Sunday night, October 15, I watched women across my social media timeline bravely and vulnerably share their stories of sexual assault and sexual harassment as part of the collective conversation tagged #MeToo. I contributed my own #MeToo post after reading the initial three shares by friends, writing that I did not think I knew a woman who had not experienced some form of sexualized violence. Within two hours, hundreds of my friends, colleagues, and former students had added their voices to the orchestra of rage, sadness, disappointment, indignation, frustration, and stoic resolve accompanying #MeToo. I experienced it like it was an atmosphere-piercing, discursive crescendo. As a Black feminist anthropologist who studies, teaches, and experiences the intricate ways patriarchy, misogyny, and misogynoir shape our educational institutions and lives, you would think I wouldn’t have been surprised by the sheer vastness of the stories this hashtag brought to the digital surface. But I was. And I simultaneously wasn’t. I knew the boundless reach of sexualized violence, and yet seeing its pervasiveness in the most-heartbreaking narratives of those in my communities made it more real. And then to see a few men in my timeline express shock, disbelief, and dismissive sentiments—as if they haven’t been listening to us for decades, generations—made me angry. However, it was the silence from the majority that made me livid. But isn’t silence part of how oppression works?

I went to sleep. And then I woke in the middle of the night in a fright, uncomfortable with my post so clearly being visible online. Initially, I posted my #MeToo in solidarity with my sistas and sibs who wanted to share their stories, and to support those in community who were hesitant because they thought they were the only ones. But as I thought about the stories of rape and sexual assault of those closest to me, I wondered if my “tame” encounters with sexualized violence even counted in comparison to theirs. I took my post down, giving myself permission to be unsure and unresolved. I’m usually pretty transparent, even in a profession that values obscurity and inaccessibility as intellect. I attempt to practice radical honesty in discussions, writing, and teaching, believing that narrative as truth-telling is a form of resistance. But for the first time in a while, leaning into the truth didn’t feel right. Not yet.[1] All I could do was lay there in my bed, wondering if the experiences of unwelcome attention; touching; uncomfortable conversations filled with sexual innuendo were enough to validate my public #MeToo. That might seem foolish, but again, isn’t this how oppression works? Isn’t it a force that would ask one to quantify and qualify one’s pain, wondering if it is “bad” enough to count as sexual assault?[2]

My mind ran across: The times in high school, when discussions about my body parts were regular fodder at the lunch table. That most of the girls I knew learned how to walk through our very crowded hallways strategically covering our butts and breasts during class changes, just in case someone picked that time to grab something they felt they should have access to. And the moments that we fought back or were silent when they did. As we got older, this training prepared us for parties and clubs where the same thing happened, but the frequency was higher as liquid-courage emboldened boys (and grown men) who wanted to prove their masculinity tried to do so by conquering our bodies. The violations that happened in those social spaces weren’t much different than those that take place at department parties or wine and cheese receptions at conferences like the AAA, where men with increasingly red, blotchy skin use their eyes to undress you and their anthropological expertise to exoticize you. Others slip their hands down your back, and you feel your whole body grow tense with fear as you try to move away without drawing too much attention. I thought about the times when as a graduate student and as a professor, the interactions with academic men push past that moment of verbal appreciation of one’s beauty (which some of us like) to that awkward, uncomfortable place where you’re having to weigh the potential damage to your career against the damage to his super fragile, yet powerful ego when you say “no.” Even now, as I write this, there are stories that I type, and then I erase. Trying to decide whether it is revealing too much; whether there will be long-term professional consequences; whether or not it is appropriate to tell; whether or not it counts as violence; even though the memories have not left me, and I’m sure the men who have done the damage don’t think twice about it.

But somehow I have made some peace with these stories at home; or at least over the years I have created a tool kit, a range of coping mechanisms, and a supportive crew that hold each other down as we experience the sexualized violence and patriarchy that color women’s (and gender non-conforming and trans folx’) everyday lives. In some ways the stories in the previous paragraph have become normalized for me. What kept me up that Sunday night was remembering the helplessness and isolation I felt as I experienced sexual harassment in the field, while doing my job as an ethnographer.

(SEXUAL) HARASSMENT IN THE FIELD

While the controversy surrounding film producer Harvey Weinstein’s bullish, disgusting, sexual violence has spurred a national discussion in the past week, anthropologists like Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford, Katie Hinde, and Kathryn B. H. Clancy have been pushing our discipline to address these concerns for the past few years. The AAA highlighted the group’s work in an October 16 press release titled “A Call for Better Conduct in Field Research.” This report, published online by American Anthropologist, presents findings from in-depth interviews with 26 women scientists, detailing the impact sexual violence, sexual harassment, and a general toxic work environment can have on their careers. “Signaling Safety: Characterizing Fieldwork Experiences and Their Implications for Career Trajectories” is a follow-up from the co-authors 2013 survey of 666 individuals where participants discussed academic field experiences. Those taking up Nelson et al’s work have often focused the conversation on the conditions and climates in field schools and spaces relevant to biological anthropologists and archeologists.

It was reading “I had no power to say ‘that’s not okay’’: Reports of harassment and abuse in the field,” by Clancy a few years ago that encouraged me to freewrite about my experiences with sexual harassment in the field as a cultural anthropologist. None of those pages made the final version of my book, but writing about it helped me process it and pushed me to have discussions about potential gendered and sexualized violence in the field with students that I train to do ethnography. In the field, I had a job to do. My job was to conduct ethnographic research that required connecting with community members, gaining people’s trust, participating and observing cultural practices, and asking the right questions to learn about cultural norms, while documenting people’s stories, belief systems, and meaning-making processes. Unlike the everyday adage that one should not talk to strangers, talking to strangers in a space that was “foreign” to me and far from the comforts of home was my actual job.

In “’Don’t Ride the Bus!’: And Other Warnings Women Anthropologists Are Given During Fieldwork,” I use humor and sarcasm to talk about some of the tough times I had during those initial months of long-term field research. When I sat down to write that article (published in 2009), I was drafting the dissertation and trying to make sense of my own personal experiences in the field while analyzing the data from my participants. I wasn’t ready to really dig into the ways certain gendered and sexualized forms of harassment had influenced which individuals and communities I ended up engaging (or not), and the spaces I made my research home (or not). To be honest, I probably haven’t completed that processing, and probably will choose not to. Thinking about all of it and sharing it is exhausting. But the increase in the discourse related to sexual violence in the past week encourages me to at least share three stories about what I experienced in the field, with the hope that it contributes to the crescendo in our discipline. Stay tuned for Part 2 on Thursday…

[1] “So, why are you writing about it here, in this very public forum?,” you might ask. This medium provides me a bit more space to frame and share my story the way I want, instead of being confined to what can feel like a limited digital space on social media. And because I believe in radical honesty as Black feminist praxis, I find that I’m always braver in sharing my story if I think it can put something into action that might help someone else. Here, I’m hoping that my story can contribute to the increasing discourse on sexual violence within anthropology and the academy.

[2] Even still, I cannot fathom the physical, mental, and emotional trauma that surviving rape or an explicit sexual assault causes in one’s life. While there may not be a hierarchy of pain related to sexual violence, there certainly are layers. And I wish nothing but the most sincere hope for healing to my sibs who have experienced these forms of violence.

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.