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CHAPTER 7
WORKING "AT HOME"
Ethnography "At Home" - A Controversy with some History
Donald Messerschmidt, editing a volume of essays by researchers concerned with
the issues of practicing anthropology in their own societies, noted in the early 1980s that
a new sort of anthropology was emerging -- an anthropology of issues -- and that those
whose fieldwork was "at home" were participating in a novel fusion of "applied
anthropology (usually and inaccurately defined only in terms of intervention and directed
change)" and "theoretical (or pure, or abstract) anthropology". With undisguised
enthusiasm, he observed that the new
opportunities and challenges of this form of anthropology beckon us home
to apply our skills and our perspectives to the issues of our own society. It
focuses our attention on the methods and theories of our profession as well
as on the pressing problems around us, on their nature and on actions to
deal with them (1981:5).
Messerschmidt's proposals, as well as his somewhat defensive posture, arise from
the debate through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s over whether the tools of western
anthropology, developed over time on the basis of studies of archaic, primitive, or
pretechnological societies, could be turned with success to the study of modern society.
The pages of American Anthropologist and other academic outlets saw articles fiercely
attacking one side or the other (see, for example Bastide 1973, Gillin 1949, Cohen 1977,
Kushner 1969, Spicer 1974, Lévi-Strauss 1963, Despres 1968, Weaver and White 1972).
These are not articles challenging the style, theory, or methodology of one study or
another, but are rather questioning whether what was being attempted was anthropology
at all.
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The nature of the debate was transformed through the 1980s and the 1990s.
Cerroni-Long (1995), drawing on Ortner's seminal 1984 article "Theory in Anthropology
since the Sixties", describes some of the key elements of that transformation, observing
that
a theory of praxis seemed to sociologists to have finally solved the
dualistic dilemma caused by the structure/agency contrast....
[Nevertheless], only some anthropologists fully embraced praxis theory as
their main orientation. Instead, the majority of the American
anthropological establishment became increasingly entangled in those
webs of significance Clifford Geertz had originally called attention to, and
entered a vortex of self-referentiality spiraling toward disciplinary self-
destruction. In a way, it could be argued that this end has in fact been
reached, if one considers the Boasian concept of culture, the comparative
approach, and cultural relativism as the foundations of the discipline. I
would argue, though, that this apparently catastrophic outcome may have
salutary consequences. Chief among them is that the insider/outsider issue
may finally receive the attention it deserves and take central stage in the
debate over anthropological practice (p.3).
The present study derives much of its character from the issues of that debate, and
many of the questions orbiting the at-home/abroad dichotomy, far from constituting mere
theoretical interests, have been so troublesome for me at times that they have literally
brought this project to complete and lengthy standstills.
In the following discussion I seek to highlight some of the more salient features of
these "troublesome questions". It is not my intent here to contribute to the debate
explicitly, but only to note that the discussion has guided my own sensitivities from the
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study's inception. Messerschmidt observes that the challenges of the new anthropology
"beckon us home" to tackle the needs and problems facing our own societies. "Beckon"
is not the verb I would employ to describe my own circumstances with regard to Mexican
labor immigration into small towns, the contextual focus of this study. The "field" is not
some far off place I have searched out because it is the site of phenomena that interest
me. Nor is it a place to which I am returning, "beckoned" from afar to employ my
insights, gained in other fields, on my own turf. The field is my home, and has been for
nearly twenty years. My situation (and the choices it has prompted) was not one of
traveling to the "exotic", but of observing the "exotic" travel to me. In short, I found
myself at the right place, at the right time, with some of the right tools and the right
disposition to undertake a closer look at an international phenomenon "coming home to
roost." While such a scenario would appear at the outset to be quite tidy, even
convenient, conducting an investigation at home has not been without its own serious
complications. Such intricacies merit attention here only insofar as they have affected the
style of my fieldwork and may help to explain some of the reasons behind what I have
done.
Problems "At Home" in the Field
The discovery early on that formal interviewing was of great discomfort to me
provided the first clue that this project was not unfolding along traditional lines.
Moreover, it was a curiosity, since I had done a fair amount of interviewing for other
projects and had never felt so ill at ease. I first attributed this reservation to being new to
the process and uneasy with the interview situation. In fact I was relieved to read about
this same "problem" related by other ethnographers (see Powdermaker 1966 and Wax
1971). Nevertheless, uncovering answers to specific questions required face to face
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questioning, and something about it, the anticipation, preparation and the actual
execution, left me deeply troubled.
Informed trust
The problem appeared to be rooted not so much in the interviewing itself, but in
the context in which the interviews were set, a context of long established friendships,
unequal power relations, and differing perspectives concerning the nature of the academic
enterprise (i.e. What exactly is a dissertation and who will read it?). In short, a
microphone, a clipboard and an interview schedule had a mildly chilling effect on
relationships of great value to me, an effect I was loathe to admit as an element of our
friendships.
Uncomfortable as I was with the formal interview, I was exceptionally selective
about whom I asked to participate and when and under what circumstances. I was also
always careful to "keep my story straight" regarding my actions and plans for my
research. Nearly two decades of experience had taught me that the communication
channels in small communities (migrant as well as anglo) are on one hand exceedingly
well oiled, and on the other are as prone to turn out many variations of a single fact as
they are to faithfully relay the fact itself. The idea that I was "doing culture and language
research about immigration from Cherán into Southern Illinois" was my consistent
byline, general enough to cover most ground, but specific enough to open the door to
questions.
Needless to say, over the years I had spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours
"interviewing" migrants. The nearly constant and immediate contact I had with Cherán
migrants and immigrants had afforded me inexhaustible opportunity to ask questions, an
activity to which I am prone at any rate. My questions have virtually never been met
with anything but the most open and full responses. As any researcher, I have learned the
hard way what questions and topics are risky and taboo.
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The fieldworker's rule of thumb that "the more you know, the more people will
tell you" was a present reality through the years, and I was often shocked at what people
were willing to divulge to an outsider concerning their problems. Repeatedly I was put in
a position to help, counsel, check facts, translate, transport, investigate situations, or refer
people to others who could help. Reciprocity, an important element of so much of non-
Western communal relationships, dictated that I receive as well -- help, advice,
protection, food, labor, and gifts. The extent of such reciprocity can be measured in the
fact that "score" has not been kept for years and we have long regarded ourselves as
inextricably and constantly in debt to each other. La confianza, they call it.
Despite such "access" and the caution with which I broached the topic of formal
interviews and solicited the participation of those whom I knew, my invitations were
invariably met with hesitation, and I was at a loss to explain this emerging pattern. I
imagined that perhaps people were thinking that suddenly I was a researcher, as opposed
to (or in addition to) the neighbor (research at home), helper, interpreter, baby-sitter, etc.
that I had been for so many years. "If information about hispanics is so valuable to him
now, what is he doing with all the knowledge he has acquired over the years when he
wasn't a researcher? Has he been researching all this time without our knowledge?"
Whether or not such hypothetical meditations were figments of my overactive
imagination was a question I needed to answer. It was answered to my satisfaction, but
didn't make me feel any better about the interviewing process. The answer lay not so
much in their personal relationship with me, a worry I had been focused on, but on my
association with a research institution.
Contact with researchers
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The hispanic population in the Union County area is an attractive population for
the researcher, the inquisitive, the compassionate, the reporter, and the crusading
advocate. Within this population can be found all manner of interesting "problems",
from linguistic to socioeconomic to psychological. Labor management, the effects of
immigration policy, rural health care, race relations, community development, etc. are all
to be found in this microcosm of the world's great migration currents.
Over the nearly two decades that I have been involved with this population, waves
of attention have ebbed and flowed. Student researchers have arrived to work out the
terms of their apprenticeships under the supervision of university professors. Health care
workers, language teachers, legal and educational advocates, sociologists, linguists,
anthropologists, immigration experts, and church workers have all made their way into
and around the hispanic community. Some have stayed on a more or less permanent
basis, others come and go with predictable regularity.
For some of the hispanics I know, such attention brings tangible benefits, namely
health care, ready translators, sometimes transportation to clinics or other services,
helpful guides through the bureaucratic maze, even friendships. For others, such
attention is confusing, particularly attention which is investigative (and whose benefits
are less apparent) in nature. On more than one occasion, I have been told during the
course of a conversation (not an interview), that the person I was talking to had been
talking about that same topic to somebody "out at the camp" (the Union-Jackson
Farmworkers Camp, located north of Cobden, is a focal point for those interested in the
hispanics in the area). More disturbing yet was an exchange during the course of an
interview setup one winter.
When I described what I was interested in, the respondent said that the family had
already been asked all those questions by "those other people". The tone was, "I just
don't know why they wanted to know all that stuff..." When I inquired as to who "they"
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might be, she wasn't sure. I was concerned that what I was trying to do with interviewing
was already damaged (after so much care and worry on my part) by other social
researchers or (worse yet in my estimation) bureaucrats, so I gently pressed the issue with
her. Was it a student? Well, yes, I guess it was. Out at the camp? Yes. I thought of a
graduate student I knew had been working around the camp and gave her a description
which she recognized.
Basically, she had been very suspicious when asked to sign a form,
understandable given her undocumented status (she had an application on file, but had
not yet received the papers she needed). The student was evidently (as she interpreted the
event to me) rather insistent that people sign an informed consent form. She had
chastised her husband for participating so glibly when they had no way of knowing what
these people would do with the information they were collecting. He berated her for
being too suspicious, and I could painfully imagine the discomfort for them both.
On another occasion I had been invited to make a presentation to a class at the
university. I spoke to a Mexican couple I knew to invite them and their children to
accompany me to make the presentation. The wife liked the idea, but the husband
graciously told me he would prefer that they didn't. Such notoriety (newspaper articles,
etc.) had not served him particularly well, making him the target of represalias. I never
learned what the nature of these "reprisals" was, nor from whom they came, but I
appreciated both his candor and his confidence in me.
As we talked more, it became clear that much of his reluctance to participate also
stemmed from an experience he had had with a university researcher. Despite promises
to the contrary, he had never seen one shred of the results of the researcher's
investigation, an investigation in which he had collaborated wholeheartedly, inviting the
researcher in, cooking meals, going places with him, etc. He felt he had been deceived,
but more importantly, he was concerned because he had no idea what had become of the
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information. As none of his family had any documentation, this put him in a precarious
situation. His father had scolded him for being so open with information about his family
and work situation. "You'll understand, Warren, when I tell you I am reluctant to help
with university things. If they want to come to my house, ask a few questions, they are
welcome. We are at home waiting for them. But to go out and talk to people doesn't
seem like a good idea to me."
Others besides these two have mentioned or signalled (as I interpreted it)
discomfort with the research swirling about them, but not in the detail that these two
have.
Reciprocity and long-term memory
A familiarity with researchers, anthropological investigations, universities, and
the "creation" and peddling of "truth" by institutions is a topic that elicits comments from
many people in Cherán as well. Given its "indigenous" character, Cherán and the
Tarascans have attracted a fair amount of investigative attention since the 1940s.
Whether the people have been told explicitly, or just have an inherent sense of
intellectual property rights is unclear. However, numerous conversations revealed a
distaste for researchers who come to visit, talk to everybody, and then go away and write
their books without ever coming back to tell what they found. People are able to
remember dates of visits and promises made for return visits.
There is a fair amount of personal psychology that goes into building and
maintaining a relationship of confianza with people who are at society's margin and who
have much to lose from loose tongues and careless reporting. Help promised in order to
gain people's trust, as these brief anecdotes show, often has not been forthcoming. In the
United States, I have found Mexicans wary of research attempts primarily because of
their vulnerable position. In Cherán, while there is interest in sharing, the nature of
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investigative surveying is not well understood, and there is a long collective memory for
the transgressions of reciprocity and confianza.
On an early visit to Cherán, I was introduced to this phenomenon. I had been
walking around the eastern part of town and came upon the second church in Cherán,
'Calvario'. It is a very old building, and is undergoing some major renovations through
private donations. In the strata of its exterior walls can be read the different phases of
construction and reconstruction. Parts of it have tumbled in earthquakes, and I have been
told that other parts fell victim to the destruction of the revolution and the subsequent
agrarista turmoil. The custody of the building is the religious carga of a caretaker
assigned for a one year term to keep watch over the building, maintain and clean it, and
regulate visitors to the site. A new caretaker occupies the position each January and lives
with his wife and family in a pair of trojes which occupy a courtyard attached to the
temple itself.
It was early in the morning when I met Juan Velázques Cortéz, milling about in
the courtyard in front of his troje. When I informed him that I was interested in the
building, he warmed up, despite the early morning hour, and invited me in. After a brief
tour, I was about to leave when he suggested that we go back inside the dimly lit interior
for "un sacrificio". With visions of bleeding goats and chickens coursing through my
head, I went back inside with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The "sacrifice" he
suggested was nothing more than a photograph of him and his wife in the chapel before
the images of the saints, the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
His wife, however, was far less than enthusiastic to have her picture taken by this
unknown newcomer. As I followed him through the courtyard and into the side door of
the building, he cajoled her to come into the chapel and up by the altar with him. She
continued to resist, sitting in the courtyard on a large petate with her teenage daughter,
just outside the side entry to the building. As I stepped through the entry behind him,
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turning my back to her, I heard her mumble to her companion, "Éste las va a vender allá."
(He's going to sell them there [up north]). She finally acquiesced and grudgingly
accompanied her husband as the subject of a photograph. Had he not pushed the issue so
hard, I would never have brought myself to take their picture, particularly after hearing
her comment. It articulated an idea that had never really occurred to me: to sell the
photos I was acquiring "up north."
Later I was to learn that some journalists had indeed come through, I believe after
the catastrophic 1943 eruption of the volcano Paricutín, taken numerous photos of locals,
and word had returned to many that the photos were sold to magazines in the States.
Fifty years later the offense still bore fruit.
Thus, one of the problems of "working at home" has been that the subjects share
my home and are knowledgeable and rightfully wary of the entire enterprise in which I
am engaged. This is good for them, and requires of me a kind of fieldwork method that is
at once ethical and inefficient by the standards of the traveler who records, departs and
writes back home without the detailed oversight and knowledge of those who form the
object of investigation. I had felt from the outset that such circumstances would add
some delicacies to the work, but I believed also that they would imbue it with a healthy
integrity. The study, open from start to finish to the people who formed its object, could
not make them into some Other, out there, at another time (Fabian 1983), but would have
to deal with them as us, here, and now. I did not foresee that my friends' knowledge of
my society and the pursuits to which we dedicate ourselves would be distasteful to them
and impinge upon the mutual trust and affection we had developed.
Identity and membership
A further complication of "working at home" is the blending, interpretation,
demarcation, and frequent confusion of the roles of the ethnographer, neighbor, and
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friend. Andrew Roth Seneff (Anthropology Department, Colegio de Michoacán)
suggested to me once that there is always a struggle in Anthropology between "author"
and "savior". While I don't care for the strength of the word savior, this dichotomy
nonetheless aptly characterizes the dilemma of my work "at home". The "author" mode
often takes back seat to the "savior" mode. So many people need so much help with so
many problems, that the urgent often takes precedent over the important. The ideals of
research, and the eventual help it might offer in terms of better understanding and
community integration, are of little consequence in the face of families who need food,
housing, medical attention, blankets, etc.
All of this gets tangled in the latticework of researcher confidence. Trust is the
cornerstone of access to people's lives and ideas. Trust gained is the result of time
together as well as hundreds of offerings of help in the myriad circumstances confronting
migrant neighbors over a decade and a half. Further complicating the situation is the fact
that my position in the Anglo community, while not of critical centrality, is healthy and
solid, giving me access to avenues of help beyond those available to some simply by
virtue of the fact that they speak English. As helper and friend, my relationships are
forged by the immediate circumstances of those with whom I work. I am a "member" of
their circumstantial dynamic, and find a taproot of membership in the reciprocity of our
relationships.
Jaffe (1995) contends that many difficulties reside not so much in insider/outsider
status as they do in the "tension between the experience of legitimate membership and the
practice of ethnography" (p.36). The dynamics of involvement and detachment are
complex, idiosyncratic and only partially under the control of the ethnographer.
Nevertheless, these dynamics have "an enormous, and often unpredictable, effect on the
practice of ethnography" (p.37). While an important part of this study's purpose revolves
around the ethnic and linguistic identity of Mexican migrants, it has been my own
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identity that has posed one of the foremost quandaries. The balance of involvement and
detached reflexivity are in constant interplay with the ever evolving attempts at anchoring
"fragmented, multilayered, and loosely interwoven senses of identity in the mundane,
uncontemplative, and socially legitimate practice of everyday life" (p.43).
My management of these balances is a playing field upon which the formal
practice of ethnography has often "lost". But it is also an arena with lessons to teach --
about "the power and unpredictability of involvement and detachment in any fieldwork
situation, where the ethnographer is pushed and pulled by immediate and distant social
and professional influences" (p.45). Those influences, and the often conflicting burdens
they place upon the ethnographer (involvement vs. a distanced posture, for example),
cannot be picked up or jettisoned at will, although many times such control would be
desirable.
Interestingly (ironically perhaps), discussions of ethnic identity often hinge on the
concept of membership, and it is just such a concept that hovers over the ethnographer
working at home. Field visits pose no such problems; Cherán is homogeneous (out of a
population of 20,000, people can name only a handful of mestizos in town, and one non-
Mexican resident - a German), and I am not a member of the Cherán group in any sense
of the word. Any normal behaviors (speaking Spanish or Tarascan, eating their food,
helping with chores, not getting sick, etc.) on my part are met with surprised pleasure.
Apart from a few requests to participate in the compadrazgo system of godfathering,
membership roles are not foisted upon me.
The boundaries are not so clear in Illinois, and for obvious reasons. I am in a
much more powerful role on my own turf, socially, culturally, linguistically. I also have
much wider power to make choices, choices which carry with them both freedom and
risk. The experiences described by Alexandra Jaffe in her "Non-ethnography of the
Military" bear striking parallels to my own although our entrance into membership and
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our tenure with that status have been quite distinct. She describes the advantages (and
relief) of enjoying
the liminal status of observer...without the burden of full membership.
This sort of detachment, like anthropological practice, must be seen as a
social strategy in the continuous negotiation of identity: the public or
private declaration of distance is an act of individual power. At the same
time, this sort of declaration can undermine the equally compelling and
necessary faith in the social contract by exposing the individual to the
uncontrollable effects of the freedom of others (1995:43).
The "legitimate membership" I own is in the migrant/small-town host milieu in
which Michoacanos find themselves when they arrive. It is in the mix of cultural norms
and societal expectations that I am most firmly anchored and through which the full onus
of membership comes. This is also where my role(s) as member is played out to its
fullest and most naturally. Such membership confers on me insider status with various
orientations, and an accompanying insider access to knowledge, although such status
does not necessarily imply the knowledge itself nor any critical understanding (Cerroni-
Long 1995:8). That understanding is based on lengthy interaction with the many
participants and ingredients in the mix.
It is the "tension between the experience of legitimate membership and the
practice of ethnography" that creates many of the delicacies of working at home. Where
membership is not in question (in Cherán, for example), neither is the practice of
ethnography. It may not be appreciated, but neither is the activity questioned as a
legitimate role for an outsider. But where legitimate membership is in play, the practice
of ethnography constitutes a rather strange behavior, and one which prompts legitimate
questions in the minds of fellow members. Given my claim that the membership resides
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in the encounter of two cultures, doubts about my work may develop in the minds of
either anglos or Michoacanos.
The pressures of academic ethnography
There are two strands of difficulty here. Some of the doubts are founded on the
artificiality (trying to find something ever new, fashionable, publishable, etc.) of the
academic business of practicing ethnography. Kirin Narayan's (1993) brief anecdote
about the observations of an Indian holy man serves nicely to juxtapose the two
perspectives on academic ethnographic practice.
"Suppose you and I are walking on the road," said Swamiji, the
holy man whose storytelling I was researching in 1985. "You've gone to
University. I haven't studied anything. We're walking. Some child has
shit on the road. We both step in it. 'That's shit!' I say. I scrape my foot;
it's gone. But educated people have doubts about everything. You say,
'What's this!' and you rub your foot against the other." Swamiji shot up
from his prone position in the deck chair, and placing his feet on the
linoleum, stared at them with intensity. He rubbed the right sole against
the left ankle. "Then you reach down to feel what it could be," his fingers
now explored the ankle. A grin was breaking over his face. "Something
sticky! You lift some up and sniff it. Then you say, 'Oh! This is shit.'
The hand that had vigorously rubbed his nose was flung out in a gesture of
disgust...
"See how many places it touched in the meantime," Swamiji
continued. "Educated people always doubt everything. They lie awake at
night thinking, 'What was that? Why did it happen? What is the meaning
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and the cause of it?' Uneducated people pass judgment and walk on.
They get a good night's sleep" (pp.679-680).
Indeed, a good night's sleep is what many of those observed seem most interested
in, for tomorrow simply means another full day's work and wages. Against such a
backdrop, remarkably pedestrian as it is, the struggles, contortions, and rigors of
academic inquiry appear absurd to say the least, and particularly to those whose interests
and background in academic ethnography are minimal. The gulf between the
nonreflexive everyday existence of nonreflexive everyday people and the postmodern
reflexivity demanded by the academy seems unbridgeable. "Classifying social action
gives it a fixity that runs counter to nonreflexive everyday experience" (Jaffe 1995:42).
Power relations and human relations
A second difficulty has to do with the power relations inherent in studying others
and drawing conclusions about their social behavior. The offense of "otherization" is so
well articulated as to be boring. Yet it is a tendency that will not go away, no matter how
often we scrub ourselves with the bristles of reflexivity. The desire (and right) to
investigate the lives of others and to report on them, normally reserved and acceptable for
such professions as journalists, lawyers, and law enforcement personnel, is largely
irreconcilable with the roles of neighbor and friend ("at home" roles), roles which I held
for years before assuming any other. As the role of investigator is closely associated with
the university, a suspect institution, the discord is all the more pronounced.
The distant, yet very real power and designs of the academy (Hill and Turpin
1995) continually confront the immediacy of social contracts and responsibility in the
arena of "at home" ethnography. The effects of the confrontation in this particular study
are awkward to measure, since there are detriments and benefits with every angle. My
sense is that, on balance over the years, it has been an obstacle to the production of an
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ethnography. The clamoring need for productivity has been hard-pressed to best the
gentle giant of friendships set in the mortar of time and empathy. My concern for the
topic had its genesis in the local and direct knowledge of friends trapped in the injustices
of international economics, dangerous and illegal migrations, the squalor of migrant
camps and substandard housing, low wages for murderous work, and a host of other
maladies falling under the antiseptic phrase "migrant labor". The pressure for academic
output changed none of that.
The study, moreover, was coaxed to life by the personal conviction that the
holistic view of the human enterprise possible through ethnographic query had much to
offer in making migrant labor more humane. That perceived holism offers at least an
occasional escape from the strictures of a logical positivism whose capacity to deal with
the intricacies of human activity is highly debatable. Working at home, under the gaze of
the observed, has allowed that conviction to evolve and blossom. It has forced an
establishment of priorities, a commitment to the side of community and personal
relationships that might have been easier to discount had the work taken place "away".
Working at home, far from being efficient in application or theory, has rooted the present
study in the realities of the social quagmire, imbuing it with a cumbersome integrity.