In public spaces, personal and professional, it’s surprising how often our year or so of fieldwork is alluded to as the time of our lives. In methods courses as much as published writing, we generally get the feeling the fieldworker is having a great time (when they’re not, it’s often a contained experience, reframed as educational experience). Part of it is probably natural nostalgia. Part may be the very conditions of research (an advisor once warned me to be careful what you work on, as you’ll come to love it a little either way). And part of it may be our fear of the otherwise: we’ve all read Malinowski’s diaries, and stories of enjoyment somehow suggest mutuality, as if our experience means our interlocutors felt the same. The idea is that ethnography entails loving attention, and positive affect – passion, interest, and intimacy – is what prompts, drives, and directs our research. Despite decades critiquing the romanticization of field research, we still talk about it in pretty glowing terms.

Of course, the fact that fieldwork is difficult is an open secret you’re let in on the day you get back from the field. Of course, uprooting and starting fresh somewhere is hard. But beyond the sort of routine discomfort, I know so many researchers whose experience is more intense. Fieldwork rearranges our mental landscape, with sometimes disruptive or disturbing results: depression is a fieldwork story I’ve heard so many times. Isolation, equivocation, and irresolvable FOMO are more or less inherent to the exercise, and may well put us at risk. But here I’m less interested in causes: I want to ask what happens in these moments, instead. I would venture that most of us are drawn to anthropology because we’re invested in the problems and possibilities of our worlds. But for many, depression manifests as precisely a lack of interest; a chemical inability to care. If we are, ourselves, our own research instruments, what happens when our attention escapes our control?

Anthropologists have critiqued the cordoning off of emotion into the personal, the pathological realm. Our experience of feelings like depression are socially structured, and these interpretations vary and change over time. But for extremely understandable reasons, not many write their research process into these results (Martin’s Bipolar Expeditions comes very close). Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling is one example of work that does. Like Martin, Cvetkovich challenges the idea that psychological states are private affairs. Claiming depression as a “public” feeling, she suggests we have good reasons for feeling bad (racism, colonialism, and capitalism among them). In doing so she shifts the experience of depression from diagnosis to embodied critique. Rather than a disease to be cured or limitation to be overcome, depression is put to work as political resource. Cvetkovich’s work is part-memoir, which allows her some leeway – but reading it, I wonder how we might think our work in this way.

If depression weren’t only a personal but a public problem – one so pervasive we might see as tied to the enterprise itself – it might first lead us to make stronger demands on our systems: our institutions could be more thoughtful about the nature of our labor; they could be more respectful of and responsible for our care. But it might also lead us to think differently about the nature of our research, itself. Ethnography is a set of practices and style of writing, but it’s also a mode of inhabiting one’s life. An affective orientation – a specific attunement – ethnographic fieldwork is a way of moving through the world. Ethnography means attending carefully to what’s around you; it entails presence and attention, and interest above all. On good days I joke that I am curious for a living – to me this is the pleasure and privilege of our work. But depression is defined precisely as a problem of motivation and mood. It saps the attention that may be our best tool. In this way depression looks like the undoing of ethnography (which goes toward explaining the specificity of the issue, and the shame). It seems striking, to me, that our way of producing knowledge is tied to a certain kind of energy and even affect; that the pressures to inhabit it may feed into its opposite, compounding an intensity already there.

But the conclusion of Cvetkovich’s Depression is equally instructive: entitled “The Utopia of Ordinary Habit,” her closing is a meditation on the mundane. Like depression, for Cvetkovich “the everyday” is labeled “private” but is in fact publicly, politically involved. In this way she sees “habit” as a site of potential, a site where political feeling emerges and is engaged. She turns specifically to crafting – routine, repetitive creation – as a practice where such engagement can be seen. Sewing, knitting, and scrapbooking, for example, all show concepts and conditions made tactile; reworked bit by bit into something else. Here Cvetkovich finds her approach to depression as public feeling rather than personal disease: not in big ideas but in their embodied process and practice; in the persistent and unglamorous commitment to daily life. I have questions about her access to sources of healing, but I’m interested in their framing, here. This focus on the ordinary, rather than the exceptional, is of course, the space of ethnography, too. Depression’s infiltration of the everyday may be another way it’s so devastating to the ethnographic imagination. But Cvetkovich’s use of “habit” also signals a way through it, also consistent with what we do: taking up and taking seriously the work of everyday living – not in spite or outside of emotion, but as a way of engaging feeling itself. Her example of “craft” points not to passion, excitement, or even interest – but rather to other affects like commitment and care. Such alternatives might be useful for talking about fieldwork, alongside the ideal of enjoyment I’ve described. They might work as more reasonable expectations, and sometimes more accurate descriptions of our work as “research instruments” in the field.

These are all loose ties and tenuous suggestions. But what I want to do here (and here, and here) is speak more plainly about some of the emotion tied to ethnography, acknowledge and work toward expanding its range. I think doing so offers possibilities for thinking our work better, but also finding subtle shifts (rather than also-needed institutional overhauls) that might encourage our practice, and sustain us in doing it well. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the same!
References:

Cvetkovich, A. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press.

Martin, E. 2009. Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Studying information technology and infrastructure in Iceland,  I repeatedly ran up against limitations to what I could know.  Data center operators had meetings about me – set talking points and erased whiteboards before I walked into rooms.  Officials and industry insiders would grin at me while they talked just around the things they weren’t going to say.  Some of these encounters started off with exchanging secrets: what do you know about the new development in town?  If my snooping was satisfactory, they would say more about it; if it wasn’t, they’d give me a stonewalling smile.  When I’ve talked about these moments with other researchers, the question is usually one of access: tactics talk.  How might we press harder, smarter, better; how might we pull more into the field of what’s known?  Issues of access are always questions of ethics: there are times when we might need to know and to say more.  There are other times it’s right to release or reject such claims.  But here I’m interested in another set of questions – something like a pragmatics of opacity.  What do we do with the things we don’t know?

Critical theorists have probed the secret: the way it excites and incites, suggests there’s something to know (Dean 2002); the way it makes and makes solid the social (Simmel 1906); the way it undergirds imaginaries (such as the state) (Nugent 2010).  Eve Sedgwick offers an interesting intervention in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction is about You” (1997).  Building on Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” she traces a history through queer theory of “paranoia,” or a mode of reading and writing (especially about systemic oppression) that is, among other things anticipatory, expository, and broad in scope.  Paranoid reading turns on telling you things are worse than you think they are; or maybe, they’re just as bad as we (should) know.  There are reasons – some of which Sedgwick gets into – for theorizing in such a manner.  But paranoia as methodology posits ignorance as its alternative, and in doing so forecloses other ways to know.

Anthropology might appear on the other side of such a spectrum: perhaps a disavowal of our discipline’s colonial legacy, we tend to privilege a certain kind of innocence.  You can read it in the charming, disarming stories (practically required writing in the genre) of the early-stage fieldworker making a fool of herself.  We’re inherently resistant to totalization; we make much of the unexpected, of exceptions to the rules.  We’re trained, as ethnographers, to ask the stupid questions; told there’s something to be gained from experiencing surprise.  But at the same time, we show a fondness for collection and connection.  When we doubt the soundness of our research projects, we’re told to place our faith in gathering a preponderance of facts.  In their culling and curation we share pleasures with the paranoid: the expansive joy of an ever-widening epistemic net.  While our pursuit of knowledge is perhaps more flexible, the drive to uncover is palpably there.

So if we reject the paranoid (but are also pulled toward it), how do we relate to information and its absence in the field?

Around the time I was leaving Iceland, a journalist I know wrote an exposé on the industry I’d been considering for a year (paywalled and in Icelandic, but here it is, just in case).  He and I had met a handful of times, and commiserated over beers about the foreign media’s interest in Iceland: the steady stream of puff pieces that never got the story right.  We’d discussed the value of long-term local research; we’d jokingly called my career the slow-motion version of his.  The piece he wound up writing was excellent: full of hard-hitting questions about the industry’s impact (sometimes citing “secret industry sources” inside).  Entitled “Dubious Connections in the Nation’s Largest Data Center,” it questions the speed with which these centers are being erected; casts well-researched aspersions on developers’ intents (Magússon 2015).  My first reaction to reading it was excitement; my second was embarrassment: why hadn’t I written this myself?

But there are stylistic moves in Jón Bjarki’s writing that lead me to reflect on differences in our work.  Throughout the piece, where information is lacking, that absence is marked clearly and emphasized.  The lack of knowledge stands in for secrecy: it’s meant to suggest that there might be something there.  The device also indexes the author’s investigative labor: it locates him as a certain kind of knower, lets the reason and responsibility for non-knowledge be known.  This dogged and paranoid (in the best possible meaning) approach to information is the thing that lets him, as a journalist, do what he does well.  My own relation to knowledge led me somewhere else.

When my own research stalled out on opacity, I shifted my focus from the secrets to secrecy itself.  I asked Icelanders living around the data centers (no more officially informed than I was, though much more knowledgeable in many ways) what and how they thought about the lack of information in this place where so much data is stored.  I went in with the kind of projected outrage that comes from being funded to get to the truth: how dare they not tell you?  Don’t you want to know?  And I was quickly educated in the attunement of attention that comes from living in Reykjanes.  I learned, in this way, about the history of the region; how the data centers were preceded by an American naval base.  I was told that secrecy there, too, was standard – how you learn, living there, to make sense of the discrepancies between official announcements and what you see with your own eyes.  But I also came to see that the content wasn’t the question: while the base (like some data centers) made a show of security, most people living nearby just didn’t care.  Unlike me, they weren’t agitating for access to each foreign presence’s strategic plans.  Instead they were theorizing and trying to shift the relations between Reykjanes and the temporary, extractive outsiders who’ve been coming through the region for years.  Not-knowing allowed me to follow these threads to a broader story – of course, this kind of wandering is only possible for those of us with the luxury of allowing our object to change.  But I came to see non-knowledge as a powerful position, and secrecy as a practice that does more than conceal.

It’s not a matter of ignoring the evidence, or deliberately leaving stones unturned.  But I’d like to interrogate some of our anxieties and incentives as ethnographers collecting “data” in the field.  I want to know more about the ways we get to truth – despite, or by – not having all of it.  My audience is not inherently different from Jón Bjarki’s; I agree with him that the public has a right to know.  But I think the public might also benefit from reflecting on how some secrets are made pressing and other secrets are made plain.

Many of us now work inside complex organizations – corporate, scientific, activist, etc. that have reason to limit access in strategic ways.  But even where secrecy isn’t operational standard, silence, evasion, and dissimulation confront us all.  Under these conditions, I wonder: how do we relate to the limits to our knowledge?  How might we think them otherwise, not as limits at all (I’m thinking, for example, of Mahmud’s work on the “profane”)?  Where pursuing information is practically impossible, ethically dubious, or irrelevant, how do we launch critique that doesn’t turn on exposition?  How could we write our research in a way that critiques this position, itself?

References

Dean, J. 2002. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Magnússon, J. 2015. “Vafasamar tengingar staersta gagnavers landsins.” Stundin. 6 September.

Mahmud, L. 2013. The profane ethnographer: fieldwork with a secretive organization. In Organizational Anthropology: Doing Ethnography in and among Complex Organizations. Ed. C. Carsten and A. Nyqvist.  London: Pluto. Pp 189-207.

Nugent, D. 2010. States, Secrecy, Subversives: APRA and Political Fantasy in Mid-20th-century Peru. American Ethnologist, 37(4): 681-702.

Sedgwick, E. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Simmel, G. 1906. The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies. The American Journal of Sociology, 11(4): 441-498.

I don’t intend to write about surveillance and suspicion, but then I spend my first five months of fieldwork feeling watched.  I move to Reykjavík for dissertation research a year after being sexually assaulted there; just in time to testify in the ensuing trial.  I schedule my first interviews between witness preparation.  And in the months before he’s convicted, I get used to seeing my assailant around town.  Our eyes meet at bars and we share aisles at grocery stores; I see or sense or imagine or conjure him a few paces behind me while I’m walking home.  But his are never the only eyes on me – my lawyer says the defense attorney will question my character, so I weigh my decisions, imagine defending them in court.  Later, our case is covered by the tabloids.  They describe exactly what he did to me, and I watch people trying to find it in my face.

Meanwhile, I’m meeting with engineers and developers, talking about data centers and fiber-optic lines.  I’m here to study the making of Iceland as an “information haven”: as John Perry Barlow called it, “the Switzerland of bits.”  A proposal for economic and political recovery, many saw positioning Iceland in this way as the path forward from the  financial crash.  So developers build data storage facilities, officials draft “information friendly” laws, and entrepreneurs found startups to manage it.  I want to trace the physical and conceptual infrastructure that allows Iceland to take on this new role.  Assuming technological connections index other intimacies, I am trying to track how debates over Iceland’s “connectivity” raise questions over sovereignty, identity, and place in the world.  My field notes from this period are hard to read now.  Desperately exhausted by the work of surviving, I’m frustrated that this should interfere with my “real” research.  But a year later, I can see something else there: a way of being that shaped the way I see and do my work.

Being assaulted during preliminary fieldwork was a first position of intimacy I couldn’t shake.  Without choosing it, I was irrevocably tied to someone; both of us were bound to the state.  With law enforcement mobilized in my “best interests” and the legal system speaking in my name, I was assigned a subject position I wouldn’t have had otherwise, as a mixed-race American in Iceland for a year.  I was claimed in ways that felt and feel complicated – to place and to people, for better and worse.  But being assaulted also changed the way I moved in Reykjavík.  Being watched made me watchful, obsessively engaged.  Preparing for a trial, a police report, a confrontation, I was aggressively attuned to my surroundings.  Hungry for detail, I filed facts away: the shifting clientele of downtown establishments; the quality of ice encasing different streets.  The exact setting time of the sun.  This strikes me now as a kind of amplified ethnography: I was overly impacted by the world.  Like a parody or distortion of the openness we aim for, I took it in hungrily but for my own sake.

I think this specific flavor of attention led me to others with peeled eyes and pricked-up ears.  It may be that my paranoia attracted others’ – but in techno-optimistic talk of the future, I learned to listen for things people felt they shouldn’t say.  It turns out that if you ask Icelandic engineers about fiber-optics, they tell you about the “spy cable” built by the United States: a communications line linking the South coast of Iceland to a network of hydrophones tracking Russian subs.  It turns out that much of Iceland’s information infrastructure was developed for the military base built there in the Cold War.  And it turns out that all this public/secret construction worked through watching and being watched.  While Americans used the Reykjanes peninsula to watch Russians, they kept tabs on Icelanders working on the base.  These Icelanders, employed to build and maintain it, felt their attention and sometimes turned it back.  Now-elderly Icelanders who worked for the military describe the conditions of suspicion at work.  Páll, a contractor today in his 60s, is first to tell me a story I come to hear many times: an Icelandic worker is stopped by an American soldier as he’s walking home with a wheelbarrow full of sand.  The soldier sifts through the sand, suspicious, but finds nothing and lets him go on his way.  The next day, the same worker meets the same soldier, whose curiosity again is piqued.  But again he searches him and, finding nothing, reluctantly lets the worker go.  The same interaction continues daily until the soldier accepts the worker’s routine.  “What happened?” asks Páll, hands spread and grinning: the worker was stealing the wheelbarrows, one by one.  When you know they’re watching, give them something to see.

I followed these stories of surveillance in Reykjanes out of selfish interest and self-preservation.  I was drawn into talk of the skills that I needed; I was being trained by experts in being watched and watching back.  But I learned that such overlapping networks of secrets kept up the Icelandic-American surveillance machine (about which — more forthcoming).  And today, as this infrastructure is turned into an “information haven,” championed as transparency’s cutting edge, some of these conditions of secrecy persist.  Former employees asked to consult on the project have been surprisingly, decidedly unhelpful: as one developer dejectedly explains it, “in Reykjanes information isn’t just given away.”  Today, then, Iceland’s most promising techno-futures are actively engaged with this particular past – not only in the form of its physical remnants, but also in these practices and affects of secrecy that persist amidst the supposedly shiny and new.  I’m not suggesting that my experience of surveillance allowed me a direct understanding of theirs.  But I do think it knocked askance my original angle, directing my attention somewhere other than head-on.  Doing so  allowed access to less obvious connections, giving my analysis a different kind of ground.

**

I remember being trained in ethnographic research.  Being told to open myself, radically, to the world.  I remember fretting about belonging, discussing strategies for accessing different social space.  Fieldwork was once framed as “penetrating intellect” (Killick 1995); more recently, “immersion” has been the goal (c.f. Helmreich 2007).  Though these ideals have been critiqued soundly (for example, Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Helmreich 2007; Mahmud 2013), they’re alive in aims and anxieties we develop for ourselves.  But we as anthropologists are differentially porous; those of us already marginalized subject to different kinds of claims.

After I’m attacked in Iceland, I tell everyone.  And everyone tells me how it happened to them – being stalked or harassed, followed or assaulted.  A handful of studies, such as Kate Clancy’s, qualify, quantify, the situation as dire.  But these still rarely public conversations tend to stop at the fact that it happens and should not.  I want for us to be safe from sexual violence happening; I want for us to have healing and accountability when it does.  But I also want to hear what it does to and for us.  If it still matters to talk about the shape of our engagement (no less than our ethnographic methods, after all), and sexual violence in anthropology is so widespread, I am stunned by how unprepared we are to discuss it.  When I do, I’m lucky to be believed but I’m pitied: it’s seen as an unfortunate limitation to my work.  It’s true there were things I couldn’t access because of violence, but there were other things I had to learn – I’ve tried to point to a few of them here.  It’s remarkable that we’re allowed just one relationship to violence, when we – as anthropologists but also human beings – know that there are so many more.  An advisor once challenged me to interrogate precisely the things that immobilize my imagination; I’ve never seen such paralysis as when we talk about assault.  Why is it that the conditions we choose are good to think with, while the things that happen to us are not?

Eva Moreno (notably, a pseudonym) claimed in “Rape in the Field” that “Anthropologists don’t get harassed or raped.  Women do” (Moreno 1995: 246).  We know it’s not only women who are assaulted.  But as Kulick and Wilson suggest in the same volume, sex “puts the self at stake” (22).  Our embodiment conditions our capacity for knowledge production – the old argument for reflexivity, perhaps overdone or out of style.  But if better engagement with sexual violence has not been made pressing as a feminist question, I suggest it is an epistemological one, too.

References

Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson. Discipline and practice: ‘the field’ as site, method, and location in anthropology. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Ed. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson. Pp 1-46.

Heimreich, S. 2007. An anthropologist underwater: immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs, and transductive ethnography. American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 621-641.

Killick, A. 1995. The penetrating intellect: on being white, straight, and male in Korea. In Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Fieldwork. Ed. D. Kulick and M. Wilson. London: Routledge. Pp 76-106.

Kulick, D. and M. Wilson, eds. 1995. Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Fieldwork. London: Routledge.

Mahmud, Lilith. 2013. The profane ethnographer: fieldwork with a secretive organization. In Organizational Anthropology: Doing Ethnography in and among Complex Organizations. Ed. C. Carsten and A. Nyqvist.  London: Pluto. Pp 189-207.

Moreno, Eva. 1995. Rape in the field: reflections from a survivor. In Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Fieldwork. Ed. D. Kulick and M. Wilson. London: Routledge. Pp 219-249.