Tag Archives: Method

Topics concerning ethnographic or anthropological methods or general Methodenstreiten

Tracking Uma Adang

Somewhere between my undergraduate and two graduate programs, I lost a bundle of anthropology books. Before my short and unsuccessful stint as a salaryman in Tokyo a decade ago, I gave my small library away, thinking I would never enter a doctorate program.

But when I in fact did become a Ph.D. student, some of those books were required reading for my core classes. I should have kept those books, I told myself (all those margin notes and underlines!), but decided against buying them again. Except for the classics in anthro theory, I thought it was foolish to make the same purchase twice. Especially ethnographies.

But there were a few exceptions, and one was Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, a work that takes you right into the Bornean rain forests of South Kalimantan. I read this ethnography in 1994 and I remember falling in love it. At the time I didn’t quite understand her arguments, but I enjoyed the way she wrote about her encounter with Uma Adang, a shamaness, a local leader, and her main “informant” in the book. The photo of this Meratus Dayak woman, smiling while cradling a white doll, was for me what Tsing described as “a disorienting caricature of motherhood.”

That image of Uma Adang came to me when I read Tsing’s latest book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Prompted by a comment by Savage Minds regular Colin Danby, I thought I might post something on Tsing’s nuanced perspective on the way globalization is interpreted in South Kalimantan (The book is an on-the-ground look at the way different groups, such as conservationists, logging companies, and local communities, talk with and past one another in their relationship to the rain forest). But when I opened the book, all I could do was to recall the powerful image of Uma Adang holding a white doll.

Like her earlier book, Friction also presents Uma Adang as a marginal voice that embodies Tsing’s critique of the global political and economic network of power. Although the Meratus Dayak shamaness has a much less prominent role in the new book than in Diamond Queen, I could not help but fixate on this figure.

For one, the way I imagined Uma Adang has now changed. The younger image of her now evokes a different set of emotions for me when juxtaposed against the photograph of her in the new book: she is sitting in what looks like a bar and her expression is solemn — broken but defiant. Behind her is a cigarette ad that has the word “BOMB” in huge letters. The caption reads “Better you had brought me a bomb…” Her explosive anger is directed against the deforestation of the jungle by the logging companies, which by her account is stripping away Meratak culture itself. The smiling figure in the first book now looks to me as one of naivete, expressing truimphant exuberance in carving out a political space for herself and other Meratus Dayak.

But Uma Adang and Tsing also retain their playfulness in the new book, especially in the chapter on biodiversity. And it makes for a nice comparison with a chapter in her earlier book.

In “The History of the World” chapter of Diamond Queen, Tsing writes about her friend’s version of global history, all in fragments, in different narrative forms and temporal registers, and full of parodic mimicry of the dominant discourse. This history, which Tsing treats as an “official” history, is to be read for its coherent unity and political message. But rather than celebrating it wholesale as a moment of political resistance, the anthropologist also recognizes aspects of the shamaness’s historiography that ends up serving the national interest of the Indonesian state. At the end of the chapter this nuanced examination of a local story leads the author to reflect upon the state of identity politics in the U.S., and writes that “the cutting edge of political organizing often is the simultaneously dissociating and validating effect of parroting dominant discourse out of context.”

In the new book Friction, she examines the concept “biodiversity” in a chapter titled ““This earth, this island Borneo” [Biodiversity assessment as a multicultural exercise].” In it she relies on a similar move of parody as a critical endeavor in which she too takes part. Citing both proponents and critics of the promotion of “biodiversity,” Tsing brings to this discussion an ethnographic account of what it means to make a list. Here Uma Adang lists all the flowers and mushrooms and the fish and lizards, in disregard of Linnaean nomenclature and full of strange and non-scientific markers of identification. This, however, is not a simple case of a local critique of Western discourse. Instead, they both acknowledge the pleasure of listing, of writing down and numbering, and hence, of having that very power to picture the world course through their veins.

Uma Adang loved the idea that I was writing down the list and enumerating each item. […] The list took on all the pleasures of writing, counting, and classifying: Uma Adang and I were pretending to be bureaucrats with the authority of state and international codification. We were ordering the world by naming it. As Uma Adang explained to me, “Everyone knows these names; but not everyone knows how to organize them properly.” (168)

Tsing’s virtuosity as a writer shines forth — a partial list of fauna and flora runs down the page margins — and it reminds me of the discipline’s excitement over “the poetics and politics” of experimental ethnographic writing (and readers of Levi-Strauss and Derrida will perhaps recall here “The Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropique). There are some risks, in my opinion and acknowledged by Tsing herself, of investing in a figure such as Uma Adang a certain subjectivity that by virtue of representing her in an ethnography domesticates the marginal within our own political agenda [footnote 1]. Yet this issue is repeatedly taken up in the book, not only in Borneo but also in other parts of the world. And this moment of parody — playful but also serious — is at least a partial answer to the question surrounding the politics of representation.

I am sure there are other compelling “informants” who span multiple books (I invite readers to comment on who might be other such figures in the annals of anthropology), but for some reason Uma Adang has made an impression on me. There are, I think, many possibilities in writing about the same person in different books over time. At the end of the first book there was a sense of a closure for my understanding of Uma Adang; when the new books takes her up again, it for me opened up new avenues of thought. This opening and closing of someone’s character is a rhetorical strategy I think might warrant some further discussion.

Postscript: As I work on my dissertation, I am finding myself increasingly drawn to good ethnographic writing as models for my own work. So in hindsight, I really wish I hadn’t given away my ethnographies!

[footnote 1: I am thinking here Vicente Rafael’s comments on Tsing’s earlier writings, but I think it equally applies to Friction.]

Mead to Boas: “Will You Be Directly Disappointed in Me?”

During my exploration of del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “anthropology,” I came upon a site with the correspondence between student Margaret Mead and teacher Franz Boas during Mead’s research in Samoa (1925-6). This site, which was created to showcase more exchanges between the two anthropologists and complements the letters already published in the appendix of Derek Freeman’s book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.

Because I am unfamiliar with the details of the Mead-Freeman controversy (started by Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth), I was unable to truly appreciate the letters in terms of proving or disproving the validity of Mead’s findings. (For more on the Mead-Freeman controversy, see here and here, among others.)

Instead I read these letters as an exchange between a student and an advisor. In some of her missives Mead is quite honest in expressing her doubts about her fieldwork situation. The way she asks Boas for advice, I thought, was revealing of their close bond. In reading this exchange between a student and her teacher, I sensed some transference between the two, which might be a familiar feeling for those who has undergone the rigors of ethnographic fieldwork as a graduate student.

When I read this following passage in a letter Mead wrote to Boas (January 16, 1926), I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve been there too!”:

But through it all, I have no idea whether I’m doing the right thing or not, or how valuable my results will be. It all weighs rather heavily on my mind. Is it worth the expenditure of so much money? Will you be directly disappointed in me?

More on Morality and Anthropology

I’ve been challenged to provide some sort of definition of what I see as anthropology’s moral core. Though moving, illness, and teaching an accellerated course have kept me pretty busy, I have been trying to keep at least part of my brain engaged with the topics I raised a few weeks ago. Let me preface my remarks by noting that I don’t have any positive assertions to make — I have some ideas of what may or may not be integral to the practice of anthropology, but others are, of course, free to disagree. You won’t even hurt my feelings (much).

I also need to make a distinction that I failed to recognize earlier, and which may be one of the reasons why my post raised such consternation. Anthropologists are involved with moral issues in two senses; the first is in their personal, often politically-charged, response to the practices and beliefs they witness in the field or in their research. For instance, we might record instances of infanticide, or of government withholding of medical supplies, or of corporations breaking land-usage laws. Anthropologists may, despite cultural relativism, feel that such practices ought to be stopped or prevented, and depending on their politics and temperament may take an activist stance regarding such practices. This sort of thing has been covered quite a bit in the literature, and is the impetus behind much of the development of reflexive anthropology. It is not what I was getting at in my earlier post, though some of my examples led in this direction.

My concern is with the moral values and principles that are put into practice or embedded in the practice of anthropology itself. How do we justify our own existence? On what are our claims to authority premised? What do we hope to accomplish with our work? Obviously, there’s some grey areas between this sense and the sense I outlined above, but in many ways anthropology is a study of grey areas and I don’t find this overlap too disturbing. What I do find disturbing is the notion that anthropologists can adopt an attitude towards our subjects similar to that of a chemist or physicist (or engineer…). Thus, I would start an outline of moral principles with the simple recognition that we have an obligation not just to “do no harm” but to provide as honest and complete an account as possible. Note that I did not say “objective” — objectivity may be possible for gods and machines, but for human researchers (and this includes physicists and chemists) the best we can do is be honest.

But before we ever get into the field, there is the question of why we should even bother to deal with. We anthropologists are lucky enough to live in a world of massive specialization and fairly well-protected freedom of inquiry, but ultimately, we are still embedded in societies that have agreed to support us in exchange for our work. While I agree that “mere curiosity” about a people may well drive particular anthropologists’ work, this is neither a compelling justification of our field nor, in my opinion, a completely value-free proposition. Let me put it this way: why should state governments fund anthropology departments in public universites? What social good does anthropology provide?

I cannot even begin to fully answer all the questions I’ve raised, but here’s a “starter-list” of values I see at work in the discipline of anthropology as a whole:

  • Difference, either among members of a society or between societies, is at worst not a problem, and is generally a Good Thing.
  • The autonomy of self-defined groups of people should be protected wherever possible.
  • Reprsentations of individuals and groups should be constructed honestly and with consideration for their effect on the people being described.
  • The use of power to coerce individuals or groups is wrong, and is a demonstration of a failure of individuals, social institutions, or inter-group dynamics.
  • People have a right to make mistakes (with a nod to Sol Tax).
  • Race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, nationality, and other labels should not be used in ways that directly or indirectly restrict individuals’ or groups’ ability to function as a full part of the society or societies of which they are part.

Far from exhaustive, but a start. Some of these are probably controversial, and some are contradictory — for instance, when two groups use force in an attempt to protect their autonomy, does their right to autonomy take precendence or their right to be free from coercion? I’m completely comfortable with such contradictions — we are, after all, human beings, tricksy creatures under the best of circumstances. I can’t help but notice that some of these don’t seem to be very controversial at all: the AAA’s code of ethics — and the AAA is far from a radical organization — includes language that isn’t far off from some of these. The controversy lies, I think, in calling this “morality” — while “ethics” can be read as principles for good scientific research, “morals” necessarily invoke limited, local, personal definitions of “right” and “wrong”, which is not just unscientific to some, but anti-scientific. My basic contention is that ignoring the moral nature of our work is intellectually dishonest, and in fact hinders our claim to scientificity. As I noted above, personal moral convictions — and the way they come into play in the course of our research — have been addressed (if only partially and sporadically) with the rise of reflexivity in anthropology, so what I guess I’m calling for is a kind of “social reflexivity” to make explicit the values that we as a field bring to our subject matter. This would involve a close look at the practices with which anthropological knowledge is created, not just the “end-product” of ethnography and theory (sorry Clifford and Marcus — I love you guys, I really do, but there’s a lot that goes on before we start “writing culture”). We are used to seeing values enacted or embodied in the slightest gestures of our subjects; I think we are fooling ourselves if we think that note-taking, conference-presenting or -attending, publishing, teaching, grantwriting, interviewing, blogging, and the other practices from the field to the academy don’t similarly enact or embody values that, inasmuch as anthropology has some degree of unity as a discipline, are shared.

Interviews

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds I discussed the convention of using a “man in the street” interview in journalism. Two recent Mark Liberman posts on Language Log raise more general questions about the use of interviews as data. In “Ritual questions, ritual answers,” he argues that

The journalists already know what the stories are. Their questions are not designed to discover any new facts or ideas, but rather to get quotes that will fit in to designated places in the frameworks of logic and rhetoric that they have already erected.

And in “Down with journalists!” he reinforces this argument with a funny example in which a French journalist finds himself the victim of this very practice.

We all know that this happens, just as we know that these quotes often server little more than a ritual function, but what can we do about it?

One option is to make the source data – the interviews themselves – available to download. In fact, such “grey literature” may eventually become available as part of AnthroSource, but it will not be easy. For one thing, there are confidentiality concerns. How do we make our data publicly available while still protecting our sources? It is possible to do – but it would create a huge burden on researchers. In essence, one might be punished for being a good researcher and collecting large amounts of data, because then you would have to carefully censure much more data to make sure it is safe for public consumption.

Making such data available online is not something that is without precedent in the field. Johannes Fabian’s book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire is very much a collaboration with his informant, the artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. The full interviews are available online, as part of the Archives of Popular Swahili website (which, in turn, is part of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa website). Now, this is somewhat different in that Tshibumba Kanda Matulu is an internationally famous artist, who is anything but an anonymous informant, and the book is constructed in such a way that his discourse is allowed to challenge Fabian’s authorial authority.

Such a model may not work for all ethnographies and all situations, but it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more primary anthropological data becomes available online. Will anthropologists creatively re-mix each other’s data? Will informants salvage their message from the grand narratives of the anthropologists? Will computational methodologies and google allow for the work to be analyzed in new ways? Or will anthropologists resist to the bitter end in the name of protecting their informants … even when they might just be protecting their own reputations? Which isn’t to say that confidentiality isn’t a real concern – just that we should think twice before ducking for cover.

NOTE: My thinking on this topic dates back to an e-mail exchange I had with Mark Liberman last year about the topic of posting primary data online.

Tutorial: How to use CiteULike with AnthroSource

There has been a lot of discussion on the blog about CiteULike and getting it to work with AnthroSource. But what does it all mean? And how does one use it? This post is intended to help get you started.

First, some background. (Skip ahead if you want to get your feet wet actually using these technologies right away.)

In my forthcoming Anthropology News article (accidentally posted to the web early because they told me it would be in the May issue, but then it got bumped till September), I describe the concept of folksonomy:

As opposed to previous systems, which required each piece of information to be classified by a professional archivist, as in the Dewey decimal system used by libraries, a folksonomy asks each user to classify information as they see fit, sharing the resulting classifications between users. This works with electronic documents because, unlike a book on a library shelf, each item can be filed in more than one place. Imagine a virtual library where everyone shelved books as they do in their own home. While some people’s shelving skills may be sorely lacking, the chances are that at least one other person would have filed Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in exactly the same place you would expect to find it—under “ethnography.” If there are an infinite number of virtual copies it doesn’t matter that someone else mistakenly filed it under “astronaut.”

CiteULike is one of many new systems which use such “social tagging” to classify information online, but unlike del.icio.us which specializes in storing URLs, and Flickr which specializes in photographs, CiteULike specializes in academic literature. Specifically, CiteULike allows scholars with access to full-text databases not readily available to the public to bookmark and tag those references. That means you can use CiteULike with commonly used databases like JSTOR (and now AnthroSource), as well as public sites like Amazon.

Now, how to use it? There are actually two ways to answer that question. Rex has already described how he fits CiteULike into his academic research. So I will answer the more basic question, of how one actually gets started using the service.

It is actually quite simple.
Continue reading →

CiteULike and Anthrosource are Friends

I don’t exactly know where I found the time to do this, and something else, like my child or my career, will no doubt suffer, but here it is: you can now Cite What U Like at CiteULike from Anthrosource. Thanks to Alex, Kerim and Bob Offer-Westort for help in putting it together. ( Oh, and Richard Cameron, of CiteULike, of course, who helped clarify obscurities involving whitespace. Which in some departments might get him a PhD .)

So, try it out, my folksonomic researching fiends.

Perceptions of anthropology

Tad at Fieldnotes has a post on “Resources for Researching Aboriginal Issues”:http://www.anthroblog.tadmcilwraith.com/2005/06/23/resources-for-researching-aboriginal-issues/ that I find quite interesting. The second resource that he mentions in his post is a researcher’s handbook by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs called “Stolen Lands, Broken Promises”:http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/Resources/rilq.htm . This is basically a guide for Aboriginal community members who wish to do research on various issues affecting their communities. The various chapters touch on different but related research topics of interest to anthropologists. What particularly caught my attention was chapter 8: “Anthropology Resources”:http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/files/PDF/RILQ2005/CH8_Anthropology.pdf .

Unsurprisingly, the ethnocentric nature of some anthropological research projects is pointed out. In fact, the authors of this handbook are very well aware that the early anthropological project was mostly reflective of Western values that were tied into a colonial project in many ways. For example, the following statement jumped out at me:

Whatever the scope of your project, you will need to make sure you cafefully analyze the material you collect. Anthropological reports were most often produced by outside researchers with distinctly different cultural practices and expectations than the people they studied. They may include important information but they may also reveal more about the beliefs and values of the time and place in which they were created. Often, these studies may meet the standards of academic research but fail to accurately represent Indigenous Peoples and our communities. Consider the biases and limitations in the documents you encounter while extracting the information you need for your research.

To me, this touches on several of the topics we have discussed here on SM recently. More specifically, theory and morality come to mind. I’ve long been ambivalent about the process of theorising about a group of people with the goal of contributing to an overarching “scientific” project, particularly when the people being theorised about have little voice with regards to the theories constructed around them or little concern for the scientific project of theory creation. Therefore, I feel that Aboriginal peoples are justified in their wariness of anthropological research. We cannot deny that many ethnographies have unjustly portrayed Aboriginals and other societies, sometimes to the detriment of fruitful dialogue.

During my own fieldwork in Chisasibi, the comment was made to me that the Cree had felt misrepresented in some previous works and were now quite sceptical of what exactly anthropologists were trying to do. As noble as I felt my intentions were at the time (ie. to help foster inter-cultural communication), in the end my project benefited me much more than the community that hosted me: it got me an M.A. and a subsequent job at a publicly funded college. In the 7 years since my fieldwork, I have not yet even had the opportunity to go back to Chisasibi to give the band council a copy of my thesis as promised. I could mail it . . .but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that anthropologists can and should be doing research that both meets the standards of academic research and fulfills a need that Aboriginal communities may have, taking into account their perspectives on self-representation. Of course, this may require changes in the criteria for academic research in the first place.

How are anthropologists supposed to preach cultural relativity if we can’t practice it with regards to cultural differences in the perception of how cross-cultural research should be carried out? This strikes me as a fundamental problem in anthropolical research, a sort of hypocrisy, that continues to plague us in spite of ongoing critiques by the people with whom we deal and to whom we owe our livelihood.

Look on the bright side of life?

I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome — perhaps some UK commentators can update us? — but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.

At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field — eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home — and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.

From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her — when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.

So anyway — I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.

However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices — the lot — that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here — I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?

article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)

Two Anthropologists, One Piece of Meat

A “while back”:/2005/06/14/cores-peripheries-and-bridges/#comment-301 Nancy wrote that:

A bridge is a bridge in a very concrete way, [and] social and cultural elements are not necessarily as tangible. The anthropologist is not just learning about an unchanging and concrete thing when s/he is learning about a social phenomenon. S/he is interpreting it as s/he is observing it and learning about it so that the very entity that s/he presents as “fact” or “reality” is already affected by her assumptions… Two people trying to understand the same social structure will understand it differently because of their assumptions.

Just how different do two anthropologists interpret ‘the same social structure’? At the time I thought this maybe wasn’t quite right (not that Nancy was mistaken somehow, just that the issue was more complex than the comment indicated). On the one hand, I felt that it was obvious that your research interests shape your focus, so of course two people with different focuses will look at the same thing differently. On the other hand, I strongly feel that cultural systems are sufficiently stable and coherent that they can be studied without giving into some sort of wishy-washy postmodernism on the one hand or vulgar positivism on the other. Culture isn’t as tangible as a bridge, but I still think it’s tangible enough — it’s telling, for instance, that refering to two interpretations of ‘the same’ social structure implies there is one ‘thing’ there.

This is a real issue for me — I did fieldwork at the exact same time with (roughly) the same ethnic group as as another anthropologist, my good friend “Jerry Jacka”:http://sasw.chass.ncsu.edu/s&a/faculty/jacka/jacka.html (who appears here with his permission). At first I think Jerry and I were a little nervous about this since this sharing a fieldsite can sometimes lead to trouble and strife so intense it is spoken of only in hushed tones over beer at hotel bars during AAAs. Lucky, Jerry and I got on famously and are good friends, and the only tales of fieldwork rivalry we talk about over beer are other people’s.

In fact, Jerry and I were often relieved to find out that we had discovered similar things about ‘our culture’ independently of one another. Although untangling the outlines of cultural structure in the field is hard (in our case only one other anthropologist had done fieldwork in our area) it was really gratifying to find the way we both came to recognize the prevailing themes in our area. “Did you ever hear about these spirit women?” I’d ask him. “Yu Angini Wanda? Oh yeah, people won’t stop talking about them. Have you run across these hired assasin/berserker types?” “Akali peyapeya? Sure.” This sort of thing.

So — just how different do two anthropologists (in roughly the same demongraphic, to be sure) interpret ‘the same social structure’? Well recently one of my “ASAO”:http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/asao/pacific/hawaiki.html homies asked members of our email list to describe their experiences in Papua New Guinea with lambflaps, cheap cuts of meat from a sheep’s belly that are sold throughout the country. Jerry and I both replied to her independently of each other, without knowing what the other had written. This makes an excellent example of how anthropological accounts of the same thing observed at the same time in the same place (more or less) differ.

Here’s what Jerry wrote:

I have a lot to say about lamb flaps as I initially found them revolting (not being used to eating mutton), particularly the boiled variety, but within months developed an insatiable craving for fried ones.

Lamb flaps (or sipsip as they are known in Tok Pisin) have taken on a huge significance in the Seventh Day Adventist community in eastern Porgera where I worked. As John Finch noted, they allow SDAs to engage in pig-like exchange functions and SDA celebrations/marriages use both sipsip and chickens to replace pork.

Ipili women have created a cottage industry out of selling raw and cooked lamb flaps. Early every morning Dyna trucks leave Mt. Hagen with boxes of frozen lamb flaps (at least women told me they came from Mt. Hagen, they may be coming from Wabag) and stop at places along the highlands highway where women buy the boxes and carry them back to their home communities, some as far as 10 km into the bush. I think the standard box is about 25(?) kilos and makes for a rather unwieldy trek through the forest as the boxes are shallow and wide and women carry them in netbags across their foreheads.

Around May or June of 1999, the boxes sold for K65 apiece (exchange rate then was about 33 cents for one kina), but in July of 1999 they shot up to K90 apiece. Women weren’t sure why the price went so high in one month, but most of the women I interviewed averaged K20 to K70 profit per box, so for some of them, they had a very restricted profit margin (if any at all) after this raise. Interestingly enough, prices didn’t change for the consumer.

Cooked sipsip, either boiled with watercress or fried, had a fairly standard size for price ratio. A 50 toea piece was about one and a half inches by one and a half inches, and one kina pieces were about twice as large. At the sipsip shacks alongside roads and in hamlets, these are the standard sizes/prices. At tradestores one can buy larger pieces that have been cooked for more money.

Women will also sell larger hunks of raw meat for people to take home to cook. A K5 piece was about 8 inches by 8 inches (around 5 or 6 rib pieces). People tended to buy these rather furtively so that others wouldn’t know they were intending to have meat at home as you’re obligated to feed people that drop by during dinner time. As you can guess, I was pretty unsuccessful at being unobtrusive while buying sipsip and inevitably had someone come by to “story” with me shortly after buying meat.

Children, from what I could tell, would spend every last toea they could wheedle from anyone on lamb flaps. SDAs don’t have a lot of chances to eat meat (chickens sold for K20 per chicken) so the ability to get at least a little bit of meat for 50 toea was very significant. I can attest, as others have, that lamb flaps don’t have much meat, but people didn’t care as the fat seemed to be relished just as well. In fact, the fat comes off in a nice strip, crispy on one side, juicy on the other, which you can eat and then gnaw on the bone to get what little meat there is.

Women that had successful sipsip shacks on two occassions were targets of accusations of menstrual blood poisoning. In both cases, younger, unmarried women were alleged to have cooked sipsip while menstruating thus making men ill. One of the women had to pay K20 to the person who accused her and I don’t know the amount the other one paid. Far worse than the fine was the public shaming they received and neither one of them cooked sipsip for some time afterward.

And here’s what I wrote:

In Porgera — at least the bit where I lived — lambflaps were ubiquitous. As mentioned elsewhere, they were used by SDAs and tref-avoidant anthropologists like myself in group mumus they wanted to participate in, but without eating pork. They were more popular than slaughtering a goat. Most people found goats scary.

Whole cases were available for purchase at large stores at the government station, after having been shipped in via truck from Lae. Typically they were still more or less frozen when they got there. Individual tradestores with refrigerators would also sell ‘racks’ of unsliced lamb flaps to women. They then cooked individuals slices slowly in large low sided pans around the edge of the village square (ama). They thus fell into the same category as ‘palawa’ (flour — fried dough pancakes right out of Grapes of Wrath), betelnut, single cigarettes, and home made popsicles — pre-cooked food that women (often from migrant families) sold when they felt like it. It wasn’t something you’d get in a tradestore (which were more or less run by men, although there were exceptions). People would occasionally buy lamb flaps to eat at home when they had more money than a can of tinpis cost, but not enough for a whole chicken. Occasionally after very long and cold walks or trips (very common in Enga) we would buy lamb flaps to eat to get some energy into us ‘or else we’ll die’. Of course, at that point, the last thing I wanted were lamb flaps. There are ways to make virtue a necessity, but it is a very poor cut of meat for straight frying. Nevertheless, I ate them frequently since they were the only readily available meat I could eat, and it was common for people walking with friends to buy small things such as this for each other.

I suppose if your kink is liquified or semi-liquified pig fat, then lambflaps would seem a natural substitute for pork and quite tasty. If your idea of fun is a hanger steak with béarnaise sauce and a nice robust Bordeaux, they’re not really for you 🙁

What does this show? Well first, thre is probably a lot of stuff in there (Wabag, K50, etc.) that only make sense if you already know a lot about Papua New Guinea. But overall it seems to me that our accounts are remarkably similar. On the other hand, there are differences of style and approach. I was going to comment on what they were, but as I read through our responses I see that I don’t have the distance necessary to pull back and compare them – I’m too close to my data. So let me post it as a question instead — what are the differences in style, interpretation, and emphasis that you see in these two responses?

Cores, Peripheries, and Bridges

There is a bridge that many people cross every day. A civil engineer seeks to strengthen the bridge so that it can accommodate more traffic and thus be even more of a public benefit. A saboteur seeks to weaken the bridge’s supports so that the bridge will collapse when it is full of people, thus maximizing human misery. Both are engineers. They understand the tensile strength of the material of which the bridge is composed. They use the same calculations to determine which sections of the bridge ought to be reinforced or weakened. Perhaps they even attended the same technical institute.

The question is, can we determine, based on the tensile strength of wood or other principles that lie at engineering’s ‘core’, which one of them is doing the right thing?

It might be very interesting to see why each one is motivated to build or destroy, but aren’t these elective affinities peripheral to the actual act of engineering itself? Would we grade down a perfectly correct analysis of the bridge because our students chose to research how to blow it up instead of strengthen it?

Blogs, Methods.

I don’t blog much. There, I’ve made my excuses for what will no doubt be intermittent posts. It’s not that I haven’t tried. In fact, I was so blogging way before it was cool; but no one else was, which kind of defeated the purpose. In 2000, I started a fieldwork blog while I was in India
to which I invited a number of people to participate by adding comments or asking questions. Interestingly, the result of this experiment was clear: no one really wants to be part of your fieldwork but you (and maybe your family and your S/O). Five years later, three of my grad students are active bloggers–two in the field and one during write-up–and they are getting a much better comment rate, though not, it should be said, from any of their professors except moi. All of them, however, are happy I made them do it (or at least, that’s what they tell me).

Kerim’s post on the subject of arm-chair anthropology actually made me think of the other experiment. In 2002, I had the idea for a blog-like project that would turn the kind of unspecified fears about the discipline that Kerim points up into more well specified methodological questions–to which working anthropologists would be asked to respond briefly, but in numbers. It was called “been there.” The end result would be an archive of structured questions and answers about how different methodological issues are dealt with across fieldsites, areas, traditions etc. The whole project was very much focused on specifying the advantages of ethnographic method; so a question like “What difference does being there make?” was intended to give people a way to articulate the importance of being there that Kerim mentions. Or, alternately, to articulate the new necessity of both the Internet, and writing, arguing, blogging, counter-discoursing informants. I thought it would be great to have a growing archive of comparable answers to focused questions– a kind of living tips and tricks handbook.

Three people agreed to participate, one person wrote a response, and so I gave up again…

But perhaps the Savage Pansies will be my new methodological guinea pigs. Perhaps I will inaugurate a sub-pansy theme related to method. Indeed, I find that non-anthropologists are just as curious about what makes ethnographic method distinctive as anthropologists are, so perhaps it might make for interesting reading. I think it will have to start as a stealthblog though, a blog within a blog, a submarine blog, ck: blog mole. I must return to baby care and scheming now.