I am living with a large extended family, an experience that has been both comforting (people are always everywhere) and lonely (what a social misfit I am living so far from my own strong kinship ties!). Seven siblings (now ages 50–35) inherited the house I live in when their parents died. When one of the brother’s wives died in childbirth, a sister adopted his two small children, and is raising them as her own. Several years back, this sister and her husband moved into the parents’ room on the top floor. Their room is next to the largest kitchen in the house, the one that doubles as the main social gathering space. This sister cooks and does childcare for many of her nieces and nephews, and her husband takes on extra hours of construction work so that there is always enough food to feed everyone (even if plain fried tortillas are served as the main course a couple of times a week). I asked the husband shortly after we met whether his job was dangerous. He said yes, it was, but because of a recent promotion to oversee a construction team, he thought some of the danger had been minimized. He gave a blessing of thanks to God as he told me this.

In April, Emily (the author) returned to New York to attend her brother’s wedding. She wrote the following letter a few weeks later, shortly after getting back to the field.

I returned to the shock of discovering that a couple of Sunday mornings ago, when clocking some extra work hours before breakfast, the husband had fallen from the third floor of a building and died instantly. The grief … the confusion … the moments of laughter-relief release … the unspeakable, unthinkable weight of sadness … the impossible difficulty of rationalizing or making sense of this death against the relentless desire to do so. I’m afraid this sentence must end there, defying proper sentence structure, since right now I’m not sure what structure really gives us in the end. Tonight the dinner table was struck by an unusual moment of stillness that once allowed to enter overtook the space around us. I swear that everyone was thinking the same thing: “At any moment he could walk through the door”—only to have to remind themselves that he would never walk through the door again. How do you believe the unbelievable? There’s a sense of wanting more than anything for time to pass so that the pain is lessened, while also not wanting time to move a second ahead, as this means a second more of life without him.

The grief is not really mine. I only knew him a handful of weeks. I wasn’t here when he died. Someday soon I will need, because of my research, to switch families and will leave again. I’m trying to sit alongside their grief though. Family members have asked me to please stay. I know the $3 a day I give for room and board is needed and I’ve been told that my company is a good distraction; the busier they can stay the better. I have no idea how any of this ties into my fieldwork and it might not. I want to learn from it, but that desire is accompanied with such a strong feeling of guilt (what privileged distance I must have to want to make use of the pain of others). Perhaps the pain in this household right now might help me to better understand this country with the deep, layered, experiences of death and grief that it holds? But am I capitalizing on the pain of those around me by analyzing it, and do I have that right? Would it be better to keep my own mind still, and let the sorrow move around me where it wants to move?

And then, life goes on: a baby was born to one of the cousins in the family the day before yesterday (the first son at the great-grandchild level—I’ll attach a silly picture of me with the baby below). The eldest sister turned 50 a week ago and was celebrated with a huge party. And my days have been completely filled with semi-structured interviews with a range of different friends-offriends here (beauticians, aerobics instructions, “amas de casa” (lovers of the home, or housewives), teachers, students, farmers). I really don’t know where much of it is going yet—I’m going to try to spend more time in some of the outlying rural communities and I’m choosing between a few different clinics, taking my time with this since once I start working there, I’ll have less time with people at their jobs and in their homes. There are some major recurring themes that I’ve been marking: a new economy of time management alongside increased stress, which people say is affecting their appetites and metabolisms; the impact of working mothers on household diets; the general distrust of what is in the country’s food supply.

As for what I’m learning: sometimes I feel like everything is completely obvious and other times I feel like what people are telling me is unbelievable. I’ve been recording almost everything and am leaving some of the processing of it all until I’ve been here for a while longer. I suppose I am trying to do my best to follow the most enduring of our methodological techniques: to listen, although right now it seems as though mostly I am listening to that which is unspoken and which may never be able to be put to words.

Now I’m off to go finish fieldnotes for the night…

Emily Yates-Doerr, wrote this while a doctoral candidate at NYU and conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala, looking at changes in what people eat and how they understand a healthy diet. The traditional local diet of beans and tortillas is being challenged by imported foods and snacks (soda, chips, sweets, and the like), while medical clinics are spreading new ideas about nutrition and health. Emily is currently a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam.

Syriac Woman: So, Sarah, where do your parents live?
Sarah: Well, my mother lives in the U.S., and my father lives here in the Netherlands.
Syriac Woman: Oh. So…they’re…divorced?
Sarah: Yes…it happened a few years ago.
Syriac Woman: So when you’re at home you live with your mother… but why don’t you live with your father now?
Sarah: Well, actually, I don’t live with my mother either; she lives in another state from me. I live with my fiancé.
Syriac Woman: You mean you live together even though you’re not married?
Sarah: Yes, we live together.

A significant pause.

Syriac Woman: Are you a Christian?
Sarah: Well, I was raised Protestant…sort of between Dutch Reformed and American Presbyterian.
Syriac Woman: Ah well, that’s something…it’s all the same God I suppose.

I experienced what felt like hundreds of variations on this conversation during my year of research among Syriac Orthodox Christian refugees living in the Netherlands. As often as not, the conversation ended there, as my potential informants turned away from me, sadly shaking their heads and clicking their tongues.

I arrived in the Netherlands in the autumn of 2009 with the intention of studying Syriac Orthodox women’s choirs, working with the daughters and granddaughters of refugees from Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq, whose families had fled multiple waves of violent conflict and political repression throughout the twentieth century. The church itself dates back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, in the third and fourth centuries, and its members still speak Syriac, a branch of Aramaic they believe to be closely related to the dialect spoken by Christ. This ancient history is an immense source of pride for the Dutch Syriac community, who call themselves Suryoye or Suroye, and the source of many claims and counter-claims about Syriac identity. By studying how members of the church related this ancient, sacred past to the rest of their lives as modern Dutch citizens, I hoped to learn how they cultivated their sense of identity as both Middle Eastern Christians and Europeans.

From the very beginning of this project, I understood I would be working with culturally and theologically conservative Christians, but I little suspected how much my own cultural and theological identity would play a role in my ability to conduct my research, sometimes limiting my access and shaping my interactions in frustrating and emotional ways. In the early months of fieldwork, I worked on building relationships with my informants in hopes of developing a richly textured and deep ethnography that would capture their life experiences and understanding of the world. But every time I initiated a conversation, I discovered that I was scrutinized and analyzed just as much as I hoped to scrutinize and analyze. The process of gaining trust and acceptance among my informants was fraught and unstable; I often ended a day’s work fearing I’d have nothing significant to bring home from the field. I knew that their tragic history as an isolated and violently oppressed minority had given them little reason to trust outsiders, so I could never be sure just how the women and men I met viewed me. Was I too different? Was I morally suspect? Would I ever gain anyone’s trust? How much could I afford to share about my self and my life without shutting my project down?

These questions were complicated by the fact that in some ways, for some people, I was easy to let in. I learned over time that my own religious background provided a reassuring sense that I could at some basic level understand them and wouldn’t mock or minimize their religious convictions and commitments. As an earnest, dark-haired, indeterminately youngish-looking woman, I plausibly fit in with the girls and young women singing in the church choirs and I would often be mistaken as Syriac Orthodox by people who didn’t know me. This began, after a while, to inspire an uneasy familiarity. Older women of the church took a maternal interest in me, worrying about whether I had enough clothing, whether I was eating enough, whether I was cold and lonely in my student room. The fact that I learned to read the classical Syriac script after a few months and could (more or less) participate in the liturgy drew approving smiles and invitations to dinner. But this warm welcome could turn to dismay, disapproval, or disappointment as they discovered incongruous things about my life that cast suspicion on my moral identity. How good a Christian daughter could I be if I was unmarried at thirty two and travelling the world alone?

My younger friends, on the other hand, were able to create a more accepting, if also somewhat ambivalent, space for me in their lives. They were the second and third generation who, while being committed to the moral precepts of their church and families, had grown up in the Netherlands attending Dutch schools and taking an occasional anthropology class at university. They understood perfectly well what a researcher was and they had Dutch friends of different backgrounds, so they knew that even with a Christian background it wasn’t likely that I would share their ideas of how to live one’s life. They tried as well as they could to meet me somewhere in the middle of our differing life experiences. But even with this good will, our conversations could lead us into difficult terrain. I heard in their words emotional, contradictory claims about what it means to be a Syriac Orthodox Christian. My informants judged themselves and each other harshly, scrutinizing their own moral behavior and drawing conclusions about identity and worth in terms I could never survive if I were actually Syriac Orthodox.

Because of my own anxiety about whether I could at any time be expelled from the community before I had learned something significant, it took me a long time to realize that the fraught emotion of these disagreements among my informants was itself a significant discovery. The painful emotions aroused in me by my interactions with them – about my religious history, my bicultural family, the lifechoices I had made in order to become an anthropologist – were activated by my informants’ complicated emotions as they struggled to define and articulate to me their own moral, cultural, and religious identities in a moment of tremendous transformation and uncertainty in their community’s history.

Coming to this realization mid-way in my research process was bittersweet. I had been prepared by my training in ethnographic methods to expect that who I was as a person would affect the kind of knowledge I could produce. As a young woman, I had access to the lives and feelings of young Syriac Orthodox women, an often over-looked segment of the community, but older, male, and more “official” bearers of Syriac culture generally wouldn’t speak to or even acknowledge me. As a Dutch-American, I had an ear for the community’s engagement with mainstream Dutch social mores and expectations of recent migrants, but struggled to keep from projecting my own history onto theirs. As a sympathetic but deep-down-mostly-agnostic ex-Christian, I could enter the aesthetic and affective world of Christian belief and practice but often had to suppress my anger at the kinds of socially conservative moral claims made in the name of Christianity, which resonated too closely with the claims that drove me out of my childhood churches in the first place. My anthropological training had taught me that the researcher’s identity and subjectivity shapes the kind of knowledge she can produce but it couldn’t prepare me for how much it would demand of me emotionally, to stay present and open to my informants’ lives and experiences no matter how much discomfort I experienced.

In anthropology, we are trained to pay attention to subjectivity, both our informants’ and our own. This is one of the reasons that, as anthropologists, we take so many years to research and write about our projects; we must develop a critical distance for our analysis of other people’s problems with self-awareness and maturity, which takes time and thought and a clear-eyed view of our own emotional engagement. Questions of subjectivity don’t necessarily have to take center-stage in the final product of our written work, as we try to keep the focus on our subject rather than ourselves, but these questions play an essential role in our research and writing process. As social scientists, self-reflection is crucially important to understanding the limits of our perception and the kinds of claims we can make about the world.

So the heart of my research process this past year has been the discovery of a complicated and ambivalent web of emotions that bind my informants’ sense of moral identity to their families and to their church. The expansion and development of my ethnographic research involves contextualizing these feelings within broader political and social histories, both European and Middle Eastern, which have brought them to where they are now and which give some insight into their fraught disagreements with each other.

My own experiences in the field as I came to understand my informants’ problems and preoccupations recall an important insight of our discipline: as social and cultural anthropologists, regardless of how much of ourselves we choose to put into our ethnographic writing, we must account for how our own subjectivity shapes our research agendas and haunts our relationships. In doing so, we ensure that when we go home to write, we can clearly disentangle our informants’ stories from our own.

Sarah A. Bakker is a Ph.D Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California – Santa Cruz. Her dissertation research conducted among Syriac Orthodox Christian refugees and their families, living in the Netherlands, focuses on music, morality, and the construction of religious and racial difference in Middle Eastern Christian identity amidst the Dutch multiculturalism debates. Her work explores questions of gender, kinship, postcolonialism, and the secular as intertwined and multi-layered problems for the ethnography of Europe.

So, what have I learned about medical anthropology in Bolivia?

A lot, although I’ve only begun scratching the surface of all these topics. For a med-anth dork like myself, this is a great situation- it seems like every day, some new potential research topic reveals itself to me. The excitement of discovering interesting local issues to explore feels all the more intense because for the most part, these are questions I can’t just research in the library. There has been a surprisingly small amount of research in medical anthropology in Bolivia. Apart from a few classic texts, like those by Joseph Bastien and Libbet Crandon-Malamud, there has been only the occasional scholar who has published about medical issues here in the past few decades. This creates in me a feeling of immediacy- the sense that I really could, and should, run off to investigate all of these issues as soon as possible.

Before I discuss the findings that relate to my original research plan, here, as a sampling, are some of the other questions which caught my attention this past summer.

Future Research Project # 1: Sexuality and contraception in Bolivia’s fastest-growing city

In one of my first weeks in Bolivia, I was having dinner with some more seasoned anthropologists. None of them worked on medical issues; archaeology and politics seem to see the most scholarly work in Bolivia at the moment. But upon hearing of my interest in gender and sexuality research, one of the women present suddenly remembered something a friend and informant had mentioned to her. “Apparently, young women are using all sorts of secretive means to control their fertility lately,” my archaeologist friend told me. The young woman who had shared this with her was from El Alto, the nearly all-indigenous city located just over La Paz, which is the fastest-growing city in Bolivia due to the high migration of Aymara people from the countryside. Although Aymara tradition encourages large families, these younger women living in the cities are seeing whole new worlds of economic opportunity opening up for them- a chance to acquire some wealth, if they didn’t have 6 or 8 children to provide for. So, sometimes with, and sometimes without, the collusion of their husbands, young women are commonly sneaking birth control and obtaining illegal abortions.

The striking thing to me was that, as this researcher recounted the story, the others who were present realized that they had heard similar reports, told in hushed tones by young women they knew in El Alto. I found everything about this situation fascinating. Not only were there the straightforward factual questions to investigate- Who are these women? How widespread is the phenomenon? Where and how are they accessing these birth control services?- but her description also underscored the reality of rapidly changing values regarding family roles, economic possibilities, and Aymara traditions. Furthermore, there is something of a lacuna regarding knowledge of Aymara sexuality in anthropological research. Aymara culture is generally known as a conservative, hard-working and closed-mouth culture, whose people are not forthcoming on issues of sex. Such mores, though, may be loosening under the influences of migration and urbanization.

Future Research Project #2: Alcohol, alcoholism, and gender

I was at a wedding in El Alto, the guest of my friend A., an anthropologist who has worked in Bolivia for many years. I had been forewarned about expectations regarding alcohol at events such as this. “You’re not really able to say no when you are given alcohol,” she told me. “There’s just no polite way to do it. You just have to prepare to be really, really sick tomorrow.”

Bolivians drink. And I say this as a girl who likes a good party, and who admirably met society’s expectations for teenage/college shenanigans: You can tag me out in the first hour of a Bolivian party, whereas they will continue on happily for another 16 (and then wake up and do it all again after a few hours of rest).

Here’s how it goes, as typified by this one wedding (which turned out to be not even close to the wildest celebrating I witnessed). It is polite to contribute a case of your own booze, since each person will consume at least this much. (Sadly for me as a beer-hater, the preferred beverages are beer, endless beer; singani, a type of liquor made from grapes; and chicha, a nauseating corn-based brew.) The social interaction of the entire event is a nonstop repetition of the following encounter: I pour you a (4-oz or so) plastic cup of beer. You spill a drop or two on the ground, as an offering to Pachamama (mother earth), toast me, and then down the entire cup in one gulp. Then, you fill my cup. I gulp it down in similar fashion. We rotate to the next person and repeat. It’s kind of like speed dating, except you chug instead of chat. As you might imagine, this is an effective way of getting inebriated, and within an hour you have people dancing, spontaneously falling over, and prone to egregious displays of what A. and I dubbed the “I love you, man.”

What separates Bolivian drinking from other types of revelry I have known is the amount consumed and the sheer endurance of the drinkers. Alcohol is not simply a social lubricant here, it is the 200 HP engine that powers the social scene. People will drink far past what I used to assume would be the point of alcohol poisoning, and they will continue this for days during a celebration: waking up early to start drinking and continuing into the wee hours of the night. And the celebrations are innumerable. In addition to weddings, baptisms, birthdays and the like, there are national and local holidays that provide near-weekly entertainment.

I have always been fascinated by cultural ideas about alcohol consumption and whether a culture possesses an idea of alcohol-ism. Here in Bolivia, I asked many people about this topic. Most people told me that the idea of having a “problem” with alcohol is not very widespread, in contrast to the disease model of alcoholism that is prevalent in neighboring South American countries and, of course, the U.S. If this is the case, I would like to find out more about how problems related to drinking are understood in Bolivia, because there seems to be incontrovertible evidence of- if not problems- issues related to alcohol. It is not uncommon to find men passed out in the street at any hour of the day, flat on their backs on the sidewalk. It’s also commonly discussed how men’s episodes of drunkenness correspond to beating their wives, which occurs with alarming frequency. There is, in general, a distinct gendered dimension to this issue, with the norms for male drinking entirely different from female drinking. In my mind, all of these questions deserve further inquiry.

Potential Research Project #3: Kallawayas: The end of a generation?

The Bolivian Andes possess their own mythical medicine men, called Kallawayas. Kallawayas are traveling healers, easily recognizable by the colorful pouches and medicine bags slung over their shoulders, who are said to have been the healers of the Inca kings. They possess extensive herbal knowledge, and perform divinatory and magical rituals for patients. They primarily speak Quechua (the other dominant language and ethnic group in Bolivia), but as healers also speak a secret language for the transmission of medical knowledge, which uses a vocabulary believed to descend from the now-extinct Puquina language.

The town of Charazani is known as the home of Kallawaya healers, and I visited this town over the summer. It is a beautiful, remote place, a small town of about 600 people nestled into the hills between two mountain ranges. Like every other town in Bolivia, they celebrate their annual town anniversary with a huge celebration, a giant 4-day orgy of drinking (see research project #2) and music, in this case provided with traditional pan-flutes and drums. At the time I decided to visit, I didn’t understand how fully this party would dominate life in Charazani over the entire weekend, but let’s just say it didn’t turn out to be the best time for gathering information on native healing practices. Still, by the end of the weekend I’d met some local families whose stories promised a wealth of anthropological riches I could potentially explore at a later time.

“You’re an anthropologist? This is beyond wonderful,” exclaimed Carlos in delight. Carlos, a Charazani native I’d met in the town square one day, was from an old local family, although not typical of Charazani, as he had attended Tulane and now lived in Miami. He, along with some friends and family, had been hoping to set up a project to record the stories of some of the very old Kallawaya healers in the area. “There is a whole generation of Kallawayas that is close to dying,” he explained earnestly, “and we don’t know how much of the knowledge will be preserved in future generations. We are hoping to capture as many of their stories as we can.”

Like most medical anthropologists, I imagine, I have a soft spot for learning about classic “traditional” medicine- ethnobotany, shamanism, what foods are prepared for what ailments, etc. The idea of collecting narratives from the famous healers of the Andes holds no small allure for me. I spent the day-long bumpy ride back to La Paz fantasizing about traipsing across the altiplano, traveling from one small village to the next (with a Quechua research assistant to translate) collecting life stories from wizened elder men as we sat drinking coca tea. But, I have other research questions in mind to be tackled, and over the summer, I think I have found an approach that examines both traditional medicine and modern city living….

Actual Research Problem #1: Sobreparto, a chronic and mysterious reproductive illness of the Andes

Over the course of the summer, I was fortunate to meet Carmen Beatriz Loza, a researcher of Bolivian history and medicine. Her partner is Walter Alvarez, who is both a Kallawaya healer and a biomedical doctor who went to medical school in Cuba. (The close ties between the Cuban health system and Bolivia, a newly socialist country, are Future Research Project Number 4, by the way. It’s a complex and intriguing relationship. Currently, there are a fair number of Cuban medical practitioners who practice in underserved areas of Bolivia, and Cuba operates scholarship programs to send poor indigenous students to medical school in Cuba.) Walter practices both traditional medicine and biomedicine in El Alto, and together with Carmen, formed a small research institute called the Bolivian Institute for Traditional Kallawaya Medicine. Here Walter and Carmen study, teach, and share traditional medical knowledge with their community, as well as research particular medical issues.

One such issue I learned about from Carmen is an illness called sobreparto. Sobreparto literally means “after birth,” and it refers to a type of illness that is known in many Latin American countries, but which has no biomedical counterpart. The illness can begin any time after birth, from the first weeks postpartum to years after birth. It is related to the belief that women are particularly weak and susceptible to sickness and spirit possession after their body has been “opened” by childbirth. Common attributions for the disease include heat or cold entering the body; evil spirits entering the body; and overwork or ill-treatment of the woman after the birth, when she is supposed to be resting and cared for by family. Ill treatment, such as physical or mental violence or neglect, by a husband is also cited as a cause of sobreparto.

Because my research centers on the topic of chronic pain, and whether emotional and interpersonal factors are understood to impact physical health, sobreparto is a fascinating case study. It is a common condition, respected and feared by Andean men and women. Its onset and course are highly variable, but the disease is often chronic. The symptomatology is also highly variable; sobreparto can include everything from skin rashes to persistent hot and cold feelings to stomach pains. It also appears tightly intertwined with local expectations of women and their work. Andean women generally lead difficult lives, in terms of both back-breaking labor and the perpetual cycle of pregnancy, birth and lactation they are in for most of their adult lives. But, as the case of sobreparto hints, it appears understood that there are moments when this stress can be too much.

Thus, I look forward to investigating this topic further as part of my dissertation research. There is a large project beginning at the Institute that I have been invited to collaborate on, which will utilize their connections to local networks of healers in order to investigate traditional ways of understanding and treating sobreparto. Walter’s clinical work and local patient base would provide access to sobreparto patients whom I could interview about their own experiences with the illness. It seems like a project that would integrate my interest in the concepts of traditional medicine with my interest in the changing, dynamic urban setting of El Alto.

This means my other potential research projects may have to be put on the back burner for now…. but from what I hear, it’s good to have future projects to think about when one is slogging through the tougher moments of a dissertation project. I’m certainly lucky to have an abundance of those to daydream about.

Abbe Rose Kopra is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, studying medical and psychological anthropology in the interdisciplinary Department of Comparative Human Development. Her research focuses on the problem of chronic pain; she is interested in cultural interpretations and attributions for chronic pain, how individuals cope psychologically with chronic pain, and the connection between the two. She is currently spending the summer in the Bolivian Andes, studying the language of Aymara and doing preliminary research for her dissertation fieldwork next year. This is her first summer in her chosen field site, and here she reflects about different aspects of the experience in a series of essays for Anthropology Now’s ‘Fieldnotes’ category.

When one arrives at a new fieldsite, the only things one can know with any certainty are the changes in one’s own experience. Lacunas of knowledge burst into one’s consciouness like the appearance of crystal-clear lakes dotting the ground when viewed from an airplane. The sprawling complexity of a landscape simplifies to valleys of ignorance and peaks of impressions that lie waiting to be remapped into a coherent whole- or else the whole land will remain unknown and passed over by you.

I arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest capital city (11,000 feet) and a sprawling metropolis in one of Latin America’s poorest countries, in mid-June. I am here for three months to work on language training and conduct preliminary dissertation research, to be continued in earnest several months later. I have not arrived emptyhanded. Besides two giant suitcases of research materials and warm clothing (winter in the South American Andes chills to the bone, despite dermis-scalding heat during the day from a sun hanging merely feet above you), I come bearing a rather incongruous amount of ideas and questions. Having spent the past three years completing stateside research projects and anthropological theory courses, I am inclined to throw myself at my fieldsite like an overeager lover.

Here is what I want to know: How do people in the predominantly indigenous area of La Paz think about, attribute, and cope with chronic bodily pain? While not as well-known as the traditions of medicine in China or India, the Andes region, with its deeply indigenous history, has an ancient tradition of medicine all its own. Andean medicine is rooted in Andean cosmology, which is a circular and holistic system focused on the interrelatedness of person and environment. Regarding bodily health, Andean thought traditionally considers a person’s body in relation to the spirits that occupy each mountain and feature of the land, as well as in relation to other people (both those alive and those within the ancestral spirit world). Herbal knowledge and practices of divination feature prominently. I was drawn to this area because these holistic traditions of medicine, still a strong presence even in urban areas, stand in sharp contrast to the U.S. biomedical tradition that I have studied the past few years. In U.S. biomedicine, mind and body are considered separate realms, and material evidence of bodily dysfunction is paramount in receiving attention, care, and the hope of relief. Thus, by examining the problem of chronic pain in these two very different settings, I hope to shed light on the tacit assumptions of both cultures regarding the social status of people in pain, the moral dimensions of suffering and of attaining (or not) healing, and how these cultural frameworks affect the lived trajectories of people with chronic pain.

Masses of theoretical preparation, however, leave me only more aware of my clumsiness when approaching this singular, living and breathing, place: La Paz. La Paz is its own entity- pulsating, mysterious, self-contained- and she has no obligation to entertain my shy questions. The courting process of this place will be long. Thus, I work to educate myself on the topics people are actually discussing here. I read the daily papers and learn the recent history of the socialist (and first indigenous) president Evo Morales. I struggle through hours of daily classes in Aymara, a local indigenous language (over 60% of the population of Bolivia self-identifies as indigenous, and La Paz is considered the Aymara capital of the world), learning much more prosaic questions such as “How much are those oranges?” and the various words for animal dung (thaxa, llama dung, is most revered, in case you were wondering) and all of the specialized uses of said dung.

Constantly, I think about the things I do and do not know, and how they are literally re-shaping my sense of myself. The most basic moments of personal space and privacy that I have always taken for granted, have been mischievously rearranged. No longer do I stumble out of my bed in the morning to eat a bowl of oatmeal while checking my email; instead at first rise I sit myself around a table with my host family and strain my brain to decipher the rapid-fire speech, or even to participate once the first cup of wretched Nescafe begins to clear my morning fog. When I leave the house at night, I am subject to being grabbed and having my head flipped over while my “mother” grabs her blowdryer and dries my hair to her standards; it is not acceptable to leave the house in this winter weather with half-dried hair, as the cold will undoubtedly enter the body quickly and cause illness.

There are many moments of regression to social childhood like this, both the overt blowdryer-type ones and the constant nagging awareness of insufficiency at the business of caring for myself. Temperamentally, this is a challenge. And yet, there are small moments of success. Late one day, unused to a full household of people and constant motion, I find a quiet bench in a sunny park where I sit to watch children scamper over a playground. I am quickly reminded that even the simple choice to sit alone here, under the spotlight of my pale skin, does not belong solely to me. A small boy, a lustrabota (shoe-shiner) approaches me and we begin a lively back-and-forth about the necessity of having clean shoes. While I fully concede his point that mine are dirty, we are less in agreement about the undesirability of this state, and even less so about the monetary value of remedying the situation. (I’m a sweatshirt-wearing grad student; who cares?) I concede, of course, to a shoeshine after realizing that I am sitting in front of the boy eating a scoop of gelato, an undeniable luxury item. But at least my recent inquiries about this particular job (there is a huge number of lustrabotas in Bolivian cities- they are generally young men and children who are working to pay for school or other basic expenses), allows me to understand the situation and his remarkable persistence for this foreigner’s shoes. It also allows me to pay the culturally appropriate price for his service, rather than the fourfold “tourist” price initially demanded. I consider this a draw, in my daily learning game: the price of an unneeded shoeshine for a semi-competent cultural encounter.

Recently, I had my coca leaves read. (Coca is one of the most important plants in Andean culture, revered for its ability to give energy and suppress hunger, and for its medicinal and spiritual uses.) I was walking around El Alto, a deeply indigenous area around La Paz. Here there are many traditional healers, and I was exploring a long street lined with the small blue huts of curanderos (“curers”) and yatiris (literally, “one who knows,” from the Aymara verb “to know,” yatiña). Curious about the practices inside these little huts, I stopped at one whose sign read “Maestro curandero,” followed by a long list of his services and skills. Greeting the middle-aged man inside, I chose the most basic service- a reading of my coca leaves, to advise me about my future. I asked for advice about working in Bolivia and about which research questions, of the many interesting medical issues I’m discovering, to focus on. He tossed coca leaves over the table and examined the patterns in which they fell. Occasionally he selected specific leaves to arrange in front of him, murmuring to himself as he did so.

My questions, regrettably, were not answered nearly as specifically as I would have liked. But the overall message was positive: Bolivia will be good to me, he foresaw. I will have success here. All this came, however, with the repeated caveat: Conpaciencia. “With patience.” Not right away. But eventually… yes.

Con paciencia. Perhaps, as a response to my questions about the future, such an answer is a total cop-out. (Do people with abundant patience often try to read into the future?) Perhaps it is just solid advice for beginning in the field. I am certain at least of the latter.

Abbe Rose Kopra is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, studying medical and psychological anthropology in the interdisciplinary Department of Comparative Human Development. Her research focuses on the problem of chronic pain; she is interested in cultural interpretations and attributions for chronic pain, how individuals cope psychologically with chronic pain, and the connection between the two. She is currently spending the summer in the Bolivian Andes, studying the language of Aymara and doing preliminary research for her dissertation fieldwork next year. This is her first summer in her chosen field site, and here she reflects about different aspects of the experience in a series of essays for Anthropology Now's 'Fieldnotes' category.

Research takes perseverance and grit, but there is no denying that it comes with certain pleasures, too. In Palestinian society, research feeds both mind and body. Once, I was interviewing two young men who were in a hurry to go on an afternoon excursion. Still, they presented me with soda and then coffee on a shiny round tray. During another interview, I enjoyed watermelon and ice cream cake. As I ate, I pondered: What could be easier than research in which people conceive of the researcher as a guest?

Obviously, though, the work of research is more than just managing the watermelon juice that threatens to escape from the sides of one’s mouth as one poses the next question. Another juicy challenge of this project has been tracking key terms as they circulate between U.S. news articles and Palestinian interpretations. The word “chaos” popped up often in U.S. news coverage of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat’s 2004 funeral. That November day, PA officials’ plans to bury Arafat in a private ceremony went awry when some of the tens of thousands of Palestinian mourners who had gathered for the funeral scaled walls to fill the courtyard where Arafat was to be buried. PA officials struggled to move Arafat’s body from the helicoptor that bore it to the gravesite, fearing the crowds might whisk it off for a more traditional – but less controlled – public procession.

Some of the U.S. foreign correspondents’ writings about the funeral reflected longstanding U.S. critiques of Arafat. A Newsweek correspondent wrote,

[Arafat’s] successors wanted an orderly funeral. They brought in bulldozers to clean up Yasser Arafat’s broken-down headquarters in Ramallah. They sealed off the compound to keep out the crowds. They even cleared a hall in which Arafat would lay in state while dignitaries passed by the coffin. What they got instead was the untidy drama of the old regime, the kind of chaos that Arafat thrived on.

In a similar vein, USA Today reported, “In an alley off the square, a man whose face was covered with a black-and-white keffiyah – the headscarf worn by Arafat and that has come to symbolize the Palestinain cause – fired a pistol in the air before melting into the crowd.” Such descriptive passages are laden with meaning. I was curious about how my interviewees would interpret them.

I knew the term “chaos” – translated to fawda in Arabic – would attract my interviewees’ attention. I had found that fawda could describe everything from a buzzy throng at a children’s summer camp to the political crisis of leadership in the West Bank in 2006 and after. During that time, the PA had lacked the power to prohibit militia members from carrying bigger guns than the official security forces, or to keep a marriage dispute from turning to fisticuffs and gunfire. Over the last two years or so, many have conversely complained that the PA has gone too far in repressing its political opponents.

The Palestinians I spoke to expressed diverse readings of the passages. One college student in Nablus thought the articles aptly identified a stubborn problem in Palestinian political culture. As he said, “One of our historical mistakes from the beginning of the modern revolution in 1964 was that the kind of enculturation we had was not democratic and civilized. It was revolutionary: ‘Let’s fight, and we’re going to liberate our lands and return to them’… there wasn’t a theoretical framing that there should have been, and there wasn’t a democratic enculturation, either. So what I liked about [the Newsweek] article was the tie between the disorder that Arafat caused, and its effects after he died. It even affected his own funeral.” His friend, a Nablus student in the department of political science, parsed the word fawda as “anarchy,” and though he referenced Bakunin with enthusiasm, he maintained that a bit more order at the funeral would have been a good thing.

On another day, I spoke to a Palestinian from a Bethlehem refugee camp, who was also in his early twenties but was not in college. He was much more critical of the articles. He had been at the funeral, and he knew the crowds had been unruly. He insisted, however, that it had been,an “organized chaos,” which can be a “beautiful thing, because authorities cannot control people absolutely, to give people a line and insist that they walk it perfectly.” He continued that an “organized chaos can be something sweet because it can be the expression of a popular opinion.” Although he had not studied anarchism, or much other political theory, the theories he expressed about “chaos” resonated deeply in a context in which state authority has been so repressive.

He also read into the passage about the gunman “melting into the crowd” a suggestion that violence was a pervasive part of Palestinian life, something which he adamantly rejected. He pointed out that Israelis also use gunfire as a means of saluting fallen soldiers and leaders.

I was curious at their different evaluations of the articles. Perhaps their answers had sprung from different political orientations or philosophies. I also wondered if the Nablus students’ evaluations of “chaos” were in part rooted in their own experiences in their city, where lawlessness had affected daily life more than in any other part of the West Bank. Perhaps the Bethlehem man who had attended the funeral was analyzing the day and the articles on the basis of his own experiences, too. He had been proud to take part in that historic day.

Ultimately, fieldwork can feel piecemeal and inconclusive, but, as I packed my bags, I looked forward to bringing my own analytic writing into dialogue with these young men’s perspectives – even though I knew I’d have to make my own coffee and slice my own watermelon to fuel my writing.

This research was funded by the Tufts University Faculty Research Fund.

Amahl Bishara is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. This is the 3rd and last post in a series of ‘Fieldnotes’ she has written for www.anthronow.com. You can find her previous posts under the ‘Fieldnotes’ category.

photo courtesy of A. Bishara

This summer I’m doing interviews with Palestinian journalists and refugees in which I ask them to interpret and critique U.S. news articles. Why, you might ask, did I choose journalists and refugees as my commentators? Why didn’t I try to obtain a broader cross-section of Palestinian society?

In looking for Palestinian commentary on U.S. news articles, I knew that I couldn’t find one Palestinian voice that would represent all Palestinians. Not all Palestinians would respond to an article in the same way. Instead, I wanted to select types of people whose voices tend to be excluded not only by U.S. media, but also by their own political processes, like those of the less-than-democratic Palestinian Authority.

Refugees certainly fit this bill. Palestinian refugees were forced to leave their home villages and cities in 1948. Since then, Israel has refused to allow them to return to those homes. A United Nations agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), set up temporary houses for them in dozens of camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Though refugees share a common claim to their right to return to their home villages, on a practical level, they have fared differently in each location.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, refugees are constrained in the same ways as non-refugees by the Israeli military occupation. However, refugee camps are distinct communities, physically set apart from other neighborhoods. For example, you know you are entering a refugee camp because the streets are narrower. Refugees are also slightly poorer than the rest of the Palestinian population. Moreover, for decades refugee camps have led challenges to Israeli occupation. This has made refugees a significant political group in Palestinian society.

Yet sympathetic U.S. human interest stories about Palestinians often report on middle class or wealthy Palestinians who work in computer technology, run fancy restaurants, or open cinemas. If we do not attend to the voices of other Palestinians, we will exclude an important part of Palestinian society from political dialogues in the news.

My reasons for asking journalists to comment on articles are a bit different. This is a part of a larger project in which I study how Palestinian journalists contribute to the production of U.S. news. Palestinians work as reporters, producers, fixers, and photojournalists for U.S. news organizations. Photojournalists and reporters gather information to be shaped by writers and editors. Fixers and producers guide foreign correspondents to information. Rarely, however, do these Palestinian journalists select a feature story and write it exactly as they would like.

So with this project, I wanted to give them the opportunity to comment on stories that they might have worked on, but may not have seen in their final forms. I also wanted to talk to journalists because I presumed their expertise on the craft of reporting would allow them to make specific critiques, but also be sympathetic to the challenges of this work.

In my interviews, I’ve found a lot of diversity within the refugee and journalist groups themselves. One refugee had the sharp critical eye I expected from journalists due to his frequent attendance at protests. [Just from the descriptions and quotes in an article on a demonstration, he surmised that the journalist made the report while standing with the Israeli commmander repressing the protest, rather than with the protesters]. One journalist was harshly critical of an article by a Palestinian journalist while another embraced it – but neither referred to technical aspects of the reporting, like where the journalist might have been positioned or whether the journalist should have spoken to different sources.

Even when people were critical of an article, they presented different reasonings. For example, an article described a new and expensive restaurant as evidence that the Ramallah economy was picking up. One journalist’s opinion was that such restaurants were not where most Palestinians liked to have fun. Rather, she and her friends liked to go to coffeehouses. Also, they socialized during the day, not at night. One refugee commented that this restaurant in particular was only for the wealthy. If he wanted to write an article about whether or not the Palestinian economy was picking up, he’d talk to vegetable sellers, rather than restauranteurs, since, after all, everybody buys vegetables. This rich variety of responses, I thought, was one reason to continue these kinds of conversations.

photo courtesy of Amahl Bishara

This summer, after two years away, I’m back in my old field site, far from the Massachusetts university where I’ve just completed my first year of teaching.  On the ride from Tel Aviv airport to Jerusalem, I take an informal census of the roadside wildflowers as I try to avoid the inevitable politics of the shared taxicab.  Attempting to delay my entrée into politics proves futile, though.  Soon the driver tells me that he cannot deposit me at the Arab hotel I have chosen for its (relative) centrality & neutrality, due to a few inexplicably blocked roads severing the main route from predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem to predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.

A few taxicabs later, I arrive at the apartment my husband has found for us, and we receive visitors in twos and threes.  I relish seeing how the children have grown and wistfully await longer conversations with these dear friends.  A few days later, I re-connect with an associate who has not only an arrangement with an office store for cheap copying, but also a car to take me to the store.  How much more convenient fieldwork is the second time around!  After a few minutes of clicking-churning copy machine sounds that dare me to dance like Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, my fieldwork is on its way.

The copies are integral to my fieldwork.  This summer, I’m asking Palestinians to read and critique translated U.S. news articles from the second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 2000.  For example, I might ask a Palestinian to consider whether an article about the separation wall that Israel built in the West Bank represents the topic thoroughly and accurately from the perspective of someone who lives next to that wall.  I’ll also ask what Palestinians think these articles might tell U.S. audiences, correctly or incorrectly, about Palestinian society as a whole.

This project stems from a tradition of using anthropological films and writings to create dialogues with those in the field.  Usually, anthropologists write or make films about a select group of people in a field site and they have the last word on how and what is written or filmed. By conducting interviews with people in the field about these anthropological writings or films, though, an anthropologist can give those people the chance to respond to the anthropologist’s ideas, or to actively help produce those ideas.

The French documentary film Jaguar (1967), by French anthropologist Jean Rouch, is an example of such a dialogue.  It is about African labor migration and features three men who traveled to the coast for work.  Its narration was recorded by the three men while watching a silent, rough cut of the film.  Thus, while Rouch filmed and edited the footage, the film’s subjects gave it its narration.  This gives these labor migrants the chance to comment on their own society and the film itself.  However, although their voiceover is an integral part of the film, Rouch still made the final decisions about the film.  The decision to use such narration, after all, suited his ideas as an anthropologist and filmmaker about “shared anthropology,” or collaboration between anthropologists and their subjects.  In my case, I’m gathering Palestinians’ ideas about U.S. news articles – but in the end, I’ll write up the results of the interviews, and I’ll select the critiques I find most noteworthy.

Bringing U.S. news to Palestinians may not seem like a revolutionary idea in our era of fast, online media. But the world is still not as “flat” as some might presume.  Even though many Palestinians are concerned with representations of them in U.S. media, most do not read U.S. news, partly because of language barriers, and partly because they have their own media to attend to.

The last few years, I have been studying how U.S. journalism and Palestinian politics influence each other.  Generally, U.S. journalists and Palestinians interact at the beginning of writing a news article.  U.S. journalists seek out quotes from officials, activists, parents, farmers.  Then, although these Palestinians’ words are transported all over the world, they tend not to come home to roost.  In gathering Palestinian interpretations of U.S. news – and publishing their interpretations and critiques in the United States – I aim to give Palestinians the chance to reply to what U.S. newspapers say about them.  Is anger the best way to describe how Palestinians felt at Arafat’s funeral? How will Palestinians respond to a lyrical article about kite flying that may not make its politics front and center?  This summer, I’m aiming to find out.

This research was funded by the Tufts University Faculty Research Fund.