A short article with the peculiar title of “Visibilization of the Anthropologies of the South” (Krotz 2012) reminded me of a minor controversy from my days in grad school at the University of Washington in the late 1960s. We had a number of fellow graduate students from other countries, and they all planned to return to their homelands to do their doctoral research. They were anxious to contribute their anthropological understandings to the ‘development’ concerns at home. My ex-husband, another would-be anthropologist (A. Michael Colfer), felt strongly that they should do their research in the US. He felt that the experience of immersing one’s self in an alien cultural environment was valuable and instructive, maybe even necessary for good anthropology. He also was interested in the insights they might bring to bear about American life. We both were. But all our exhortations were in vain (at least as far as I know).
Meanwhile, not long after we finished our own coursework [and aborted our research in Iran, both stricken by hepatitis], we found ourselves job-sharing (each half time) with the consulting firm, Abt Associates, finalizing our dissertations based on earlier research, and doing new research on our own culture! The Abt project was part of a comprehensive evaluation effort, assessing the value and results of a National Institute of Education (NIE) program to improve education in ten rural sites across the US. There was a quantitative element, coordinated from Cambridge, MA—to which we contributed primarily as data collectors; and qualitative components on each field site, led by anthropologists and sociologists. Michael and I worked in Quilcene and Brinnon, WA, on the Olympic Peninsula throughout the mid-1970s.
Already interested in the issues involved in studying one’s own culture, we paid close attention to what was happening to us, as we strove for the objectivity that anthropologists still believed possible in such research. One of the most troubling issues we had to consider was our own assumptions. In a foreign culture, many things happen that are surprising and that make little or no sense on first inspection. These prompt us to examine our own assumptions and develop hypotheses about what alternate assumptions might lead to the curious behaviour or beliefs. When studying our own culture, there were fewer (or more subtle) peculiarities that could alert us to divergent assumptions. We had to keep questioning what we believed to be reasonable understandings, seeking out alternative interpretations of what we saw. We felt we had to be continually alert and suspicious of our own understandings.
Another issue was our clear placement within the social structure we were studying. We came to Quilcene as in-migrants, we were highly educated, and were somehow related to both the school and a government program (which tended to put us into a social category we later labeled ‘public employees’, a social category clearly opposed to ‘locals’, Colfer with Colfer 1978). The public employees worked for the school, the US Forest and Park Services, a Washington State Fisheries Lab and a Fish Hatchery; they tended to have a universalistic world view, valuing education, formal qualifications; they fit within a bureaucratic social world. As we learned how the local system worked, we had to develop mechanisms for retaining, or gaining, access to the important views of those in the population who considered themselves locals (about half the people). These local folk were
- most closely associated with private industry (especially logging and fishing),
- they often had a low opinion of formal education (though many were highly educated also—something one only discovered by ‘digging’), and
- they tended to value independence, competition and self-reliance.
We were eventually able to develop relationships with a significant number of the locals: I found that women’s social lives were partly organized by their children’s ages (Colfer 1977). I could easily meet and visit with those women who had children my daughter’s age, and these women served as portals to the broader local community. My husband was able to emphasize his own resource-poor childhood in rural Maine, his father’s profession as a frequently unemployed carpenter devoted to union activity. We both willingly drank and partied with the best of the locals (not something approved by most of the public employees). And we drove a pickup truck, a decidedly local preference. Still, we found that maintaining such access, ethnographically—which implies a high level of trust—was a constant balancing act.
We were regularly reminded of the tenuousness of this trust by frequent ‘jokes’ about the Peyton Place-style novel we ostensibly planned to write or the tape recorders people imagined we had hidden in our pockets (see Colfer 1976). We were conducting our research shortly after the discovery of ex-President Richard Nixon’s tape recording dirty tricks. Although gaining trust with the locals was more difficult than with the public employees, there were also elements of concern among this latter group. At one point, our carefully tended trustworthiness was cast in doubt by the actions of an NIE program officer coming to check up on the program’s progress. He failed to understand
- the documentary nature of our role,
- the delicacy of the boundary between ethnographer (studying, understanding) and spy (reporting on and, more importantly, to); and
- the importance of the population’s perceptions of our neutrality and approval in our continued work.
In front of the principal and superintendent of the school, he asked to speak privately with us about the school’s progress—something we had to refuse point-blank (an action, which in turn resulted in a complex cascade of implications for us, for the consulting firm, and for the community).
Beyond such complexities of studying one’s own culture, there are some obvious advantages: one immediately understands some things, because one shares the views—many nuances that would pass over one’s head in an alien culture come through quite clearly in one’s own. One speaks the language (although not necessarily the subcultural subtleties), which moves the research along more swiftly. There is no long or difficult personal period of adjustment to a truly alien setting.
Now that we (anthropologists) have recognized the impossibility of being truly objective in social research,* one constraint I struggled with at the time has been moderated if not removed. In the mid-1970s, I felt some intellectual discomfort with my decision to continue to exercise my [very American cultural] right to freedom of speech about my own feminism. In Quilcene, notions of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ clearly held sway. But I felt that the trust I sought required truth-telling. In the end, I could see that my simple honesty about my egalitarian views, and Michael’s and my example of sharing our job, domestic tasks and childcare, were having an effect on the women of Quilcene with whom I interacted—an effect that part of me enthusiastically applauded. I was able, inadvertently and despite my self-doubts, to do what my ex-co-graduate students from other countries were hoping to do back home: contribute to [what I considered] positive social change.
I did no preaching; I simply sincerely expressed my own views in open communication and I acted out my life according to my values and beliefs. I then saw the remarkable effects of example. In retrospect, I believe I behaved honorably and in a better scientific tradition than that which prevailed at the time. And I learned a lot more about the pro’s, con’s, and techniques for studying my own culture. I, like Krotz, would like to read more about what researchers from the South have learned in [surely some] parallel experiences…
*I don’t suggest we need not strive for objectivity, in many endeavours; I just believe we cannot truly achieve it, enmeshed as all human beings are in our own cultural systems (I also believe there are endeavours in which subjectivity legitimately reigns). When we strive for objectivity—as when we seek to use scientific methods—we need to think about our biases and share them as openly as possible, to aid others in evaluating what we conclude.
References
Colfer, Carol J. Pierce 1976. Rights, Responsibilities, and Reports: An Ethical Dilemma in Contract Research. In Ethics and Anthropology: Dilemmas in Fieldwork, eds. Michael A. Rynkiewich and James Spradley, 32-46. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Colfer, Carol J. Pierce 1977. Women’s Communication and Family Planning in Rural America: The Case of Bushler Bay. Honolulu, HI, USA: EWCI (Case Study #4; reprinted 1978).
Colfer, Carol J. Pierce, with A. Michael Colfer 1978. Inside Bushler Bay: Lifeways in counterpoint. Rural Sociology 42: 204-220.
Krotz, Esteban 2012. Visibilization of the Anthropologies of the South. Anthropology News 53(7):30 (September)