sobre la práctica de una investigación descolonizada.” In Anuario 2007, Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica, ed. (coord.) Axel Köhler, 299–315. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas: Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas, Nueva Época. Jiménez Pérez, José Alfredo. 2010. “Sbonel jbijiltik: Dibujando nuestras sabidurías.” In Köhler et al., Sjalel kibeltik, 308–15 (see Köhler). Köhler, Axel, Xochitl Leyva, Xuno López Intzín, Damián Guadalupe Martínez Martínez, Rie Watanabe, Juan Chawuk, José Alfredo Jiménez Pérez, Floriano Enrique Hernández Cruz, Mariano Estrada Aguilar y Pedro Agripino Icó Bautista. 2010. Sjalel kibeltik, Sts’isjel ja kechtiki’, Tejiendo nuestras raíces. México, D.F.: RACCACH, Cesmeca-Unicach, CIESAS, PUMC-UNAM, IWGIA, Orê, Xenix Filmdistribution, PVIFS, RACCACH, CDLI-Xi’nich, Sociedad Civil Las Abejas, Sak Tzevul, OMIECH, Oxlajunti’, and MirArte. Köhler, Axel. 2011. “Acerca de nuestras experiencias de co-teorización.” In Leyva et al., Reflexiones desde nuestras prácticas políticas y de conocimiento situado (see Leyva). Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lassiter, Luke E., Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya Johnson. 2004. The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African American Community. Oxford: Altamira Press. Leyva Solano, Xochitl. 2006. “Zapatista Movement Network: Respond to Globalization.” LASA Forum 37 (1): 37–39, http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/forum/files/vol37/ LASAForum-Vol37-Issue1.pdf. Leyva, Xochitl, and Shannon Speed. 2008. “Hacia la investigación descolonizada: Nuestra experiencia de co-labor.” In Gobernar (en) la diversidad: Experiencias indígenas desde América Latina. Hacia la investigación de co-labor, ed. Xochitl Leyva, Araceli Burguete, and Shannon Speed, 65–107. México D.F.: CIESAS, FLACSO Ecuador and FLACSO Guatemala. Leyva, Xochitl, Araceli Burguete, and Shannon Speed, eds. 2008. Gobernar (en) la diversidad: Experiencias indígenas desde América Latina. Hacia la investigación de co-labor. México D.F.: CIESAS, FLACSO Ecuador, and FLACSO Guatemala. Leyva, Xochitl, Axel Köhler, Xuno López Intzín, Damián Guadalupe Martínez Martínez, Rie Watanabe, Juan Chawuk, Floriano Enrique Hernández Cruz, José Alfredo Jiménez Pérez, Mariano Estrada Aguilar, and Pedro Agripino Icó Bautista. 2010. “Introducción.” In Köhler et al., Sjalel kibeltik, 255–72 (see Köhler). Leyva, Xochitl, et al. 2011. Reflexiones desde nuestras prácticas políticas y de conocimiento situado. Tomo I and II. México: Las Otras Ediciones y Programa de Democracia y Transformación Global–UNSM–Perú. Lugones, María. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” In Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: A Web Dossier, vol. 2, dossier 2, pp. 1–17. Spring, http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/ dossiers/1.3/documents/LugonesWKO2.2.pdf.
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Martínez Martínez, Damián Guadalupe. 2010. “De regreso a hombre verdadero.” In Köhler et al., Sjalel kibeltik, 287–303 (see Köhler). Mignolo, Walter. 2006. “El desprendimiento: Pensamiento crítico y giro descolonial.” In Cuadernillo núm. 1: (Des)Colonialidad del ser y del saber (videos indígenas y los límites coloniales de la izquierda) en Bolivia, ed. Walter Mignolo, Freya Schiwy, and Nelson Maldonado Torres, 11–23. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo and Duke University. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Proyecto Videoastas Indígenas de la Frontera Sur (PVIFS). 2007. Edición especial I, II y III. CIESAS, Cesmeca-Unicach, Xenix Filmdistribution, México, http://sureste.ciesas.edu .mx/Proyectos/PVIFS/pagina_principal.html. Quijano, Aníbal. 1993. “Colonialidad del poder: Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas, comp. Edgardo Lander, 201–46. Buenos Aires: CLACSO and UNESCO. Rappaport, Joanne. 2008. “Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography as Theoretical Innovation,” Collaborative Anthropologies 1: 1–31. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010 [1984]. Oprimidos pero no vencidos: Luchas del campesinado aymara y qhechua. La Paz: La Mirada Salvaje. Rouch, Jean. 2003 [1973]. “The Camera and Man.” In Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. and trans. Steven Feld, 29–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, ed. 2009. Una epistemología del Sur: La reinvención del conocimiento y la emancipación social. México D.F.: CLACSO and Siglo XXI. Vergara, Jorge Iván. 1999. “¿La voz de los sin voz? Análisis crítico de la producción de testimonios en las ciencias sociales.” Estudios Atacameños no. 17, Universidad Católica del Norte, pp. 7–24, http://www.apostadigital.com/revistav3/hemeroteca/vergara1.pdf.
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The IDIEZ Project A Model for Indigenous Language Revitalization in Higher Education
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john sullivan, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
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The Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ) is a Mexican nonprofit corporation founded in 2002 and associated with the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. In cooperation with Macehualli Educational Research, our nonprofit corporation in the United States, we provide scholarships to indigenous college students who are native speakers of Nahuatl, train them to work as teaching and research assistants, and involve them with Western scholars in collaborative projects designed to revitalize and develop their language and culture. This brief essay is divided into two parts. First, I would like to share a few anecdotes that mark in my mind fundamental moments in the development of our work. Second, I discuss a series of principles, in many cases emanating from the anecdotes, that guide our activities; they may be of use to other institutions of higher education that have academic programs for native speakers of indigenous languages.
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Important Moments In 1990 nine young Nahua students from the Mexican Huasteca region were invited by Antorcha Campesina, a Maoist political organization within the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, to attend high school in the city of Zacatecas and participate in the group’s political activities. After graduating, the majority of them left Antorcha Campesina and continued their studies at the Zacatecas State University (UAZ), taking advantage of the institution’s room and board scholarships for low-income students. More important, they began inviting friends and rela-
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tives from back home to study in Zacatecas, creating a social network that to this day informally supports more than fifty indigenous high school and undergraduate students from the states of San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, and Veracruz, as described by Angelina Belmontes Martínez (La migracion de indigenas nahuas de la Huasteca potosina, hidalguense y veracruzana que realizan estudios en la Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas [Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma de Zactecas, 2002]). During the latter part of the 1990s I was working as a professor in the Humanities Division at the UAZ, teaching Hispanic literature courses and a workshop in classical Nahuatl. A colleague in the Economics Department, Rodolfo García Zamora, told me that he had two students who were native speakers of Nahuatl and asked me if I would like to meet them. I will never forget that meeting. Urbano Francisco Martínez, from the village of Chapulhuacanito, municipality of Tamazunchale, in the state of San Luis Potosí, and Delfina de la Cruz de la Cruz, from the village of Tepecxitla, municipality of Chicontepec, in the state of Veracruz, told me: “Nosotros casi no sabemos hablar náhuatl. Nuestros papás y nuestros abuelos sí lo hablan en la casa. Pero nosotros, no. Sólo entendemos un poco.” (We don’t know how to speak much Nahuatl. Our parents and grandparents do speak it at home. But we don’t. We just understand a little.) Here were two indigenous college students denying a fact that I became aware of soon afterward: both were 100 percent fluent in the language and practiced all aspects of the culture. This policy of denial took many forms. I remember visiting the UAZ law school library searching for students to recruit into our program. Ofelia Cruz Morales, who is now a lawyer as well as a permanent teacher and researcher at IDIEZ, would turn her head and scrunch down into her seat, hoping I would not notice her. Every one of the students who has worked at IDIEZ has suffered systematic and continuous physical and/or psychological abuse coercing them to abandon their native language and culture. It does not matter what the Mexican Constitution says; it does not matter that there is a National Institute of Indigenous Languages; and it does not matter that there is a bilingual primary education system. The truth is that one of the goals of Mexican society and its institutions is to erase indigenous languages and cultures from the face of the earth. I began practicing conversational Nahuatl for one hour per day, first with Urbano and then with Delfina, paying them twenty pesos per
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hour from my federal research stipend. We designed and implemented a course, based on Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell’s The Natural Approach (Hayward, Calif.: Alemany Press, 1983), offering it at the UAZ and then developing it into an intensive summer program for foreign students and teachers. I remember two things about these early lessons. The first was a feeling of joy that has only increased over the years. I had studied classical Nahuatl in the mid-1980s with Jim Lockhart and had fallen in love with the way he looked at the language because it combined morphological analysis with the possibility of getting to know sixteenth-century Nahuas as they talked about their daily lives through mundane documents. Now I could befriend living Nahuas, begin to converse with them in their language about any topic, enjoy the sound of their voices, and continue with the morphological analysis. However, I began this activity with prejudices. I believed that classical Nahuatl was indeed “classical,” and for the longest time I found myself trying to correct Urbano and Delfina when their grammar differed from that of the documents I had worked on with Lockhart. I had also learned somewhere that modern Nahuatl had become horribly contaminated by Spanish and was now only a simple and bastardized version of its former self that could express no more than was needed for life on a farm. These prejudices dissipated quickly, so much so that today working with either modern or classical Nahuatl by itself would be out of the question. In 2001 Urbano, Delfina, my wife Angelina and I recognized that two things were needed in order to continue our work with classical and modern Nahuatl: a space free of university politics; and a mechanism for generating independent funding. So we founded our Mexican nonprofit corporation and invited more students to participate in the conversations, including Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, Manuel de la Cruz Cruz, and Eliazar Hernández Hernández. The sessions had begun as a way for me to learn modern Nahuatl. Now we were working together on curriculum materials, a bilingual vocabulary, and a grammar of modern Huastecan Nahuatl. We read and analyzed passages from classical Nahuatl texts, and the students began to do some autobiographical writing. The language of discussion for all these activities was Spanish, but by that time I knew enough spoken Nahuatl to recognize that everything we were discussing and writing in Spanish could be done in Nahuatl.
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Then one day it hit me like a brick. I realized that every minute we spent speaking to one another in Spanish was a minute we were contributing to the extinction of Nahuatl. That day IDIEZ started down a new road. We would constitute a space where Nahua students could practice and develop their language and culture monolingually. Our dictionary and our grammar would be monolingual; we would redo the Florentine Codex using modern sources; and we would plan a degree program in Nahua letters in which Nahuatl would be the language for discussions, readings, and writing papers. The preparation of the monolingual dictionary is a special part of what we do at IDIEZ. On the one hand, along with a monolingual grammar, thesaurus, and encyclopedia, it constitutes a requisite reference work for academic activity in any language. On the other hand, it is an important didactic tool. Our students begin their lives speaking Nahuatl in their homes and villages. But school teaches them that they must discard their language and culture in order to become educated and move up the socioeconomic ladder. Nahuatl is relegated to visits home, while Spanish takes over as the means for developing critical and creative thinking. Students begin their university education and enter IDIEZ without having worked on these skills in their native language. Surprisingly, it does not take them too long to get back on track. A few years ago while we were working on some aspect of grammar at the institute, I asked Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, who now is a lawyer and full-time teacher and researcher at IDIEZ, and who has twice been hired by Tulane to teach Nahuatl, to go up to the blackboard and explain a certain Nahuatl grammar point in Spanish. She had a hard time doing it. The next day I asked her to explain the same point in Nahuatl, and she whipped through it like a pro. One of the reasons why Sabina could do this was because when she arrived at IDIEZ, I put her to work developing definitions and example sentences for the headwords of our monolingual dictionary. Sometimes she would work by herself, and sometimes she would get together with the other students to discuss difficult concepts, all in Nahuatl. Sabina is developing her intellect concurrently in Nahuatl, Spanish, and English, but this opportunity is not available to the vast majority of indigenous students in Mexico. If a country’s capacity to develop and compete depends on the multiplicity of perspectives that its citizens have at their disposal to apprehend and
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transform the world, a de facto educational policy of cultural reduction does not make much sense. One of the goals of IDIEZ is to train indigenous students to become independent teachers and researchers. On the one hand, this means that they can teach courses and participate in research projects that are not connected to the institute, while continuing to have access to all the resources it develops. On the other hand, it means that the students and the institute itself need to grow free of me. Earlier I remarked that Urbano, Delfina, and I started from zero to construct a modern Nahuatl conversation course based on Krashen and Terrell’s The Natural Approach. From the beginning I micromanaged this project and was present during all class sessions where Urbano or Delfina would work with groups of non-native speakers. Often I would interrupt class, correcting teaching strategy or taking advantage of spontaneous situations to make comments on methodology or language structure. A number of years ago Delfina and I were invited by Stephanie Wood to visit a group of her students from the University of Oregon who were participating in a Spanish Institute in Mexico. I was to give a talk, and Delfina would teach a model class in Nahuatl conversation. That day when Delfina began to teach her class I was standing outside the classroom. At some point I decided to step in and intervene with a comment. Without even turning to look at me, she held her hand out in my direction, and the unspoken meaning was clear: “Stay out, I’m teaching.” My first reaction was shock, and my second reaction was, “Oh, you’re right.” A few years ago we instituted a new component in our summer course: individual tutoring. Aside from the normal two hours per day of instruction in modern Nahuatl and two additional hours of classical Nahuatl, each student would work individually with a native speaker for one hour a day. The topics of discussion were up to the student: some would review conversation exercises; some would work on a research project, such as a dissertation or book; some would discuss different aspects of indigenous life. Before this innovation I had participated in all research-related activities conducted at IDIEZ. Or more accurately, I was careful to participate in all research-related discussions at the institute because I did not want to miss out on any new language or cultural information that might come up. I remember walking around the room that summer, trying to sit in, and at times participate, in each
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of the student-tutor pairs. I remember being frustrated because the native speakers were using words I had not heard before, and topics that I knew nothing about were being hashed out between tutors and students who were linguists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers. I quickly came to a few realizations. Obviously there was no way I could be in ten places at one time. But more important, what went on in these sessions was none of my business. This was magic: friendships and professional relationships were being forged between Western and indigenous students, professors and researchers. In time the extent of the magic became clear. More and more, students and professors are returning to IDIEZ, virtually and in person, with funding to continue working on projects with us. Many people have either reoriented their research or studies or decided to go to graduate school after participating in our summer program. When indigenous people look into the mirror of Mexican society and media, they see a distorted and negative image of themselves. And the result is a low level of self-esteem. At IDIEZ indigenous students are put in front of a classroom full of foreigners, many with advanced degrees, who look up to them as teachers with respect and admiration. In the tutoring sessions, students and native speakers work collaboratively: each sharing with the other what his or her culture offers. The result of this, for the self-esteem of the indigenous student, warrants comparison to the butterfly coming out of its cocoon. IDIEZ is located in Zacatecas, a non-indigenous area that is about fourteen hours by ground transportation from the villages of its students. We consider it important to establish links with and channel resources to indigenous villages. However, options for personal and family betterment are limited, and local development will probably not be promoted by the government until villages have been abandoned and land is transferred to corporate agriculture and livestock ventures. For this reason most people who leave their village to study or work have no intention of moving back permanently. We are playing with the idea of building or taking advantage of an existing community center, equipping it with a library and a computer lab, and training villagers to participate in the teaching and research projects we have with foreign institutions. But this is a long-term possibility that will require funding and extended negotiations with local, state, and federal authorities. Happily, empowered students from IDIEZ are not waiting for the big
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project. Last year Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, who has a master’s degree in Indoamerican linguistics from CIESAS in Mexico City and is a full-time teacher and researcher at IDIEZ, got together with his brother Abelardo de la Cruz de la Cruz, a law student at the UAZ, and some other Nahua friends with university degrees, and spent a week in the Huasteca going around to high schools to talk to indigenous students about their educational experiences and encouraging the students to go to college. They are planning follow-up visits.
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The vast majority of Nahua language revitalization projects are carried out in rural villages. But the indigenous students at IDIEZ calculate that 70 percent of young people leave their communities to study and/or work in cities and settle there permanently, returning to their homes only to visit. Many marry mestizos, and few speak to their children in Nahuatl or pass on religious traditions. Within a generation, these immigrants lose their language and culture completely. Currently, Mexican institutions of higher education contribute to this process of cultural extinction for they offer no programs of study in which indigenous languages are the means of communication in the classroom. This is the last step in the process, beginning in elementary school, that teaches young Nahuas that their language and culture are obstacles to personal advancement. We believe that the political autonomy of universities opens up the possibility for a change in this function and actually situates them as the ideal platform for urban language revitalization. For this reason IDIEZ has created a space within the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas where indigenous students can socialize and study in their native language. Our new students have entered the university convinced that they will erase their indigenous identity and become mestizos. But they soon come to understand that they can undertake a career in Spanish and become a Mexican professional while continuing to practice their native language and culture and contributing to its development. IDIEZ is a place where indigenous college students can speak their language without fear of the discrimination they encounter in the larger society. But a safe space is also needed where those who have immigrated to the cities can pass on their language and culture to their
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children in a group setting. For this reason IDIEZ plans to open a Saturday school where parents can engage in academic and extracurricular activities with their children, using Nahuatl as the language of communication.
Our Institutional Platform and the Importance of Academic Freedom
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The accelerating trend of language and cultural extinction in Mexico can only be reversed if small, independent groups of teachers and researchers dedicate their minds to this problem, working within an environment of academic freedom, which is present to some extent at public universities and only completely so in nongovernmental organizations. A few years ago at the beginning of the Fox presidency, Sylvia Schmelkes, head of the Mexican Secretary of Public Education’s Department of Intercultural and Bilingual Education, spoke to a large gathering of researchers, bilingual educators, and administrators. She explained that the Mexican government was aware that it was incapable of planning and implementing effective indigenous language revitalization programs, including bilingual education. She went on to announce that the government wanted to hand over this responsibility to researchers at Mexican public universities and that there would be funding for innovative projects. Unfortunately her proposal ran into the brick wall of established interests within the federal and state departments of education and the Mexican national teachers’ union. Instead, a series of indigenous or multicultural universities were set up across the country. In the majority of cases, the only thing indigenous about these schools is their student population. They offer the same standard careers of medicine, law, accounting, etc., as do other Mexican universities, taught in Spanish and with minimal funding. Content subjects are not offered in indigenous languages, and research is not carried out in this area. We agree with Dr. Schmelkes’s initial proposal, but with a condition. In Mexico, tenure is understood exclusively in terms of labor rights. Rather than put its trust in the capacity of its researchers to identify problems independently and create solutions that will contribute to national development, Mexico believes that the government is better suited to determine research topics. And it has structured the salaries
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of university professors in such a way as to assure conformity to these guidelines. For this reason, while IDIEZ has signed an agreement of academic cooperation with the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, our nonprofit corporation is self-funding and retains absolute autonomy in all things pertaining to our research activities.
A Network of Collaboration
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IDIEZ is the hub of a growing international network of people and institutions working together on indigenous language revitalization projects. Professors and graduate students from foreign universities generally make their first contact with us as students in the Summer Nahuatl Language Institute that we run in collaboration with Yale in Zacatecas, where they work closely with our native Nahuatl-speaking teaching and research assistants. Many professional relationships have developed from these encounters and are producing collaborative research in the form of theses, dissertations, and books as well as invitations to speak and teach both in person and virtually at universities in the United States. The computer center we are planning to set up in the village of Tepecxitla in northern Veracruz will give native speakers of all ages the opportunity to collaborate with IDIEZ and with foreign universities. This triangle of collaboration is absolutely necessary if language revitalization is to succeed. The village concentrates large numbers of people who not only speak Nahuatl in multiple daily contexts but also live within its sacred landscape and practice its traditions; however, they have no access to funding, technology, or education in their own language and culture. IDIEZ has teachers and researchers who are native speakers of Nahuatl and are educated in their language and culture, but it is located far from the Huastecan villages, and it must rely on nongovernmental funding in order to assure academic freedom. Foreign institutions have technology, libraries and databases, project funding, and large numbers of students and professors interested in indigenous languages; however, they lack access to the real linguistic and cultural context of the village and to educated native speakers. We believe that communication via the Internet will generate a multidirectional flow of relationships, information, technology, and funding that is the key to reversing indigenous language extinction and promoting its development and extended use in multiple sectors of Mexican society.
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Extending the Practice of Indigenous Language and Culture
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Most language revitalization projects focus on documenting language. A researcher registers data in the form of video or audio recording, or vocabulary and grammar notes, and then processes this material via theory and methodology into results that are formatted and distributed for consumption by non-indigenous academics. Publications are normally held in libraries and databases with some degree of access restriction. Even when copies are made available to the informant’s village, they are not very useful: the work is written in the language of the researcher; it contains concepts and terminology that are not used in the village; and many Mexican educational institutions still consider books to be precious objects that should be preserved in glass enclosures, far from the destructive hands of readers. Language documentation can be a helpful tool; and as noted, IDIEZ is preparing a monolingual dictionary, a monolingual grammar, and a monolingual encyclopedia as reference works to aid native speakers in their academic activities. But in and of themselves, these tools do no more than preserve language, and language revitalization should not be thought of in terms of preservation. The only way to revitalize indigenous languages is for native speakers to use and develop their language more frequently and in ever more diverse situations. For this reason, IDIEZ provides a space where Nahua college students and professionals can gather and use Nahuatl as a means to socialize, discuss topics of importance to them, and participate in academic activities. This space is one of our most important functions and it must be replicated on campuses throughout the nation.
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Indigenous Researchers Traditionally Western researchers incorporate native speakers of indigenous languages into their work as informants whose role in the research process is limited to the passive transfer of raw linguistic data. Eventually a publication contributes to the researcher’s professional advancement in the form of tenure, ranking, salary, and prestige, while informants, in the best scenario, receive only a small stipend for their work. What concerns us most at IDIEZ is the fact that informants do not
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participate in the identification of research problems, the design of the methodological and theoretical apparatus and its application to the research process and the collected data, or the construction of arguments and proposals. In other words, they never gain the tools, skills, and practice necessary to be able to design and implement research projects of their own independently. This resembles the colonial practice of transferring raw materials from Third World nations to industrialized countries, the policy of societies that prohibit literacy among certain classes of people, or perhaps the recent history of the Catholic Church when it limited the reading and interpretation of the Bible to priests. At IDIEZ we train indigenous college students to work as research assistants. During the school year they participate actively in the preparation of our monolingual reference materials, working on the definitions, example sentences, derivatives, and morphological analysis of headwords for our dictionary, discussing and constructing concepts for our grammar, and writing the articles for our encyclopedia. They also work on curriculum development for our summer and distance courses. But this process actually begins in the Summer Nahuatl Language Institute that we teach in Zacatecas. Foreign students receive four hours per day of classroom instruction in older and modern Nahuatl. They are also paired with native speakers to do an additional hour of individual work on a research topic of their choice. At the beginning of the course I tell the students that the goal of these tutoring sessions is not data extraction but rather collaborative work and information exchange: they must explain to the native speaker how they set up their research project and include the tutor in its development during the summer. I remind them that as U.S. or Canadian students they have learned to organize ideas and develop arguments, skills that are not generally taught in Mexican schools. In other words, if students and tutors work collaboratively, they will contribute to each other’s academic growth. Interestingly, an ever increasing number of our summer students secure funding to continue working with their tutors during the school year on book projects, dissertations, and theses. These research products include an indigenous perspective and constitute what we believe to be the initial stage in a new model for collaboration between Western researchers and the indigenous researchers we are training at IDIEZ.
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Monolingual Texts and Activities
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Most people agree that multilingualism is a positive thing. The problem is that multilingual materials and activities do not contribute to multilingualism. The simultaneous presence of Nahuatl and Spanish in a text makes it difficult for an indigenous student to grow in the native language. Whenever following a line of thought becomes difficult, the reader is pulled away toward the ideological weight of the national language, Spanish. Rather than work through the construction of an argument in Nahuatl, the student intuitively jumps to the translation. Students working that way will never learn to think conceptually, critically, or creatively in Nahuatl; and if these skills are not practiced daily and mastered by native speakers, the language will be permanently relegated to use in the home and the village, and it will soon perish. In short, multilingualism needs to be defined as the ability to work monolingually in various languages.
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Academic disciplines are set up in a way that hinders our recognition of the basic continuity between older and modern indigenous language and culture. Historians and archaeologists concentrate on the past, while anthropologists and linguists tend to focus on the present. Even those who study literature have divides, addressing either codices and colonial writing or present oral tradition. After ten years of working simultaneously with classical and modern Huastecan Nahuatl, I have no doubt that I am working with temporal and geographical variants of a single language, a single system of sacred landscapes, a single system of natural deities—in short, a single culture. Each variant has specificities that must be respected and understood, but studying one to the exclusion of another is like intentionally eliminating pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece complements the others, and no one piece makes much sense unless it is compared and contrasted with the others. Specifically, there are many aspects of classical Nahuatl, as described in the grammars (both those written during the colonial period and those written recently) that can be understood better if the student works simultaneously with a modern dialect. And the structure of modern Na-
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huatl variants can be comprehended more easily if we take into account information from classical texts. This gets quite complicated, not to mention fascinating, because modern Huastecan Nahuatl, for example, actually has many structures that are older than those used in the sixteenth century by native speakers in central Mexico. While there is no scientific reason for separating the study of older and modern Nahuatl, this artificial rupture is an important part of Mexican national ideology. On the one hand, the country professes pride in its roots—the great Aztec, Maya, and Olmec civilizations—and pays lip service to the value of multiculturalism. On the other hand, Mexico is obsessed with entering the First World. From this perspective the indigenous village with its subsistence farming prevents the growth of agribusiness and the livestock industry. Indigenous languages and cultures constitute an obstacle to national consolidation and development. In short, Mexican Indians are pressured daily to move to the cities and Hispanicize. IDIEZ recognizes the continuity of indigenous language and culture. For this reason, all of our teaching and research activities work simultaneously with classical and modern Nahuatl. We believe that Mexican indigenous students should be aware of the existence of their cultural heritage and should have the opportunity to study it.
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The alphabet we use for writing modern Nahuatl is the product of more than four hundred years of evolution. Nahuatl was alphabetized by groups of friars and Indians at the beginning of the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. They used the spelling conventions employed for the Spanish of that period, but since these had not become completely standardized, each group developed its own way of writing Nahuatl. One of the initial tasks was preparing the first group of indigenous scribes, who would record in Nahuatl the municipal documentation of the many communities whose government had been restructured according to the Spanish model. And they produced not only administrative writings (city council minutes, bills of sale, wills, financial records, etc.) but also histories, literary creations (songs and plays), and personal correspondence. To this corpus we may add the tremendous amount of works created through the collaboration between Spanish Sullivan: IDIEZ Project • 151
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clergy and Indians, such as dictionaries, grammars, encyclopedias, and religious writing. All these works, in manuscript form or published, are available for our reading today. Once the first generation of indigenous notaries had begun working, the participation of the Church in the training process lost importance because the scribes in each town took over the process of preparing their successors. From that point on, the spelling system used in indigenous writing became more and more standardized, and the conventions, with few exceptions, are those used by Horacio Carochi in his Gramática de la Lengua Méxicana, published in 1645. Nahua writing and intellectual activity continued after the Mexican War of Independence, through the nineteenth, twentieth, and now into the twenty-first century; however, in 1940 a new set of spelling conventions was introduced into Nahua writing, creating two parallel schools of though and practice that compete with each other to this day. The new system has developed independently of the earlier colonial conventions, grounding itself in linguistic considerations that seek to rationalize spelling: digraphs originating in Spanish orthography are eliminated whenever possible; and glottal stops and vocalic length are represented. In general, the new convention confuses the concept of everyday writing with that of phonetic documentation. The older spelling system continues to be used in a modified form, and it has been codified by Richard Andrews in his Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), Frances Karttunen in her Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), and Joe Campbell and Frances Karttunen in their unpublished Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar. The members of the Asociación de Escritores Indígenas, A.C., and Macuilxochitl, A.C., as well as the teachers and researchers at IDIEZ use forms of this modified older orthography. We write following the ancient tradition of indigenous writing because we feel that spelling is the product of tradition and not of science. We are proud that our work builds on the great works of our fellow researchers, both past and present. Further, the conventions of the linguistic tradition are so different from older writing that they constitute an obstacle to the reading and study of the great corpus of works that constitute the written cultural legacy of the Nahua civilization. One of the fundamental goals of IDIEZ is to stimulate indigenous students
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to participate in academic activities in their own language, through reading of and commentary on texts written by their ancestors. In other words, we seek to revitalize the tradition of older indigenous writing in Mexican higher education.
Conclusion
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In 2002 the founders of IDIEZ formulated the organization’s goals in its articles of incorporation: (1) promote cultural heterogeneity as the stabilizing and integrating basis for Mexican society; (2) construct a model for higher education that allows indigenous students to become integrated into Mexican society as professionals, reinforce their ethnic identity and customs, and continue participating in the development of their community; (3) sensitize and educate the general public regarding the value and content of ethnic cultures through direct contact with indigenous teachers; and (4) generate knowledge about ethnic cultures past and present, making it available to the scientific community, the general public, and the indigenous communities themselves. Today the nine Nahua teachers and researchers who work at IDIEZ, our ever expanding network of collaborators, and I all hope that our work will serve as a catalyst and model for the establishment of other spaces for native speakers of indigenous languages in universities throughout the Americas. Linguistic and cultural heterogeneity empowers individuals, strengthens society, and spurs the development of every aspect of human life. We all need to practice it publicly and speak up for it.
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john sullivan is a professor of Nahua language and culture at the Universidad
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Autónoma de Zacatecas in Mexico and is the director of the nonprofit Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology, where he works with indigenous college students on language revitalization projects. He has a PhD in literature from University of California San Diego and is a Guggenheim Fellow.
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INTERVIEW
From Boy Scout to Hired Gun An Interview with J. Anthony Paredes samuel r. cook, Collaborative Anthropologies,
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In this issue we begin a series of interviews with anthropologists who have distinguished themselves as contributors to development of and dialogue concerning collaborative anthropological endeavors. Acknowledging that collaboration is not a new idea but an everevolving ideal, we thought it would be fitting to launch the series by interviewing an anthropologist whose long track record exemplifies the spirit of collaboration.
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J. Anthony Paredes, like so many American anthropologists, was drawn into the discipline by an interest in American Indians. And like so many of us, he has taken to heart the criticism that anthropologists have sustained from indigenous peoples and scholars worldwide. However, he has distinguished himself through his humility in the field and his professionalism on all fronts. Paredes has worked with the Poarch Band of Creeks in Alabama since the early 1970s, conducting research based on an ethic of service and a willingness to place community concerns before self-interested research agendas. His work with the Creeks is just one of many stellar examples from his long career as an anthropologist in the American South. He served most of his tenure at Florida State University, crowning it with innovative work in cultural resources management for the National Park Service in the Southeast region after attaining emeritus status from FSU. As past president of the Society for Applied Anthropology he stands as a model for anthropologists wishing to forge their careers in the steel of public engagement. In the interview that follows, Samuel R. Cook engages Paredes in a thoughtful dialogue concerning the relationship between anthropology and science, research and reality, and the future of our discipline in a global age.
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cook: To what extent did the applied aspect of anthropology influence your decision to become an anthropologist? paredes: I’ll get to that question but let me give you a little background first. For the longest time, I didn’t know there was anything but applied anthropology, even though I didn’t know it by that name. I came into anthropology by virtue of a very long-standing interest in American Indians. I don’t know how it started, but it endured, and I never gave up. There were side-tracks. But I continued with that interest, which led me to the Boy Scouts, and ultimately meeting people who guided me to the Orlando public library and to things like the Bureau of American Ethnology reports. And thanks to that library, and thanks to the encouraging people in the Boy Scouts, I really got very deeply into the literature on American ethnology, and got to know indirectly about people like Kroeber, and Wissler, and Lowie and people like that. My reading took me into the modern times as well. I think particularly of a book that my mother’s brother—fittingly enough—gave me when I was an early teenager, a book by Oliver La Farge, A Pictorial History of American Indians. It had an excellent section on modern Indians and their problems, and the Code Talkers, and all of that, of course. I didn’t really get it as to what an anthropologist was, I don’t think, other than those people who wrote those Bureau of American Ethnology reports. But in the tenth grade I read in English class a book called Two Hands and a Knife. It was about the son of an ethnologist—an occupation I had never heard of before—who is stranded on an island in Canada after a period of fieldwork with the Ojibwa. And he survives through his knowledge of Ojibwa woodcraft. At that point, I think the idea that one could make a living as an anthropologist entered into my brain, and I believe that’s the only point when I thought of anthropology as anything other than applied. I think I thought of anthropologists as professional Indian experts, who provided information for all those Boy Scouts and hobbyists across the world. At some point after that I said, “This is not very practical.” For one thing, how was I going to pay to go to college? And one of the ways I could do that was to take a (Florida) state scholarship to become a teacher, and pay back the scholarship by becoming a high school teacher. So I decided I would probably become a high school history teacher. Things went along and I got more and more involved in Boy Scouts and got to know very well a couple of Boy Scout executives, and then it
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sort of came to me that I could be a Boy Scout executive. That led me to my college career. I was steered to Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, which had one of only four programs in the country sponsored by the American Humanics Foundation, which was dedicated to preparing young people for professional careers in things like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. So I went to Oglethorpe. I lasted only about two years in the Humanics program because there I was introduced to all kinds of new things—no one in my family had been to college and I knew well only one person who went to college. I was introduced to a new level of anthropology. My freshman year, I took the course “Man and the Universe,” which ran all year long as part of Oglethorpe’s common core curriculum. In this course we started with cosmology, and then worked our way down to atoms, and worked our way back up through molecules and cells and living things, and then worked our way up to the organic, and in effect the “superorganic”—though I didn’t know the term at the time—and learned about insect societies and human cultures. The course culminated with the reading of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. It was a wonderful course. Then, later on, in an art history course that everybody had to take, in my sophomore year, I became acquainted with Greek archaeology and the development of civilization. And, again, back in my freshman year I remember my “Western Civilization” textbook (I still have my copy) began with Lewis Henry Morgan’s savagery, barbarism, and civilization sequence. In my upperclass years, through a philosophy class, I got to know the works of Bronislaw Malinowski. And in a sociology course I had a wonderful professor who was a great devotee of Robert Redfield, and there I had a heavy dose of the folk-urban continuum. Later I took a reading course from that sociology professor, and I remember going to his office for an oral exam my senior year. Remember that this is 1960. The Civil Rights Movement is just getting to be rolling along. And I sit down while he putters around, and then he says, “Tony, as a sociologist, what would you do about the current racial situation in the South?” I was bowled over. I have no idea what I said, but it was a very applied kind of question. And he had himself almost gotten into a lot of trouble for documenting the disadvantages that the African American community near the university had to contend with. I’ll never forget Dr. Reser asking me that question.
Cook: Interview with J. Anthony Paredes • 157
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I had already decided to become an anthropologist. I realized I had learned a lot of things in a lot of courses. But I had also done enough reading in anthropology—including having stumbled upon Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as a Philosopher—that I had a different data-set as a sort of counterpoint to the ethnocentric, intellectualized productions of the West. I understood that anthropology was a corrective to misguided thinking about a lot of things, no matter what and how well reasoned. If you start with premises that are lacking in something—namely, a knowledge of the rest of the world—you’re going to come to conclusions that are not correct. At any rate, I wanted to be a college professor, but through these various classes, I came to understand that anthropology itself—the whole discipline—was kind of an applied project in looking at other societies to understand our own problems, whether they were racism in the South, or problems with the economy, or the international race with the Russians. So in a sense I thought of the whole field of anthropology as a sort of laboratory of humanity, and having read John Collier when I was in high school, that was on top of a full appreciation of how anthropology could be useful for specific things, like addressing the problems of American Indians. I completed all my courses by the middle of my senior year and headed off to the University of New Mexico to begin my graduate career. First, however, I was interviewed by a panel of tweedy scholars from around the Southeast for a very prestigious and competitive national fellowship that was aimed at getting more people to go into college teaching. In 1960 there were not enough college teachers. Answering a question about why I wanted to do anthropology, I said some of the same things I just mentioned, but I also mentioned the importance of anthropology in dealing with the problems of American Indians. And one of these “suits” said to me, “Well, it sounds to me like perhaps you should be going to work for the Indian Service rather than going into academia.” I was stunned by that because I had come along as a working class kid when there was a disdainful attitude toward people who went to college just to get educated, and I couldn’t understand how learning to do a better job of administering Indian affairs put me out of the academic world. cook: As an anthropologist who has worked extensively with American Indian communities, you’re no stranger to the strong cri-
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tique that our discipline often receives from indigenous scholars and activists. How has this critique impacted your work in specific ways, and do you think it has helped to shape the direction of anthropology over the years? paredes: Let me answer by saying I think it is important to keep in mind that through all of that critique (I guess it begins with Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins), there have been a handful of people who are themselves American Indians and who have remained loyal to their discipline as anthropologists. Bea Medicine had no great love for the “Native American studies” bunch. I remember a conversation with Bea in which we talked about the fact that even Vine Deloria, late in his book in a chapter “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” states that in the end, anthropologists are some of our best friends. Bea said, “Unfortunately, most people don’t read that far.” But a lot of younger anthropologists, like Vine Deloria himself, have nothing but praise for that first generation of “Indian lore experts” who documented so much of Native culture. A few who pop into my mind, especially now that the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists section has been founded in the American Anthropological Association, are people like JoAllyn Archambault, George Abrams, Valerie Lambert. I think the critique has not influenced my work with the Poarch [Band of Creeks] directly, other than in an odd sort of way startling Poarch Creeks themselves, sometimes. Back in the early seventies one of my Poarch colleagues was at a conference and there was the usual anthropology-bashing going on, and she finally said, “Well, that’s not the way our anthropologist acts!” (Laughter.) I think the point is often repeated across the country, but not known well. And I think the critique has sometimes strengthened relationships between anthropologists and the people they work with, particularly those who were involved with the people before the critique. One of the good things the critique might have done is to scare off some of the faint-hearted and send them scurrying away into literary studies. At its worst what the critique of anthropology produced was a new genre of American literature, and that’s called Native American Studies. I think it has made all of us, including myself, a little more careful in an intertribal context, in our identity as anthropologists. I remember one time when Vine Deloria was speaking at Florida State University and he did one of his raps on anthropology—he’d been
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brought there by an Oklahoma Creek friend of mine whose husband was on the faculty. And I walked up and greeted him (I think I might have met him once before), and I said, “Hello, I’m Tony Paredes and I’m an anthropologist.” And he gave me one of those shit-eating grins like he and I both knew that this ritual was stuff for the uninitiated. But to the uninitiated outside of American Indian Studies, I don’t think there are many people of academia who are aware that there are still very good relationships between Indians and anthropologists— especially applied anthropologists. And I think a lot of the prissy anthropology that went on in the postmodernist revolution deserved to be knocked about a bit. cook: Let me ask you about your experience with the Poarch Band of Creeks, since that has certainly been one of your richest experiences over the years, especially in the pursuit of federal recognition. paredes: The Poarch Band of Creeks had an advantage in me in that I did work on their community just before the administrative procedures for federal recognition were worked out. They had tried earlier for federal recognition. But one of the advantages they had in me was that I had this body of data on the contemporary community and on oral history that was put together before there was even an administrative process to go through, and that could therefore be regarded as “untainted” research not geared toward any specific thing [political goal]. That gave me the groundwork for providing them with consultation when they tried in 1975 to say that they had been incorrectly terminated in 1924. That didn’t work, but then along came the regulations, and they went for that. They started out with the lawyers, and the lawyers did some pretty damn good ethnohistorical research on their own, and I was a pro bono consultant in the late 1970s. Then they got their petition’s “obvious deficiency letter” from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. My role was through a grant from the Alabama Indian Affairs Commission and later a grant through the Administration for Native Americans that I helped write with Larry Haikey, who was working for the Poarch community [not yet officially designated a “tribe”]. At that point I was working directly with the tribe, doing formal documentation through ethnohistorical sources and drawing from my own research to address the obvious deficiencies with that first petition. The ANA grant was intended—and it was Larry Haikey’s idea—to provide even heavier doses of documenta-
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tion, and also to put together ethnohistorical data that might be used for other purposes. Larry came from the University of Tulsa to study with me at Florida State University. Garrick Bailey and the late John Peterson suggested he study with me. Larry Haikey is a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation. He was well trained in archaeology. I put him to work at Poarch the first summer he was at FSU with a small grant in 1977. My idea was that this would be a great opportunity for someone who was a Creek Indian, albeit not from Poarch (but that was probably an advantage in itself ), to follow in my footsteps, so to speak, and see what things looked like from his perspective. They ended up hiring him at Poarch as a planner, and he ended up marrying a Poarch woman. Larry went on to a distinguished career with the U.S. Forest Service as an archaeologist, and now he’s a BIA archaeologist. Larry Haikey was a contributor to my co-edited book Anthropologists and Indians in the New South (Bonney and Paredes 2001). He was one of the three Indians who contributed commentary. In his commentary Larry makes the important point that anthropologists are very useful to Indian tribes if they are objective and scientific and provide the technical expertise to answer questions that are put to a tribe by any kind of agency. And he makes the important distinction between the anthropologist as “hired hand” and as “hired gun.” In the hired hand category he’s talking about anthropologists as advocates or for doing things for the tribe. But he talks about the anthropologist as hired gun as an expert who is under contract with the tribe to do something of a nature that they don’t have the expertise to do. I’m reminded of an occasion in which I was being introduced to someone by Eddie Tullis, long-time chairman of the Poarch Band of Creeks. He introduced me as the anthropologist who had helped them get federal recognition. The way he put it was something like, “He put our story in words that the government could understand.” cook: That provides a good segue to my next question, because collaboration has become a kind of buzzword in recent years . . . paredes: Really? And I didn’t know I was doing that all these years! cook: Right, and we find ourselves trying to distinguish it as a new idea, when many people would argue that it’s not, which is one of the main points of Field and Fox’s book, Anthropology Put to Work . . . paredes: It’s not a new idea for those of us who know it’s not a
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new idea. At the meeting where I first gave the paper “How to Be an Applied Anthropologist without Really Trying” (Paredes 1976), someone introduced me for the first time to Ned Spicer. He said to me in a low voice, “Those of us of an older generation know just what you’re talking about, but we didn’t write much about it.” Which goes back to even before I was born, I think. People were doing it. Spicer was doing it, certainly, with the Yaquis. And before I forget, I have got to say this: in my career of becoming an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico I had applied role models, even though the department at the time had no great love of “applied anthropology”—which I think was thought of in terms of using anthropology and applying it to a target group and manipulating that group to do what you wanted them to do. At the very time that the department had this sort of bias, Harry Basehart, my major professor, and Florence Hawley Ellis, with whom I worked a little, were both doing all kinds of very important Indian Claims Commission work with the Mescalero Apache, in the case of Basehart, and with Taos, in the case of Ellis. Basehart was collaborating with Tom Sasaki in the sociology department, who was really an anthropologist and who through the Cornell medical project wrote a wonderful book (Sasaki 1960) about an experimental, planned Navajo community. Sasaki picked me out to be one of his assistants in the early days of the University of New Mexico Peace Corps training center. And that just channeled me into a career in applied anthropology. I want to make sure it’s on record that despite being in this department that had suspicions about applied anthropology, I got a lot of good applied anthropology. Even old “Nibs” Hill, W. W. Hill, who was perhaps most suspicious of applied anthropology, was the means by which we had such wonderful Native anthropologists as Ed Ladd, Ed Dozier, and Alfonso Ortiz, because in his work with the Pueblos Hill encouraged these young guys to come and study anthropology at the University of New Mexico. An afterword: I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the precedent-setting “collaborative” work of Sol Tax and Frank Speck, both of whose work touched on my own with the Poarch Creeks. Tax touched it indirectly through organizing the Chicago Indian Conference of 1961, which Poarch leaders attended and were inspired by; and Speck touched it directly, having been the first anthropologist to visit and write about the Poarch Creeks (Speck 1947).
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cook: At the risk of sounding redundant, do you see any element as more important than others in the collaborative process? paredes: The most important thing to keep in mind is complementarity. Collaboration does not mean “equality” in the sense of interchangeability. To sum it up in Larry Haikey’s concept of the hired gun: the anthropologist has to have specific skills in data collection and transforming these ethnographic data into data that can be codified— in many cases they need to be quantified—and at the same time has to be ever mindful of the aims of the group. Whether the aims are simply to have the anthropologist write a nice book about them, or whether the aims are damned specific, like the first time I was hired by the Poarch Creeks. They were very specific: answer the points in the obvious deficiency letter. That was not a license to go running off doing some really neat ethnohistory on the Poarch Creeks that covered a lot of bases. In fact, in my report, each section title was a quote from the obvious deficiency letter, and below that was information on what I had found out to counter the obvious deficiency. So I would say complementarity—the anthropologist should recognize what his or her role is, and carry forward. I think one of the important parts of it is constant feedback on the part of the anthropologist to the group one is working with or for. And I think one can do collaborative anthropology that is primarily serving the ends of the anthropologist, and one can do collaborative anthropology that is primarily serving the ends of the community. cook: In a recent letter to Anthropology News, you expressed great concern about young anthropologists not recognizing the term ethnology. How has anthropology changed over the course of your career, and where do you see it going? paredes: It has changed, I think, in two different directions. First, it has changed in the direction of becoming more quantitative and rigorous in many respects—and that covers the whole field of anthropology from archaeology to linguistics. I think some of that work reflects the need of anthropologists to put things in terms “the government can understand.” For example, sometimes privately I’ve chuckled at Rich Stoffle’s work (University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology) with some of his elaborate models of interviewing and consensus among interviewees and so forth. But he’s on the right track. We need to be pretty rigorous to convince politicians and oth-
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ers of our points. And we’ve seen this in archaeology—and by the way archaeology is a type-case of hired hand anthropologist, but also some archaeologists can be excellent examples of hired guns for tribes when it gets down to NAGPRA and that sort of thing. Second, I think a large portion of cultural anthropology has unfortunately slipped down some kind of Francophile rabbit hole, in which people seem to forget that, as Dell Hymes put it, the purpose of anthropology is to learn something about the world, not to become third-rate philosophers. I’m afraid a lot of anthropologists have become thirdrate philosophers. It’s scary! It’s scary to be a good anthropologist. You have to put your nose to the grindstone, collect a lot of hard data out in the field, and you can’t just analyze text all the time. I’m a great admirer of some of Clifford Geertz’s early work on things like the definition of a Balinese village and its many dimensions in cognitive and behavioral anthropology, and knowing what the modes of social interaction are. But I don’t think it’s the job of anthropologists to interpret cultures. That’s the job of artists and philosophers. I think our job is to create data points by which we can compare the human experience over time and in different places, and answer the questions: What are the universals of human culture? What are some of the similarities, even if not universal? And what are the differences, and how do we explain them? And we have a huge wealth of collected data from past times—especially the colonial era, from ethnology—that we should still be working through, in both the study of cultures individually and the study of culture in general. We pick up where archaeologists leave off and pass it along sometimes to good ethnohistorians. cook: Do you envision the resurgence of a generalist and comparativist anthropology? paredes: Not necessarily just a generalist. I think we’re going to see more and more anthropologists waking up to the fact that, “Oh my God! There’s this thing out there called cross-cultural psychology!” We’re about to lose the affirmation of our profession. That’s what happened with multiculturalism. We better get on the stick! I heard an NPR report the other day about psychologists studying cultural differences in facial expressions. They had been off working with an African group. And I heard someone talking about the new warning labels on cigarette packs, saying that among other things they had looked at what other countries were doing that was more aggressive in labeling the dangers
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of cigarettes. That’s cross-cultural work right there. I remember two years ago, the National Association of Student Anthropologists and the Association of Senior Anthropologists had a joint roundtable that was initiated by the student group. A lot of those students were of the opinion that, yes, theory is great. It’s important to learn theory, interpretive theory, whatever kind of theory . . . but we want more “stuff.” They want more exotica. Exotica is important because it tells us the limits of human possibilities. It doesn’t matter to me, for example, that only 2 percent of human societies in the World Culture Outline are polyandrous. There are polyandrous societies. And we need to find out how that happens, why that happens, how that happened in the past. cook: I think physicists have come to that kind of realization before others in the hard sciences. paredes: But at any rate I think that if anthropology is not comparativist, it’s nothing. So I’ve just got to believe that we’re going to get back to our roots and remember why we’re doing all those ethnographies in the first place—to establish data points for making comparisons, whether they were wrong-headed comparisons like the old evolutionary comparisons, or whether they were some kind of Freudian comparison à la Whiting and Child, or whether they’re comparisons of the role of social networks among urban American Indians, which is something I worked on. Which, by the way, I was surprised to find there were damned few people doing urban Indian studies in the late sixties, at least in their writing and publication, paying attention to what, say, the British anthropologists were doing in African cities. Thank goodness I had Harry Basehart, who was both a North Americanist and an Africanist, to get me into social network theory, and to get me into doing comparisons with what the British were finding out about African urbanization. That brought me, I think, to some fairly new insights on American Indian urbanization. But we’re just crazy if we don’t stop trying to get deeper, and deeper and deeper, and deeper into one single culture, and we should realize that yeah, that’s fine to do that if it enhances our documentation of what that culture is like. For certain purposes, it’s enough just to know that people practice sororal polygyny and not necessarily know how they feel about it. For other purposes it really is important to know how women feel about it, how men feel about it, how children feel about it—say, if you’re in psychological anthropology.
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I think the younger generation is hungry for all that stuff that they see reported in newspapers by evolutionary biologists who have a superficial understanding of anthropology, and by people like crosscultural psychologists. And this is not the fault of cross-cultural psychologists and evolutionary biologists. They both need to be doing collaborative whatever-they-do with anthropologists to have a deeper understanding of just how deep cultural influences can be—(not to sound contrary to my interpretation-of-cultures bashing)—but also to understand the larger cultural context. If, for example, somebody is doing work on menstrual taboos from a cross-cultural psychology standpoint, they need to know culture area stuff about menstrual huts and realize that to some extent the menstrual anxieties or taboos of any specific cultural group are embedded in the ethnological diffusion of particular manifestations of that in such things as menstrual huts, as my professor Philip Bock (1967) demonstrated. cook: What advice would you give to young anthropologists? paredes: One of the things I was very much involved in as a professor at Florida State University was the local chapter of Sigma Xi scientific honorary society. It’s the oldest scientific honorary society in the country. I went to an early program at Florida State when I first arrived. It was on the problem of the job crunch that was coming along, not only for anthropologists but for others in academia, including physicists. And I remember a physicist on the panel who said, “You know there are plenty of jobs for physicists out there if you will just adapt to doing what your boss says to do—if you go to work each day and your boss tells you what problem you’ll be working on, not what you want to be working on.” I think that’s one of the things people who are going into agency work or private firm work need to understand—that your research is not just intellectually driven but compliance driven or product driven, and you work on a project that’s assigned to you. You have to learn to be much more bureaucratic, in a different bureaucratic mold than we have in academia. Academia is one of the clumsiest bureaucracies around. You have to learn to be an employee and follow all kinds of rules and regulations. You have to learn a whole new style of bureaucratic infighting. And you have to learn to do things that when you went to work that morning you had no idea you would be doing. I remember, for example, coming in one morning toward the end of
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the Clinton Administration, when I was working for the National Park Service, and an assignment was handed to me by my boss, the southeast director of cultural resources. (“Cultural resources” was a term I had to get used to. It didn’t make much sense to me. In Park Service jargon it meant primarily historic buildings, archaeological sites, things like that). Somebody in Washington had been going through the Clintons’ unanswered White House email at the end of the administration and trying to answer it all. And one of the questions to Hillary Clinton was about a mass burial of agricultural workers—I think they were mainly Caribbean Afro-Americans—in south Florida killed during a hurricane in 1923 and to be commemorated in some fashion. That got passed to the director of the National Park Service, who passed it to the national director of cultural resources, who passed it down to the regional director of the Southeast, who passed it to the director of the cultural resources division, who passed it to their newly hired anthropologist. “Give me an answer in a couple of days,” he said. So I got on the phone, having known the state historic preservation officer and his staff in Florida, and came up with an answer on how to put together a historical marker under Florida law, and what citizens needed to do to talk to their congressman if they want to get a historic park going, and so forth. You don’t expect to come into your office at a university and have an assignment like that handed to you, although you might be handed some group assignment like, “It’s time to get ready for our annual accreditation.” Be ready to work on what your boss says instead of what you want to do. And the other thing is just following a lot of bureaucratic rules that might take up a lot of time. Realize that it is a very tedious effort to explain what it is that anthropologists do. Sometimes, the best thing is just to do it and not try to explain. And recognize sometimes that your very closest allies are going to be people close to the ground and not people at the top of the organization. But you have to impress them, too. You have to be prepared to be what I call a “grunt anthropologist.” This is the equivalent of a shovel jockey who has a master’s degree and is out there on the archaeological site, shoveling and sifting, and maybe doing a little lab work. We have a lot of good anthropology to do, and it doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of grand theory formulation, but it certainly is done better if people have some theory in their brains and have some comparative anthropology under their hats.
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References
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Bock, Philip K. 1967. “Love Magic, Menstrual Taboos, and the Facts of Geography.” American Anthropologist 69: 213–17. Bonney, Rachel A., and J. Anthony Paredes, eds. 2001. Anthropologists and Indians in the New South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Paredes, J. Anthony. 1976. “New Uses for Old Ethnography: A Brief Social History of a Research Project with the Eastern Creek Indians or How to Be an Applied Anthropologist without Really Trying.” Human Organization 35: 315–20. Sasaki, Tom T. 1960. Fruitland, New Mexico: A Navaho Community in Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Speck, Frank G. 1947. “Notes on the Social and Economic Conditions Among the Creek Indians of Alabama in 1941.” América Indígena 7: 194–98.
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ISSUES IN STUDENT FIELDWORK
Collaborative Service Learning and Anthropology with Gitxaal-a Nation
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charles r. menzies, University of British Columbia caroline f. butler, University of Northern British
Columbia and Gitxaal-a Environmental Monitoring
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Early ethnographic field schools used the “field” of indigenous communities as a laboratory. Today’s schools, like our program at the University of British Columbia (UBC), are more likely to involve collaboration with an indigenous community or organization and to be based upon principles of service learning (S. Beck 2006; Iris 2004; Lamphere 2004). As Huber notes, “The dual emphasis in service learning in anthropology is on ethnography as process rather than a product embodied in a book, journal, or video; and on ethnography in service to the subjects and not just to the students (or to anthropology as a body of knowledge, to which the students’ work contributes)” (quoted in Colligan 2001: 14). Thus students learn and make meaningful contributions to the community with whom field schools collaborate. Service learning is not, of course, unproblematic, but it does provide a real opportunity for students to participate in what Lamphere calls “a sea change in the discipline” of anthropology that “shifts the balance of power toward partnership” with community members (2004: 440, 432). At the core of the collaborative service learning model is a philosophy that “emphasizes the obligations of students to local communities
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through volunteerism, contributions to community life, and collaborative research endeavors that directly benefit the host community” (Iris 2004: 57). Ultimately, a service learning approach has the potential to facilitate the scholarly growth of more engaged and considerate students. Our objective at UBC’s school has been to establish and maintain ties with indigenous communities or organizations wishing to conduct research that records, enhances, and preserves their own cultural systems and social relations. This has entailed a detailed protocol of engagement that lays the ground rules for creating opportunities for respectful community-focused student research (Menzies 2004a). The reflections included in this special section of Collaborative Anthropologies emerge out of the Gitxaal-a-UBC collaborative venture in service learning student research. This introductory section has two goals: first, to outline the history and explain the context of the Gitxaal-a-UBC collaborative venture, and second, to discuss the critical research issues that are illuminated by the field school structure and experience. Specifically, we are interested in (1) exploring the ways in which the field school experience as a mediated fieldwork encounter is both inherently rewarding and disappointing for students, and how that dynamic can result in a very positive training experience, and (2) outlining two specific difficulties of collaborative service learning research projects: the cost for communities and the problematic potential for cultural tourism on the part of students.
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The Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia has run a number of collaborative field schools over the course of its history. The most recent series of graduate student ethnographic field schools began in the early 1990s under the direction of Bruce Granville Miller (Menzies was co-instructor for the last three of these schools). Five of these field schools were in the territory of the Sto:lo Nation, who live along the Fraser River some thirty miles inland from Vancouver. The Sto:lo have more than five thousand members living in twenty-four communities. UBC students were delegated projects by the researchers in the Sto:lo Nation Treaty Office. In 2006 and 2007 the UBC field school was hosted by the Gitxaal-a Nation on the north coast of British Columbia under the direction of Charles Menzies and Caroline
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Butler. Since 2007 an additional half dozen students have had the opportunity to conduct guided independent studies under field school– like conditions working with Menzies in Gitxaal-a territory. Menzies is an indigenous scholar whose family is part of Gitxaal-a Nation. Butler is a resident of Prince Rupert, where she and her partner are raising their family. Both of us have over a decade each of research experience on British Columbia’s north coast. Menzies, born and raised in Prince Rupert, began his research in the mid-1980s. Butler’s first north coast research was as one of three students working with Menzies in 1997, conducting research into First Nations’ involvement in the forest sector (Menzies and Butler 2001). Butler subsequently returned to conduct research for her doctoral dissertation. We both have strong research and family connections in the region and have been fortunate to be able to draw upon these relations as we mentor student researchers entering our home communities of Gitxaal-a and Prince Rupert. The shift from Sto:lo to Gitxaal-a territory constituted a major change of location, structure, and dynamic for the field school. Gitxaal-a society (which anthropologically has been considered part of the wider grouping of Tsimshian peoples) is organized in a number of ways: clan affiliation, social class, housegroup membership, and village residence. For the Gitxaal-a each individual (with the exception, in the past, of slaves) belongs to one of four clans: ganhada (raven), gispuwada (blackfish), lasgeek (eagle), or laxgibu (wolf ). Clan affiliation, reckoned matrilineally, does inform who can marry whom and consequently affects alliances between members of specific house groups. Clans do not, however, exercise any specific political authority. That rests with the sm’ooygit and relevant housegroups. Historically three or four classes can be identified: high-ranking title holders and other title holders; freeborn commoners without rights to hereditary names; and slaves, those born to slaves or captured in war. Members of the title holding classes formed the hereditary leadership of Gitxaal-a. They are the sm’gyigyet (singular, sm’ooygit, meaning “real people”) or chiefs, who held specific rights and responsibility with respect to other community members. The origins of a sm’ooygit’s right to governance can be found in the adawx (histories; see Nees Ma’Outa’s concluding comments) and is often linked to an event in which an ancestor received a gift or privilege from the spirit world, through political conquest, or through an alliance with another community. This
Menzies and Butler: Collaborative Service Learning • 171
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political organization is of critical importance when considering discussions for field school access in this community. To act with respect means that student desires to be actively involved in collaborative discussions must, to a certain extent, be set aside out of respect for community-based protocols of diplomacy that require discussions with university-based leadership figures. Titles, or hereditary names, were and are an important aspect of Gitxaal-a social organization. Hereditary names were and are passed along from one generation to the next through the feast system. Hereditary names are linked to histories, crest images, territory, rights, and responsibilities, among other things. Not every Gitxaal-a person has a hereditary name, nor are all Gitxaal-a people eligible to take on a hereditary name. Hereditary names exist through time with different individuals holding or taking on the name. For example, from the time several millennia ago that Sm’ooygit Ts’ibassa (a high-ranking Gitxaal-a hereditary name) left Temlax’am (an ancient village of origin) through to the Ts’ibassa of the early twentieth century, this name has been inherited and has existed as a social role that has been taken up by a line of successors. Ownership of, access to, and rights of use of resource gathering locations were and largely are governed by multigenerational matrilineages called walp or houses. Notwithstanding the prominence of a paramount sm’ooygit or leader at the village level, the effective source of political power and authority with respect to the territory lies with the house leaders. Membership in a particular housegroup is determined matrinileally, by one’s mother’s position. This social unit is the effective political building block of Gitxaal-a villages. Each house owns and has responsibility for a patchwork quilt of resource gathering and social use areas. Taken in combination, the house territories, situated around natural ecosystem units such as watersheds, form the backbone of the nation’s collective territory. Villages consist of groups of related and allied housegroups who traditionally wintered together in a common site. While there have been some changes following the arrival of Europeans (for example, Lax Kw’alaams consists of members who were formerly nine separate winter villages near Skeena River), the Gitxaal-a village of Lach Klan has been continuously inhabited before and after Europeans first arrived in their territories. Within the village there is a paramount sm’ooygit who
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is the house leader of the most powerful housegroup, in the dominant clan. While this person has traditionally wielded much power and economic wealth within the village, it is important to point out that his authority resided in the power and prestige of his housegroup. The contemporary Gitxaal-a village of Lach Klan, on Dolphin Island about thirty miles to the southwest of Prince Rupert, is home for about 450 residents. There are another 1,300 Gitxaal-a people living off the reserve in Prince Rupert and other urban centers. Lach Klan is accessible only by boat or floatplane from Prince Rupert. Gitxaal-a people have been heavily involved in the development of the resource industries in this region, but the steady decline of fishing and forestry employment have resulted in high rates of unemployment and reliance on social assistance (Menzies and Butler 2001, 2007, 2008). The Gitxaal-a Nation struggles with the social issues facing many First Nations communities in Canada, but they have had greater success in retaining their language and customary harvesting practices than some of the neighboring nations. Traditional governance is through hereditary walp (house) leaders associated with each of the four matrilineal clans. Currently these leaders work with the elected band council to direct community programs, economic development, and ongoing land claims. Setting up field schools and student research opportunities requires diplomatic negotiations in ways that respect Gitxaal-a protocols. The field school projects in 2006 and 2007 were connected to an ongoing collaborative community-based research project called Dmsayt N’Moomdm. This project was a three-year initiative focused on exploring the ways in which families and communities cope with poverty in Lach Klan and Prince Rupert. Drawing inspiration from the Sm’algyaxlanguage phrase Dmsayt n’moomdm (We will all work together), the goal of the research was to find solutions to social problems from within Gitxaal-a customary practices. This project built on a long-term relationship between UBC and Gitxaal-a Nation. Subsequent student research projects have developed out of the Laxyuup Gitxaal-a research project, which combines archaeological and anthropological research with Gitxaal-a research objectives and Gitxaal-a Environmental Monitoring, a Gitxaal-a research agency acting on behalf of the Nation. The collaborative research protocol that we developed with Gitxaal-a extends beyond the ethical guidelines set out by UBC and major funding institutions. The community guides, controls, and owns the re-
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search products, with original recordings and transcripts remaining in the community. There are individual and community review processes for both transcripts and research products, and there is a focus on developing products that are of use and relevance to the Nation, such as reports, posters, films, and in particular, school curriculum materials (Ignas 2004; Lewis 2004; Menzies 2004a; Orlowski and Menzies 2004; Thompson 2004). Menzies developed the general guidelines for research projects for the field school and subsequent guided independent research projects in direct consultation with the elected leadership of Gitxaal-a Nation (Menzies 2004a). As described in Menzies’s paper “Putting Words into Action,” a series of meetings was held over several years to set up the process whereby research projects that involve students could be established. Once established, the approval process mandated that research would fit within the general social, economic, and political needs of Gitxaal-a Nation as articulated by the local Government Council and Hereditary Leadership of Gitxaal-a Nation. UBC personnel working with appropriate Gitxaal-a Nation staff would then develop general parameters for individual research projects. Finally, student researchers would make arrangements for the individual consent of those identified as potential research participants. This rather hierarchical structure reflects the customary organization and cultural protocols of Gitxaal-a —even as it clashes with notions of liberal individualism more prevalent in a university research environment. The 2006 field school involved six students working in both Prince Rupert and Gitxaal-a. Erin Seldat researched the local environmental movement with a focus on Gitxaal-a salmon farming. Rachel Donkersloot looked at the social impacts of fisheries privatization. Oralia Gómez-Ramírez investigated social service provision to First Nations living off-reserve. Jessica Rogers interviewed government and First Nations representatives about new forestry agreements. Kim Dertien worked with women in Gitxaal-a on issues of material poverty. Robin O’Day produced a booklet for the community including brief life stories of four Gitxaal-a elders. In 2007 five students worked in Gitxaal-a. Rodrigo Ferrari Nunes documented the impacts of development on hunting practices. Marina La Salle looked at consultation processes regarding proposed developments in Gitxaal-a territory. Lainie Schultz documented stories about
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and recipes for traditional foods. Solen Roth looked at youth sports programming. Natalie Baloy explored the history of gardening in the community and a contemporary gardening program. Jennifer Wolowic worked in Prince Rupert doing a photography project with a local aboriginal youth program. We also have had five other students, Robin Anderson (whose reflection on fieldwork is part of this compilation), and Jana Kotaska, Jon Irons, Morgan Moffitt, and Naomi Smethurst, whose theses and dissertation research in Gitxaal-a were part of other collaborative projects with the community. These students’ experiences, while different from the field school, provide parallel examples of individual service learning projects conducted under similar protocols and collaborative structures. Jessica and Jennifer’s field school projects also laid the basis for their subsequent graduate thesis projects (and for Jennifer, a documentary film called For Our Street Family, distributed by DER). In addition to the field school students, several community members have participated as researchers alongside us and our students over the past decade. Ever since hearing Vancouver social activist Jim Green address an undergraduate class in the early 1980s, Menzies has been an advocate of combining university and community researchers in a combined act of research. Community-based researchers have played a range of roles and have had varying degrees of involvement. Two of the researchers, Sam Lewis and Ernie Bolton, have worked with us from the start through a range of projects and have played a large role in shaping our understanding of community protocols and customary practice. Others have played central roles analogous to those of the student researchers: Raven McMahon was involved in a project prior to the two field schools, and Clayton Hill and Julia McKay worked with students during the field schools. Ernie Bolton, in particular, has played a critical role as co-researcher, translator, and mentor to Menzies and Butler during our research with and on behalf of Gitxaal-a Nation.
A Mediated Experience A field school is a controlled research experience. Between the community and the student sits an instructor, or perhaps two, and a preexisting collaborative relationship. This type of mediation has significant impacts on the research experience. For an instructor, the most Menzies and Butler: Collaborative Service Learning • 175
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difficult part of a field school is finding the balance between providing a safe and supportive learning environment and allowing students to experience the true difficulties and complexities of ethnographic research. We form a buffer, which is necessary to provide training, but which simultaneously limits and shapes the students’ perceptions of the field experience. One of the field school participants comments that as a student, she had to trust her instructors’ description of the field school as being collaborative since she “was not privy to the decisions-making process between [her] supervisors and the Nation that created the project” (La Salle 2010: 407). This is a common problem for students who desire the real thing in all of its constituent aspects yet who are passing through on their way to their own projects and unlikely to make the leap to long-term research in the field school site (see Roth’s and Baloy’s reflections, following, for a nuanced and mature consideration of this issue). But there is a practical matter that limits students from being privy to all aspects of the years of negotiations and discussions between project and community leaders—it takes years to set up these programs, and students do not have years to contribute. In the context of Gitxaal-a the negotiated process also sets up a fairly hierarchical structure that does not incorporate students until the projects are themselves in place. Thus while the project is collaborative in design and history, the student may mistakenly conceive of it as something less than full collaboration, since students are not directly involved in all the various levels of discussions and negotiations required to set the field school in place. One of the most positive aspects of this kind of mediated structure is that it is safe: that is, the risk that a student will fail in a major research project is constrained by the work of instructors and community liaisons. The project is defined to such an extent that the student research becomes somewhat analogous to “invited technicians for the vehicle [of community driven research]” (La Salle 2010: 416). As an introductory fieldwork experience this has several benefits. Students have peers and instructors to use as sounding boards as well as for support—to seek advice on methodology and ethics and to debrief about the more emotional and trying aspects of fieldwork. The students are provided with an opportunity to conduct research and to fail without jeopardizing their theses (though some of our students go on to produce a thesis
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or dissertation inspired by this initial experience). For many this is the fieldwork dress rehearsal, even as the field school research is simultaneously real research with real value and meaning for Gitxaal-a. Nonetheless, students can miss the point, they can miss the key person, and they can ask the wrong questions. For them the goal is to learn from these mistakes. Students are graded on their research efforts, and on their critical reflections on the process and progress of their work, not solely upon the content or final product of their work. They also get the opportunity to see how half a dozen projects of a similar scale proceed—to analyze the differences in how they work, to watch the triumphs and mishaps of their peers—so that they actually get six times the experience. On the downside, the research experience is safe. The student projects have been developed for them with the approval of community leadership; this does not always guarantee success, but it removes a large part of the complexity of research. The students are walking through a door that has been opened for them by a decade of relationship building. They do not get to experience fully the difficulties of building trust and forging positive collaborative relationships. The community was familiar with UBC researchers, and many community members were very familiar with the interview process. The interviews were facilitated by the team structure, with community researchers identifying appropriate participants, setting up the appointments, and facilitating the interviews. The field school is short, and in that sense the experience is simplified. Four weeks is really too short a time to get to know any community. We have been working with the community for several years and still feel that we are only beginning to learn. Four weeks is too short a time to experience the peaks and valleys of sobriety and dysfunction that characterize this place. The students did not witness any of the violence and tragedy that strikes regularly in this indigenous community and others. Four weeks is too short a time to comprehend the complexities of internal dynamics and politics. Some students heard critiques of the community leadership but were unable to contextualize these issues in terms of either customary structures or contemporary social realities. The field school dynamic illuminates questions about the complexity of collaboration. Some of the students felt somewhat thwarted by the mediated nature of student project development. We attempted to
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match student interests and skills with project topics that have arisen out of our discussions with hereditary and elected leaders. However, this troubled some students, who would have preferred a more direct process of negotiation and collaboration with the community. Is it collaborative research if the research practitioner was not personally involved in the development of the project with the community? Is there collaboration by proxy? These are important questions in this type of research context. The time constraints of the field school and the complexities of local governance make it unreasonable and inappropriate to expect students to be able to be “given” projects directly from elders or band council members, or from the “grassroots” community as a whole. Yet this mediated collaboration made it more difficult for some students to “buy into” their projects. Interestingly, the community had more confidence in the value and benefits of the research than some of the students have had. Some of the students struggled with having little analysis in their oral presentations at the end of the field school—as their reports were still in the early stages of development. We encouraged them to “echo back” what people had told them. For some, this did not feel like “grownup” anthropology. But when a Gitxaal-a woman wept after the presentations and told the students that the presentations had reminded her of her grandparents and what they had taught her, the value of our students’ work became a little clearer. One thing that has struck us during our work with First Nations on the northwest coast over the course of more than a decade is how encouraging many leaders and community members are of what we anthropologists distastefully consider “salvage ethnography.” The mechanisms for intergenerational transmission of knowledge and language are not gone in Gitxaal-a and neighbouring communities, but many members consider them compromised, especially for off-reserve children. They are most interested in cultural documentation and mechanisms for cultural learning for youth and children. Even seemingly simple projects like documenting recipes for traditional foods are sincerely valued by community members and really are part of larger community efforts toward decolonization and cultural revitalization. The feedback from community members transformed our students’ preexisting ideas about the nature of valuable anthropological work. One of the student projects raised the important issue of internal
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power hierarchies within the community and the perceived alienation of many community members from the process of research collaboration and project development and approval. Other students encountered critiques of the local leaders from the community members they interviewed for their projects. These articulations are important to hear and important to listen to. However, the short-term nature of the field school projects means that students cannot adequately contextualize these critiques. An early draft of one community presentation included a rather strong critique of the equity of band council hiring practices. This critique was based on interviews with two community members who had significant problems with substance abuse. To the student our editing of the report felt like a reinforcement of local power hierarchies. For us the issue was one of accuracy and understanding both the particular context of those internal critiques and the more general complexities of local governance. Field school students have to grapple with the tension between limited time and exposure to the community and seeking to understand social relations and facilitating community discussion about their research issues. Several of the students struggled with the issue of not returning (Roth’s reflection in particular picks up this theme). With well-developed ethics regarding the importance of maintaining relationships with research communities, the reality of the one-off nature of the field school research project for most students was difficult. Community members asked when they would return. They ask us when we are coming back with students. Ironically, we were nervous about the 2007 field school—having five students in the village for four weeks sounded like an overwhelming number of researchers. We had found through a decade of steady research in the community that we were repeatedly directed to the same community members and relied very heavily on a handful of elders. We feared that should all the student projects take the same trajectory, some very elderly and knowledgeable people would be exhausted. Furthermore, collaborative research relationships are delicate and dynamic, and the field school posed a potential threat to the partnership, should anything go awry, despite the best intentions of the students and the careful mentorship of the community researchers. And here we are four years later with no field school, anticipating community disappointment that it will be just the two of us and perhaps one or two students. Rather than threatening the research relationship,
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the field schools have strengthened and extended the collaboration between Gitxaal-a and UBC. And this reflects the students’ sincere commitment to the community. So there is something inherently disappointing about field school research for students. It is controlled, it is mediated, it is short term, and it is a one-time deal—it is a dress rehearsal. But it is also an inherently satisfying and a critical learning experience. More important, collaborative service learning provides relevant research products to communities—it provides them with keen and dedicated researchers focused on applied projects for the community. While both field school instructors and students commonly extol the virtues of field-based learning over classroom-based methods courses, something is working in those classrooms. The student concerns identified in the preceding description suggest that students are coming to the field school with well-developed ethics and ideas about collaborative research. Their concerns about collaboration, about internal power hierarchies, and about not returning suggest that they enter the field as committed agents of positive change and respectful community-focused research. While we could not provide them with the opportunity to negotiate projects or truly get to know the community, their community-based research provided them with the important experiences of sweating about their collaboration and contribution and of dealing with the complexities of community politics. While the experience for students is mediated, controlled, and limited, it does provide them with their first serious experience putting methods into practice. More important, it provides them with the opportunity to bring something positive to a community and to experience the satisfaction of that type of anthropological contribution. The ultimate goals of collaborative field schools, then, can be to train anthropologists dedicated to applied, relevant, and community-based research; to support the ethics and commitments with which students come to the field; and to build upon these forces.
Difficulties with Collaborative Service Learning Collaborative service learning provides the opportunity to train students in an effective, if mediated, learning environment. As instructors and researchers we also recognize two very specific difficulties with our pre180 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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ferred model of collaborative service learning: the social cost of collaboration for communities, and the possibility of cultural tourism and the consequent responsibility to confront naïve and implied racism within the field school experience. By naïve racism we are referring to that insidious form of racism marked by an unaffected simplicity; a sense of surprise that the actor could in fact be racist, which often leads to indignation at the suggestion that one’s actions or attitudes are in fact racist. Naïve racism typically avoids the more pernicious, violent, or aggressive forms of racist behavior. As such, it is at times more difficult to root out. The first point—the social cost of collaboration—is fairly straightforward, and several of the student reflections discuss this question in some manner. The second point—the problem of cultural tourism—is more problematic and entangles person, emotion, professionalism, and power (reflections by Roth, Baloy, and Gómez-Ramírez directly address this issue in a thoughtful and considered approach). The cost of collaborative research is often overlooked or deflected by researchers. We do not like to consider that our good work and intentions may actually place a burden upon a community. Jana Kotaska, a graduate researcher with a professional history of working for First Nations communities in addition to her own graduate research, argues that investigator-led research has been vilified to such an extent that we are losing definitional clarity of what collaborative research actually is. In the process the virtues of collaboration are overstated. Sometimes researchers may suggest that the benefits of their research offset any costs. They may suggest that the actual cost is in fact minimal. Or they may deny that there are any costs involved for the community of study. Yet we would be less than honest if we refuse to acknowledge that our research—whether collaborative or not—entails some costs to the community of study. Respectful research requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment that want we want to do may well have implications and costs for those we study. There are at least two types of costs that collaborative research entails: individual and personal costs, and collective or social costs to the community. When Menzies first came to Gitxaal-a as a professional researcher, his cousin Marvin (Teddy) Gamble stood up for him and introduced him as the nephew of Sm’ooygit He:l. At the time Menzies understood that there was an implication to this introduction—it was a public statement of belonging and relatedness. It was also a claim upon one’s
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person. More important, it was Marvin Gamble standing up and speaking on Menzies’s (and by extension UBC’s) behalf. He was taking on a social and public responsibility for the work that Menzies and those associated with him would be engaged in. Gamble’s actions are consistent with Gitxaal-a protocols, in which individual actions are understood within the context of social relations of family, expectation, obligation, and responsibility. So even as his action was individual, it also placed both the researcher and the research project into a wider social net of responsibilities and obligations. Collaborative research is often described as benefiting communities through sharing power and control thereby offsetting the potential burden on the community of study (Iris 2004; Lamphere 2004; La Salle 2010). In this context it is becoming more common to hear researchers point out that they have been invited into a community to do their research rather than having solicited the opportunity for research. This badge of invitation becomes a discursive marker of virtuous research and is at times opposed dismissively to researcher-led research (La Salle 2010; Nicholas 2008). However, the declaration that a researcher is “invited” by a community is rarely as straightforward and obvious as it may sound. The notion of being invited merits further consideration. At the core, this is a process of interaction, building upon long-standing relations that, if positive and successful, lead to research connecting the desires of the researcher with the needs and expectations of the community. As we have noted, no community is ever fully unified or totally homogeneous; there are factions and conflicts big and small. Navigating these waters involves a precarious negotiation through which research projects transform to more clearly align with some aspect of the local community. Thus invitations emerge, but as a result of a long process of negotiation and/or a long history and experience of research on the part of the community. Being invited, we would suggest, is more a measure of a community’s organization and history than an award of honor bestowed upon a researcher. The notion of an invitation, of having been asked to do something for a community, reflects the cost or the burden of research placed upon a community. It is thus more an exchange; that is, researchers are “invited” to do work that the community wants done, and in exchange the researchers are allowed to do some aspect of the research that they may have wanted to do in the first place. Thus the cost to the community is, to an extent, offset. Collaborative research, despite its progressive intention, entails a
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significant social, cultural, and labor cost for the community. Collaboration requires time and energy from a community (or at least from significant members of that community). Irrespective of whether a community is able to commit to collaboration, it takes time away from their own projects. For example, our recent film Bax Laansk: Pulling Together began life as a collaborative project within the Dmsayt N’Moomdm project. It was conceived as a participatory, collaborative venture that would highlight the wealth within and from which Gitxaal-a people find their sense of identity. It was to involve youth and elders and would be used in the local school and shown to the general public. It was, in short, a grand project inspired by the best theories and university practices of progressive collaborative documentary film production. Early on in our planning Merle Bolton, a relative of Charles Menzies (and also the community development officer), pulled us up short by telling us what to do:
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The result was our film written and directed by Charles Menzies and Jennifer Rashleigh. The film comes from our directorial voice; it is our story about Gitxaal-a. But we also produced a series of documentary vignettes of Gitxaal-a people harvesting and preparing foods and materials in the customary manner. Merle’s point was that the full range of activities that collaboration called for placed far too serious a burden upon the community. She was interested in having the film and the series of short films about Gitxaal-a practices. However, she found the theoretical arguments for and the practical realities of a collaborative project unconvincing and ultimately burdensome. If doing the film was important, then according to Merle, we needed to find a way to do it that would reduce the social cost of the filmmaking process to the community while at the same time providing something of direct benefit. Our resolution was to create short descriptive documentaries for use in the local school system as part of our larger film project. Mitigating the cost of collaborative research can be managed in a variety of ways. We can exchange our services or restructure our research (even to the point of transforming our research program). However, addressing the issue of cultural tourism and naïve racism is a more difficult and pressing matter. Menzies and Butler: Collaborative Service Learning • 183
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How do we counter cultural tourism? Universities and other research agencies are locked in positions of privilege and power. People who can afford to attend and participate in these institutions are largely the beneficiaries of this privilege. We would argue that conducting research with First Nations communities in the contemporary context obligates researchers to give up their position of power and privilege by becoming critically aware (without handicapping themselves with liberal guilt) of their social location. Much has been written on the issues of power and privilege and their implications for confronting issues of racism and intolerance. We have on occasion assigned two papers to our students that deal with these issues, Megan Boler’s “The Risks of Empathy” (1997) and Carol Schick’s “‘By Virtue of Being White’” (2000). Our choice is guided by the particular ways in which these papers deal with well-intentioned people and the pitfalls of naïve racism. Schick’s paper examines how well-intentioned pre-service teachers enact dominant racialized models in spite of themselves. Boler uses her experience as an instructor of a large introductory multicultural studies course to highlight how a passive empathy with victimized peoples is not sufficient to address naïve racism. Both papers provide a basis to engage with students about their own preconceived notions, subjective outlooks, and positions of privilege and power. This is of particular importance when students, irrespective of their own racial, ethnic, or class backgrounds, are brought into a research context in which the wounds and reality of colonialism are more than an abstract theory or some text to analyze. Midway through the last field school that we taught, Charles noted that of the students with us in the field, only one was from British Columbia, and the majority were from large urban centers. For our students this was truly a novel experience in a place far from what was familiar to them. Nonetheless the students were fitting in well; they were considerate, they were empathetic, and they were working hard to subscribe to the tenets of respectful research. Community members were eager to show the students around. They provided opportunities for the students to attend community dinners, to go on outings to garden islands, or to pull bark. The students were invited to participate in local activities like youth camps and community dance practices. Yet as instructors, we had a sense of unease with the process. What was wrong when everything was going so well?
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Part of the problem has its basis in our discipline’s long-standing aversion to being just another group of tourists. Levi-Strauss disdainfully critiques the travel writer—that critical source of touristic inspiration—as the superficial purveyor of the dross of travel: “covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in colour, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession” (1978 [1955]: 17–18). As anthropologists we want to make certain that what we do is different. We do not, for example, go to a drum-making workshop to get a drum. In fact, we might avoid the main workshop and hang out in the back room to demonstrate that we are not like the other tourists. We are interested in understanding the “real” experience of making the drum, its meaning for the drum maker, and how it is used in an “authentic” context. The reality of it all is that no matter how we might position ourselves, the drum maker probably thinks we are tourists just the same. Field schools try to locate themselves outside tourism even when part of the cachet of the field experience is that it provides an opportunity for students to travel to a place that they might not otherwise visit. They stay for short periods of time, do something, observe things, participate, and bring back images and memories to share with others back home. Students thus accumulate “authentic” memories to showcase to their peers back home (note Roth’s similar concerns with the perils of collecting). Just as our fictional drum maker does not differentiate the anthropologist from other tourists, community members often see field school students in a similar light—visitors who come for a time and then leave. We try to use service learning as a mechanism to counter the tendency toward cultural tourism. And, of course, we see our field school and students’ work as being something other than tourism. For the most part our students also note this. They struggle to make their stay meaningful, not simply for themselves but for their hosts. Our students’ own self-conscious awareness of their touristlike presence—as opposed to a defensive denial of it—makes their work with Gitxaal-a more effective, more nuanced, and ultimately more useful that it might have been had they maintained the pretence of not being in some way a tourist. Linked to the potential problem of cultural tourism is the naïve racism that comes as part and parcel of our students’ privileged location within a research university. Irrespective of their racial or ethnic iden-
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tity our students arrive at the field school site as people who carry the privilege of whiteness (Jensen’s 2005 reflection on white privilege presents a compelling account of the implications of racism and an invocation to act). This is a position of power that draws strength from the history of state colonization of indigenous peoples, of the forced enslavement of Africans, of the myriad of oppressive acts that many earnest, well-meaning people sidestep by denying their own implication and complicity. In a field school setting white privilege can take many forms: from a student arguing that “I should expect the same rights as the people I study,” or a sense of entitlement to a particular type of experience within their research, to a demand to participate fully in all the decision-making processes. Much is made in our society of individualized rights. While this is not the place to enter into a full debate, it is useful to ask at what point researchers should subsume aspects of their own individual rights to ensure that the rights of those they study are respected? It is our perspective that by virtue of choosing to conduct research within a contemporary aboriginal community, the researcher necessarily gives up certain expectations of liberty, certain aspects of the right to consent. In the current context researchers must consider their location within the field of knowledge production and the implications that it might have for continuing inequitable social relations or ending them (Menzies 2001, 2004). This does not mean that one gives up privacy or safety; nor does it mean that a researcher abdicates the responsibility to conduct honest and accurate research. It does, however, mean that researchers gives up certain expectations about being able to do whatever they want in “pursuit of knowledge.” The majority of our students have understood the value of this perspective. They have been able to set aside their sense of middle-class entitlement and their embedded and unstated privileges of whiteness. It is not an easy task for them. That our students allowed themselves to interrogate their own privilege is a testament to their commitment to respectful research.
Introducing the Student Reflections For several of our students it was the community response to their projects that was the most enlightening aspect of the course—the confirma186 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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tion of the value of their efforts often in opposition to their own disappointment with the brevity of their work or the seemingly simple nature of their project. During our first few days of the 2007 field school Chief Councilor Clifford White shocked the students by telling them they were role models for Gitxaal-a youth, essentially upping the stakes from anything either of us had established. At the end of the field school a community member who had spent a lot of time with the students told them that he did not know what he would do without them. The student reflections gathered here cover the range of critical issues that have emerged for our students. From the angst of separation and belonging (Roth) to coming to terms with the nature of the field experience (Baloy and Anderson) and the issues of discrimination and marginalization (Wolowic and Gómez-Ramírez), our students reflect upon their experience and come to the conclusion that it has been a transformative moment for them. We asked students to focus on their experience—to prioritize the experience of being new researchers. The field projects they prepared for the community talk about the research results, and in those reports one can hear the voices of the community front and center. Our students’ reflections gathered here are about their researcher experience. The products of their research are available in the community and in other appropriate venues. Our field school experience confronts and disrupts our students’ expectations. The field school, if it is working, should leave a student feeling disoriented, unsure, but also in some small way transformed. In each of the reflections we can hear these themes rolling through earnest words and thoughts. We are pleased at the work our students have produced. In the face of difficulty, dislocation, and encouragement they have produced work that makes us feel good in our hearts.
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Reflection 1: In and Then Out of Gitxaal-a, Becoming One of Its “Butterflies” solen roth The suspicion of the intellectual who both objectifies and speaks for others inveighs us to develop a kind of self-reflexivity that will enable us to look closely at our own practice in terms of how we contribute to dominance in spite of our liberatory intentions.
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Among the Tsimshian peoples of northern coastal British Columbia, the butterfly has come to be the symbol of outsiders, those who do not belong in the four original clans of the raven, wolf, blackfish, and eagle. The butterfly crest captures the tendency of outsiders to be temporary rather than permanent residents of First Nations communities, despite the fact we often occupy professions that make us more than simple passers-by: teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers and, of course, researchers. As a student participant of the Gitxaal-a-UBC field school, I experienced discomforts in relation to my bearing this particular social location. This unease emerged not from the attribution of this status to my person by Gitxaal-a community members—it was well deserved, as I was no doubt yet another butterfly among the ravens, wolves, blackfish, and eagles. Rather, the source of my discomfort was the discrepancy between my expectations on the one hand, and my experience on the other; between what I thought would be expected of me and the things I was in fact prompted to do; between what being an outsider in Gitxaal-a meant to me and what having outsiders in their community meant to people living in Gitxaal-a. It has long been recognized that anthropological fieldwork is not the encounter of a subject with an object but the encounter of subjects within a particular context and within frames of reference provided by these subjects’ respective experiences and knowledge (see Scholte 1972). Yet even when the intersubjective dimension of those encounters is acknowledged, ethnographic texts hardly ever account for it fully, if only because the interpretation provided often remains the work of a single author, usually that of the researcher—the present reflection being no exception. While self-reflexivity does not make up
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for this lacuna, it does provide a tool with which to examine the production of interpretations that arise from intersubjective fieldwork experiences. According to Laing, the ambiguities in communication that arise from intersubjectivity, which only increase when different social and cultural contexts are in play, mean that it is less frequent to understand each other and know that we do than to misunderstand each other without knowing that we did (Laing 1983). This would be in great part due to the fact that in social interaction, we tend to worry about what other people expect from us or, to be more exact, about what we think they expect from us. If this holds true for interpretations that arise from fieldwork experiences, it also does for the conclusions we base on those interpretations in terms of what constitutes ethical behavior in the field. Rules can be created with the intention of being in accordance with agreed upon ethical principles and yet produce behavior that reveals itself as inappropriate in the situations in which they are meant to be applied. It is no easy task to translate non-negotiable ethical values into guidelines that recognize the negotiated nature of social interactions. This challenge is at the root of some of the problems anthropologists and the communities they work with encounter when asked to consider ethics as rules that should necessarily be enacted through specific sets of protocols. By thinking critically and reflexively about the preconceptions with which I entered the field and how these principles shaped my behavior in Gitxaal-a, I hope to use self-reflexivity as a means to further our understanding of ethics as situational rather than fixed ideological stances. I examine my reactions to particular situations in light of what I have learned from and since the field school. First, I examine some of the experiences and reasoning on which were based my assumptions upon arriving in Gitxaal-a about what “appropriate” behavior should be for an outsider doing research in a First Nation community. These preliminary considerations are followed by discussion of two examples illustrating how my efforts to look out for the interests of my hosts and to act in principled ways as an outsider to and guest of Gitxaal-a Nation were often guided by preconceptions of our relative social locations as well as preestablished behavioral guidelines. Both revealed themselves as inadequate in regard to the intersubjective and situational dimension of anthropological research. Finally, I consider what this specific
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personal experience has taught me more generally about research and issues of ethics. Though this reflection on my experience in Gitxaal-a is primarily self-reflexive, it is not disconnected from broader theoretical and ethical stances I had taken in previous research projects. The latter were themselves informed by two debates that have animated our discipline, particularly in the past three decades. The first debate concerns the notion of cultural appropriation, the second, the politics of self-representation (see, for example, Young 2009; Battiste 2000). Both these debates are at once theoretical and ethical, discussing the concepts of ownership and representation not only as descriptions of how things are but also in terms of legitimacy related to how things ought to be. In these debates the general trend in anthropology has increasingly been to consider minority and indigenous groups’ properties and voices as at risk of being stolen or usurped. This in turn called for protectionist and reparative measures, such as the negotiation of intellectual property rights and the repatriation of human remains and cultural belongings (Bell and Paterson 2009). This movement was accompanied by many challenges made to the legitimacy of researchers to speak on behalf of cultures other than their own. Indigenous scholars, politicians, artists, and activists made it clear that their identities were no longer to be described and defined solely from the point of view of outsiders, and self-representation became not only an option but a right that should and would be defended and promoted. The status of indigenous peoples’ objects and knowledge as resources fallen under the public domain of intellectual property and museum collections, and/or as alienable commodities fallen under the regime of private property and capitalist exchange, were disputed on theoretical, ethical, and legal grounds (Anderson 2009; Messenger 1999). Early in my graduate studies I examined the ethics of contemporary collecting practices through a comparison of art amateurs’ collecting ethics to those of anthropologists (Roth 2006). In the first phase of my fieldwork I studied the Parisian milieu of African art collecting; in a second phase I conducted interviews with anthropologists about the objects they brought back from the field, the mode of acquisition of these objects, and the ethical implications of taking part in material exchanges with their hosts. Regardless of the quantity of items they had brought back from the field—which in at least two cases amount-
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ed to over a hundred items—the anthropologists I spoke to (with one exception) refused to call themselves collectors. They did not want to be associated either with the attitudes of early ethnographers, whose intensive collecting filled the shelves of imperialist museums, or with the practices of the contemporary art collecting milieu, which they regarded as unethical and corrupt. Also, most of them thought it important to distinguish objects obtained by material exchange from those obtained by monetary exchange, the former mode of acquisition being in their eyes more acceptable—more ethical—than the latter, as it lessened the risk of corrupting their relationships with the community and similarly lessened the risk of participating in the capitalistic corruption of this community’s “traditional economy.” My encounter with these anthropologists greatly influenced my own principles regarding being the owner of objects from a community with whom I worked. In general, the ambiguity I perceived in these anthropologists’ attitudes did not concern the acquisition of objects while in the field per se, nor their role in social and economic change. Rather, it concerned their tendency to conceive of themselves as ethically minded noncollectors, despite these acquisitions and despite their occasional entanglement in practices that could be considered ethically suspicious, particularly by today’s standards. My own desire to escape these ambiguities led me to decide—once and for all, or so I thought— that the least ethically ambiguous behaviour was to systematically steer clear of owning objects related to my field of research. I thought this principle in turn would enable me to avoid potential conflicts of interest and ethical dilemmas related to appropriation altogether. Needless to say, several of my field experiences were later to expose the flaws of this reasoning. In relation to my research on collecting, I developed an interest in museum anthropology and the politics of representation. Following the idea that self-representation is a means of emancipation from imperialist discourses and misrepresentation, there is real value in enhancing originating communities’ control over the way they are represented. As an aspiring museum anthropologist trained under the latter idea, I have often felt upon my shoulders the weight of what visual anthropologist Jay Ruby calls “the moral burden of authorship” (Ruby 1995). According to Ruby, there are two ways through which one can attempt to address the ethical responsibilities attached to the creation
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of representations: engaging in collaborative research, and turning the anthropological gaze on one’s own culture. Prior experience doing both of these things—as a research assistant for a collaborative museology project and having “anthropologized anthropologists” as part of my masters thesis (see Roth 2007)—did not keep me from forming assumptions that were in keeping with a rather superficial understanding of the politics of representation. In the context of indigenous identity politics, I took the concept of self-representation in the very literal sense of one’s representation of one’s own identity, in which alterities—the identity of others and relationships to these outsiders—have no role to play other than as counterpoints to that identity. In this view, self-representation is necessarily a form of exclusionary identity politics. This overly simplistic understanding did not turn out to be in accordance with the modes of representation and performances of identity that I witnessed while living in Gitxaal-a. Though I have been told the representation of outsiders as butterflies was related to the initial greeting by the Tsimshian of Europeans as “beautiful people,” I have also heard it described as the metaphor of butterflies coming and going, hauling with them the precious pollen they have extracted from the locations situated along their trajectories. During the field school, this second image functioned for me as a reinforcement of my personal guideline to avoid as much as possible becoming the proprietor of objects related to the field. The retail businesses operating in Gitxaal-a are three convenience stores, which primarily sell food, and one gift shop housed in the Gitxaal-a Administrative Offices, which sells crafts, postcards, mugs, and a line of Gitxaal-a Nation branded apparel. On one of the last days of field school, seeing that I was looking at the latter items, Clayton Hill, one of the indigenous research assistants working with the field school, asked me if I would buy a Gitxaal-a Nation fleece. I had come to recognize that my no-acquisitions rule was both impossible to respect and nonsensical for any fieldwork experience. So many of my interactions with community members had involved exchange—of services, of food, of knowledge, of stories—that setting objects aside now seemed absurd. Yet something about acquiring—and therefore potentially wearing—Gitxaal-a Nation apparel felt inappropriate to me, an outsider to the community. When I told Clayton this, thinking he would immediately acquiesce, he was taken aback by my answer; perhaps even insulted.
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“Why? Look at me, I’m wearing this, and I’m not from UBC!” he said, pointing to his UBC sweatshirt, a recent gift from our instructors. “Yes, but you’ve been working for UBC all month, it’s different . . .” I said. “And you’ve been working for Gitxaal-a all month! It’s the same!” he answered. In view of Clayton’s reaction, it became clear that my views on appropriation and identity politics had made me unnecessarily closedminded in my thinking and inflexible in my behavior. His reaction puzzled me, in turn forcing me to reflect in more depth on the reasoning behind my reluctance to own and wear Gitxaal-a Nation apparel based on an erroneous conflation of ownership and appropriation. In the case of apparel, that is to say, objects that can not only be owned but also worn, the conceptual confusion was even greater, as things owned/ appropriated could be tied to a corporeal display of identity, and therefore representation. My discomfort thus stemmed in part from the assumption that community members would generally disapprove of an outsider wearing Gitxaal-a-branded clothing, perceived as a form of usurpation of identity. To put things simply, I was concerned that wearing Gitxaal-a Nation apparel would be taking the risk of being perceived as identifying myself as being from Gitxaal-a, which would be both misleading and deceptive. This presupposed a classic semiotic approach of clothing, for which adornments primarily serve as communicative symbols, as if one was always what one wears, and clothing on which is written “Gitxaal-a Nation” would necessarily be like saying, “I am from Gitxaal-a.” Recent anthropological scholarship on clothing has criticized and complicated this frame of analysis. For instance, anthropologist Karen Hansen has highlighted the relative failure of an oversimplified approach to account for the fact that “subjective and social experiences of dress are not always mutually supportive but may contradict one another or collide” (Hansen 2004: 372). Borrowing from Terence Turner, Hansen sees clothing as a “social skin” that both “touches the body and faces outward toward others” (372), a duality the interpretation of clothing should not ignore. Due to this duality, I felt unable to ensure that the social experience of my wearing Gitxaal-a Nation clothing would correspond to my subjective experience of it as one who had worked with and respects this community—and I wanted to avoid having to experience the collision of these perspectives, potentially resulting in an intersubjective communication breakdown.
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While clothing is superficial in that it does not necessarily transform or transcend the identity of its wearer, clothing can indeed be used to assert or perform identity and status publicly. The use of crest adornment by the aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest is a case in point, and an element of context that should not be overlooked. Blankets, tunics, jewelry, tattooing, but also T-shirts and fleece vests have been and are currently used to display crest imagery during culturally sanctioned performances. Here, the existence of a relationship between adornment and politics is clear, and my knowledge of this fact most certainly influenced my attitude toward Gitxaal-a Nation apparel. Though the particular line of apparel discussed here was not adorned with family crests, I had been told that their production was related to a recent political and cultural repositioning, corresponding to the community’s withdrawal from the political entity of the Tsimshian Tribal Council as well as to the official change of spelling from the anglicized Kitkatla to the Sm’algyax transliteration Gitxaal-a. In light of this, I thought an outsider wearing the apparel would undermine its efficacy as an instrument of identity politics. Though perhaps not entirely flawed, this reasoning was based on my assumption that the politics of representation at work in this community were necessarily exclusionary. It had not crossed my mind that having outsiders participate in this assertion of identity and pride, in particular in the case of outsider-butterflies, could be seen as support and enhancement of this assertion, and not necessarily its attenuation. It took Clayton’s reaction to make me realize that my reluctance to wear Gitxaal-a apparel could just as well be interpreted as shame to be personally associated with his community, in particular by those who, like him, knew of my particular outsider-butterfly relationship to Gitxaal-a. By fear of a misunderstanding associated with one intersubjective interpretation of my wearing the apparel, I had neglected to consider the occurrence of another just as likely and possibly more damaging interpretation. While I thought wearing the gear would have been inappropriate and presumptuous of me, it was actually my refusal to wear it that reflected my presumptions and presumptuousness. It reflected an accommodation of my own discomforts and interiorized ethical dilemmas. The guidelines I had set out for myself were drafted to fit my own comfort levels, not those of the community members with whom I was interacting. In this situation, as in others, what I thought would help
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fig. 1. Lach Klan School logo with butterfly in the center. Courtesy of Gitxaal-a Lach Klan School.
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minimize the effects of my location as an outsider was in fact a manifestation of this very location and the assumptions I had taken into the field with me. The community elementary and junior secondary school is situated in the center of the village, near its church and not far from the Administrative Office. One evening, as I was attending a Gitxaal-a Drummers and Dancers rehearsal in the school gym, I was struck by a large design printed on the back wall. Crest representations of the four clans of Gitxaal-a—eagle, blackfish, wolf, and raven—were circled by the four words “Community,” “Achievement,” “Respect,” and “Encouragement.” Placed in the center, surrounded by these crests and words, was a butterfly. It was this particular element of the design that pressed me to find out who had created it and what it was supposed to represent. Something about the centrality of this butterfly design as well as its association to those particular words made me feel curious and susMenzies and Butler: Collaborative Service Learning • 195
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picious. My initial reaction to the design was that it appeared to reflect a colonial and paternalist attitude. Indeed, I was convinced that having outsiders included in the representation and, of all places, in its center, could only be the result of pressures from, if not the direct production of, butterfly-outsiders, or at least from power dynamics favorable to them. Surely, I thought, the design meant to suggest some kind of domination of the butterfly over the other clans, whose behaviour was to be guided by these dominating outsiders’ “good words.” But I was wrong. The design was in fact the school logo and had been designed by its aboriginal students. More than anyone, the young designers surprised the “butterflies” themselves. The non-aboriginal school principal’s reaction to the logo when it was initially shown to her was analogous to mine. “I didn’t even think they would put the butterfly in there,” she told me. Concerned that other community members might object to the logo, the principal recalls telling the students that it needed to be “more representative of the community,” a suggestion to which the students responded that it was indeed representative: butterflies are a part of the community as a group, even though individual butterflies eventually fly away. As for the centrality of the butterfly design, they explained that the four other clans are their protectors, and that in return, the butterflies help them learn. Where I saw a butterfly dominating from its central position, the students had represented protection of the outsiders by the community, giving the logo an entirely different meaning. While I had perceived the words included in the logo as a reflection of paternalism on the part of outsiders, these positive words had in fact been bestowed upon the school by its students. My being puzzled by the inclusion of the butterfly crest reflects my assumption that those who go in and out of the village and are not originally from Gitxaal-a are not seen as constituting a part of the community in their own right. Thus the inclusion of outsiders in the representation by students of their village and school clashed with my idea of self-portrait. I did not expect that such a representation would include reference to those whose presence is in many ways tied to the legacies of colonialism: teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers, and researchers—whose outsider location is well captured by the metaphor of the butterfly coming and going. Yet the logo and the meaning given to it by the students tend to indicate that in the students’ eyes, these outsiders collectively form an integral part of the community.
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In this context, it is of significance that the principal felt it was necessary to consult with community leadership before deciding to use the proposed design as the school logo. The Gitxaal-a Council and community elders finally ruled that it was appropriate that butterflies be accounted for in the school logo, in particular considering their involvement in the school’s activities. Thus, had the design excluded the butterflies, it would have gone against self-representation—would have “dishonoured [the students’] idea,” as the principal later put it. A serious yet often overlooked legacy of colonialism is the widespread and well-engrained assumption that history has bound First Nations people to positions of relative subordination. The expectation that First Nations communities and individuals need non-Natives’ help to achieve what they set out to do reflects the sentiment of many non-Natives that they necessarily occupy advantageous social locations compared to those occupied by most First Nations. The fact that I immediately perceived the butterfly to be dominating the logo is symptomatic of such a bias. That I did not immediately discard my own interpretation given that the community would most certainly not have let a disdainful logo be printed on their school gym’s wall was another manifestation of my bias. More generally, my reaction shows that I had internalized models of “culturally appropriate” representations that decidedly reflect my own perceived social location more than the concerns of the group being represented or, in this case, representing itself. As this example shows, the students and political leaders of Gitxaal-a clearly did not feel threatened by a self-representation that includes butterfly-outsiders. Yet before even knowing the story behind the design, I had feared on the community’s behalf that they had somehow been the victims of a “butterfly effect.” My assumption that Gitxaal-a community members generally felt strongly about carrying out exclusionary identity politics, in particular in the context of a recently asserted independence from the Tsimshian Tribal Council and the refusal to take part in federally and provincially sanctioned land treaty processes, was again challenged during a feast held on August 17 to honor a visiting Nisga’a group. On this occasion the Gitxaal-a Drummers and Dancers were asked to perform. For one of the songs, community members in the audience were invited to perform their crest dance. As the clans were being called one after the other, I felt it was improbable that butterflies would be called to dance. This
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was a public performance, the audience for which was of course other Gitxaal-a community members, but also and perhaps primarily their guests from Nisga’a Nation, in honor of whom the feast had been organized. This led me to think that the dance group conceived of their performance first and foremost as a representation of their community and Nation. My assumption was that only the four clans that “truly” composed the community of Gitxaal-a would be part of the dance. But yet again my reasoning was flawed, and the butterflies’ turn to dance did come. It was later explained to me that acknowledging the role played by butterflies in the community is a tribute to Gitxaal-a’s connectedness to the rest of the world, and the responsibilities all humans have toward one another given the repercussions of our decisions and actions on those to whom we are connected, in full autonomy, equality, and reciprocity. Beyond “collaborations” and other intercultural “encounters,” it is that status of partnership that is not always fully recognized. Asked to give a welcome speech for an academic symposium held at UBC, Musqueam elder Larry Grant explained his feeling that aboriginal people have been deemed “good enough to be the backdrop for a two-week celebration [the 2010 Winter Olympic Games], good enough to be Brothers in Arms, but not good enough to be brothers at home” (public speech, UBC First Nations Longhouse, March 4, 2010, as recorded in field notes). In the context of a society that prides itself on its multiculturalism but in which segregation and fear of difference still largely prevail, even something as simple as the performance of the butterfly dance is less trivial than it seems. Across Canada and in British Columbia, relationships between non-Natives and Natives tend to have developed into “looking relations” (Charlotte Townsend-Gault 2004: 189). That collaborative enterprises are flourishing at the institutional level, including at this field school, is indisputable, but the number of opportunities in everyday life for Natives and non-Natives to engage in intercultural dialogues and activities is still incredibly limited. And when such opportunities arise, even seemingly consequenceless forms such as participation in a dance at a public event, few are those who abandon their observatories to transform “looking at” into “doing with.” Giving a performance a standing ovation poses us little problem, but standing up when invited to participate (as butterflies or otherwise) is another story. I would not be surprised if this was at least partly symptomatic of assumptions and questions such as those with which I entered Gitxaal-a a few summers ago.
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There are parallels to be drawn between the ways in which my views prior to arriving in Gitxaal-a influenced both the interpretations I formulated in the field and the guidelines of ethical behavior I had established for myself, on the one hand, and the attempts of many institutional research ethics policies to translate particular values into specific protocols, on the other. It is beyond the scope of this reflection to explore the comparison in depth; a few comments shall suffice. Intersubjectivity theorist Michael Jackson argues that there is much “mutual misunderstanding and downright misery that spring from the inherent ambiguity of everything human beings say and do in the presence of one another” and suggests that an outsider to our society would be astonished at “the energy devoted to reducing this intersubjective ambiguity and dealing with the fallout from never knowing exactly what others are feeling, thinking, or intending” (Jackson 2007: 148). Without letting this bleak view of the human condition discourage us from trying to understand one another, recognizing the existence of those ambiguities may help us acknowledge the importance of flexibility in codes of ethics. That is not to compromise the goals these codes make us reach for, but to ensure that the specific ways in which we are asked to reach for them do not make us overlook our appreciation of a given situation to the benefit of rigid applications of preset guidelines. Policies on research ethics are instrumental in effectively compelling researchers to respect ethically commendable principles. My intent is not to overlook these positive outcomes. However, while research ethics policies are presented to us as targeting the protection of the people with and about whom research is being conducted, these policies usually do at least as much for the protection and comfort of researchers in the practice of their profession (Menzies 2001: 24–25). In particular, the rigid bureaucracy attached to many of these policies reflects first and foremost the efforts of research institutions to avoid the potential lawsuits and political conflicts that could affect them. Furthermore, much as my personal set of predetermined guidelines made me confound appropriate behavior with behavior I would myself feel comfortable with, excessively inflexible research ethics policies can reveal themselves ineffective in giving priority to the interests of communities as they come to be formulated and understood in the course of collaborative research. When I arrived in Gitxaal-a in August 2007, my previous reflections on ethics, collecting, and identity politics made me anxious to appro-
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priate neither objects nor voice from the people with whom I would be working. The principles I had set out for myself in order to avoid doing this would reveal themselves as unable to reflect the complexities and ambiguities of relationships developed in the field. There certainly was value in anticipating the ethical dilemmas that could arise during my upcoming research experience, even without in-depth knowledge about the situation I was entering into. Once in the field, however, I believe it would have been beneficial to have let the situations guide me in my actions more often rather than following the guidelines I had set for myself beforehand. Thinking ahead is no doubt a useful exercise, but it has to be followed by further reflection in relation to given situations and in response to particular social configurations and interactions. Researchers are otherwise at risk of following procedures tinged with more political correctness than actual respect, in turn putting the individuals and communities they work with at risk of being confronted to the kind of colonial impositions ethical guidelines are meant to counteract. Much like a research design too rigid to accommodate the serendipitous aspect of fieldwork, the weight of preconceptions about one’s own location in the field and concerning so-called appropriate behavior can have counterproductive effects. My month of fieldwork in Gitxaal-a has, among many other things, enabled me to experience the intersubjective and situational aspect of anthropological research that rigid guidelines and predetermined protocols are not likely to accommodate adequately, even when the latter are informed by liberatory intentions.
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Reflexivity was not a topic of much interest when Arthur Wolf and I first did field research in the late 1950s and early 1960s. . . . When we analyzed our data and wrote them up, we felt a responsibility to “our” village to “get it right,” but they were “our” data, not theirs, and we assumed only our reputations as scholars would be affected by not “getting it right.” —Margery Wolf (1992: 3)
Taking a cue from Margery Wolf, in this contribution I reflect on what it means to “get it right” when writing ethnographic texts. As a student 200 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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of the 2007 Gitxaal-a-UBC ethnographic field school, I found that instructors Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler expected us to conduct “mutually useful research” with Gitxaal-a community members and to produce “an intellectual product of value” upon our return to Vancouver. Here I explore what it means to create an intellectual product of value. Value for whom? For whom are we writing as ethnographers? Whose stories do we write about and for what purpose? Who benefits from getting it right and who is implicated in that process? How do we know if we get it right when we write? I raise these questions to examine how, as a first-time ethnographer, I coped with these challenges and tried to navigate an ethical path. I draw on my experiences as a participant in the field school to consider ethnographic responsibility in that context and how it continues to shape my methodological practices. I contend that writing relevant and accessible texts for Gitxaal-a community members, and acknowledging their central position in the research product, offer important ways to address and combat the legacy of colonialism and exploitative extraction in that community. Through my field school experience, I found that my responsibility to get it right involved conducting a research project of relevance to Gitxaal-a people, writing accessibly about their stories, and creating a product that reflected their stories, interests, and authority. Questions of ownership, authority, relevance, and ethnographic writing continue to be important for anthropologists. If we are to learn from the discipline’s colonial past, we must continue to find ways to negotiate our role in knowledge production in the communities where we work and to aspire to conduct relevant research, write accessible texts, and acknowledge the central place of our research participants in their own stories. Prior to my arrival in Gitxaal-a in 2007, filmmaker Jennifer Rashleigh and Merle Bolton, Gitxaal-a social development officer, established a gardening project in the community. After a planning and knowledgesharing workshop in October 2006, they ordered supplies to create kitchen gardens for eight interested families. When Jen arrived with the seeds in May, the gardening group gathered for four days of greenhouse building and planting. Jen explained, “We all had to decide collectively how we were going to go about doing this. And it really very much felt collaborative and cooperative from the get-go. . . . We were all working together.” The crew gathered materials and tools and went
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to work mass-producing planks and greenhouses and delivering them to each gardening family’s house. The gardeners planted seeds in starter trays; the seeds sprouted later that month. When I arrived at the end of July, the gardens were filled with vegetables; cabbages had grown massive leaves, pole beans were six feet tall, and an assortment of lettuces was ready to eat. Everyone involved was very enthusiastic about the gardens. Other social programs in the village had not inspired the same level of interest, so I endeavored to highlight the success of this one by studying gardeners’ motivations for participating and their growing process. Most gardeners were happy to share their stories with me. I interviewed many of the gardeners—mothers and their children, husbands and wives, sisters, friends—often while standing in their garden plots and tending their plants. I spoke with Jen and Merle about the intentions and aspirations of the gardening project. I also sought to position their gardening efforts in a wider context of historical gardening in the community and its nearby islands. I met with two elders who told me about gardening as young women. They spoke of planting potatoes while their husbands fished, tending raspberry and blackcurrant bushes, and collecting seaweed to fertilize their soil, as their father had taught them. Through additional library research I learned about horticulture practices along the northwest coast spanning hundreds of years (Deur and Turner 2005; Gottesfeld 1999). The past and present of Gitxaal-a gardening came together during a trip to a nearby island that had been a traditional garden site. Although most of the island was now covered in thick thimbleberry bushes, there was a space with shorter, less dense vegetation, and the gardeners gathered there to look around. They did not see any remnants of the potatoes or blackcurrants that once grew there, but they did find Indian rice, a root plant that was historically harvested by Gitxaal-a people. Two of the gardeners remembered collecting the rice with their grandmothers when they were girls. A few gardeners told stories as Jen filmed, and everyone sat with them and listened. Doing fieldwork among the gardeners was a rich experience, filled with frequent conversations and short-term relationship building. The gardeners were excited about their gardens, and I enjoyed digging in the dirt with them. My transcripts were peppered with expressions of delight: “Wow, look at that cauliflower!” and “Did you see those beans?
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They’re huge!” These were moments of joy and discovery. It was also a time of sharing—sharing stories and tips about gardening, recalling memories of planting, and engaging collectively in a process of growth and community collaboration. Though the ethnographic process felt joyous and collaborative, my initial drafting of the ethnographic product—“an intellectual product of value”—felt awkward and solitary. After returning to Vancouver I revisited my field notes and transcripts looking for themes, read scholarly articles, and jotted down ideas and outlines. I struggled with finding my voice, with organizing gardeners’ words, and with fitting my project into an academic milieu. How could I turn their experiences and excitement into “data”? How could I write something of value to them? What scholarly authority did I have to write about this short period of time in their lives? Where did my own experience of fieldwork and being there fit in? In the rest of this reflection I focus on these questions to chronicle the choices I made and to examine how these choices relate more generally to the ethics of ethnographic writing. Menzies and Butler have been careful to ensure that their research— and the research of their students—is relevant to Gitxaal-a people and that their findings are available to interested community members. They have learned from cautionary tales about resource extraction and exploitation in the community and applied these lessons to their research processes (see Menzies 2004a). In the first week of the field school a meeting was arranged with community members to identify areas of interest for field school students to direct their studies. The gardening project emerged as a viable topic through these discussions, and facilitated through Menzies and Butler’s prior knowledge of diverse community interests, and through informal conversations with gardeners. Our instructor’s own collaborative research model helped lay a foundation for us as students to model our own research practices. Selecting community-defined research projects jumpstarted our own smaller-scale collaborations with Gitxaal-a community members and set the tone for the field school and our final “intellectual products of value.” The scope of the ethnographic field school did not allow time for collaborative writing or reading of the ethnographic product. I only had time to collect data and begin to forge relationships with community members involved with my project. I nonetheless worked to write a text “relevant and responsive” to the gardeners with whom I worked (Lassiter 2001). This was a challenging but enriching task.
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I realized I was not sure how to create a product of relevance and value. None of the gardeners had talked about the final written product of my research as we stood over potatoes and peas. We instead talked about memories of childhood planting and harvesting, joys of gardening, and the hardships of village life that accentuated the gardens’ success. Despite our best efforts, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that the gardeners would be involved with the research process but that the product was intended for others. Perhaps they did not even think of the product much at all. I did not actively challenge this at the time. I knew my “intellectual product of value” would go back to Gitxaal-a at a future date. So, imagining the gardeners with copies of my paper in their hands, I began to write. Initially it seemed I was draining their experiences of their original dynamism by writing their words down and shaping them into a single piece. I kept thinking of the plants in their gardens; they were still producing when I left Gitxaal-a, and the gardeners’ story/ stories were of course continuing without me there to act as witness and recorder. How could I write something of value for the gardeners? I recalled some mild discomfort I experienced while in Gitxaal-a: the other field school students had grappled with heavier issues, such as implications of development, low involvement in community activities, and troubled youth. My project, by comparison, had sometimes seemed light and inconsequential. I was operating under a general sense that studying difficult and upsetting social problems is somehow more helpful and useful than studying successful programs. I soon realized that my discomfort was rather unfounded. Exploring and writing about the reasons for the success of the gardens and their place in the still unfolding history of gardening in Gitxaal-a was indeed worthwhile. By writing about the gardens, I was contributing to a larger project of identifying motivations for participation in social programs, community-directed development ideas, and desires for familybased initiatives. Also, I had an opportunity to highlight the hard work of Merle, Jen, and the gardeners today and in the past, and to convey the worth of the gardening project. The gardens were highly relevant to the gardeners themselves, and to take their project seriously required dedication to documenting their efforts. By focusing on the successes of the gardening project and the continuity of cultivation in Gitxaal-a, I found the tone becoming relatively
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upbeat and optimistic. I ultimately chose to write about the past, present, and future of gardening in Gitxaal-a. I constructed a narrative that explored the linkages and disconnections between historical gardening and the contemporary gardening project as well as the possibilities for continued engagement and gardening enthusiasm. I did not write positively out of false idealism, and I discussed challenges that the community has faced, including the physical and material costs of capitalistic food consumption. While identifying and analyzing social problems is an important endeavor, there is also a need to analyze successes, enthusiasm, and affective dimensions of productive programs. I did not feel obligated to paint a rosy picture of the gardening project, but I did feel responsible to get it right by highlighting the gardeners’ enthusiasm, dedication, and goals. I hope that the resulting product reflects the interests of the Gitxaal-a gardeners and that it will serve future interests as other programs are developed in the community. Although I could not produce a truly collaborative text, nor could I read the final text with the gardeners, I sought to get it right by making my findings as relevant as possible to community needs and to write something that would matter to them. Lassiter (2001: 145) writes, “When all is told, the texts that we produce with our consultants do matter. They matter intellectually, politically, and ethically in a variety of contexts—in the academy, in the communities in which we study, in our practice, in our moral commitments. They also matter to . . . the people who are our collaborators, co-intellectuals, colleagues, and friends” (see also Garcia 2000). No matter how engaged anthropological consultants and communities feel in the research process, the research product must also address them and reflect their interests. Writing relevant works is part of a larger effort to conduct ethical research and to reimagine the balances of power between communities and the academy. After recognizing that a “product of value” meant a product of relevance for Gitxaal-a gardeners and other community members, it followed that I would have to write this product in an understandable and accessible way. What use is a relevant research product if Gitxaal-a gardeners are unable or unwilling to get through the first page? How valued would a product be if filled with jargon, buzzwords, or complicated sentence structure? In his chapter on writing accessible texts, Lassiter shares a piece of advice from his fellow graduate student: “‘The way to write well,’ he
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said, ‘is to read’” (2005: 124). He shares his own process of reading other writers’ works to learn from their stylistic, vocabulary, and structural choices. Lassiter points out that anthropological jargon is a form of shorthand. Jargon enables anthropologists to write for other anthropologists with efficiency—using one word or phrase to signify a wider concept already familiar to readers. Problems arise, of course, when one is not writing only for other anthropologists. The system of shorthand Lassiter describes falls apart when the audience also comprises members of the public or research participants. I wrote with the gardeners as my primary audience, and I had no intentions of disseminating the product beyond this audience. I had few writing role models for this endeavor. Research products written explicitly and directly for research participants are not disseminated in the same way as academic journal articles and books. Therefore, though these types of research products exist, they are not as readily available for me and other new ethnographers to learn from as we write. Other relevant research products apart from academic writing—legal documents, for example—are also often written on behalf of research participants but not always with them as the primary audience. So, when I began to write my “intellectual product of value,” I felt rather unprepared to write with Gitxaal-a gardeners as my readers. I had little idea of how other anthropologists had approached this task, nor did I know much about what kinds of materials the gardeners themselves might enjoy reading. Issues of format were also on my mind. Perhaps a booklet, colorful pamphlet, or other format might be more useful and readable? For a previous field school one student had produced a small booklet with life histories of five elders from Gitxaal-a. A photograph accompanied each story. When we arrived for our field school many people expressed an interest in seeing their stories written in a book like his. Writing accessibly did not mean that I had to sacrifice academic rigor in my writing for the gardeners. In fact, my instructions from Menzies and Butler, and the expectations of Gitxaal-a in this service learning partnership, were to produce an intellectual product of value. I was committed to producing a relevant and accessible text for them that would contribute to their own ongoing processes of developing the gardening project. This required sorting through data and producing an analysis that would make sense to them and enhance—not displace—their own understanding.
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After writing what I considered to be a relevant and accessible text, I sent it to my instructors for review. Though they were satisfied with my analysis and did not comment on issues of relevancy or accessibility, they instructed me as follows:
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Please take a bit of time to rewrite so that it is a report on the gardening project and its continuity with the history of cultivation in the community and region, and not a report on your project. Remove a lot of the “I’s” and the “I began to think about . . .” The structure is effective with the garden trip framing it, just remove the focus on you as narrator and participant.
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Upon receiving their feedback, I was unsettled and rather perplexed. While writing, I had decided to tell my own story first, “positioning myself ” as I had learned from other anthropological writers to do. I then added the words of the gardeners to my own narrative. I thought this was a way to establish my relationship to the gardeners and to be transparent in my research and thought process. I had been there and been involved, so I should be there and involved in the research narrative. I had recorded the gardeners’ voices, but I did not have the capacity to write collaboratively with them so that their voices could be properly heard in my final paper. Therefore, it made logical sense to me at the time that I should tell my story and incorporate their words into the narrative, as that would be the truest representation of events I could develop. I thought I was getting the story right by writing it from my point of view—my truth. I was trying to get it right by writing from a place of personal experience, recognizing my own role in the ethnographic process, and adopting an authorial, narrative voice rather than a detached, authoritative voice. As I removed many first-person singular and plural pronouns, the story seemed decentered and lopsided. I was making myself into more of an observer than a participant—an ethnographic authority, not an autobiographical author. I was writing myself out of this history. This did not seem to me to be a decolonizing form of ethnographic writing; instead, it seemed to be a reinforcement of the colonial anthropological gaze—looking down from above and writing with cool authority. It was only later that I reflected on Menzies and Butler’s instructions and began to understand better. Menzies recently spoke of his own ethnographic film projects in
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Gitxaal-a territory (Menzies 2011). He shared a story of speaking with a family member and research interlocutor about his ideas for a film and its overall narrative. His family member suggested he just make his film and give the community “the pieces”—the raw footage—for their own use. He used this story to reflect on his own efforts to develop an “ethnographic fidelity to social reality.” Sometimes this entails disarticulating himself and his own narrative from the stories of his research participants. This strategy allows for a more fluid and user-friendly form of research transmission that enables practices of remixing and reworking the research products by interested community members. Taking Menzies’s lead, I had to reconceptualize my own role in the Gitxaal-a gardeners’ story/stories. I realized that this research product could take on a life of its own, separate entirely from my own purposes. It was not just a paper written and graded for the field school but a historical document for the community’s archives and a documentation of the gardeners’ efforts. I was not standing aside and acting as an aloof and detached expert authority. I was instead bringing to the surface the real actors and agents of the story—the people who should have their authority, expertise, and experience heard and documented. By disentangling my own experience of the gardens from the rest of the text, I found that the gardeners’ story/stories were more fully present in the written product and less obscured by my own reflections and commentary. In a thoughtful examination of the place of the ethnographer self in ethnographic texts, Lassiter (2005) brings together reflections from Ruth Behar, Renato Rosaldo, and Paul Rabinow, to comment on writing about the Self and Other and the coexperiential and intersubjective dimensions of ethnography. He writes, “The serious ethnographer, especially the serious collaborative ethnographer, must critically and constantly examine when and how personal experience helps to elaborate and further the larger ethnographic project” (Lassiter 2005: 110). Though my fieldwork process was intersubjective and relatively collaborative, the short duration of my stay necessitated a critical evaluation of my place in the final text and the overall context of Gitxaal-a research relationships. The temporariness of my stay in Gitxaal-a and my tenuous ties to the community were a reality of the field school. I was there to learn from my instructors, the gardeners, and other community members, but I was not establishing my own individual long-term research relationship with Gitxaal-a people. Instead, as a field school student, I was a part of a larger project.
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For community members my own individual identity and experience was much less important in the long run than the stories I documented while there. Would the intellectual product of value that I wrote be valued for my story or for theirs? In telling my story, I had risked not telling the gardeners’ story/stories, which was, after all, the goal. Once I disarticulated myself from their experiences, I actually relocated myself as the temporary participant-observer I really was. Clifford Geertz reflects, “Finding somewhere to stand in a text that is supposed to be at one and the same time an intimate view and a cool assessment is almost as much of a challenge as gaining the view and making the assessment in the first place” (1988: 10). In my first round of writing for the gardeners, I had stood myself up in the middle of their gardens and their stories, planting myself there because it seemed most “right” to me. In the end, though, I came to realize that getting it right entailed reflecting critically and humbly on my own place in their narrative. I stood aside so that the gardeners could take their rightful place in their own gardens. In Gitxaal-a, after hearing presentations of field school students’ preliminary research findings, one of the gardeners said that adults in her community need to teach as well as keep learning. She said she had been at the side of her grandmothers, trying to learn everything she could from them. She said everyone needs to encourage young people to do the same today. The UBC field school students had acted in this role for our stay, by learning from adults and asking questions. Our final products, directed to the communities and the people we interviewed, are intended to share the stories they told us and return these to them. For my part, I endeavored to get these stories right by constructing a relevant and accessible text and measuring my own place in their story. I found that writing for the participants of my research enhanced my own research practice, encouraging an ethical and decolonizing approach. Margery Wolf writes, “Like most anthropologists, I remain more interested in why Chinese peasants do what they do, and . . . in ‘getting the news out’” (1992: 1). Through writing a story about Gitxaal-a gardens, I focused on getting the news in in ways I hope the gardeners find relevant, readable, and valuable.
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Reflection 3: Whose Field Is It Anyway? robin anderson
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Being in the community and conducting research gives us a fresh perspective on our complex allegiances. I spent two months in Gitxaal-a, conducting research for my master’s thesis on diet change and diabetes and for a project on climate change. The research consisted mostly of semistructured interviews about resources and their use, past and present. For the climate change project, resource experts—fishermen, hunters, and harvesters—shared data to form a baseline against which the further effects of climate change could be measured, although their stories also attested to the disenfranchisement and degradation of resources the community had already suffered. For my project on diabetes, I focused on diet change in the last sixty years. I interviewed those who could remember having grown up on traditional foods and could speak to the changes in the foods consumed in the community and in the way these foods, old and new, were procured, preserved, shared, and cooked. I also interviewed community members with diabetes about their experiences. Everyone in Gitxaal-a was neighborly—until I mentioned that I was a researcher. There were people in Gitxaal-a who declined to give an interview for the research project, and at first this worried me. I understood that people’s reactions were the results of a long history of sharing information with outsiders only to have it disappear from the community or return to gobble up their resources. But a lack of participants can really put a damper on plans to make an important ethnographic contribution to the field of anthropology, let alone any meaningful contributions to the community. I wanted to expose diabetes not as a personal or cultural failure but as a community-wide problem created by colonial practices; I wanted to explore ways that individuals and the community were combating this disease; I yearned to produce something useful. My research topic had been decided together with community leaders, who felt that studying diabetes would be more relevant than my initial interest in HIV. However, I could hardly claim that I was being “sought out” for my research expertise, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) suggests is central to the collaborative model. In the mo-
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ments when community members politely declined to participate, I asked myself if collaboration between the academy and the community is possible. Eventually I realized that collaborative research entails the right of a community or of individuals not to collaborate—that is, to say no. Exercising the right to say no is an aspect of self-determination, and hearing it—listening to it, appreciating its emancipatory dimension—is a precondition to doing collaborative work. “No” disabuses us, as anthropologists, of the “best friend” fantasy described by Deloria (2004: 24), in which the anthropologist is taken into the bosom of the community and entrusted with secrets that make the researcher an authority on that community or nation. “No” forces us beyond “the ongoing implications of the colonial encounter” (Lassiter 2005: 15); it forces us beyond collaborations that “deepen but don’t derail” (Hinson 1999, in Lassiter 2005: 12). Saying no is an act of decolonization, the very thing collaborative researchers work toward by conducting the research. Knowledge may be power, but no is also power, and it must be respected. The project participants recognized the research project as an opportunity for learning, growth, and cycling knowledge back into the community. The interviews were a legitimate, dedicated space for reflecting on the issues of climate change or diet change. These issues proved to be important to Gitxaal-a identity and sometimes of great personal importance to the participant. As participants recalled forgotten childhood memories, recounted their battles with diabetes, or expressed the deeper meanings of harvesting their own resources and eating their own foods, they used this space to achieve a new level of self-reflection and understanding. In this sense we created new knowledge together. This mutual learning was what made it feel as if (to paraphrase Linda Tuhiwai Smith) we were doing research “with,” rather than doing research “to.” For every community member who declined to participate, there was a participant who thanked us for providing the opportunity to think and talk about these important issues. In these instances the academic goal of generating knowledge and the community goal of maintaining knowledge in the community complemented and enabled each other. Talking and learning with participants felt collaborative. The academy and the community have differing needs, not only in terms of conducting research but also in terms of what the research products will look like and what kind of information they will incor-
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porate. My academic thesis reflects the traditions of canonical Western thought. I develop a linear and logical argument (that diet change is intimately tied to political and economic change, and that colonization is in fact the root cause of food insecurity and hence diabetes in Gitxaal-a), supported by subcategories of information and examples. The linearity of the thesis is illustrated by its table of contents; the bibliography shows that I am indeed drawing from and contributing to a larger body of knowledge. This structure conforms to well-established modes of academic thought and writing, and few academic theses are accepted that diverge significantly from these traditions. Study of indigenous ways of knowing suggested to me that while Western thought valued categories and subcategories, logic, and linearity, indigenous and in particular Tsimshian thinking placed higher value on relationality and responsibility, stories, and circularity. I also knew from my time in Gitxaal-a that almost no one there would be interested in my academic thesis as it stood, full of references to people (academics) they did not know. The written nature of the work also presented challenges; some of the project participants struggled with literacy, and reading a fifty-page paper would be daunting. Finally, the specialized language was another barrier. I just could not see people in Gitxaal-a identifying with phrases like “community-level food insecurity engineered by the economics of colonialism.” In order to return my research to the community in a meaningful way, a different format was needed. I wanted something visual rather than literary, that would show the relationships between my disparate findings, and that would honor the holistic understanding of wellness that participants had demonstrated in their conversations and interviews. I settled on a poster that displayed concentric circles representing (1) the individual, (2) the family and community, and (3) the political and ecological arenas, and that showed how changes at any of these levels effected changes in the others. This format was much closer to my original conception of how to structure my findings for the academy, but I had found it impossible to represent its concentric nature in a linear, literary paper. The poster format also allowed me to include findings from my research that had not fit neatly into my thesis but that I knew to be important in Gitxaal-a. The poster, like the academic thesis, is unequivocally a research product. Both are intended to share the project findings with a particular
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community or audience, a particular “field.” And yet there is a mutual exclusivity to the two products. Just as my academic thesis had little import in the community, so the poster played no part in the calculation of my academic standing or achievement in the university. These two research products and their mutual exclusivity are the manifestations of my multiple allegiances as a graduate student. For all the overlap between the interests of the community and the academy that I experienced while conducting fieldwork and meeting the research protocol’s stipulations, the need for separate research products demonstrates that the two fields still, in many ways, speak two mutually unintelligible dialects. This tension raises important questions about producing collaborative ethnographic texts. Linearity is closely tied to the ideas of progress and positivity in which history advances in forward march. Circularity and relationality—the logic of many indigenous peoples—is, in this line of thinking, unsound. By tenaciously adhering to linearity the academy is in fact dismissing indigenous ways of knowing. This dismissal is analogous to the dismissal of oral histories from “History” (see, e.g., Wilson 2004). Could a concentric-circle format expose the lacunas left by the academy’s canon? Could it shake the master’s house, just a little, from the inside? These questions are, at their root, the “knowledge for whom?” question (Hale 2007: 106). Despite the concentric circles, I still feel that the poster was not really useful in the sense that its central purpose was to communicate the information collected, the ideas discussed, and the conclusions I had drawn based on the data and my reading in the production of my thesis. As I reflect upon my research experience with Gitxaal-a I realize that I am grappling with how to do decolonizing work within a colonial context and, indeed, whether such work is possible. We are expected, and expect of ourselves, that we will contribute to both the field of anthropological knowledge and the field of our fieldwork; that is, the community. When these two fields are in tension, we return to the existential questions at the base of collaborative work: what does it look like? How do we do it? How do I do it here, now? Is it even possible in this context? These questions are difficult, because they are ultimately questions of power. To whom do I owe my primary allegiance? To the academy, the community, the project, or to myself ? With whom does power reside, and with whom should it reside? At other times, the needs and expectations of the two fields are in
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fig. 2. Visual representation of Gitxaal-a diabetes research. Courtesy of Jason Laidlaw.
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harmony. At these times, we are grateful for the work of our predecessors and feel affirmed in our roles as researchers. We are aware of the value of our work for both fields, and we see that our actions have distributed power more equally between these players. We begin to ask epistemological questions. What qualities unite these moments? How did we achieve them? What are their effects? How can we replicate them? It is by recognizing and cultivating these moments that we work toward a more fully collaborative method.
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Reflection 4: See What Happens When You Give Us the Camera
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In this reflection I discuss my experience of using participatory still photography as a visual research methodology that engaged youth, explored their experiences, and answered their expressed need for representation in the town. I worked with two youth programs in Prince Rupert, the town closest to Gitxaal-a’s home village. The youth program was run by a First Nations center, the Friendship House Association of Prince Rupert. Planet Youth is a drop-in center open to all youth offering a pool table, Internet access, and video games as well as alcohol-free dances, movie nights, daily cooking activities, and kayaking trips. Street Spirit is an outreach program for at-risk youth that hosts boys’ and girls’ groups, education workshops, and work experience programs and helps refer youth to other services they may want or need. Youth ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen attend these programs Tuesday through Saturday from 3:00 to 10:00 p.m. On average forty to sixty teens walk through their doors throughout the evenings to talk with friends or youth workers, take part in activities, and just to hang out in a place where they feel comfortable and safe. I worked with Planet Youth and their Street Spirit programs to develop a photography project. I spent a total of three weeks at the center, beginning with just sitting around when it was open, then participating in different activities, and eventually hanging out with youth at the places they gathered around town when the center was closed. From the beginning, the Menzies and Butler: Collaborative Service Learning • 215
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youth tested my non-authoritarian demeanor and my “least adult” role in the center (Mandell 1991; Christensen 2004). On my second day at the center I tentatively handed out three small cameras supplied by the field school and let youth borrow my own professional level digital camera. This helped establish relationships, engaged the youth’s participation, and brought life to the project. John Collier (1967: 13) wrote that photography can act as a cultural can opener, providing “rapid entry into community familiarity and cooperation.” I would not go so far as to say my cameras were can openers or acted as a “golden key,” but they certainly brought energy and exchange into my research. When working with any community, and with marginalized youth especially, developing relationships is the first step in creating a successful research project. Putting the cameras into the youths’ hands established trust. I was initially surprised by the respect and care with which each youth held the cameras. The cameras were caressed, respected, cherished, and always handed back. The only rules for the teen use of the cameras were to let me know who had them and to return them to me at the end of the day. My presence in the vicinity of their picture taking may have influenced what the youth chose to photograph, but it also provided me with the opportunity to observe how they interacted with the cameras and each other. Within days I came to be associated with the cameras. As soon as I arrived I was asked for my cameras, and they would float freely through the hands of the youth at the center. They were returned to me when I left for the evening. While I jotted down field notes, the youth ran around the vicinity of the center, both inside and out, recording visual moments. They photographed slices of reality that captured the atmosphere of the center and the spirit of their friends. Photography became a daily part of attending the center as youth embraced being the subjects of their friends’ photographs as well as being photographers. In course of three weeks the youth took more than seventeen hundred photographs, mainly of one another. Placing cameras in the hands of participants as a tool in “photovoice” methodology is becoming increasing popular as a way to empower youth and engage them in the serious tools of research (Strack et al. 2004). Margaret Mead (1975) saw cameras as tools for anthropologists. Timothy Asch and colleagues (1973) argued that cameras “could
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be to anthropologists what the telescope is to the astronomer and the microscope to the biologist.” For most of the youth with whom I engaged, the camera was viewed more as a toy than a tool. The cameras were something to play with, to have fun with, and something to do when bored. For children, toys are something to engage with actively. For these youth cameras became a way to experiment with how to look at their world. The photographs taken by the youth were both posed and unposed and often became a group project as six or seven youth set out with the four cameras. We arranged photography field trips and I accompanied the youth around town. As they traveled they decided where to go and what to photograph. While walking with them I attempted to introduce photography’s ability to speak of life experiences metaphorically, such as taking a picture of broken glass to capture an experience of feeling broken. The youth seemingly rejected this approach. Instead they saw the world around them as something to climb on and explore while focusing their efforts on photographing one another in these spaces. Lending itself to playful interaction with the cameras is digital photography’s instant feedback. A picture is taken and seconds later reviewed by the photographer. The image is not kept hidden on a roll of film to be developed and reviewed at a later date. The instant feedback allowed by the camera’s review setting ensured that the youth never grew tired of their toys. The review setting made the cameras into toys that not only responded to the youth’s intentions but also shaped how the youth would use the cameras. Individual photographers constantly played with their vision of photography based on the photographs they had taken just moments before. Digital photography allows for individual experimentation with trial and error as the photographer judges some photographs as good or bad. Often the photographers would show images they especially liked to friends. Or, when capturing a friend, a photographer would laugh and show the subject an image judged as bad before permanently deleting it. I cannot begin to guess the number of photographs deleted by the youth before the camera’s memory disks were uploaded into my computer. Moments surrounding the use of the cameras were filled with a collaborative exchange of creative ideas among the youth, filled with playful energy and constant exuberant laughter. Not only were youth interacting with the cameras; they were
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playing with each other through the process of photography. Their play revealed the youths’ interests, and their photographs expressed the powerful relationships they have with one another. Subjectivity through the split-second slices of reality recorded by the camera lens revealed much about the youth’s priorities and relationship to their friends and the world around them. Once printed, the photographs were placed in a binder that passed through the hands of the forty or more youth who walk through the doors of Planet Youth on any given day. First they named everyone they saw, then flipped through and named everyone again. Then they named the photographer of each picture, being sure to announce which photos they had themselves taken. They made sure to show others the pictures they especially liked, walking around the center to share with their friends the pictures they particularly enjoyed. Entering the field school, I had hoped to use photography as a way to visualize the spaces of this small town from the youth’s perspectives, but the youth transformed the project into a collective group self-portrait. The process of photography revealed what the youth saw as photographable. The photographs they created were intimate portraits and street photography that captured expressions, body language, and the emotions of their shared lived experiences. The process of photo-elicitation helped reveal why the youth focused on images of one another based on their value systems. Conversations during our photography field trips revealed that the youth did not feel welcomed in the public spaces in town, and they believed older people did not like them because of their First Nations identities. “People call us a waste of space,” one young man told me as we walked by the mall where I had witnessed a group of teens being shooed away the day before. He and other youth then countered these narratives and experiences with stories of how their friends at the teen center supported them during times of emotional upheaval. Thus the photographs and the process of talking pictures inspired conversations about who and what was important to the youth. Most answers to the questions I asked as we flipped through pages of pictures back at the teen center related to how accurately the images captured the personalities of their friends. For example, one girl responded, “Cause it looks like us. What we do on a regular day when it’s nice out.” Others mentioned how old or how young someone looked in
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a photograph, but most answers related the subject of the photograph to the identity of who was pictured. By talking about the person in the photograph, the youth revealed how intimately they knew one another. Youth also projected emotions and experience onto the photographs. Without the photos, the youth may not have been willing or able to communicate certain ideas verbally. However, by creating captions for the photographs they were able to express many of their ideas. This was not always an easy process, especially when the youth were just being introduced to idea of using photographs as ways to communicate. When I first asked what we should title the photographs the only answers I received were shrugs and, repeatedly, “I don’t know.” When I steered the conversation back to comparing the image with the subject in real life, youth began to grasp the concept, and within minutes an energized group brainstorming session began. Often several youth who were not involved in the initial production of a photograph would think of captions and write them down next to the image. Later the teenagers would decide on a title as a group. Through this process the photographs became a representation of more than simply the person photographed. One picture of three silhouetted boys walking through a tunnel was titled “Walk Beside Me,” based on a quote from Albert Camus: “Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow, don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” The girl who thought of the caption described the photograph as both solitary and hopeful and said this was one her favorite quotes. To her, the image communicated the idea of friendship and needing support to find your path. She expressed how important friends were when life seemed difficult. Brainstorming the title of two close-up portraits that would be framed together went through several stages. The haunted eyes of the girls caused one to ask what they might be thinking about. Through their caption suggestions, the youth provided their answers to what these two girls were thinking about. Suggestions included “Life” and “A smile on the Outside, A Frown on the Inside.” The youth related these expressions to the lived experience of those photographed, and expressed a shared experience of deep sadness often relating to foster care, alcohol abuse, and the struggle of simply being First Nations. Finally “Just Thinking” was agreed on as the appropriate title for these images, as the youth decided this title caused more reflection on these issues.
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fig. 3. “Walk Beside Me.” Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Wolowic.
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By looking through several photographs new meanings were communicated by the youth through the project. The meaning formed by the titling process also connected different photographs to each other. The “Just Thinking” portraits take on expanded meaning when placed side by side with a photo titled “In the End,” a perilous yet inspiring image of one young man, lost in his iPod, teetering on a railing over the ocean with his face in shadow. Through the process of naming the photographs and finding which ones stood out in the minds of the youth transformed them from individual moments in time to representations of their subjectivity and experience. Through photography and elicitations, the teenagers self-produced their representations and became co-intellectuals in analyzing the meanings of the images. I call the project a group self-portrait because of the collective nature of how the images were created and interpreted. As a project, it was not only a collaboration between myself, the center, and the youth, but the representations created are the result of a coauthorship among the forty teenagers themselves.
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fig. 4. “Just Thinking.” Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Wolowic.
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Through this process of placing cameras in their hands, watching their interactions, looking over the images, and naming and discussing a select few of the photographs, the act of photography translated these youth’s lives into a visual representation. For these youth, the images are metaphors for the structures that influence their lives and their response to these experiences. The photo-elicitation process captured the intimacy and closeness of this group of teenagers, who actively referred to one another as a “Street Family.” For many Planet Youth and Street Spirit members these are pictures of their “family,” their support network, and the people to whom they are most loyal. They describe the Street Family as the people they go to when they need to talk to someone. The intimacy within their photography is only possible because of their close friendships and reflects these tight bonds. These bonds allow their photographs to capture the expressions of life and the range of emotions these youth experience on a day-to-day basis far better than any outside photographer could do. Another common theme for the youth was that of feeling invisible. They were often drawn toward pictures of shadows and faceless images that represented this experience. One staff member said the photoMenzies and Butler: Collaborative Service Learning • 221
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fig. 5. “In the End.” Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Wolowic.
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graphs ask people to find out who these youth really are while providing a window to look through. But the staff who already know these youth were amazed at how well the photographs captured unique personalities. “I know every one of the kids in there. These are them,” one staff member exclaimed as she flipped to the book of photographs. Photo-elicitations translated the youth’s day-to-day experience into research themes. The photography project revealed the Street Family: the fictive kinship network the youth created as a way to find a sense of stability when much of their life was unstable. They actively refer to one another as mom, dad, niece, nephew, aunt, and uncle on a regular basis and have mapped their “Street Family Tree.” Their photographs reflect a sense of family, and their images reveal, as one youth described it, “the people we go to when we want to talk to somebody.” For the youth, the project allowed them to choose how they wanted to be represented. They chose who, when, and where to photograph and were able discuss how the photographs represented themselves. However this was not enough, as the youth repeatedly expressed a desire to counter the negative stereotypes held by some adults in the wider community. The youth and the teen center expressed a need to apply the anthropology. The youth’s photographs captured a portion of their
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relationships to one another and in reflection toward their relationships to the larger community. Looking at the pictures via a public display would engage the youth’s agency within their community. After seeing the responses to the initial photographs and their potential as a way to communicate with the larger community, we were able to find an empty storefront on the main street of town to display twenty-two of the photographs. The challenge became narrowing down the seventeen hundred photographs the teens had taken to so few. The selected photos were enlarged, framed, and then put on display for the larger community of Prince Rupert. My field school project gave back to communities through the concrete exchange of material in the forms of photographs and the exchange of ideas across the community. The photographs were a way to engage the public, and displaying the photos on the main street allowed a marginalized group of teenagers to have a place in the center of town for a time. The photos have become a means to raise funds for the youth programs. Planet Youth, Street Spirits, and their parent organization, the Friendship House Association of Prince Rupert, retain control over these images and use them in grant applications and for fundraising. When given a short amount of time, how best can we fulfill our obligations to the needs of research and to those whose perspectives we are researching? The medium of photography via a methodology of photo-elicitation is a powerful mechanism for revealing future research themes as well as establishing the trusting relationships needed for future research. It was extremely important as part of the field school, and for my own practice, to show the community my commitment to their interests by prioritizing the display of the photography project before I left as a way of publicly giving back to the teen center and the youth who hosted my project. As Menzies notes in the documentary film Returning to Gitxaal-a (2005), unless the act of returning research data and projects is done publicly, it is not really done at all. By completing, publicly displaying, and then publicly presenting the photography project in Prince Rupert and Gitxaal-a our objective was to put our words into action—to show our commitment to community-based collaborative research.
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Reflection 5: Racial and Gender Politics in Collaborative Service Learning oralia gómez-ramírez
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My field school project was designed to determine the extent of social service programs available in Prince Rupert for aboriginal people and to assess their accessibility, particularly for urban aboriginal women. I was starting my research with an interview of a non-aboriginal man who headed up one of the key service providing organizations in Prince Rupert. My interview was to focus on understanding the main characteristics of the programs carried out by the organization he led: when, where, and how often the programs took place; who ran them; who made most use of them. This latter aspect was of particular importance to my research project. My interview with the head of the organization was going well. He willingly answered my questions and appeared genuinely receptive to my research project. He explained in detail what programs were offered by his organization and what each of them was about. After each explanation of a particular program I made a point of asking him who had access to the program; in other words, if he could tell me what proportion of the attendees were men and women and what their ethnicities and/or racial affiliations were. His organization did not formally collect this kind of data. At first he attempted to provide me with some estimates. He seemed to tolerate my questions until finally he paused and pointedly told me the following:
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I don’t keep records like that [those distinguishing between aboriginal and non-aboriginal users of programs] because there is no distinction. I don’t look upon distinction. We don’t differentiate between people. People are people, whether you are white, whether you are black, whether you are brown, yellow . . . we are all people. And when we start to bring in these distinctions, we start separating people. And that’s not the way it should be. They are not meant to be separated; they are meant to be together, unified, so I don’t bring in distinctions. I don’t see any aboriginal; I don’t see any white, any . . . I see them as persons; I see people.
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We are all people. He was right. Yet as a woman of color I think that despite the unquestionable truth of his assertion about a general human sameness, socially and politically speaking we “are” not all the same. My reflections arise out of this encounter. I draw on McIntosh’s (1990) and Frankenberg’s (1993) arguments about employing antioppression feminist frameworks to interpret my ethnographic field school experience under a social justice lens. I write from the standpoint of an able-bodied, non-native English speaker, and woman of color, who at the time of writing is neither Canadian citizen nor permanent resident but who, unlike other transmigrants, enjoys several of the prerogatives of being affiliated with a post-secondary institution such as the University of British Columbia (K. Beck 2006; Haque and Gray 2006). I reflect on those lessons arising from being confronted by the challenges of doing anthropological research in a still-racist and sexist context (Varcoe 2006). In doing so I briefly discuss what I regard as three promising decolonizing and anti-oppressive possibilities available to anthropology students in service learning field schools. Ultimately, I suggest that a collaborative anthropology of structurally marginalized communities should contribute to revealing the roots and workings of social oppression in its many intricate and specific forms. Participating in this collaborative field school strengthened my conviction that anthropologists should continue to learn and be committed to recognizing, challenging, and opposing prevailing systemic inequalities and all forms of discrimination still affecting the members of those communities. In my field school report I argued that service programming targeted at aboriginal women’s needs required ethnic- and gender-visible reformulation if their intention was to address effectively the needs of indigenous peoples systemically marginalized from the larger social and community prerogatives since colonization. Despite a variety of services offered in the city of Prince Rupert, adequate attention to the needs and specific historic, social, and economic circumstances of aboriginal peoples was rarely encountered. Yet aboriginal peoples were the major users of social services in town. This struck me as yet one more expression of the resilient history of systemic marginalization, exclusion, and alienation of First Nations peoples from the benefits of the Canadian nation-state. Moreover, looking at the existing services in gendered terms, I found that there were not enough available programs for ab-
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original women, and that the few programs available to them catered merely to pregnant women, women with children, or female victims of abuse and violence. I encountered two disquieting “power-evasive” strategies during my field school research. First, while aboriginal men and women were primary users of services in town, the non-aboriginal people typically in charge of service programming and delivery were reluctant to address the ways in which ethnic and racial identities—and, perhaps more important, the history of these ethnic and racial identities under colonial and neocolonial rule—shaped both First Nations’ and non-aboriginal people’s contemporary realities in particular ways. And second, even though aboriginal women’s needs were consistently present, men’s experiences seemed to have a higher profile and visibility in service programming and delivery. In revealing this systemic reluctance to acknowledge issues of structural gender inequality, my report emphasized that specific problems faced by women had not yet been solved. Consequently, I argued for making service programming both ethnicand gender-distinct. I claimed that more research was needed concerning the specific racial and gender workings of poverty—and the services intended to address it. Likewise, a gender-blind perspective was not necessarily a baseline for equal gender inclusion and participation. I closed by asking how, if not by making gender and race visible, we would achieve an equal society in which gender and racial categories were no longer necessary. Prior to and during the course of the field school, we read widely on First Nations issues in the region and in Canada more broadly. Most researchers conducting work on this subject have come to understand that the contemporary situation of aboriginal peoples is produced and shaped by the history of dispossession and alienation from the natural resources and lands that originally belonged to them (Barsh 1994; McDonald 1994; Menzies 2004b [1988]). As I write this, and given that our field school projects were going to examine to a greater or lesser extent topics involving First Nations, I realize it should not have come as a surprise to encounter gender- and color-blind understandings of the social services situation for First Nations peoples, and in particular First Nations women in Prince Rupert. I am not suggesting that field school participants should have expected to find racist or sexist statements and attitudes in the field, for one of anthropology’s cen-
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tral tenets is to be informed enough to ask appropriate questions and conduct sensible research but also flexible enough to let the field data guide the conclusions. Instead, what I am saying is that I should have anticipated how I would negotiate perspectives that rendered gender and race invisible, and how I would manage to situate them within the broader context of colonialism while still being sympathetic to the research participants who generously accepted to be interviewed for my field school project. However, the resistance to address issues of race- and genderbased discrimination, mostly among non-aboriginal service providers, caught me somewhat off guard. Following Ruth Frankenberg’s (1993) insights on the social construction of whiteness and privilege, I have come to understand these silences and omissions as “power-evasive” strategies. Even more painful than dealing with the daily materializations and effects of racism and other forms of inequality, perhaps, is finding out to what extent many people are reluctant to consider acknowledging the “subtle” ways in which these inequalities continue to be maintained. Peggy McIntosh (1990) sets out a powerful critique against unearned white and male privilege. Drawing on insights gained as both a feminist and a white person herself, McIntosh argues that in the same way as there is a generalized male unwillingness to acknowledge that in this society men are still overprivileged, white people also tend to deny the advantages they gain as a result of the disadvantages of people of color. McIntosh argues that by resorting to these power-evasive strategies, power dynamics behind them are neither lessened nor ended. Rather, the power dynamics are denied and, in consequence, protected. In fact, the structures of inequalities still play against First Nations people in Canada. First Nations issues have historically been overlooked in social policy frameworks (see Barsh 1994; Clarke 1998; McDonald 1994; Menzies 2004b [1988]; Ouellette 2002). A disproportionately high number of aboriginal people are in prison, and for many of them their major source of income comes from government transmission. The racial and gender dynamics I encountered at play in this city showed me that systemic discrimination against First Nations peoples, and in particular against First Nations women, continues to exist. However, Menzies explains, “popular explanations deny the overpowering dominance of European traditions and economic processes that
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were forced upon Aboriginal peoples [overlooking the] important and powerful set of explanations [that] roots social inequality in the historical and cultural phenomena of colonialism” (2004b [1988]: 229). While I feel strong respect for every person who kindly agreed to give me an interview during the field school, being confronted with color-blind responses hurt me. It hurt me partly because I am a woman of color in Canada and know that race does continue to matter, and racial discrimination does continue to exist. Moreover, it made me feel uneasy because, as anti-racist scholars have noted, power-evasive understandings of the world are neither innocent nor inoffensive. Instead, they are highly productive strategies and ideologies that prevent us from challenging the status quo and, in the end, implicate our complicity in leaving systemic structures of inequality intact. Therefore, power evasion in the form of color-blindness impedes racially privileged groups from interrogating their unearned advantages (McIntosh 1990). As George J. Sefa Dei has put it, “in taking the position of racialized neutrality—a position from which a person of dominance or privilege may deny the existence, salience and real-world consequences of race—society is distracted from social justice concerns and its complicity in perpetuating racism” (Dei 2006: 16). Similarly, in analyzing the ways in which whiteness was constructed among a group of women in the United States, Frankenberg (1993) found that one of the power-evasiveness strategies they made use of was precisely their inability to see race (socially understood) and to recognize how race continued to shape unequal dynamics of power, discrimination, and privilege. In other words, under a feminist anti-oppression and social justice lens, ignoring the realities of race and gender today can be seen in a strict sense as a productive strategy—one used to protect privilege, thereby maintaining prevalent inequalities. The field story with which I started this reflection has stayed with me as a lasting memory of the field school. The man I interviewed seemed genuinely interested in my project. Yet, when confronted with my questions on the racialization of services, he appeared to suggest that I was in fact creating those same social disparities his organizations’ programs were supposedly designed to address. This suggestion made me feel uncomfortable and disconcerted. Behind his well-intentioned color-blind statement about the fundamental humanness of every human being lay, nonetheless, a particular approach toward social and
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economic inequalities with which I did not agree. Two competing ways of conceptualizing social inequalities were in that very moment at play. Racism from my interviewee’s point of view seemed to consist of isolated, sporadic acts of insensitive individuals. On the other hand, racism and discrimination are recognized as systemic and structural; they give unearned privilege and dominance to some groups at the expense of others. Yet, more than an individual response to a structural problem, the response from the participant in my study about my inquiries about race and gender was also a structurally framed reply. In today’s world, many well-meaning people may concede that racial inequalities still exist, but they may at the same time suggest that the best way to combat racism is by ignoring the shocking realities of race today. Consequently, some social service participants’ inability to “see” race- and gender-based forms of exclusion in Prince Rupert posed an interesting set of challenges that I had to learn to negotiate. For instance, how would I manage to write about these findings both prudently and compassionately in my final report? On the day of the field school public presentations, how would I argue effectively that despite a variety of services offered in Prince Rupert, attention to the needs and specific historic, social, and economic conditions of First Nations peoples was rarely encountered? Moreover, how would I express that First Nations men and women were primary users of services in town, yet services and programs were not sensitive to how their indigenous identity shaped their realities in particular ways? As a novice anthropologist in Canada I felt at a crossroads. On one hand, I was a field school participant seeking to learn how to do sound field research on First Nations issues, in Canada, and in a language other than my own. Our mentors had insisted throughout the development of our field school projects that our role as researchers was to provide an informed opinion about the topics assigned to us. My project results were unnerving; yet I was neither able to ignore the findings nor inclined to make them sound less appalling. On the other hand, I was simply a field school participant, a foreign woman of color, and thus felt truly grateful for having found people amenable to providing interviews and sharing their experiences and expertise with me. Even though I did not always find sensitivity toward indigenous, racial, and gender issues, I could not help but feel genuine interest in the programs and admiration for the social service work they do.
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In spite of—and perhaps because of—this personal and professional dilemma, the aspect I remember most clearly from the field school research experience is the final presentation of the preliminary findings. I worked on an eight-page preliminary report for about four or five full days. I felt distressed by my research findings. I was going to talk about discrimination—a topic that people do not often like talking about, as it disrupts “comfortable complacencies” (Aveling 2002: 119). I called and invited every person I had spoken with to attend the presentation. I wished all of the aboriginal men and women I had talked to would come. In the same way, I hoped that all of the non-aboriginal service providers I had met would make it to the public presentations. Yet I feared their criticism for raising critical concerns as a foreigner. In the face of these fears this was also my most rewarding experience during the field school. When the day of the community presentations in Prince Rupert came, many of the men and women I had interviewed showed up. There were sandwiches, cookies, and coffee, and I invited the people I knew to help themselves to some food. I was thrilled so many of them had made it, but I was still nervous about what they would say about my report. When I finished my presentation, one of the non-aboriginal female service providers raised her hand and asked what they could do to improve. She did not react with denial or complacency. On the contrary, she seemed truly interested in designing and offering social services that were sensitive to local gender and racial needs. Of course, I was humbled by her response. Ultimately, my report and presentation were, as Nichols and Iris argue, “the best thing [to] give back to the . . . host community” (2004: 120). This experience provided me with the conviction that presenting the results publicly before leaving the field is an excellent way anthropologists can go about doing collaborative research committed to social justice and anti-oppression (see also Lamphere 2004). No matter how daunting this experience may seem, this is a terrific opportunity to challenge the research tradition of extracting materials from the communities without providing anything in return (Menzies 2001). Additionally, this can be a suitable occasion to bounce ideas and interpretations off people concerned, to receive feedback, and to take note of participants’ expectations about our final reports. Taking part in this service learning field school was a meaningful and valuable experience to me both as a student participant and as a femi-
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nist anthropologist. As a student participant, I surely learned important field research skills. This was the first time I conducted field research in Canada and in a language other than my own. So engaging in a handson research experience required understanding how I personally work as a researcher when out of my comfort zone. The challenges involved establishing connections, making phone calls, setting up and preparing interviews, introducing research, and presenting written consent forms to potential participants (something I had not had to do before) as well as conducting interviews. Interviewing was equally self-testing, both with service providers and with aboriginal women. In addition to the importance of asking meaningful questions, I needed to feel at ease conducting interviews in English, and this was not always a given. I believe some difficulties arose from my voice volume and accent, and sometimes I discovered myself having to translate my English into English, which I found just as amusing as disturbing. But by the end of the field school experience, I felt more at ease with interviewing and more confident about seeking guidance and validation of the information and reporting preliminary findings back to the community. From identifying and exploring the kind of work conducted in the different areas of anthropology, to gaining insights into one’s own research interests and capabilities, to acquiring hands-on research experience potentially useful as students enter into the labor force (Iris 2004; Nichols and Iris 2004), the positive benefits and outcomes of field school programs have been counted as many. I can confidently say that I benefited in all these ways from practicing field methods in this setting. But the teachings did not end there. As an anti-racist feminist anthropologist, I also learned how important it is to place research findings within the proper broader context. This might seem a straightforward lesson. Yet the dilemma I faced when presenting downbeat results to the same people with whom I had worked confronted me with the need to reconsider this task in new ways. To begin with, I had to ponder carefully the potential implications of what I would write and what I would say during the presentations. Moreover, I had to anticipate (or at least think hard about) the ways in which people would read and interpret my report findings. At some point, I doubted whether I had the right even to suggest that some of the social service programs and their delivery systems were premised upon and feed back into the long history of colonialism. Was I getting it right? Was I reading too much into
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incidents and findings similar to the opening one? The challenge was to present the results but, at the same time, not to contribute to further deepening the differences and conflicting positions. Gender and racial imbalances were there before the field school took place. However, arguing for gender- and race-distinct social service programs also ran the risk of being misinterpreted. In seeking to be gender and culturally sensitive, essentialized understandings of race or gender could be reinforced. My intention was neither to generate nor emphasize persistent differences. Instead I sought to point out existing gender and racial politics to advance equality. In order to do this successfully, providing context was essential. This was the most significant analytical and writing lesson I did learn during the field school. I am pleased I did. I am also glad the people—for example, the lady who politely asked me a question during the public presentations—were receptive to the findings. Ultimately the purpose was to construct, not to destroy. I do hope my final report was an item of value both to Gitxaal-a Nation and to the people involved in the design and implementation of social services in Prince Rupert. After all, this collaborative field school had set out to produce mutually beneficial research, where not only would students gain and put into practice research skills but where community members would also benefit from the research results (McDonald 2004; Menzies 2004a). I learned three important decolonizing and anti-oppression tactics that can be put into practice to oppose to the effects and consequences of power-evasive understandings of the world. The first consists of examining the “productive functions of power” (Dei 2006) using a racial lens. Anthropological training provides us with the necessary skills to do this: we look at the different cultural and social expressions and put them in context, we pay attention to the specific histories of the communities, and we are trained to challenge simplistic answers given to complex questions. I want to suggest that engaged anthropologists need to debunk the engrained ideas sustaining the belief that “treating everybody the same” is anti-racist work. The myth of meritocracy behind this approach, where supposedly everybody counts on the same structural support to make it in society, as Dei explains, “complicate[s] racism by masking its real material and political effects and consequences” (2006: 26). In Colleen Varcoe’s words, a “level playing field” (2006: 535) overlooks the historical impact of colonization, immigra-
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tion, and racism. Thus, color- and ethnic-blind perspectives grounded on the myth of meritocracy and oblivious to the legacies of colonialism have to be challenged. I firmly believe we can and should try to do so. As a feminist, the second tactic I learned is to interrogate power using a gender lens. Power shapes men’s and women’s experiences differently (often unequally), and we cannot be insensible to the ways in which gender differences and/or similarities play out in each context. Feminist thought has become increasingly sophisticated in response to the complexities of men and women’s experiences and situations. We cannot assume that women’s position and status is universal or constant across time and space. In my view, a committed anthropology has to take gender affinities and/or dissimilarities seriously into account. Having gender-disaggregated research findings allows us to confront better the gender-based inequalities that in many cases still exist. Finally, the third decolonizing and anti-oppression tactic consists of turning the gaze inward. We must investigate our own location within (and perhaps our complicity with) the wider functions of power and how this may affect the ways we establish research partnerships with indigenous and marginalized peoples. What difference does it make, for instance, being a student from a post-secondary institution? My own lived experience as a woman of color who has faced some of the expressions of systemic gender, racial, and linguistic-based discrimination, is certainly behind my strong passion to unravel and dismantle the bases in which they are founded. Therefore, I think it is essential always to make an explicit commitment to scrutinizing our social positioning as researchers within the broader gender and racial dynamics within which we conduct our research. I echo Charles Menzies when he argues that the only possible way there is still space to do anthropological research among indigenous and other structurally marginalized peoples consists in acknowledging power imbalances involved in knowledge production and in directing research efforts toward participation, respectful research, and social change. If research with, for, and about indigenous peoples is to take place, “such research will only make a meaningful contribution if researchers change their approach so that it becomes part of a process of decolonization” (Menzies 2001: 21). Supporting decolonizing efforts also includes becoming “more effective anti-discriminatory practitioners” ourselves (Aveling 2002: 122), and committing our service learn-
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ing or collaborative experiences to the production of research with clear anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-oppressive intent. The social service provider who prompted this reflective piece was clearly trying to teach me a lesson: Why make this an issue of race? I definitely learned one: in order to challenge and dismantle racism and sexism we must resist power-evasive understandings of the world. Contemporary racism and sexism against First Nations often come under the guise of color-blind and gender-blind ideologies, which are presented as “non-racist” and “non-sexist.” We need to make public what has been kept silent—even as we participate in service learning field schools.
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First of all I want to thank our creator for this day, to thank our creator for each and every one of you being here and for the special uniqueness that you bring to this group. I also want to thank each and every one of the presenters who provided useful insight for Gitxaal-a—insights that we use on a day-to-day basis. Through your papers and your deliberations you had with our community you help us with bringing back part of our own cultural ways. I’m a practitioner. I come with leadership for our community, not only as a former elected chief councilor but also on the hereditary side of our leadership, and I want to provide some comments in terms of your papers and your work. Our hereditary process is a collaborative process. I do not know if you recognize the collaborative nature of the hereditary processes we have practiced throughout the generations and the years. Our hereditary ways are a process of collaborating with our own people. Our people would argue that there is no better collaboration than through the hereditary process, which includes everyone: one belongs to a house, one belongs to a clan, one belongs to a crest—which does include the butterflies. I really appreciate the work that Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler have been involved in. They have provided a path for everyone else coming forward who wants to work with Gitxaal-a. They can also attest
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that it is not an easy process in terms of breaking the ice and being able to come into the community, to start doing some work. One of the things that Charles knows is that when the community decides not to respond, they can decide not to respond. We were in that situation as chief and council. We had unilaterally decided that we were going to start a project at one point. We then called Charles and Caroline and said here is what we want to do. However, we had not discussed it with the community. The community elders basically said “No. There’s no way. There’s no way you’re going to be able to talk about that.” So needless to say, months of work and funding literally went by the wayside because we had not set up our own process the right way; in the collaborative way. From our hereditary system we have a process that is in place that is called our ayaawx. Our ayaawx are the laws that we provide to our people. These laws are passed down through our adawx. Our adawx are the stories that we use to pass on all of our relevant information to the next person in line of inheritance. I have a responsibility to my nephews and my nieces. I pass it down through what we call gugwilx’ya’ansk. Gugwilx’ya’ansk is being able to have those people who are next in line able to pick it up, so that they are also able to pass it down to their nephews and their nieces. I say nephews because for my wife and my children I have very little responsibility. This may seem a little bit awkward in today’s society. But my uncle and my aunts have more responsibility for my wife and children than do I. The house that they belong to is of the raven clan. I am of the wolf clan. My uncle and aunts have more responsibility to my children than I do, and they have to follow through the process that has been passed down from our traditions. There is a process in place in our hereditary system that strongly includes the collaborative process. From centuries ago our people have taught us to be collaborative through our hereditary system. These are the kinds of laws that have been passed down to us. Much of this cultural work takes place in our feasts. A lot of our feasts have gone on for days and weeks if need be so that our people could talk about the process. Collaboration is neither an easy process nor a quick process. It is very time-consuming. One of the preceding reflections talks about “getting it right.” We too have to get it right in our community processes. Otherwise we see
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the exact same thing happen that we experienced through the elected council where we had decided on taking a path of action without following our own process of collaboration. Our community came forward and said, “That’s not right. You’re going to do it our way; the right way.” So I really appreciate that the students coming to Gitxaal-a follow the process that was put forward. This shows that you honor our process, our hereditary and collaborative process. You respect the need for your work to come back to Gitxaal-a. I thank Charles and Caroline for being able to make this research a safe and respectful arena for everybody. I want to mention, for example, the holistic respect that was shown in regard to the diabetes project. From our perspective we cannot look at one issue without looking at the overall picture. Our diet is tied to the health of our territory. Consider the salmon that have been depleted or our own abalone. We are not only concerned with how to replenish the salmon or the abalone. We are concerned to leave our world in a better position than we found it. If our territory thrives, so will our health and well-being. These are not separate things. It is important for us to connect our values with our real social needs and hopes today. Yet, as First Nations, we go through a real struggle in terms of this collaborative process. On the one hand our younger people are saying, “We want jobs, we want employment.” We have 80 percent unemployment in our community. We have a real need for employment opportunities. But on the other hand our elders and hereditary leaders say, “Look at our values, make sure that sustainability is there, that the environment is number one, is taken care of.” Our hereditary leaders do not want development just for a few bucks. In terms of leadership we are caught in the middle. How does one lead people down this path when there are very few resources to begin with? We are expected to develop some sort of economy out of this. We are expected to negotiate with the provincial and federal governments. We take all of these concerns on the leadership’s table and say let’s be collaborative, let’s make informed decisions together. Research projects and field schools like this set an example from which business and government could learn. The butterflies—people from outside—are now part of our world. The first contact between butterflies and First Nations actually hap-
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pened in our area. Our old people saw those big ships coming. At first they thought it was a monster actually coming over. But then they saw these are new people from far away. Some of the names that we carry today in Gitxaal-a come from those adawx, from those stories. Our stories date way back, even beyond that moment of contact, to the great floods of ancient times. The inclusion of the butterfly (really the inclusion of the rest of the world) into the process of collaboration is critical to us. It is part of our history. It is also part of our future. Every day as our world turns we are sharing the same air, we are sharing the same waters, we are sharing this whole small little earth that we have together. We have to find ways and means to be able to work together to be able to keep it going. Collaboration is important. To move forward together we need to be open to working together. And it is very time-consuming to make sure that all the people are working together. Dmsayt N’Moomdm. This is a term that describes working together. Charles and Caroline have used this to describe their recent research with Gitxaal-a. We appreciate it when our Sm’algyax language is used because it brings our people into the circle of learning. The field school process has also been a learning experience for us. It helps us put back into place what the history of government laws has broken apart. The laws stripped us of our language and our cultural ways. We were not allowed to practice our feasting. Today, when these student researchers come into our community and talk about collaboration (and we feel that we have a very strong collaborative community), it honors our past and reaffirms our desire to grow, to expand, and to develop further. In conclusion, then, I want to go back and thank Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler for the decade of work that they have done within our community, for the relationships they have built, and for having an open communication process. We need to be able to cherish this so that we can continue to move forward and continue to collaborate in a respectful way that recognizes each other’s culture. To return to the butterfly: the butterfly in the middle of the school logo does not mean to diminish our own structure. Rather, it shows we develop an inclusiveness of all people. So I encourage you to continue to collaborate. It is a win-win. It is a win for those doing the re-
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search. It’s a win for the community. It’s a win for the individuals who are asked to open up and share their information. I thank you all for your presentations and reflections upon your experience. I value them and I know that our community does as well. • • • • • charles r. menzies is a member of Gitxaal-a Nation and is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. caroline f. butler is an environmental anthropologist whose research has fo-
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cused on indigenous resource management, commercial fisheries, and environmental knowledge. She lives in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, where she works for Gitxaal-a Environmental Monitoring, facilitating heritage and land use research and planning for the Gitxaal-a Nation. She is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia.
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solen roth is a Franco-Ontarian whose parents have roots in Brittany and Alsace, France. She was born and grew up in Ottawa until she moved as a teenager to the village of Méaudre, in the French Alps. She holds a BA in sociology from the Université Pierre Mendes–France in Grenoble and holds an MA in anthropology from l’Université Louis Lumière in Lyon. In 2006 she moved to Vancouver to pursue a PhD in anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She is currently writing her dissertation about the political economy of the Native Northwest Coast giftware industry. This phase of her doctoral program is supported by a graduate student fellowship from the MCRI-SSHRC project Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH).
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natalie j. k. baloy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the
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University of British Columbia. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in Vancouver and focuses her research on local issues. She currently studies non-Aboriginal people’s understandings of aboriginality and ideologies of belonging in (post)colonial Vancouver.
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lumbia was on medical anthropology and First Nations issues in Canada. She completed her thesis, Diabetes in Gitxaal-a: Colonization, Assimilation, and Economic Change, in 2007. She now works as an interpretive writer for AldrichPears Associates, an interpretive planning and exhibit design firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, and applies her anthropological training to projects around the world.
jennifer wolowic is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. She received her master’s degree in anthropology from the same university and has bachelor’s degrees in film production and anthropology from San Francisco State University. She has twice received the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Visual Anthropology Award for Best Student Work. Her current research explores the affective qualities of social networks among First Nations youth and how the process of producing visual media influences interpersonal connections and the circulation of representations. 238 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
oralia gómez-ramírez is a PhD candidate in anthropology, Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar, and Liu Scholar at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral research examines trans politics and sex work in Mexico, specifically looking at transgender people’s most recent efforts to obtain legal, labor, health, and social rights.
nees ma’outa (clifford white) is a hereditary leader of the Laxgibou, Gitxaal-a, former Chief Councilor Gitxaal-a Nation, and a consultant to First Nations and governments on indigenous issues.
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Asch, Timothy, John Marshall, and Peter Spier. 1973. “Ethnographic Film: Structure and Function.” Annual Review of Anthropology 2: 179–87. Anderson, Jane E. 2009. Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Aveling, Nado. 2002. “Student Teachers’ Resistance to Exploring Racism: Reflections on ‘Doing’ Border Pedagogy.” Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 30 (2): 119–30. Battiste, Marie. 2000. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver: UBC Press. Barsh, Russel Lawrence. 1994. “Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples: Social Integration or Disintegration?” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 14 (1): 1–46. Beck, Kumari V. 2006. “Being International: Learning in a Foreign University.” In The Poetics of Anti-Racism, ed. N. Amin and G. J. S. Dei, 85–106. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Beck, Sam. 2006. “Community Service-Learning: A Model for Teaching and Activism.” North American Dialogue 9 (1): 1–7. Bell, Catherine, and Robert K. Paterson. 2009. Protection of First Nations Cultural Heritage: Laws, Policy, and Reform. Vancouver: UBC Press. Boler, Megan. 1997. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies 11 (2): 253–73. Christensen, P. H. 2004. “Children’s Participation in Ethnographic Research: Issues of Power and Representation.” Children and Society 18: 165–76. Clarke, George Elliot. 1998. “White Like Canada.” Transition 73: 98–109. Collier, John. 1967. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Colligan, Sumi. 2001. “Building a ‘Multi-Sited Imaginary’: Case Studies in Service Learning from the Berkshires and Beyond.” Anthropology of Work Review 22 (2): 14–18. Dei, George J. Sefa. 2006. “Introduction—Language, Race and Anti-Racism: Making Important Connections.” In The Poetics of Anti-Racism, ed. N. Amin and G. J. S. Dei, 14–30. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Deloria, Vine Jr. 2004. “Marginal and Submarginal.” In Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, ed. Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Angela Cavendish Wilson, 16–30. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Deur, Douglas, and Nancy J. Turner, eds. 2005. Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Garcia, Maria Elena. 2000. “Ethnographic Responsibility and the Anthropological Endeavor: Beyond Identity Discourse.” Anthropological Quarterly 73 (2): 89–101. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gottesfeld, Leslie Main. 1999. “Aboriginal Burning for Vegetation Management in Northwest British Columbia.” In Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Robert Boyd, 238–54. Corvallis: Oregon State University. Hale, Charles R. 2007. “In Praise of Reckless Minds: Making a Case for Activist Anthropology.” In Anthropology Put to Work, ed. Les Field and Richard Fox, 103–28. Oxford: Berg. Hansen, Karen Tranberg. 2004. “The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 369–92. Haque, Eve, and Ellen Gray. 2006. “Putting Them in Their Place: Language Policies and Newcomers to Canada.” In The Poetics of Anti-Racism, ed. N. Amin and G. J. S. Dei, 73–84. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Ignas, Veronica. 2004. “Opening Doors to the Future: Applying Local Knowledge in Curriculum Development. Canadian Journal of Native Education 28 (1–2): 49–60. Iris, Madelyn. 2004. “Fulfilling Community Needs through Research and Service: The Northwestern University Ethnographic Field School Experience.” NAPA Bulletin 22: 55–71. Jackson, Michael. 2007. “Intersubjective Ambiguities.” Medische Anthropologie 19 (1): 147–61. Jensen, Robert. 2005. The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege. San Francisco: City Lights Books. La Salle, Marina J. 2010. Forum: “Community Collaboration and Other Good Intentions.” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 6 (3): 401–22. Laing, R. D. 1983. Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books. Lamphere, Louise. 2004. “The Convergence of Applied, Practicing, and Public Anthropology in the 21st Century.” Human Organization 63 (4): 431–43. Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2001. “From ‘Reading over the Shoulders of Natives’ to ‘Reading Alongside Natives,’ Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research 57 (2): 137–49. ———. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lather, Patti. 1991. Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern. New York: Routledge. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1978 [1955]. Tristes Tropiques. Original in French, trans. John and Doreen Weightman 1973. New York: Atheneum. Lewis, John (Wuyee Wi Medeek). 2004. “Forests for the Future: The View from Gitxaal-a.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 27 (3): 8–14. Mandell, Nancy. 1991. “The Least Adult Role When Studying Children.” In Studying the Social Worlds of Children, ed. F. Waksler, 38–59. London: Falmer Press. McDonald, James. 1994. “Social Change and the Creation of Underdevelopment: A Northwest Coast Case.” American Ethnologist 21 (1): 152–75. McIntosh, Peggy. 1990. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Independent School (Winter): 31–36. Mead, Margaret. 1975. “Visual Anthropology in a Disciple of Words.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 3–12. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Menzies, Charles R. 2001. “Reflections on Research with, for, and among Indigenous Peoples.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 25 (1): 19–36. ———. 2004a. “Putting Words into Action: Negotiating Collaborative Research in Gitxaal-a.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 27 (3): 15–32. ———. 2004b [1988]. “First Nations, Inequality, and the Legacy of Colonialism.” In Social Inequality in Canada: Patterns, Problems, and Policies, 4th edition, ed. J. Curtis, E. Grabb, and N. Guppy, 295–303. Toronto: Prentice-Hall. ———. 2011. “Ethnographic Fidelity: A Manifesto for Ethnographic Film.” Talk presented at The Sounds of Conversation, Satellite Gallery, Vancouver, BC, January 19, 2011. Menzies, Charles R., and Caroline Butler. 2001. “Working in the Woods: Tsimshian Resource Workers and the Forest Industry of BC.” American Indian Quarterly 25 (3): 409–30. ———. 2007. “Returning to Selective Fishing through Indigenous Fisheries Knowledge: The Example of K’moda, Gitxaal-a Territory.” American Indian Quarterly 31 (3): 441–64. ———. 2008. “The Indigenous Foundation of the Resource 149: Economy of BC’s North Coast.” Labour/Le Travail 61 (Spring): 131–49. Messenger, Phyllis Mauch. 1999. The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property: Whose Culture? Whose Property? Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Nicholas, George P. 2008. Why “Collaboration” Means More Than “Working Together.” Paper presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, BC. Nichols, William, and Madelyn Iris. 2004. “Role Negotiations among Students and Native Sponsors in an Ethnographic Field School.” NAPA Bulletin 22 (1): 113–27. Orlowski, Paul, and Charles R. Menzies. 2004. “Educating about Aboriginal Involvement with Forestry: The Tsimshian Experience—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 28 (1–2): 66–79. Ouellette, Grace. 2002. The Fourth World: An Indigenous Perspective on Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Activism. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Returning to Gitxaal-a (film). 2005. Written and directed by Charles Menzies and Jennifer Robinson. Vancouver: Ethnographic Film Unit. Roth, Solen. 2006. “Objets des autres” et relations (post)-coloniales à l’alterité (“Objects of Others” and (Post)-Colonial Relationships to Otherness). MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, Université Louis Lumière, Lyon, France. ———. 2007. “Anthropologizing Anthropologists: Futile Navel-Gazing, Fertile Reflexivity or Perspectives Gained from Studying Sideways.” Online proceedings, Anthropology Graduate Student Conference, “Humans: Anthropological Perspectives on Holism.” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, March 16–18, http://www.anth.ubc .ca/fileadmin/user_upload/anso/anso_student_conference/Roth_2007_UBC.pdf. Ruby, Jay. 1995. “The Moral Burden of Authorship in Ethnographic Film.” Visual Anthropology Review 11 (2): 77–82. Schick, Carol. 2000. “‘By Virtue of Being White’: Resistance in Anti-Racist Pedagogy.” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 3 (1): 83–102. Scholte, Bob. 1972. “Toward a Reflexive and Critical Anthropology.” In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 430–57. New York: Pantheon Books. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Strack, Robert, Cathleen Magill, and Kara McDonagh. 2004. “Engaging Youth through Photovoice.” Health Promotion Practice 5 (1): 49–58.
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Thompson, Judith (Edõsdi). 2004. “Traditional Plant Knowledge of the Tsimshian Curriculum: Keeping Knowledge in the Community.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 28 (1–2): 61–65. Townsend-Gault, Charlotte. 2004. “Circulating Aboriginality.” Journal of Material Culture 9 (2): 183–202. Young, James O., and Conrad G. Brunk, eds. 2009. The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons. Varcoe, Colleen. 2006. “Doing Participatory Action Research in a Racist World.” Western Journal of Nursing Research 28 (5): 525–40. Wilson, Angela Cavender. 2004. “Reclaiming Our Humanity: Decolonization and the Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge.” In Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, ed. Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Angela Cavendish Wilson, 69–87. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wolf, Margery. 1992. A Thrice-told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Editors’ Note: In an effort to encourage dialogue about student fieldwork, we invited two anthropologists to comment on the Gitxaal-a-UBC field experience—Susan Hyatt and Tim Wallace, whose responses follow.
Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork
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With Marcela Castro Madariaga, Margaret Baurley, Molly J. Dagon, Ryan Logan, Anne Waxingmoon, and David Plasterer
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Terms like partnership and collaboration have become ubiquitous in academic circles these days. While many individuals and institutions talk the talk, it is much harder to find examples of walking the walk. Charles Menzies, Caroline Butler, and their students have presented an impressive set of papers documenting their experiences doing service learning projects in a First Nations community in British Columbia. Like Menzies and Butler, I too have involved my students in a series of community collaborative projects in the very different setting of Indianapolis. Menzies and Butler’s introductory remarks, along with the reflections of their students, provoked my students and me to think about how their ruminations jibe with our own experiences. As faculty members leading a field school, Menzies and Butler make some key points that are too often overlooked in planning and executing community collaborative projects with students. As they note, “For an instructor, the most difficult part of a field school is finding the balance between providing a safe and supportive learning environment and allowing students to experience the true difficulties and complexities of ethnographic research.” In setting up projects in Indianapolis,
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I do not have the same kind of connection to neighborhoods here that Charles Menzies has with the Gitxaal-a Nation; therefore, I work to forge these relationships well in advance of involving students in local projects. In some cases this has led students to complain that they are getting a skewed perspective on the neighborhoods where our projects are located, in that they are relying on networks that I have established ahead of time. Because students in these courses have often not done fieldwork before, they do not understand that first of all, any genuinely collaborative project does require months and even years of groundwork, and second, in the time span of a semester-long weekly course, for students to participate in as many fieldwork activities as possible— including in-depth interviewing, participant observation in community settings, archival work, and mapping—it would be far more challenging, if not impossible, for each of them to accomplish individually as much work as we collectively produce in such a short period of time. I find that many of my colleagues in the academy who have embraced the notion of service learning similarly underestimate the extent to which community collaboration requires huge investments of their time before, during, and after the project. (And it is also fair to say that many service learning projects do not even pretend to embrace the value of collaboration.) Among the many other trenchant comments Menzies and Butler make about the nature of this kind of research is their observation that academics’ claims of being “invited” into a community to do research are often overblown. As they note, “Being invited, we would suggest, is more a measure of a community’s organization and history than an award of honor bestowed upon a researcher.” I concur fully with this important observation, and in fact I would hesitate to claim that I was ever spontaneously “invited” into any of the communities where I have done fieldwork, either with or without students. These relationships emerged as a consequence of long and deep conversations, which, as Menzies and Butler aptly put it, “lead to research connecting the desires of the researcher with the needs and expectations of the community.” I have made proposals for student projects to various kinds of local organizations; in most cases, they have responded with enthusiasm, but I am in agreement that to characterize these reactions as “invitations” overstates the case. The field school compilation by Menzies and Butler and their stu-
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dents is a critical piece because it strips away the romanticism of collaborative fieldwork to show how, as is the case with any other human affiliation, this bond is forged through extended processes of give and take, compromise, and sometimes accommodations (on both sides). The starry-eyed presentations of such research endeavors in some of the current academic literature—as a magical seamless coming together of researcher and community—are not only unrealistic; they are often self-serving on the part of the institution and/or the researcher. In thinking about the work of Menzies and colleagues, I asked six of my students to reflect on their own research experiences. The projects that these students and I have undertaken in Indianapolis have been quite different from those carried out in Gitxaal-a Nation; nonetheless, all the students found commonalities with Menzies and Butler’s students. In the comments that follow, students Margaret Baurley and Molly Dagon comment on a project they were involved in, in which we partnered with the relatively newly formed Community Heights Neighborhood Organization on Indianapolis’s Eastside. Our final product was a small book produced for the community titled Eastside Story: Portrait of a Neighborhood on the Suburban Frontier. Not every successful partnership need emerge from a situation of deprivation or clear social need, and indeed this project was based in a neighborhood that on the surface seemed stable and middle class, with its neat rows of brick bungalows. In contrast to Menzies’s well-placed concerns about students engaging in “cultural tourism,” for those of us who teach methods classes in our own home locales, especially in public universities like mine where a high percentage of our students grew up in Indianapolis or in nearby environs, our challenge is to show students how any setting can become an interesting and challenging site for the execution of intellectually engaging fieldwork. Our more recent project “The Neighborhood of Saturdays: Memories of a Multi-ethnic Neighborhood on Indianapolis’ Southside” is addressed by Ryan Logan, Marcela Castro Madariaga, David Plasterer, and Anne Waxingmoon. For this project students have been working on creating a historical ethnography of a neighborhood that flourished from the turn of the twentieth century up to the early 1970s, when it was disrupted by the construction of Interstate 70. Prior to that time the neighborhood was a gateway to Indianapolis, both for European immigrants and, beginning in the 1920s, for African Americans migrating from the South as well as from other midwestern cities.
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As Menzies and Butler’s students did, I believe my students have also found these experiences profoundly unsettling and transformative. In their comments they have used the excellent papers published in this volume as a lens through which to refract their own experiences doing fieldwork. In doing collaborative research, the potential for the conversations to continue is limitless.
Butterflies, Past and Present: Response to Roth
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marcela castro madariaga
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The first time we met the former residents of the near Southside of Indianapolis, I was lost. I remember not knowing what to say, how to act, or where to go. The truth was that I had all these preconceived notions about how they were going perceive me. Once we stood up in front of the community members and said our names, I was relieved. At the end of the presentation, different members of the community came and introduced themselves to us. They heard that I was from Argentina, and that brought back memories of their own travels, and of their ideas about my home country. While talking to the members of the community, I started understanding the concept of building trust. The reflection by Solen Roth underlines the importance of our impact on the communities where we work. As researchers, we collaborate with people to create a product that offers useful information for both the researcher and the community. We spend hours interviewing and doing archival research. We go to their houses, and they come to our meetings. The information is constantly flowing both ways. We are not a fly on the wall; rather, as Roth writes, we are the butterflies. We will never be someone from the community, since we do not share the same past, but we continue to affect each other’s present and future. If I have learned anything from my field methods class, it is that although I will go home at the end of the semester, and in a year I may even have forgotten about this project, the community members do not get to forget about it. The work we do as students, researchers, and collaborators continues to shape the history of the community as it continues to change, and it will play a powerful role in how they will receive future butterflies.
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What We Leave Out: Response to Baloy margaret baurley
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Like Baloy, I too am a first-time ethnographer, and like Baloy, I have struggled with how to create a relevant end product for community members. After compiling our transcriptions and comparing our findings as a group, we clearly saw that neighborhood history was important to the neighborhood organization, especially for the elders in the group. Keeping that in mind, we divided our research into various categories, such as housing, businesses, schools, and religious institutions. While this made the material easier to organize and shape, I recall struggling with what we had to leave out. Because we worked most closely with community members active with the neighborhood association, it was difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that our data would not be truly representative of the neighborhood as a whole. While the community association was a tremendous asset, most of its members were homeowners who resided in one particular part of the neighborhood. In contrast, renters tended to live on other blocks that were not as well represented. Baloy poses several essential questions about why we write ethnographic texts, who we write them for, and how we know when we “get it right.” In the case of Community Heights, our participants answered all these questions for us. They wanted us to create the book Eastside Story for them, especially as a keepsake for future generations. They wanted their voices to be heard, and they wanted others to know about their community. When we held a formal book launch in the basement of a local church one weekend, and an animated and diverse crowd of community members descended on the newly printed books and finally held a piece of their own history in their hands, we knew that for them, we had definitely “got it right.”
Hyatt: Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork • 247
Producing Something of Value to the Community: Response to Anderson molly j. dagon
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Like Robin Anderson, we found that we also needed to produce two different products, one for the community and the other for academia. The need to produce different products based on the same research equates to writing in two different languages: one colloquial for the community and one laced with a vocabulary only other anthropologists are likely to recognize. Anderson notes that the two fields “speak two mutually unintelligible dialects.” I found creating the two different products to be refreshing because in writing my academic paper, I was reliving and expanding upon the work we did for Eastside Story, and I gained a clearer idea of the importance of our project overall. For the most part I worked alone while creating my product for an academic audience. I shifted from researching housing in our neighborhood to focusing on the more sensitive topic of the racially restrictive covenants that people had shown us in their original deeds (though, of course, they were no longer enforceable). Many residents were also disturbed by this aspect of the community’s history, but others were very reluctant to discuss this topic. Since I relied on participants for information, the power to share or withhold this information lay with them. I found myself relying mostly on archival sources, like census data and land deeds, to understand this sensitive aspect of the community’s history. What I learned is that if one source shuts you off, turn another one on; archival research has power too, and this worked for me. Anderson hits a note that we all should think about while conducting fieldwork: that is, how we decide who controls our final product. I think when we acknowledge the need to produce different products for different audiences, we are able to stand by our work with pride and maintain our own control over the research. This is also an important consideration.
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Telling Their Story: Response to Wolowic ryan logan
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My experience working with former residents of the Indianapolis Southside neighborhood, through the project we call “The Neighborhood of Saturdays,” has shown me just how ethnography has changed through the years. I can see how as students, working collaboratively with this community, we are writing an ethnography that reflects the perspectives of the people with whom we are working, a view that may be different from our own understandings. The use of photographs in our work has been instrumental in recording the history of the community. Throughout our time with the Southsiders, our class has organized several “scan-a-thons,” where we invited current and former residents to bring their photos and to wait while we scanned them. Photographs capture the essence of “how things used to be” and really bring the old Southside to life. Jennifer Wolowic describes how pictures revealed the priorities of the Gitxaal-a youth and their relationships with the world. This idea also rings true for me in my work in Indianapolis. The photographs brought in by the community reveal what was “true” for them and what aspects of the neighborhood shaped their lives. Their photographs capture the Southside as they remember it and emphasize how the neighborhood has changed. Wolowic also describes how she and the youth analyzed the photographs collaboratively. Her project turned out to be a “co-authorship among forty teenagers themselves.” Our scan-a-thons have also helped turn all the participants into the co-authors of their collective history. Most of all, our collaboration has helped to recreate the story of a neighborhood still treasured by former residents, even though its material presence vanished from our city’s current landscape long ago.
Hyatt: Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork • 249
Race and Gender in Fieldwork: Response to Gómez-Ramírez anne waxingmoon
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I am affirmed in my fieldwork experience by Oralia Gómez-Ramírez’s reflection. In our own project “The Neighborhood of Saturdays,” I experienced a similar crisis. In one interview an informant expressed sentiments that implied a shared racism, overlooking the nonwhite background of my teammate, and assuming I shared such opinions. In that moment my ethical values as a human being felt confused with my work as an anthropologist. I proceeded with the interview, albeit a bit hastily, and thanked the informant for his time. I felt confused and upset with myself for several days, as my personal background and feelings felt more relevant than did my role as an anthropologist. The informant had reminded me of my own relatives, with whom I have severed relationships for saying such things. Later, in a debriefing session with a classmate, I was reminded that my job as an anthropologist will be rather limited if I preach at every racist whom I end up interviewing. My confidante assured me that I did the right thing in proceeding with the interview rather than excusing myself. I have not yet fully reconciled this in my mind, but I have a high level of self-awareness about future pitfalls I may encounter in fieldwork. I am curious about how Gómez-Ramírez responded to her first interviewee’s reproduction of “color-blindness” (which would be socially invisible, whereas my informant’s comments were more hostile). This experience held fewer consequences for me than Gómez-Ramírez’s experience did for her: my informant was not in charge of policy, and I was not researching policy. Nonetheless, as my research could contribute to future policy, indirectly and in ways that I cannot now imagine, I find her three modes of anti-oppressive anthropology to be mandatory for engaging in any form of fieldwork in a “post”-colonial society.
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By Way of Conclusion: Finding the Song david plasterer
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I have always loved music. Through our current ethnographic project, which focuses on documenting the experiences of former Southsiders, I have been able to pursue my interest in the role music plays in community histories. But I was also curious as to how I would be able to produce something of value for the community through music. It was only when we started really meeting with people and seeing how excited they were about our project, hearing their stories, seeing reunions at our community scan-a-thons, and conducting interviews in people’s homes and offices that I began to see the possibilities for incorporating music into our project. During an interview with a former Southsider who I knew played the guitar, I asked about where people went to listen to live music near the community. As he was attempting to recall certain places, he remembered that he had played “hillbilly music” at a particular tavern with one of his friends. It was as if he had had no recollection of this until that moment, and he admitted that he had not thought of that time in his life for many years. He seemed excited to have retrieved this memory of a forgotten time in his life, and I felt grateful for being able to ask the questions that led him there. Ethnography in many ways is about interpreting meaning; in symbols, rituals, everyday life, and just about everything else humans do. However, there is often a rift between how the ethnographer and the “ethnographed” interpret meaning. It is this rift between interpretations that forces us to form the “complex allegiances” Anderson addresses. If we want to continue the process of decolonizing anthropology, then examining this rift and seeking to build a new bridge across it—as Menzies, Butler, and their students do—may be a great place to start. • • • • • susan hyatt is associate professor of anthropology and graduate program director for the MA in applied anthropology at IUPUI. Her work focuses on communitybased activism in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
margaret baurley, molly dagon, ryan logan, marcela castro madariaga, david plasterer, and anne waxingmoon were all undergraduates at IUPUI when they participated in the two fieldwork projects described. Hyatt: Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork • 251
Apprentice Ethnography and Service Learning Programs Are They Compatible?
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A Response to the Gitxaal-a Nation Program Led by Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler
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tim wallace, North Carolina State University
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Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler title their contribution to this journal “Collaborative Service Learning and Anthropology with the Gitxaal-a Nation,” yet they make a reference to “early ethnographic field schools [using] indigenous communities as a laboratory,” seeming to imply that their program is not an ethnographic program. However, they next suggest that today’s UBC schools (presumably they mean ethnographic field schools) are based on principles of collaboration and service learning. It seems that Menzies and Butler are trying to say that “early” ethnographic field school programs were a touch misguided but that theirs is not, because their goal is a collaborative partnership between the program leaders and the community, on the one hand, and the students, on the other. Nevertheless, in my opinion, their program is a hybrid ethnographic field school–community service learning program. Although I commend their success in producing a collaboration with the community that would host the students, in my opinion it has come at a cost—the deemphasis of critical ethnographic training needed for apprentice ethnographers. In what follows I would like to share a few points from my reading of this interesting program. My own curiosity with field schools emanates from my eighteen-year experience (1994–present) designing and leading ethnographic field schools in Hungary, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. I am always searching for ways to improve what I do, and I was hoping to find some new ideas here for my own program (Wallace 2004).
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As a collaboration model, I think the Gitxaal-a program works fairly well, but as an ethnographic training model I have some concerns. Before elaborating, first I should explain what I mean by an “ethnographic field school,” because there is a range of programmatic types that can fall under the category of field school, but in my opinion not all programs that are field schools are ethnographic training programs. Ethnographic field schools, in my definition, are those in which there is a combination of ethnographic field method instruction combined with research practice in independent projects, participation in a group research project, or completing research “practice exercises.” Completing an ethnographic field school within less than five to six weeks and emphasizing this kind of training program is a challenge. The Menzies and Butler program is only four weeks long and might perhaps better be classified as a community service learning program, where the research assignment activities are directly related to facilitating positive benefits for a local community in which the participants are working or studying. In this kind of program the emphasis is on collaborative assistance rather than ethnographic training. My experience as a program director leads me to conclude that it is difficult to combine ethnographic training and community service learning. Volunteer work and ethnographic work are quite different, and often students really need the latter first to be able to negotiate the former successfully. For me, the Menzies and Butler program seems to confirm this lesson. A third type of field program is cultural immersion. Students have an intense experience living in another culture, receiving formal classroom coursework that is combined with field trips within the region or country where the program takes place. The program director teaches at least one of the courses and may recruit other local experts to teach. Frequently students are housed together in hotels or other indoor or outdoor facilities. The Gitxaal-a program does not seem to fit this model, nor does it fit a fourth type—a language training field school, such as the Tulane University Kaqchikel Summer language training program led by Judith Maxwell. Students combine cultural immersion with intensive language training in one main locale throughout the stay and have a few field trips. The program director is a director of residence life and makes sure the student experience is appropriate and on target, smoothing over any rough spots for students during the program.
Wallace: Apprentice Ethnography • 253
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A final one I would mention here, again probably not applicable to the Gitxaal-a Nation program, is the academic-discipline-centered or topically organized study trips that include on-site courses and related field trips to take advantage of the context for concrete learning and conceptual development. This type of program is usually led by a staff member of the sending institution but may also employ local professionals (instructors, professors, guides) to enhance and/or complement the quality of the program. In sum, various kinds of programs are labeled field schools, but the term ethnographic field school should be reserved for specific programs that emphasize ethnographic training and practice. In my opinion, whenever feasible, students should be given as much freedom and independence to develop their own skills in research methods as is feasible, given the field setting and the number of participants. A homestay experience in the host community, combined with the ethnographic fieldwork training program, makes for a full, transformative ethnographic research experience that will serve the student well in future career paths, whether in anthropology or in other fields. In any event, the specifics of the selected model must, inevitably, depend on real-world practicalities and constraints. As regards the Menzies and Butler Gitxaal-a program, the key evaluative questions in my mind are whether students have actually had an opportunity to learn how to do ethnographic fieldwork, and whether their instructors/mentors provide them with sufficient on-site academic oversight and support to encourage them when they do well and help them recover when they make mistakes. Students in my own program need constant reinforcement to understand what works and what does not. It usually takes weeks for them to figure out how to design, plan, implement, and complete a research project. The addition of a collaborative approach should mean that it will take students more time, not less, to develop a project that is coherent, consistent, and in keeping with the needs and wishes of the host community while also learning the basics of ethnographic fieldwork. In my just completed 2011 program, for example, one of the participants added a major applied and collaborative component to her work. She struggled throughout the seven weeks to balance the fieldwork needs with the required programmatic aspects of her applied assignments in the community where she lived. She had to learn, simultaneously, how to balance her applied work with the conflicting demands of the different personalities who
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oversaw her community service work and with the complexity of the local cultural milieu she was experiencing for the first time. The development of an ability to handle those personalities and cultural demands as well as to figure out how to be an anthropologist created delays, much as for a person acquiring two languages simultaneously—learning two cultural “grammars” takes longer, though often the bilingual (and bicultural) person is better equipped in the long run. Over the years, in my own work with students in field programs, I have found that service learning projects are best accomplished by students who have both prior familiarity with the setting and some basic practical experience in ethnographic field techniques. Perhaps the key element emphasized in the Menzies and Butler program was service learning. Students were expected to accomplish something that would benefit the community. They were supposed to “learn and make meaningful contributions to the community.” The students noted in their responses the difficulty they had in figuring out how they could make that a reality despite their unfamiliarity with the community and with ethnographic techniques. While each student eventually found a successful way to fulfill the undertaking of making a contribution to both the community and the program organizer-leaders, they seemed to me to be uncomfortable with the process and unsure of the significance of the fruits of their labor. The program directors’ main focus was the establishment and maintenance of ties with indigenous communities. And, though I assume they were concerned about the mentoring responsibility to their students, that concern does not seem effectively communicated in their report. Menzies and Butler do seem quite concerned, however, about preventing students from being “cultural tourists.” They believed that their students could not be trusted to fit in well and to avoid taking advantage of being “insiders” to “accumulate ‘authentic’ memories to showcase to their peers back home.” They also seemed to assume that field schools should try to locate themselves outside the tourism realm; this is a false assumption, because students (and usually the ethnographers themselves) are always tourists. They further assume that there is something wrong with being a tourist. Aren’t we all tourists at some time or another, even if we are Native Americans? Why would we single out students as susceptible to the bright lights of tourism, when all of us are tourists, even people from the various ethnic groups we study?
Wallace: Apprentice Ethnography • 255
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In the end Menzies and Butler clearly had nothing to worry about, because from the students’ responses it is clear to me that the students were behaving commendably. They brought with them an anthropological reverence for tradition and for indigenous culture—something that is common in anthropological training but that must also reflect the pre-arrival orientation given by the program coordinators. I was surprised to see that Menzies and Butler regard service learning as a “solution” to the pitfalls of student cultural tourism. Service learning is a practice designed to provide a learning opportunity for students when they assist a local community in some way. There are many ways to accomplish service learning, but service learning does not in itself provide any ethnographic training. As far as I can determine using the definitions earlier listed, the Gitxaal-a-UBC program was not a true ethnographic field school or one in which students acquire all the primary skills associated with ethnographic field work; that is, the practical knowledge that comes from developing and designing a research project, implementing it, and completing an analysis and write-up. Students were not asked to do their own independent research, and with only four weeks in the field, they would have had far too little time to achieve such a result. Here are some additional questions I would like to have had asked and answered in the Menzies and Butler contribution: How were students prepared psychologically for their experience? What site and behavioral constraints were imposed on student conduct and research? What guidelines did the authors provide, not only in terms of how to respect and collaborate with the hosts but also in terms of how they were to conduct their work and how they were to be evaluated? What ethnographic skills were the students to have learned in their four weeks in the program? And what were the expected anthropological training outcomes for Menzies and Butler, and how did they evaluate student success in achieving them? The student reflections suggest to me that students were very concerned about making their work relevant and respectful, which led to stressors concerning the relationship they had with their hosts. Of course, had they had to do a practice ethnographic project, there would have been other stressors. Yet in the end they might have learned what is really entailed in designing a research project and carrying out ethnographic fieldwork. In my program, I often tell students that the main
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focus of the program is on how they develop their ethnographic skills, as reflected in the design of their practice project, in their technique and quality of field notes, and in their enthusiasm and dedication to hard work. Clearly, the Gitxaal-a Nation program encouraged hard work and dedication, but did it sufficiently develop ethnographic skills? In their reflections the students seem to have felt insufficiently prepared for the fieldwork and overwhelmed by the importance of not being “wrong” in their actions, out of fear of offending their hosts. Yet by the very nature of learning, apprentice ethnographers will make mistakes or get it wrong. There will be hyper-reactions to mistakes, but the role of the on-site instructors is to be prepared for these and to work with both the students and the community to overcome troubles when students get it wrong. All students, as Margaret Mead suggested long ago when referring to ethnographers in the field, bring to the field their own personality traits, which will influence both what they see and interpret and what they do. I wondered as I read the Gitxaal-a-UBC compilation whether program coordinators were more concerned with preventing mistakes than with using them as learning opportunities. The Gitxaal-a Nation program seems somewhat like Sol Tax’s Fox Project, which took University of Chicago students to the Meskwaki. Tax felt that the lack of structure was beneficial and led to the emergence of truth and basic values (Tax 1960). However, in retrospect, Tax’s students felt that they did not know what they were doing, and what they did was largely on their own and helter-skelter.
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To some Fox Project students, Tax’s approach seemed alarmingly free-wheeling. On one of his occasional visits from Chicago, the professor asked how things were going. “We don’t know how we’re doing,” Leslie confided. “Great!” Tax replied. “That’s how things ought to be.” Uncertainty and improvisation were part of his method. In theory, at least, the anthropologists should resist the impulse to impose their own ideas, letting the Meskwaki make their own plans. Action anthropology, he argued, would help them make freer choices about their future. In practice this theory required considerable restraint. The students constantly worried about whose values they were asserting and who was defining the ends and the means of their work. Independent historian Judith Daubenmier, who has studied the Fox Project Wallace: Apprentice Ethnography • 257
field notes, now in the Smithsonian Institution archives, says, “They tried hard not to foist themselves on the Meskwaki.” Fred Gearing, still remembered gratefully by some tribe members for supporting the American Legion, plays down his contribution. “I was just sort of around and sort of helping,” he says. “I would spill a little cement here and there. I don’t know of an instance where people asked my advice about something. I might have nudged them a little bit—‘Why don’t we do this painting?’ It was on that level.” (Mertens 2004: 1)
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I believe that despite the hard work that the program directors engaged in to establish the Gitxaal-a-UBC program, perhaps not enough was done to give students a longer opportunity to develop their ethnographic skills. Although I am an applied anthropologist and very much interested in collaborative ethnography, I am worried that students without ethnographic training may not learn ethnographic fieldwork well enough to be both successful ethnographers and collaborators. On the other hand, if the goals of a program are primarily to provide assistants for a collaborative project, and the assistants are fully aware of the definition of their roles and tasks, ethnographic training need not be a key component of the program. From time to time anthropologists express worry that apprentice ethnographers are going to stress or negatively affect the community in which they are working. I think this concern, while legitimate, is overblown (Miller 2006). I have led ethnographic field schools in three different regions of the world. In each case students were well received, and local people were anxious to have them return each season. Have there ever been students who were less exemplary in their work or not as committed as they should have been? Certainly. Does this describe the majority? No. The program leader has a responsibility to be well prepared and proactive to oversee all aspects of the program, including student comportment and appropriate field work activities. Communities are not as fragile as we anthropologists often assume, and although Native American communities may have been exploited by anthropologists in the past, this has not been the fault of students in ethnographic field schools but rather that of the organizers. In the case of the Gitxaal-a Nation field school program, Menzies and Butler have done well to negotiate a collaborative community service
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program. Nevertheless, their report on the nature of the program suggests that it exists primarily to support the goals of the organizers and the Gitxaal-a Nation rather than to prepare apprentice ethnographers. In my opinion, training in ethnographic field work requires students to have more latitude in the topics of their research and more mentoring in their development of ethnographic skills than seems to have been available to participants in this case. In the end Menzies and Butler are uncomfortable with traditional ethnographic field school structures and have opted for a service learning model that provides only a partial introduction to ethnographic training. There is no doubt in my mind that the students gained much from their experiences, yet I would suggest that the ethnographic training in this program was limited. Collaborative ethnographic work is complicated, difficult, and probably very rewarding. I commend Menzies and Butler for their hard work and innovative collaborative program, yet I believe that students need more ethnographic training in order to be prepared to engage fully in community service programs with communities such as that of the Gitxaal-a Nation.
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ment of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. He led his first field school program in Hungary in 1994 and completed his eighteenth in Guatemala in 2011. He is the president of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (2011–13) and editor of the Society for Applied Anthropology newsletter, SfAA News.
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Mertens, Richard. 2004. “Where the Action Was.” University of Chicago Magazine 96 (4) April, http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0404/features/action.shtml. Miller, Janneli F. 2006. “Can You Take Undergraduates into the Field? A Field School Example.” Practicing Anthropology 28 (1): 40–43. Tax, Sol. 1960. “The Fox Project.” Human Organization 17: 17–19. Wallace, Tim. 2004. “Apprentice Ethnographers and the Anthropology of Tourism in Costa Rica.” In Passages: The Ethnographic Field School and First Fieldwork Experiences, ed. Madelyn Iris, Washington: American Anthropological Association, NAPA Bulletin 22 (1): 35–54.
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Butterflies, Anthropologies, and Ethnographic Field Schools
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The butterflies—people from outside—are now part of our world. The first contact between butterflies and First Nations actually happened in our area. Our old people saw those big ships coming. At first they thought it was a monster actually coming over. But then they saw these are new people from far away. Some of the names that we carry today in Gitxaal-a come from those adawx, from those stories. Our stories date way back, even beyond that moment of contact, to the great floods of ancient times. The inclusion of the butterfly (really the inclusion of the rest of the world) into the process of collaboration is critical to us. It is part of our history. It is also part of our future.
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Collaboration is critical to us. It is part of our history. It is part of our future. I stand with Nees Ma’Outa in this statement of fact—as an indigenous scholar and member of Gitxaal-a Nation and as a Western-trained social anthropologist. Ethnography, the research method and practice of sociocultural anthropology, is nothing if it is not collaborative. There are, certainly, different ways of being collaborative and different approaches to conducting oneself in a collaborative manner. One might suggest that ethnographic research, at its core, is a collaborative venture. Kevin Dwyer, in Moroccan Dialogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), nicely makes this point in his discus-
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sion of the dialogic manner by which his research with Faqir Muhammad progressed. Dwyer had assumed that he would be the interviewer and Faqir Muhammad the informant. What ensued was a process of interaction and engagement—collaboration, in other words—in which the conversation between the two men found its own path: hence the notion of the dialogic. What is innovative about Dwyer’s approach is not the discovery of a new method but the recognition in writing that older models of the expert interviewer masked an inherent act of collaboration between self and other; an act of collaboration that lies at the core of the anthropological enterprise. Late twentieth-century approaches have made collaboration more explicitly part of the ethnographic process. This very journal reflects our contemporary attention to the process of collaboration and what that might mean in theory and application. We are learning to be forthright in our recognition of what anthropological practice entails. We are converging on ideas that have long been explicit in our indigenous world. Nees Ma’Outa clearly articulates that the Gitxaal-a approach is one that is firmly collaborative: “Our hereditary process is a collaborative process. . . . Our hereditary ways are a process of collaborating with our own people.” For Gitxaal-a, as with many other indigenous nations, collaboration is a necessity and a virtue. Unlike the competitive individualism of free market capitalism, in which one ego is pitched in battle against another, our indigenous world places the emphasis upon overcoming conflictual individualism. This is not a perfect model—Nees Ma’Outa himself points to problems in process and moments in which we forget the collaborative path. There are moments when we have forgotten ourselves, mistreated our nonhuman relatives, and lost the ability to collaborate. Our history speaks to these moments by reminding us that our approach necessarily involves collaboration. Collaboration has its roots in a common human experience, and it is from this place that we reach out to the butterflies, be they merchant explorers in the 1700s or early twentyfirst-century anthropologists. Anthropologists pride themselves on being able to see, to hear, to feel, to enact strange and foreign cultures. While we are always cautious to set ourselves apart from mere tourists, our passion and excitement does share a common foundation in the European wanderlust
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that set off that remarkable explosion of human productivity we now know as the birth of capitalism and the age of invention and exploration. Thus, rooted as we are in the same history that gave us the enlightenment on the one hand and the slave trade on the other, we stand on a Janus-faced heritage that both gives strength to our passion (exploration) and undermines our intentions (appropriation). Conjoining indigenous traditions of collaboration with anthropological traditions of inquiry has the potential to transform anthropological practice and to step beyond the appropriation side of our disciplinary heritage. The underlying aim of our graduate ethnographic field school has been a proactive intervention in the world within which we live, work, and teach. No longer interested in just taking from those we study, we see a value in preparing our graduate students in ways that will make them effective global citizens and informed local residents. To this end we have for at least two decades (in our program’s current format) run ethnographic field schools for graduate students in collaboration with local First Nations communities. This may well be a unique approach to ethnographic field training in that we explicitly link ethnographic training to the production of a research product of value to the host community. Our interlocutors Tim Wallace and Susan Hyatt both join this conversation from the vantage point of also being instructors of ethnographic field schools. There is a welcome complementarity in the differences in our respective teaching experiences. Wallace directs what is perhaps the most traditional school, an undergraduate summer homestay program in Latin America. Hyatt, drawing upon the well-established tradition of community studies (à la Chicago School) directs an urban ethnographic field school in Indianapolis. Our own UBC program is a collaborative venture located within, and operating under the authority of, an indigenous First Nation. As Wallace points out in his commentary, and as Hyatt demonstrates through the collaboration of her students, there are many points to reflect upon in this Jacob’s Coat of experiences that we call an ethnographic field school. Wallace asks whether the students “actually had an opportunity to learn how to do ethnographic fieldwork, and whether their instructors/ mentors provided them with sufficient on-site academic oversight and support.” We too have asked this same question of ourselves prior to, during, and after our Gitxaal-a-based ethnographic field school. We
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share with Wallace and all those in similar teaching environments the concern to provide the best possible situation for authentic learning that meets the needs of our students without compromising the lives of our hosts. Four weeks on-site is admittedly a short time to try to get an ethnographic research project up and running, all from scratch. Many of our students—both in our Gitxaal-a field school and in the Sto:lo-based program that I co-directed with Bruce Granville Miller from 1996—express feelings of being rushed with only four weeks in the field. One mitigating factor is that the four weeks in the field are not the sum total of the field school experience. Long before our students (all of whom are graduate students, most with previous field research experience) enter the field site, they have participated in an orientation workshop, met with the instructors individually, and discussed their particular research interests and the potential research projects. In these pre-field-site meetings we work with our students to mesh their interests with community expectations so that the students can start their research immediately upon arrival in the field site. There is also an advantage to working with graduate students as opposed to undergraduate students. Graduate students tend to be older and more mature and have already accumulated a body of practical and academic knowledge that allows them the freedom and capacity to articulate—as they have done here in response to our request—the ambiguities, ambivalences, and uncertainties of real ethnographic research that counts for an audience wider than a solely academic one. This is not to say there is no place for undergraduate field schools—there is. My colleagues and I at UBC have integrated hands-on, real-time ethnographic research into a range of core and elective courses in our undergraduate program (including an innovative urban field school taught by Alexia Bloch and sociologist Jennifer Chun; see http://ivefs.arts.ubc. ca/). Nonetheless, there is a difference when one has the fiscal freedom to limit an ethnographic field school to a hand-picked half dozen graduate students and to have two full-time faculty working with them throughout the program. The field school does not end at the four-week mark. We do expect our students to give a credible public presentation to community members before they leave community, as part of our commitment to engag-
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ing in respectful research practices. This event does not, however, signal the end of the students’ work. Students work on their final products over the course of the next several weeks or couple of months. Most of them produce documents on a par with a master’s degree thesis. Several of our students have in fact continued with their research, extending their stay or returning later to elaborate on their findings and transform their field school reports into full-fledged graduate theses (Anderson and Wolowic were among those who used their field school experience as the foundation for master’s theses). Throughout this process the two field school instructors work with, live with, talk with, mentor, advise, direct, and engage with our students as their intellectual product is created. (Perhaps there was a time in anthropology in which the report was seen unproblematically as a report on what happened; but today, we understand that the writing of an ethnographic document is every bit as important to problematize and to mentor as the research that makes the writing possible.) All of our mentoring occurs in a context that respects and honors the collaborative tradition that Nees Ma’Outa tells us lies at the heart of Gitxaal-a traditions. My cultural and personal history is one in which mentorship through action and demonstration is of critical importance. I have had the privilege of learning from gifted teachers at home, in my community, and in the academy. As a young boy on my family’s commercial fishing vessel I learned by watching and then doing. The more experienced crew, in turn, would watch me at work and then show me how they did the same task. Whether it was coiling fishing line, baiting hooks, or mending nets, the inexperienced could watch, copy, correct, watch, and do it all again. In the same way I have listened to my family and my elders tell the stories of my family and my people. I listen, observe, and then when my turn comes to teach I try to honor them by emulating their approach. I share with Wallace the concern that as teachers we honor our own teachers and ancestors by doing our best to ensure that our students receive sufficient on-site academic oversight and support. That we may fail to do so, that we may not live up to the expectations and hopes of our elders and teachers, is a concern that all good teachers must share. I trust we have the humility to know that there is always room to change, always an opportunity to improve, and that in the face of failings we can strive to do better in the future.
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Hyatt and Wallace both comment on my worries about the pitfalls of cultural tourism. Hyatt finds the problem one of spurring her students to look beyond their familiarity with the urban American world they are studying. Wallace reminds us that we are all tourists at some point in time.It may well be that I am too close to the community of study and thus inaccurately feel as much a subject of my students’ gaze as I do a mentor facilitating their learning. But I think there is something more to my ambivalence toward the anthropological gaze. Coming, as I do, from a people often studied by the butterfly anthropologists, I carry a certain sense of discomfort with the ways in which my communities have in fact been laboratories of study, sources of data upon which external theories have been applied in a process similar to (if not actually part of ) the acts of colonialism and appropriation that have shaped the history of the Americas. This is not a new critique. Anthropologists such as Kathleen Gough, Eleanor Leacock, and Eric Wolf have commented at length and long before I have about this very situation and the place of anthropological practice in the story of Western imperialism. I share my anthropological ancestors’ critique of anthropology, but being a member of the community on which Americanist anthropology cut its teeth compounds my critique. In my teaching I often say that the time has come for anthropologists to stand on the shore with Sabaan. We need to reverse the gaze of the early commercial explorers. In so doing, we need to transform the anthropological gaze so that it is no longer party to the project of Western imperialism. Sabaan was one of the hereditary leaders of whom Nees Ma’Outa speaks; one of the old ones who first saw the butterflies arrive in our land. The butterfly, Captain James Colnett of the sailing vessel the Prince of Wales, landed on Gitxaal-a shores in 1787. He saw an underexploited landscape, peopled with bothersome primitives who hindered his ability to repair his ships and get on with his work. Little did he acknowledge that the land he stepped upon was owned, nor would he accept that the people he met had laws or customs of any account. Sabaan saw something different. At first he saw a winged monster bearing down upon him. But then he realized it was a vessel of some kind and there were people onboard. Sabaan greeted these people in accord with protocol. Over time, however, it became clear that these people, as powerful as they were, acted as wayward souls who did not
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know their proper place in the world. Yet, even in the face of their lack of civility, Sabaan was able to see them as people. Sabaan was obligated by Gitxaal-a protocols to greet these people and to treat them with civility. This is one of the pivotal stories in recent Gitxaal-a history. For too long anthropologists have stood on the deck of the incoming ship with Colnett. They have shared Colnett’s passion and excitement with discovery and with travel to strange new places. But in addition to these positive virtues, anthropologists have for too long also shared Colnett’s perspective that our indigenous societies contained resources worth taking and using in accord with anthropological needs. Rather than regarding communities as sources of data to test anthropological theories, anthropologists would do well to seek the underlying concepts of indigenous societies and to apply those to the problems confronted. Anthropologists can become active participants in the transformative act of standing on the shore with Sabaan. Allow me to paraphrase the words of Nees Ma’Outa:
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To return to the butterfly: So I encourage you to continue to collaborate. It is a win-win. It’s a win for those doing the research. It’s a win for the community. It’s a win for the individuals who are asked to open up and share their information. I thank you all for your comments and reflections upon our own ethnographic field school. I value them and I know that our community does as well.
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charles r. menzies is a member of Gitxaal-a Nation and is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
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George R. Lucas Jr. Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2009. 234 pp. Paper, $24.95. robert albro, American University
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George Lucas’s book was published at a moment of high controversy in the American Anthropological Association as its membership actively debated what role—if any—anthropologists should play in the U.S. military’s ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The controversy still lingers. This debate reacquainted the discipline with long-standing and not altogether resolved tensions over the relation between academic and practicing anthropologists; appropriate sources and applications of disciplinary knowledge; the discipline’s relationship to and critique of both power and the state; and, of course, the interpretation of disciplinary ethics. Entering the fray, Lucas—who hangs his hat at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership of the U.S. Naval Academy—uses the methods of applied philosophy and the tools of a professional ethicist self-effacingly and often sensibly to engage the discipline about how it conducts its own internal dialogues and construes its ethics. Not an anthropologist himself, Lucas provides a timely and often helpful extra-disciplinary account. He is well informed and treats anthropological preoccupations with respect. But given his critical distance, he does not accept these at face value. Instead, he compares the terms of anthropology’s with other conceptualizations of academic, civic, and social responsibility, just wars, and the ethical standards of other disciplines. While anthropologists are unlikely to agree with everything Lucas has to say, he does the discipline a service, as an informed observer
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conversant with disciplinary concerns while subjecting its sometimes parochial internal debates to broader assessment. In this process he helps to widen the universe of discussion by encouraging us collectively to scrutinize the basic assumptions underlying our sense of our moral responsibilities: as anthropologists, social scientists, citizens, and as human beings. For this work, Lucas should be commended. Lucas is most provocative when examining the ways in which the discipline chooses to tell its own story. He describes this as a “collective self-consciousness” (69) that includes a “litany of shame” (25) about supposed complicities with the military that in his view have an “outsized mythological significance” (56). In point of fact, he gently suggests, our history is not what we have made of it. Despite regular invocation of the infamous Vietnam-era Project Camelot as a key historical precedent, for example, no anthropologists were in fact integral to it. Lucas is at his most helpful when discussing the disciplinary prohibition against “secret and clandestine” research. Most notably in chapter 6, Lucas examines disciplinary convictions about secrecy and sets them alongside secrecy’s evident role in our discussions of disciplinary history. He points out that a long-standing concern among anthropologists about secrecy appears in fact to be a concern about the possibility of espionage, which is not the same. He also suggests that in principle, secrecy cannot simply be dismissed as unprofessional. Lucas differentiates between secrecy per se and the often morally objectionable intentions behind it. He discusses the appropriateness and inappropriateness of clandestinity, deception, not being public, espionage, classified work, an intention to victimize, an intention to protect anonymity, the complete withholding of research (including results), and uses of “double blind” experiments in other social sciences, among other nuances. By unpacking the prohibition against secrecy while considering different varieties of secrecy, Lucas encourages a productive redirection of our discussion of this bugbear, from its status as a self-evident ethical dictum toward greater attention to what people actually do, and how varieties of secrecy might play a part (though often not in ways we might assume). In short, Lucas’s is a concern with our “practice,” while noting a perceived disconnect with how we talk about what we do. This book helpfully reminds us that our debates are often insular ones, with too much time spent talking to ourselves about ourselves. These nuances lead Lucas to question the apparent elision by anthropologists
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of the rejection of all forms of secrecy with a rejection of government work. Many anthropologists might not reach the author’s own conclusions. Nonetheless, the conversation is worth having. While Lucas proves an able and thoughtful interlocutor for anthropology, at times he inadvertently contributes some confusion to the discussion as well. An understandable focus of his attention throughout is the Human Terrain System, which is highly controversial among anthropologists. But at times this particular program is conflated with a more generic “military anthropology,” sometimes referred to as the “larger HTS project” (5). In fact, it is a stretch to refer to anything so coherent as a well-defined military anthropology. And outside the HTS program, there is no broader HTS project to speak of. This, in turn, adds some confusion to the later discussion of hypothetical ethical case studies, particular in chapter 5, where HTS and military anthropology are used interchangeably. Anthropologists working with the military are engaged in a wide variety of other activities, and HTS is but one program. Lucas considers the best balance between the responsibilities of citizens and scholars. And it is perhaps this thread of the book’s argument that runs up against the discipline at the oddest angles. Lucas pays regular attention to the obligations of responsible citizenship and develops these with just war arguments. For him it is not trivial that anthropologists are also citizens. He describes anthropologists as “custodians of subject matter expertise deemed vital to the nation’s security” (11). This is, in the main, not how at least sociocultural anthropologists in the United States primarily see themselves. At least since the 1960s the discipline has actively pursued its work in settings of post-coloniality. As such—and simplifying—ethnography has been regularly carried out among people on the margins of, or marginalized by, states. A large part of the intervening decades of disciplinary work, then, has amounted to comparative critiques of state practice rather than work in the service of the state. While citizenship has itself certainly been a disciplinary topical focus in recent years, disciplinary work conducted within the horizon of, and with the expectations of, citizenship in a particular state is not— for better or worse—the usual starting point for anthropologists skeptical of the state (any state). Anthropology’s historical investments, then, are likely to make a just war argument particularly unconvincing
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to them. The question is: just for whom? This does not reflect a gardenvariety relativism nor a paralysis when confronting rival duties so much as a concern with the potential arbitrariness of the moral judgments informing any “just” war. Put another way, anthropologists are trained not to take for granted the cultural proportion of citizenship but are instead often to be found plying their trade at its margins. This makes even having such a conversation as Lucas’s particularly challenging. Nevertheless, I think we are all better off if we persist in doing so, as Lucas has done here.
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robert albro received his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University
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of Chicago in 1999. He currently researches pursuit of the sociocultural in the securityscape. He has been a Fulbright scholar and held fellowships at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution. He was recently chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities. Albro received the AAA President’s Award in 2009 for outstanding contributions to the association. He has taught at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, and at George Washington University. He is currently in residence at American University’s School of International Service.
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Charles R. Hale, ed. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. 417 pp. Paper, $34.95.
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josiah mcc. heyman, University of Texas at El Paso
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Engaging Contradictions addresses collaborative research with communities, mainly for social justice ends. It centers on advocating for work of this sort, by contrast with conventional noncollaborative academic practices, whether critical of social arrangements or not. Though weighted somewhat toward anthropology, it includes several other fields—ethnic studies, American studies, economics, geography, and sociology. It is valuable for both penetrating insights and revealing case studies, though (as with most edited works) it is uneven. I have read and reread parts of it often. Themes that extend across the volume include, not surprisingly, a reconsideration of the objective/subjective distinction, arguing that such a distinction is not simple and neat, perhaps not even useful, and
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that explicit value orientations are honest and helpful in the social sciences. The authors challenge the standard power hierarchy of the social scientist coming into a field site to seize data with at best passive consent of “subjects”; the alternative developed in this book is a more equitable relationship in which research goals and designs, and use of data, emerge through dialogues between thinkers-actors, some being community members and some being social scientists. The authors are often sharply critical of would-be academic radicalism for being unconnected to actual social struggles, producing instead commodified “critical” writing (“‘luxury’ knowledge production,” in Hale’s words, 16). The book is only intermittently attentive to actual challenges and contradictions in engaged scholarship, as indicated by the title; more such work is needed. Hale’s introductory essay is of great importance. He particularly tackles the question of whether engaged research is scientifically poorer than arm’s length research. As he points out, the learning process may well be richer because of the mutual confidence and extended interaction with community collaborators, and the challenge of praxis in the world often makes for strong tests of our research analyses and models. He argues that engaged research can make good use of scientific standards and methods. (He also critiques the deceptive idealization of perfect objectivist science.) Hale’s other agenda is to delineate the alternative power relations in engaged research, which at one point he characterizes as the equitable returns model of academic work, by contrast with the maximum output model. He considers some of the challenges of institutionalizing this alternative social arrangement in universities, and more generally he acknowledges the difficult balances and contradictions of activist scholarship throughout his review of the field. One covert theme, however, deserves to be brought to the surface: Hale in particular, and more inconsistently the other authors, tends to view activist scholarship merely as community-based research. Research, as in the creation of new knowledge, is only one scholarly capability and practice, however. Turning now to the case study chapters, Gilmore’s addresses prisoner/prison community activism in California. She brings in Terry McGee’s elevation of the Malay word desakota to describe communities as multi-locational networks of people and issues. Her chapter is a fascinating study of an activist movement, often sharply insightful about
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the importance of knowledge in political struggle, and she mentions roles of some students and scholars, but there is little about the concrete process of academic-activist engagement. Nabudere’s chapter, by contrast, is largely about constructing an institutional framework for a new kind of scholarship, community-based schools (including a research component), and most recently a university on the same model. His study addresses the important process of decolonizing knowledge in post-colonial educational systems, specifically in Africa. Lipsitz broadly follows Hale in directing his critique toward the reified division between distant, objective science and passive community. He points historically and in the present day to the positive value in bridging this divide. An interesting side to his exposition is his emphasizing that activists will also need to change and move to meet the academic side as well as the other direction. We are left to wonder how this happens, and how often. Pierre’s essay, though interesting topically (addressing the traces of racism in an ostensibly nonracial country, Ghana), is disappointing in the context of this book. It is an academic consideration of the subject matter with no actual engagement with a change process. She argues for something akin to topical resonance as engagement; without dismissing the value of such a resonance, it does resemble ivory tower–style critical social science. Bickham Mendez addresses collaboration in two settings, one distant (Nicaraguan women factory workers) and one close to home (janitorial staff at her university). This brings forth perceptive discussions of transnationalism and scholarly activism and of power/status hierarchies in both settings between academics and non-academics. Vargas analyzes a case in which he was a student of the key intellectual figures in the social justice movement, the Coalition Against Police Abuse and the Community in Support of the Gang Truce of Los Angeles, rather than being the intellectual figure in superordinate relation (in that regard) to the community members. Martínez offers a particularly clear and insightful chapter concerning his community-based research on human rights issues of Haitianorigin women in the Dominican Republic. He starts off with a smart conceptualization of three modes of academic practice: ivory tower research; applied research based in communities but directed by external power-holders; and community-based research. (To be accurate, contemporary applied anthropology includes considerable collabora-
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tive work and is not always top-down in this fashion.) He then provides one of the more revealing case studies in the book of the challenges of actual collaborative research. It calls for attention to power dynamics in social movement organizations and how that affects academic collaboration. Speed’s fine chapter is similar. She addresses the tension between community self-understandings (as essentially indigenous) and her own scholarly evidence and analysis of ethnic fluidity and construction. The account of the mutual negotiation of these issues is rich. She also provides a telling critique of disengaged “critical” scholarship, in this case work that critiques the role of law and legal definitions, by noting how contradictory, messy engagement in practice differs from this sort of perfectionist criticism. Tang and Kiang’s chapters deserve consideration together. Both recount personal journeys through community-engaged research in tension with ivory tower academia, in both cases with Asian-American communities. They show the considerable research value of work actually done toward goals and needs identified by communities. Kiang particularly turns critical toward the ivory tower domestication of once radical ethnic studies, with the production of precious but increasingly unconnected scholarship. Bracketed in the volume between Tang and Kiang is Nembhard’s intellectually interesting contribution on alternative economics of cooperation and self-help of various sorts. This item clearly shows the scholarly value to be gained by attending carefully to actors and activities on the ground, but it does not describe direct engagement or activism. Greenwood’s essay presents his long-standing agenda of action research. He frames this in an Aristotelian triad of epistêmê, tékhnê, and phrónêsis. Roughly parallel to the scheme presented by Martínez, this triad of ways of knowing describes knowledge for knowledge’s sake (as judged by professional peers), knowledge that is instrumentally useful, and collaborative knowledge production by direct stakeholders. He then gives a critical account of universities, seeing them as centered on some mixture of the first two and not institutionally well suited for the third—and adds to this deepening concerns over university neoliberalism. Pulido brings this point about the university setting home in a remarkable chapter that should be read by all aspiring activist schol-
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ars. It is hard to summarize the many diverse insights she offers, but one telling example (Pulido being a geographer) is her consideration of the choice of place in which to engage in activism—close to or distant from the university. Fundamentally this is a humane, thoughtful guide to how actually to live the life of a scholar activist in an uncaring (though in her case not hostile) university setting. Joyce and Gordon close the book by considering whether and how it is institutionally possible to live this life of activism in a university setting. They see the university as presenting a series of captivating risks—narcissism, elitism, hierarchy—that certainly ring true. They then characterize two incomplete points of entry of radicals into the university. One is just being there, being a demographic icon—one senses here a critique of certain sorts of sexuality, gender, race, and ethnic studies. The next is an internal, academic performance of radicalism, showing off for the self and for other academics. Again we see, as so often in this volume, a pointed criticism of purely academic “critical” social science. Their final alternative is to “exit” the university (while staying inside, meeting classes, being paid, and so forth) by means of engagement with radical actors and movements outside academia. I emphatically agree with this analysis, but it goes just so far. Now, how do we actually conduct this exit, in diverse and complicated settings? Is exit just alienation from our colleagues? Our students? Is it a new, positive practice? Several issues I have with the book are not so much flaws in the work itself but matters that call for further, deeper consideration. The arguments of activist scholars against pseudo-objectivity and ivory tower scholasticism can easily become a trap, in the sense that soon it will be a ritual debate on both sides, diverting attention from the need to scrutinize the reality of activist scholarship as such. Let us take the justification for collaboration and activism as given; what then? To my mind, the next step is critical case studies of actual practices of activist scholarship, delineating different philosophies, practices, alternatives, contradictions, and so forth. Engaging Contradictions contains several such case studies, but is not constructed as a systematic analysis of them; we should do such work. In conjunction with this, the book is surprisingly devoid of explicit attention to power relations in collaboration and in wider fields surrounding activism. That power is relevant is unquestionably implied
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by the framing of described activism as being aimed against inequalities and social injustices. But power settings are not simple or obvious. Activist social science deals with power formations even in community settings and organizations of the relatively “powerless,” and also when dealing with foundations, government agencies, NGOs, unions, and (rarely) corporations. Those entities cannot simply be dismissed as “not grassroots,” because they are important allies, resources, and opponents in the social change process. Engaged scholars, then, need to be excellent strategic and tactical analysts of power fields (see Josiah McC. Heyman, “Activism in Anthropology: Exploring the Present through Eric R. Wolf ’s Vietnam-Era Work,” Dialectical Anthropology 34 [2010]: 287–93). The general focus of the book on community-based research is excessively limited in terms of possible activist practices, though some chapters go beyond this conceptualization. Teaching is an obvious and vast one, as is institutional change inside universities. Attention to the class, race, and gender placement and potential of highly differentiated academic institutions is needed. Likewise, research thought of as investigation resulting in original knowledge (even simple fact gathering) is too limiting a notion of how activist scholars deploy their knowledge. We also gather secondary sources, synthesize, write, explain, and in many other ways communicate knowledge as part of social struggle processes. Key examples are short information sheets and proposal writing or assistance with that. Closely related is engagement in the policy process in various ways, such as writing model legal or regulatory language or providing testimony and documentation (some, but not all, from original research). Finally, there is direct work on activism, such as community education and organizing. Thinking of all these things, and the thousands of scholars engaged across them, brings us to the fundamental point that we need more robust accounts, analyses, and syntheses of real world scholarly activism. We need to know what we have gotten ourselves into. • • • • •
josiah mcc. heyman is professor of anthropology and chair of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is also a close collaborator with the Border Network for Human Rights, based in El Paso, and the Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance, and a borderwide stakeholders’ coalition. His scholarly and activist work focuses on borders and migration. Among his publications of interBook Reviews • 275
est are Josiah McC. Heyman, Maria Cristina Morales, and Guillermina Gina Núñez, “Engaging with the Immigrant Human Rights Movement in a Besieged Border Region: What Do Applied Social Scientists Bring to the Policy Process?” NAPA Bulletin 31 (2009): 13–29; and Heyman, “The Inverse of Power,” Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 139–56.
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George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, and Tobias Rees, eds. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 152 pp. Paper, $21.95.
douglas foley, University of Texas at Austin
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George Marcus and James Faubion, eds. Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 248 pp. Paper, $21.95.
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Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary addresses issues that have been fueling discontent in American anthropology since the 1960s. In this volume Tobias Rees invites Paul Rabinow and George Marcus to dialogue about their role in transforming contemporary American anthropology. James Faubion also makes a cameo appearance during these conversations. The dialogues begin with some brief reflections on their academic training. Apparently Marcus was less than enamored with his training in Harvard’s interdisciplinary social relations program. He portrays himself as rather estranged from anthropology and reading far and wide outside the field in search of interesting ideas. In sharp contrast, Rabinow extols the intellectual vitality at the University of Chicago and of anthropological mentors like Bernard Cohn. He characterizes himself as a “leftist Geertzian,” which in this case means he was more discontented with American imperialism and capitalism and the Vietnam War than Geertz was. He says his association with Geertzian interpretive anthropology made him a target of prominent Marxist anthropologists like Eric Wolf, Laura Nader, Gerald Berreman, Eleanor Leacock, and Sherry Ortner. To my knowledge only Wolf identified openly as a Marxist, and the rest considered themselves “progressives.” Be that as it may, Wolf and allies apparently ostracized Rabinow and prevented him from working at the City College of New York. According to the authors, the Marxist-leaning crowd generally rejected their Writing Culture critique to preserve a more positivistic no-
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tion of science and history. I found this story of petty academic politics fascinating. Most “cultural” or “post” Marxists whom I know would not stereotype the Writing Culture crowd as postmodern nihilists against scientific rationalism and grand theory. I thought the Writing Culture authors were an eclectic philosophical mix of Marxism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, and critical humanism. As the dialogues suggest, Rabinow still leans toward poststructuralism and constant experimentation, and Marcus still leans toward critical humanism and building bridges between early and contemporary anthropology. Their rather facile portrayal of the Marxists vs. the Writing Culture debate also leads into a problematic discussion of which perspective had the greatest impact on the field. The authors generally agree that Dell Hymes’s Reinventing Anthropology (1972) and their Writing Culture (1986) were two distinct, powerful interventions into anthropological business as usual. For them the Hymes book was a political critique of anthropology’s complicity in neocolonialism and its relative lack of public relevance. They contend that his political critique is now mainstream American anthropology in the form of subaltern studies of identity. The authors consider this reconstruction of anthropology a positive political development but a limited philosophical reconstruction of anthropological thinking. In their view, subaltern scholars substitute the concept of identity for the concept of culture, thus preserving anthropology’s hallowed commitment to cultural holism. Regrettably, the authors then portray identity studies as the “exhausted paradigm” of mainstream anthropology. When asked what kind of contemporary anthropology they prefer, they characterize Appaduari’s global studies, the Journal of Public Culture, and science and technology studies as a more “cosmopolitan” form of contemporary anthropology. For them cosmopolitan anthropology flows from the early Writing Culture critique and is free of the moralizing tendencies of subaltern identity studies; consequently, cosmopolitan anthropology is more inclined to study emergent cultural processes, not imagined cultural and social holisms. The dialogues book probably was not intended to reproduce this shop-worn, divisive dichotomy, but it does so. The cursory comments on anthropological history gloss over subaltern scholars’ reconstruction of cultural holism through a complex fusion of poststructuralist, feminist, Gramscian, Bourdieuian, and critical race theory notions of science, history, and method. Characterizing these developments as
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mainly “political” is not unlike the way orthodox Marxists stereotyped the Writing Culture authors. Orthodox Marxists glossed over the useful practices that they helped spawn, such as the rise of reflexivity, experimental writing, auto-ethnography, dialogic life histories, and poststructuralism. The extreme forms of postmodernism and orthodox Marxism never achieved large followings in anthropology. These perspectives were quickly transformed into more sensible theoretical and methodological perspectives—the poststructuralist and the post-Marxist, for lack of better labels. I suspect that this happened because most ethnographers are empiricists first and philosophers and grand theorists second. Most ethnographers are pragmatists who borrow and apply whatever ideas seem useful for interpreting their fieldwork experience. Their interpretive lenses are invariably a kaleidoscope of eclectic theories that help them tell useful, more revealing stories than journalists or positivist social scientists can tell. Moreover, most anthropologists probably never got too involved in the debates on “crises” and the “end of anthropology.” Of course without such debates, few new ideas would be produced, but academic debates are never simply the disinterested pursuit of truth. They always take place within a status hierarchy of competitive people with egos. Anthropologists have careers, and like other commodity producers in highly competitive social fields, they are required and/or inclined to play what Bourdieu might call the who’s-got-the-cultural-capital game. As Habermas might say, this is not exactly the ideal speech situation for discursively redeeming truth claims. What may be a well-intentioned search for truth can also produce limited views of rival schools of thought. This is not to argue that participants in these dialogues are playing the cultural capital game. Their limited intellectual history of the field presented in these dialogues is surely the function of the discursive situation itself. I am skeptical about any book that invites “leading figures” to dialogue on the future of a field. No scholar can explicate complex philosophical arguments in casual oral performances. Putting scholars in this role invites off-the-cuff commentaries. The format encourages participants to make sweeping characterizations and talk in sound bites about fellow anthropologists. Ultimately, they end up sounding too much like the privileged white males that the feminists castigate in Women Writing Culture. Their comments on identity studies as an exhausted, less philosophical mainstream perspective
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leaves out women and scholars of color as the experimental anthropologists. That role is assigned to “cosmopolitan” anthropologists with their philosophical roots in the writing cultural critique. But what about new ideas for rescuing an allegedly dying field? Do the authors add to their already notable contributions to the field? I had a difficult time answering this question because the narrative is more circular than linear and is not a coherent presentation of the authors’ perspectives. It also has an “in-house” character that assumes considerable familiarity with the authors’ previous publications. Be that as it may, let me try to present some key themes that I dug out of the dialogues. The authors advocate a conceptual triad, borrowed from Raymond Williams: emergent, residual, and dominant. This triad is hailed as “foundational” for a new contemporary ethnographic practice. Later in the dialogues Rabinow makes clear that he believes there is “no unified culture, no underlying society which has a core or essence.” So presumably the key methodological innovation in this triad is what the authors refer to as a new interpretive “sensibility.” This new sensibility is founded on new ontological premises and epistemological practices that are explicated much better in Rabinow’s anthropos book and in Marcus’s earlier writings. The general idea, however, seems to be to create an approach better suited to studying emergent global processes than cultural holism was. As they discuss the proposed triad, differences surface about the concept of history, which Rabinow no longer finds useful. What he surely means here is liberal and Marxist enlightenment views of a progressive, linear history vs. Foucault’s more skeptical view of history as ruptures that can also be regressions. Marcus eventually responds that his idea of multi-sited ethnographic approaches follows “a course set for ethnography by some influential macro-narrative of process of how capitalism works.” This comment suggests that Marcus may still be more committed to a historical materialist view of history and society. Conversely, at one point Rabinow says he no longer believes in the concept of a society or a culture. Does that mean he no longer believes that Marx’s concept of capitalism or Foucault’s administered society of scientific experts and governmentality has no ontological foundation? Or is he making a methodological comment that such conceptual models of society are limited ideal typologies? Ultimately, the dialogues do not make clear what each author’s philosophical position is. They use the remaining
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dialogues to come to a consensus on a new guiding ethos and interpretive sensibility not rooted in a holistic theory of culture and society. After some discussion Marcus notes that many colleagues take his idea of multi-sited ethnography too literally as multiple spatial locations. In search of common ground, he applauds Rabinow’s agenda to develop an “apparatus” and “assemblage” for studying “emergent” processes. Marcus characterizes his own interpretive sensibility as a kind of “contraption,” a “Rube Goldberg machine” that he constructs with “epistemic partners.” He is drawing an analogy that building an ethnographic interpretation and research design is like building a contraption out of materials that emerge, that you discover. Since the authors no longer like the old terminology of “native view” or “informant,” perhaps “epistemic partners” connotes locals who are more like collaborators and co-constructors of Marcus’s interpretive contraptions. Not exactly the image of the autonomous, self-assured scientist testing his professional theories. The conversation picks up steam when Rabinow remarks that they are “on to something.” The group eventually decides that Marcus’s Rube Goldberg machine or contraption has much in common with an idea Rabinow borrows from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. They conclude that ethnographic interpretation, unlike journalism and much social science, must not rush to be “timely” (i.e., trendy and fashionable). Rather, ethnography is open, unfettered, creative exploration of the field experience in search of novel ideas and novel storytelling. This “untimely sensibility” is what makes anthropologists unique and an ungainly fit in the positivist and productivist ethos of the traditional social sciences. I concur that ethnographers need an “untimely sensibility” and that their interpretations are a little like Rube Goldberg contraptions. And without “epistemic partners” to help create semi-coherent portraits of messy emergent processes, anthropologists would be more prone to essentialize and “other” the people they study. But I am not sure what is new in all this, beyond the references to Nietzsche and the Rube Goldberg metaphor. Their call for a new interpretive sensibility and ethos reproduces a time-honored image of anthropologists as alienated intellectual bricoleurs/artists engaged in the lonely, heroic quest for truth. As the dialogues continue, Rabinow portrays the new crop of anthropology students as coming from NGO backgrounds in search of
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humanitarian projects and no longer interested in the old subjects like ritual, myth, magic, and fieldwork in faraway places. Marcus responds by wanting to look for bridges between the old meta language and the new. They agree that he is more inclined than Rabinow to look for new applications of earlier concepts. Marcus says Paul’s anthropos book is reinventing ethnography anew. He thanks Paul for his new schema of conceptual tools, such as “equipment,” “problematization,” “apparatus,” “assemblage,” “event,” and the “untimely.” He then tosses out the terms “paraethnography” and “imaginaries” as his way of working within the contours of traditional method. I confess this particular section and its blizzard of undefined meta language and mutual admiration tested my patience as a reader. The next section ends with rather fast and loose discussion of various issues. Marcus claims that the current practice of the self-reflexive in ethnography answers to a very narrow set of rationales and justifications. Rabinow reaffirms the importance of “ascetic work on the self ” to advance knowledge, and he argues for a hermeneutics of the self as a critical aesthetic, ethical, and even ontological practice. The discussion eventually calls for some kind of standard or exemplar for aspiring anthropologists that encourages innovation. Marcus again represents himself as wanting to do this by building bridges between the old and the new. Rabinow concurs that he is the man for that job, since he is “an anthropologist of anthropology.” Rabinow then reveals that he has never been interested in mainstream preoccupations like identity politics and colonialism. He represents himself as having to “forge his own path,” and claims that to be loyal to his vision of anthropology he has had to “remain disloyal to the existing state of affairs.” The point of these self-representations seems to be to establish that both remain dedicated to the “experimental moment” they helped create. Now that they have become tribal elders, they have a strong sense of duty to pass on this sensibility to the next generation. In that vein, the dialogues express a certain optimism that anthropology is in the midst of rediscovering its purpose through these new theories and methodologies. The crises have not abated entirely, and much conceptual work remains, but they are hopeful that the next generation of anthropologists is up to the task. The final section of the dialogues explores what struck me as the main new idea, a design studio pedagogy, to which I will return.
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Overall, I agree with various points brought up in the dialogues, but too much of the discussion seemed like the proverbial old wine in new bottles. I recommend reading the authors’ earlier books instead of or perhaps before reading Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. I would also recommend reading John Comaroff ’s December 2010 essay “The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/discipline” (American Anthropologist 112 (4): 524–38). He addresses the death of the field discourse in a particularly accessible and upbeat manner. He claims that most contemporary anthropologists pay little attention to the crises discourse and have moved on. He cites a number of exemplary ethnographies of contemporary life. His prescription for revitalizing the field is based on what he conceptualizes as a “principled praxis” and a “grounded” methodology that tacks back and forth between the subject’s lived reality and the interpreters’ invented interpretive lens. This is actually where Marcus and Rabinow end up, but Comaroff ’s expression of this “sensibility” is more openly modernist, less rhetorically “experimental,” and easier to understand. Fieldwork: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition is an interesting discussion of pedagogy and method. It is organized to convey the experimental ethnographic research at Rice University under the direction of Marcus, Faubion, and Fischer, among others. Like most books of readings, the essays go in many idiosyncratic directions, but all the authors are more or less dedicated to illustrating how the old Malinowskian norms of ethnographic fieldwork die hard. Despite a strongly interdisciplinary, humanities, and poststructuralist training program, the ghost of an ethnographic past apparently haunts most Rice students’ first fieldwork projects. Why this is so at Rice and whether this is happening elsewhere are interesting questions. After reading Marcus and Faubion’s introductory essays, I was expecting to hear more about the specific pedagogical training that Rice students received that helped them design and practice fieldwork for a more contemporary ethnography. Only Kristen Peterson’s essay provides reflections on her training. She recounts an engaging story on how her letters from the field became part of the Rice pedagogical process and her personal development. Most of the essays address what many fieldwork stories address. We learn that doing ethnography is a messy process filled with relational problems, ethical dilemmas, ideological clashes, complicity, guilty compromises, and the elusive
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search for a focus. Kim Fortune discusses how she trains ethnographers through an absorbing set of questions on interrogating “texts” in the broadest, intertextual, postmodern sense. Presumably she also has students read Foucault’s discussions of archaeology and genealogy to hone their critical sensibilities. Her suggestions seemed useful and contemporary, and I wanted a more detailed account of her approach. As would be expected, these pieces tend to reflect the narrative style of the Writing Culture essays. They range from Nahal Naficy’s sparkling literary and confessional essay to Jae Chung’s dense theoretical foray. Generally, these novice ethnographies have moved beyond reflections on rapport and social relationships to address more philosophical issues. Several explore the ontological assumptions and epistemological practices that authors did or did not share with co-researchers and research subjects. On that theme, the essays of Lisa Breglia, Deepa Reedy, and Christopher Kelty are particularly interesting. In a short review it is impossible to do justice to all ten authors, but a key issue that surfaces repeatedly is what Marcus calls “scale” and Faubion calls the “ethics of connectivity.” As modern ethnographers leave behind villages or small towns and enter complex bureaucratic and corporate worlds, the scale of the field site changes dramatically. An ethnographer working in a local site now studies complex events like chemical plant disasters, tourist uses of archaeological sites, the AIDS epidemic, dangers of nano technology, or Korean venture capital markets. Such ontological complexity requires a “rescaling” of the research design and new epistemologies to capture elusive, particularistic, and emergent nonlocal processes. According to Marcus and Faubion, questions of scale and connectivity cannot simply be resolved with spatial metaphors that remap the global, national, and local as simple geographics. These highly diffuse phenomena entangle local actors and the researcher in conflicting, complicated legal regulations, discursive regimes, macroeconomic and political practices, and institutional agendas. The novice ethnographer is ill prepared in the worldviews and language of stockbrokers, policy makers, and scientists. Ethnographers are often in over their heads on how to rescale the traditional small community/group focus to track and provide rich empirical portraits of highly diffuse societal processes. For me, the question of scale or rescaling is the most important methodological question facing contemporary anthropologists. I
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equate the conceptual problem of expanding one’s local ethnography to the extralocal with the sociological debates over the macro-micro and structure-agency. My own bias is that rescaling or reassembling traditional ethnography can only be accomplished through the creative modification and deployment of some version of grand theory. My Rube Goldberg machine for “rescaling” and “assembling” contemporary ethnographic field studies would start out with Marxian and Weberian notions of political economy and bureaucracy. And if ideas like network, cybernetic flows, nervous systems, discursive regimes, governmentality, rhizomatic nodules, cultural ecological niches, or borderlands were also useful, my interpretive “contraption” would become very eclectic. My only concern would be combining disparate ideas in a logically consistent manner. For me, that reinvents anthropological holism in a manner that historicizes the “emergent” as process, practice, and performance. This may be a more modernist solution than Faubion and Marcus would advocate, but it is my way of making sense out of the problem of scale in contemporary ethnography. Given my perspective, what I was looking for in these essays were accounts of how novice ethnographers slay the ghosts of ethnographic past with innovative theory. Even the most theoretical essay by Chung does not address how she rescaled her failed office ethnography to explain how Korean venture capital markets work. She provides a vivid account of how futile hanging out in a local venture capital office was but says little about what she did to transcend a localized ethnography. The same is true of Jennifer Hamilton’s discussion of volunteering in a Vancouver legal aid office. She was hoping to study a complex configuration of kin, political associations, funding, and government agencies that confront urban Native Americans. Her essay highlights restricted access more than how she reassembled her research design. In another case, Kristen Peterson goes to Nigeria and grapples with what she calls the “unknowable,” “phantom epistemologies” and feels as if she produced a “para-ethnography” of elusive facticity based on anecdotes and rumors. The essay is rich in the rhetoric of provisional, cautious interpretation, but thin on how she rescaled her original field study of the AIDS epidemic. The essays left me wondering whether grand theory training played less of a role that I imagined in Rice’s experimental, interdisciplinary anthropological program. Or perhaps the editors simply did not tell each author what methodological issue they planned
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to emphasize. Or perhaps I am misreading their enterprise. Whatever the reasons, the essays did not focus enough on an important methodological issue that confronts anthropologists studying complex, technologically advanced, bureaucratic societies. One of the most interesting ideas in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be is the concept of the “design studio” of architects and artists. Marcus contends that these scholars use a pedagogy much more suited to the challenges of contemporary anthropology. He argues that anthropologists should adopt the design studios’ collaborative, peer-oriented critique of student’s projects that take place over an extended period. This pedagogy has the great virtue of being open, reflexive, and democratic. Many traditional, hierarchal anthropology departments could surely benefit from such pedagogy. In my experience some anthropology departments already use a version of the design studio approach without the label. The University of Texas subprograms in activist anthropology and African American diasporic studies are very collectivist, open, and self-critical groups when it comes to designing fieldwork projects. Nevertheless, an explicit commitment to design studio pedagogy might refine and improve the pedagogical practices of these programs. None of these former Rice students acknowledged going through this type of pedagogical experience before going to the field. That left me wondering when Marcus and his colleagues institutionalized this approach. Perhaps the design studio concept represents what Marcus learned from constant experimentation and false starts. Perhaps it was never used at Rice. An account of his learning process, of when and how he comes to the design studio concept, would be useful for anthropologists itching to transform their graduate programs. I love the idea of a more collective, extended, and peer-based pedagogical process. Constant reflection and constructive criticism of novice ethnographers’ fieldwork design would socialize them to be more open emotionally and more intellectually agile. We all know that fully anticipating “the field” is next to impossible, but extended reflections and planning sure beat the old sink-or-swim approach. The other relatively new methodological issue addressed is a type of collaboration seldom discussed. Legions of applied anthropologists have told this story, but it is relatively new territory for cultural anthropologists who subscribe to a more public anthropology. Nahal Naficy, Cris Kelty, Deepa Reddy, and Lisa Breglia felt deeply compromised in
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their commitment to be independent, critical, truth-seeking scholars. Their field stories are about team research projects in which “hard scientists” (chemists, geneticists, archaeologists) and foreign studies specialists stereotype the ethnographic method. Their collaborators turn critical ethnographers into reluctant public relations experts, legitimating “ethnic insiders,” and technical coordinators. Chris Kely makes an interesting distinction between genuine collaboration and the technical coordination necessary in a hierarchical research team’s division of labor. In different ways, many of these essays complicate any overly romantic idea of collaborative ethnography. Collaborations with other professionals are certainly possible, but this new methodological territory may come with losses of autonomy, shifting role expectations, and complicities that cultural critics find tough to swallow. Overall, I would recommend the fieldwork book. The intellectual quality of the essays is good, but readers may find the narrative mix of philosophical and personal reflexivity and angst a bit challenging. That, of course, is the virtue and the bane of the experimental genre. All things considered, Marcus and Faubion raise some interesting methodological questions, and the essays begin to articulate these concerns. The students could have addressed questions of scale, connectivity, design studio training, and collaboration more thoroughly, but their fieldwork reflections do initiate the discussion.
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douglas foley is professor of anthropology and of education at the University
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of Texas at Austin. His most recent ethnographies include Learning Capitalist Culture (2nd edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and The Heartland Chronicles (expanded edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Foley is the former editor of Anthropology and Education Quarterly and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
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Stephen W. Silliman, ed. Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. 288 pp. Paper, $35.00 darby c. stapp and julia g. longenecker, Northwest Anthropology LLS
Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology, edited by Stephen W. Silliman, is a welcomed addition to the expanding professional literature concerning indigenous peoples and 286 • collaborative anthropologies • volume 4 • 2011
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their exercise of control over their archaeological heritage. As a professional university-based archaeologist, Silliman sees potential for the discipline of archaeology to help address the needs and concerns of indigenous groups and, at the same time, stimulate the intellectual and methodological development of this discipline. Silliman and his sixteen colleagues have generated a scholarly product, primarily for the professional audience, sharing experiences and concepts resulting from archaeological field schools conducted with indigenous groups, all in North America. Silliman uses the term indigenous archaeology to describe this variation of archaeology, defining it as a catchall for the various terms that have been used to conduct similar efforts by archaeologists and indigenous groups. He defines indigenous archaeology as “for, with, and by Indigenous people.” The notion of an indigenous archaeology suggests that there are commonalities that can be drawn from the many experiences of archaeologists and indigenous groups working together. By highlighting these commonalities, a method, theory, and ethic can emerge. In support of this notion, we can look to the global health community, where there is growing recognition of the many similarities among American Indians and indigenous peoples, such that it is useful to think in terms of a global indigenous health field. Silliman further proposes an orientation he calls collaborative indigenous archaeology to describe the openness of archaeologists to learn from their indigenous counterparts, and vice versa. He borrows the concept of “at the trowel’s edge” to explain that collaboration begins at the ground level and involves planning, preparation of research designs, excavation, analysis, and interpretation of the archaeological deposits. This process, along with attention to how one teaches collaborative indigenous archaeology, is the thrust of Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge. While we have concerns about use of the terms archaeology and collaborative, as discussed later in this review, we are glad to see more and more archaeologists open to sharing and, in some cases, relinquishing intellectual and programmatic control over the recovery, analysis, writing, and preservation of archaeological resources. We are especially glad to see those archaeologists who bring their skills and experiences to indigenous settings spurred on by concerns for social justice. When archaeologists accept that an indigenous group has the right to
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exercise control and make decisions regarding the group’s own heritage (and even to make mistakes, as the action anthropologist Sol Tax would say), we get closer to what the authors describe as an indigenous archaeology, “an archaeology for, with, and by indigenous peoples.” The book begins with a foreword by Larry Zimmerman, an archaeologist who early on fought for the rights of indigenous groups to obtain ancestral skeletal remains, protect ancestral sites, access traditional use areas, treat and interpret material culture, and be involved in archaeological research. Zimmerman provides a brief personal account of his archaeological experiences in Iowa, where he spent his life working, helping, and learning with Native Americans. He predicts that Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge “will help create a better archaeology.” Stephen Silliman introduces the book in chapter 1. The collection of twelve papers grew out of a 2005 symposium held at the Society for American Archaeology’s 70th annual meeting in Salt Lake City. The symposium was oriented around archaeological field schools conducted in collaborative settings. With support from the Amerind Foundation and others, the indigenous and non-indigenous participants met afterward to continue discussions. This book is a product of those efforts. Silliman does a good job in the introduction at explaining the many dimensions of indigenous archaeology, the roles that archaeologists may play, and the influence that working with indigenous groups can have on the intellectual development of the discipline. As he explains, indigenous archaeology is a process, not just a product. The introduction also brings in the many dimensions that are not typically faced with scientific or humanistic archaeology. For many indigenous groups, archaeology as a formal discipline is foreign. Archaeological deposits are rarely encountered, and when they are, they are not viewed as something worthy of study but rather as cultural remains that need to be cared for. There is generally more of a protection mindset than a research mindset. One part of the introduction that should have been stronger is the historical overview of early collaborative work among archaeologists and indigenous groups. The roots of indigenous archaeology extend at least four decades, but little of this work is acknowledged. Much of the work being done today across the world is directly related to these early efforts, and if we want to build an indigenous archaeology, there is a wealth of existing data from which to learn. We would refer readers to
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Opening Archaeology: Repatriations Impact on Contemporary Research and Practice, edited by Thomas W. Killion (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2008). Another section of the introduction we think should have been stronger is the one on pedagogy. Silliman proposes the following question: “How do we take the insights and methods that develop in on-the-ground research projects and among living communities into university and college classrooms, archaeological field schools, or even to younger generations still in primary or secondary school?” (18). The examples suggest that pedagogy is being limited to formal educational settings, the primary participants of which are non-indigenous. We would expect the majority of pedagogical efforts to be directed at indigenous communities and would encourage preparation of a companion product to Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge with the indigenous user in mind. In our experience the issue of creating capacity, developing a quality, sustainable indigenous work force, and a community that supports it, has been high on the list of indigenous goals. Teaching, training, and instructing opportunities are sought after and supported activities. In many cases the indigenous people in the heritage programs have not pursued college degrees and do not have professional backgrounds. They bring a different type of information, knowledge, and wisdom. Still, there are times when general and specific training is required, be it on laws, methods, or consultation; these trainings vary from workshops and field schools to elder training. Should not a collaborative indigenous archaeology address both Western systems of education and indigenous sessions? This is an area where the academic community can be of great assistance to indigenous groups: collect the past literature, synthesize it, and share what is learned. Pedagogy needs to focus on both indigenous groups and university students. We refer readers to Collaborative Programs in Indigenous Communities: From Fieldwork to Practice, by Barbara Harrison (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001) for innovative examples based on New Zealand experiences. The remainder of the book is divided into three parts: Methods and Practices in Archaeological Field Schools, Indigenous Archaeology and Education, and Reflections on Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology. Part 1 begins with chapter 2, a strong account of a field school operated by the University of Arizona and the White Mountain Apache Tribe. This three-year field school built upon existing long-term rela-
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tionships, was supported by various agencies including the National Science Foundation, and had a strong tribal component. Our favorite part was the 51 percent rule, which stated explicitly that the majority of benefits must accrue to the tribe. Chapter 3 presents a case study from the Mohegan Tribe, located in present-day Connecticut. The authors balance theory with details about how the Mohegan Archaeological Field School evolved, the principles behind it, the tribe’s role, and the students’ success, concluding with a number of reflections that many will find enlightening. Chapter 4 provides another example of a tribal field school in Connecticut, in this case associated with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation. The discussion covers field schools as learning environments and describes two models that have been used in the past. Chapter 5 presents a case study associated with the Oneida Indian Nation of New York and Colgate University’s two-week workshop held annually for eight years, explaining the program, its design, its successes, and its challenges. The final case study, presented in chapter 6, presents an informal collaborative project in New York between Ithaca College, Wells College, and Cayuga members of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. The author describes the political aspects of Cayuga heritage and provides keen insight into the field school concept and its role in indigenous education. He concludes with this observation to take to heart: “Ultimately, I believe that archaeologists must be prepared to walk away when native people view the archaeology as more dangerous and harmful than interesting and useful” (119). The four chapters in part 2 focus on indigenous archaeology and education. Chapter 7 concerns pedagogy and decolonization. It is a highly readable section providing theory and models of education, drawing abundantly on the thoughts of scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr., Paulo Freire, and Gregory Cajete. Chapter 8 is particularly interesting, as the two authors juxtapose their experiences in Zuni Indian country in the Southwest and with the Pequot in New England. Chapter 9, the chapter to which we relate best, addresses indigenous archaeology as indigenous cultural resource management. The author gives an excellent overview of indigenous resource management history, discusses the challenges involved in teaching the subject, and then
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provides details from the teaching program at Northern Arizona University. Rich quotes from student evaluations are provided. The last chapter in part 2 is an excellent overview of the Navaho Nation Archaeology Department Student Training Program, one of the earliest tribal programs in the United States. Its time depth makes this material especially important to consider. Of the fifty Navaho students participating in this program, an impressive twenty-seven have received college degrees. Part 3 consists of two chapters by authors who reflect upon collaborative indigenous archaeology based upon their years of involvement with indigenous groups. Kent Lightfoot gives perspectives on the implications of collaborative archaeology for North American archaeology; we found his words on writing collaborative research designs particularly instructive. His discussion on low-impact archaeology—the use of oral history and other lines of evidence—is welcome and bodes well for the development of this subfield. The final contribution is by George Nicholas, who has spent much of his life working with First Nations in British Columbia. Following a brief account of his experiences directing a post-secondary indigenous archaeology program on Kamloops Indian Reserve First Nations, Nicholas reflects on topics such as curriculum, pedagogy, building capacity, benefit, and power relations. He accomplishes this goal by drawing upon examples from the earlier chapters, in the process creating a fine closing to the book. Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge is important for several reasons. First, it keeps the literature of indigenous archaeology fresh and dynamic. The book provides many new examples and expands the geographic coverage in the literature by adding new cases from eastern North America. The approaches described for conducting archaeological field schools will be helpful to those developing or modifying their own field schools. We would note that field schools are but one mechanism for teaching at the trowel’s edge, one that comes principally from the discipline of archaeology. In the indigenous world, workshops, trainings, culture camps, and other indigenous approaches to learning need to be explored. Finally, the rich discussions found throughout the book advance the intellectual and practical components of indigenous archaeology. There are nuggets of wisdom everywhere. The book does give us pause in a few areas. Our perspective comes
Book Reviews • 291
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from twenty years working as archaeologists with Mid-Columbia Tribes on the Columbia Plateau in the Pacific Northwest. We offer these thoughts to enrich the debate and the learning process. As mentioned, we struggle with the word collaboration in the context of indigenous archaeology. We would never use the term collaborative to describe our relationship, simply because our relationship has not been collaborative. Collaboration to us is a balance of power; our relationship is better described as supportive to our tribal partners. We bring our anthropological and archaeological expertise, but we do so at their discretion. Our job is to provide options, evaluations, impact assessments, and recommendations and, once a decision is made, to assist with implementation. We also struggle with the use of the term indigenous archaeology and find it somewhat of an oxymoron. We do not know what value the term adds, because the commonalities that bring archaeologists and indigenous peoples together are much broader than the term archaeology implies. Further, archaeology often has a negative connotation associated with destruction and grave robbing and in that sense is de-energizing. From our experiences, there is little interest in the indigenous community for the study of the past through the removal and study of material culture (or however you want to define archaeology). Rather, it is the protection of resources in general, including archaeological materials when necessary, that draws the interest. To us it makes more sense to build a body of method, theory, and ethics around a broader class of resources, and therefore a term such as indigenous resource management would be more useful. We would suggest minimizing use of the term indigenous archaeology to a smaller set of activities that relate only to the treatment of archaeological materials. Our final comment is to suggest that archaeologists working in indigenous archaeology/indigenous resource management fit within a spectrum. At one end are archaeologists driven by the intellectual component of archaeology and who want to collaborate with indigenous people to advance their studies and their discipline. At the other end of the spectrum are archaeologists who, for reasons motivated by social justice, lend their skills and time to indigenous groups, without expectation. Most archaeologists find themselves somewhere along the spectrum, their position often determined by the setting at hand. Indigenous groups who must engage archaeologists, voluntarily or invol-
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untarily and for whatever reason, will recognize this spectrum. As long as we can all understand one another’s motives, we should be able to get along, learn from one another, and get the job at hand done. • • • • • darby c. stapp and julia g. longenecker live and work in Washington state,
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on the last stretch of the undammed Columbia River, overlooking the Hanford Reach National Monument. Darby received his PhD in historical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania and his MA in anthropology from the University of Idaho. Julie received her MA in anthropology from the University of Idaho and her BA from University of Wyoming. They have been married to each other for thirty years and recently co-wrote Avoiding Archaeological Disasters: A Risk Management Approach (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009).
Susan Sleeper-Smith, ed. Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 374 pp. Paper, $35.00.
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cécile r. ganteaume, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian
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The twelve essays gathered in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives are written by an impressive group of international scholars. Their essays look far beyond the question “Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity?” and examine, largely, the varied ways that power has operated in the formulation of knowledge about indigenous cultures—that is, in the construction of ethnographic knowledge—and how that knowledge has shaped the narratives that museums, other cultural institutions and social practices have presented about indigenous peoples. Written from a decidedly postcolonial perspective, the essays emerge from deeply held convictions about the significance of museums, in particular, as sites where knowledge is constructed, contested, and negotiated. Many of the essays are wellthought-through examinations of different histories and cultural and political situations in which museums operate. They present nuanced understandings of the factors that subtly and not so subtly shape the representation of indigenous cultures—in tribal as well as national museums, archives, libraries, and public displays. The book is organized into three parts, each composed of four linked essays with an overarching introduction. Book Reviews • 293
Part 1: Ethnography and the Cultural Practices of Museums
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While we get little sense of how Native groups may have attempted to resist colonists in the early nineteenth century in Hal Langfur’s essay “Elite Ethnography and Cultural Eradication: Confronting the Cannibal in Early-Nineteenth Century Brazil,” we do get an extremely detailed account, informed by facts based on rigorous archival research, of how Portuguese colonists rationalized their harsh and ultimately violent treatment of Native peoples, specifically the Botocudo in eastern Brazil, and of how, in time, the production of ethnographic knowledge and a concomitant European mindset toward those people took hold and eventually shaped Brazil’s first historical societies and museums. Zine Magubane’s essay “Ethnographic Showcases as Sites of Knowledge Production and Indigenous Resistance” examines one of the many tragic ways in which the spread of the British Empire and subjugation of indigenous peoples went hand in hand. Drawing largely on announcements and articles in the Illustrated London News, a hugely popular newspaper, Magubane examines the phenomenon of displaying indigenous Africans in London in the nineteenth century. She explores the motivations—the quest for imperial dominance—behind this middle- and upper-class amusement and the popular attitudes toward it. While she persuasively contextualizes the phenomena of these showcases within the nineteenth-century racial “sciences” of ethnology and phrenology, she also takes note of the strategies employed by African people to make known their reluctance to participate in these showcases and relates the participants’ own astute observations on English society—that is, their return of the gaze. On first appearance, the subject of Ann McMullen’s essay, “Reinventing George Heye: Nationalizing the Museum of the American Indian and Its Collection,” deals with the caricature of George Gustav Heye that has taken hold over the years since his death and, McMullen argues, that has obfuscated any understanding of Heye’s original intent in establishing the NMAI’s forerunner institution and, worse yet, has (mis-)shaped many people’s deepest assumptions about the value of the collection. While having no desire to “valorize” Heye, McMullen maintains that a more balanced understanding of Heye and his purpose is fundamental to any interpretation of the objects in the core collection of the NMAI. Most pertinent, McMullen ponders the ways
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in which this important collection can now be of value in increasing Native American cultural sovereignty—and she questions why “reinterpretation and repossession of visual culture has fallen so far behind writing in Native self-representation.” Ciraj Rassool’s “Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa” is an activist scholar’s unflinching look at the apartheid legacy of a major ethnographic museum, the South African Museum (SAM), and its (white) crowd-pleasing Khoisan diorama. It is an equally honest portrayal of the challenges facing a post-apartheid indigenous community museum, the District Six Museum. Encumbered by the legacy of its racist (justified as ethnographic) conceptual framework, the SAM is presented as a moribund institution—dealing uncomfortably, if not against its will, with its famed diorama and skeletal remains. Rassool delineates the social and historical factors behind SAM’s representation of Khoisan people and formation of its osteological collections, thus contextualizing the contemporary controversy surrounding the museum’s long-held stance toward indigenous peoples. At the same time, Rassool steers us through the political, social, and cultural contexts within which the District Six Museum attempts to establish itself as meaningful form of social action.
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Part 2: Curatorial Practices: Voices, Values, Languages, and Traditions
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Miranda J. Brady seeks to assess the success of the National Museum of the American Indian as a “dialogical” vs. “traditional” museum through a Foucaultian analysis in “A Dialogical Response to the Problematized Past: The National Museum of the American Indian.” Accepting and working with the NMAI’s stated aims, she weighs the historic and museological validity of these aims against those of the museum’s predecessor institutions and then measures them against the NMAI’s actual practices. All this is good. Still, Brady’s essay is a global look at the NMAI. Collecting an immense amount of data, she skirts many, many issues (of varying degrees of saliency) rather than deeply and fruitfully exploring a small number of concerns. In “West Side Stories: The Blending of Voice and Representation Book Reviews • 295
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through a Shared Curatorial Practice,” Brenda Macdougall and M. Teresa Carlson display an impressive grasp of the history and contemporary political situation of the Northwestern Metis. To their credit, the authors display a convincing portrait of their well-earned rapport with these communities. One senses that a disciplined and empathetic research team is at work in these communities. But as far as telling us how well Metis history and cultural values are produced or reproduced in their exhibition, they give us a far less satisfying picture. We have scant idea of how the conceptual framework for their exhibition, let alone its constituent parts, are visualized. They say they have found a new way to disseminate their information. But as they do not explore any real design issues in their gallery, one is not persuaded that they have successfully branched out into the visual presentation of their research. In “Huichol Histories and Territorial Claims in Two National Anthropological Museums,” Paul Liffman guides us through the depth and complexity of two Huichol mytho-historical narratives, with the intent of explicating how Huichol define their sovereignty as a people through their sacred history and “performative construction of territory”—which is to say, through their contemporary land claims. As Liffman explains, the Huichol have become adept at representing their identity and history in the public sphere: in their schools, agrarian courts, regional political arenas—and in museum exhibitions, notably those at the National Museum of the American Indian and the Museo Nacional de Anththropología in Mexico City. By giving shape and form to the Huichol’s complex relationship to their territory, the museums have brought the Huichol ritual practice of territorialization to museum visitors—and have become relevant to the Huichol. Jennifer Shannon draws upon her firsthand involvement in the production of one of the inaugural exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian to write about the nature of the process by which that museum attempted to present “Native voice” in its opening exhibitions. Her essay “The Construction of Native Voice at the National Museum of the American Indian” focuses specifically upon her work with the Native American community in Chicago, the Kalinango of Dominica, and Inuit community of Igloolik for the exhibition Our Lives. Her essay provides insight into some of the problems that NMAI staff grappled with, but missing is any real sense of the rich body of material pro-
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duced by the communities with which the NMAI worked, and which, for perplexing reasons, she refers to as “ethnographic evidence” and “text-artifact.” Missing is any sense of how the experiences so intensely and profoundly lived by the communities were elicited, or of how these experiences came to be regarded, by both the communities and the NMAI, as part of a community’s identity.
Part 3: Creation of the Tribal Museum
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Kristina Ackley’s knowledge of Oneida history and her gift for unraveling the complexities of Oneida self-representation are both amply present in her essay “Tsi niyukwaliho tΛ, the Oneida Nation Museum: Creating a Space for Haudenosaunee Kinship and Identity.” Ackley’s thinking about the role of the Oneida Nation Museum (ONM) within the Wisconsin Oneida community sheds much light on the challenges endemic to tribal museums. Her discussion describes the particular ways in which the ONM is continually learning to be a significant Oneida community center by navigating competing ideas in how Oneidas want to represent themselves and their history, revitalize their traditions, and strengthen their relationship to other Haudenosaunee people. Ways for the ONM to mediate these conversations without alienating a large portion of the community, as Ackley demonstrates, require a delicate process of continual negotiation. “Reimagining Tribal Sovereignty through Tribal History: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in the Klamath River Region,” by Brian Isaac Daniels, contrasts, perhaps a bit too starkly, national museums, libraries, and archives and corresponding tribal institutions. Daniels yields no value, it seems, to national cultural institutions, seeing them solely as implements of the nation-state. Putting that aside, he examines the naissance of what he calls indigenous heritage institutions among the Hupa, Yurok, and Shasta in the Klamath River region of northwestern California. He details the particular sociohistorical contexts in which their museums and archives are made and argues for a different kind of credibility for these institutions based on their inherent sovereignty and heterogeneity within the nation-state. Gwyneira Isaac’s “Responsibilities toward Knowledge: The Zuni Museum and the Reconciling of Different Knowledge Systems” is a study of the problems that arise between two conflicting systems of
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knowledge: Zuni and Anglo-American. Isaac focuses on Zuni protocols for the treatment of ritual knowledge and Anglo-Americans’ need to disseminate this “ethnographic” knowledge. Specifically, she examines the impact within Zuni society of the “reproduction of knowledge”— that is, of archival films and photographs, museum replicas, and computerized databases—research tools long built into Anglo-American ethnographic practices. Isaac shares with us the ways in which the Zuni tribal museum deals with the “reproduction of knowledge” and how it negotiates its position within the pueblo’s hierarchy of responsibility toward ritual knowledge. Amy Lonetree opens her essay “Museums as Sites of Decolonization: Truth Telling in National and Tribal Museums” by critiquing the inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories, for its failure to “tell the hard truths of colonization and the genocidal acts that have been committed against Indigenous peoples.” She argues that the NMAI must be a “site of decolonization” through truth telling, such as is brought about through truth and reconciliation commissions. Lonetree cites the Saginaw Chippewa’s Ziibiwing Center for Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways as an effective “decolonizing museum.” It is a museum, she tells us, with a coherent narrative structure that tells the hard stories of land theft, disease, poverty, violence, and forced religious conversion. Particularly important, she notes, is the fact that it assists community members in the healing process. By failing to reveal the past wrongs of colonization, Lonetree argues, the NMAI fails in challenging the public’s continued refusal to face the nation’s genocidal policies. And it fails, crucially, to promote healing. • • • • •
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cécile r. ganteaume joined the National Museum of the American Indian when it was established as part of the Smithsonian. Before that she worked on the curatorial staff of the NMAI’s forerunner institution, the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation in New York City. She is editor of An Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian and curator of the exhibition of the same title. She is currently editing a volume of essays in honor of George Horse Capture. She has an MA in anthropology from New York University.
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Information for Contributors
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Luke Eric Lassiter, Editor—
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Collaborative Anthropologies Marshall University Graduate College 100 Angus E. Peyton Drive South Charleston, WV 25303-1600 Tel: 304-746-1931 Fax: 304-746-1942 www.marshall.edu/coll-anth
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Collaborative Anthropologies encourages submissions that engage the growing and ever-widening discussion of collaborative research and practice in anthropology and in closely related fields.
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Works must be original and not previously published. Manuscripts should be submitted in English and prepared according to the guidelines of The Chicago Manual of Style (following the author-date documentation system, which employs parenthetical text citations and a reference list), with one-inch margins, double-spaced type, and no more than 14,000 words. Each submission must also include an abstract 150–200 words in length.
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E-mail submissions (in Word, WordPerfect, or compatible RTF) are encouraged, though hard copies will be accepted (when mailing, send four copies). Please contact the Editorial Office with any questions. book, media, and exhibit reviews Collaborative Anthropologies encourages book, media, and exhibit reviews that chronicle the creative and innovative use of collaboration in anthropology and closely related fields. Reviews should be submitted in English and prepared according to the guidelines of The Chicago Manual of Style (following the author-date documentation system, which employs parenthetical text citations and a reference list), with oneinch margins, double-spaced type, and no more than 2,000 words. Please contact the Editorial Office with any questions or suggestions for reviews.
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A forum for diverse voices and perspectives spanning a variety of academic disciplines, AIQ is committed to publishing work that contributes to the development of American Indian studies as a field and to the sovereignty and continuance of American Indian nations and cultures.
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Focaal is a peer-reviewed journal advocating an approach that rests in the simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights, and global vision. It is at the heart of debates on the ongoing conjunction of anthropology and history as well as the incorporation of local research settings in the wider spatial networks of coercion, imagination, and exchange that are often glossed as 'globalization' or 'empire'.
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Race ascendant: Framing physical anthropology in Central and Southeastern Europe, edited by Marius Turda and Tudor Georgescu — Non-binding coercions: Ethnographic perspectives on soft law, edited by Filippo M. Zerilli — The East speaks back: Gender and sexuality in Central Eastern Europe, edited by Agnieszka Koscianska and Jill Owczarzak — Migrants, mobility, and mobilization, edited by Pauline Gardiner Barber and Winnie Lem
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