Writing, Researching, and Living Through Crisis: The Conditions in Which We Work

 For my dissertation, I conducted ethnographic research in Ecuador beginning in the summer of 2017 and ending in the winter of 2022. Initially, I was meant to be conducting long-term ethnographic research from February 2020 to January 2021. A month into my time there, however, I was sent home due to COVID-19 and subsequently lost a year of in-person research time. 2020 was also met with immense uncertainty and violence. Collectively, people were being expected to continue living and working while an invisible, viral force was causing harm to people around us.

I was also witnessing very real, overt violence committed at the hands of the state in my “backyard” of Minneapolis during this time. While anti-Blackness is something I witness and experience often, this violence was exacerbated amidst the pandemic. Being a student meant to conduct research for the academic year 2020-2021 ultimately felt like an impossible task, and being a Black woman during this time, also felt like an unbearable weight to bear. 

During the summer of 2021, I safely made my way back to Ecuador to restart my year of fieldwork, accompanied by my partner this time. About three months into our time there, I received news that one of my very close friends from home had died. This person was a large part of my adolescence, having shaped who I am as a person and many friendships I have made and kept along the way. Being thousands of miles away from home during this time was exceptionally painful. At the same time, I had just hit a stride in my research, which created conflicting emotions within me. The heavily ingrained sense of productivity from years of academia was preventing me from having time to sit in my emotions. Being so far from my community also made grieving my friend’s death even more isolating and difficult.

A few days after learning about my friend’s death, I also received news that one of my sisters got into a serious car accident that permanently impaired the vision in her left eye. Once again, I was met with the immense pain and guilt of being so far away during times of crisis. My partner and I decided to go home for a few weeks to be with my sister and nephew after her accident, which felt like exactly where we needed to be. During those weeks we cared for my sister in a way we would never have been able to do in Ecuador.

About two weeks upon returning to the field again, my partner and I both contracted COVID. Being sick is never enjoyable but being sick and in isolation, miles away from family or personal comforts, is even harder.  And while we had planned to stay in Ecuador until June of 2022, a visa issue[1] ultimately sent us both home three months early. 

I say all of this, not to elicit pity or to “trauma-dump.” Instead, it is my hope that by mapping out the very real conditions that I conducted my research in, those reading this can understand just how impossible it is as researchers to have a “perfect fieldwork experience” or to separate our personal lives and identities from our research. To prepare for fieldwork, we plan with colleagues and committee members for the changes and shifts that will inevitably happen with our projects. But when a novel global pandemic hits, how do we prepare for the changes and consequences of this to our lives and research? Lucía Stavig notes how the pandemic raised a new set of ethical concerns for researchers and forced anthropologists to critically ask themselves, “do we know when to stop[2]?”

Given the severity of the pandemic when I had begun my long-term fieldwork, my university almost immediately required me to return home. The question of when it was right to return to Ecuador, however, was something my university provided little to no guidance on. Even though I was fully vaccinated when I returned to the field, the Omicron variant was beginning to spread at a rapid rate. The fear of me or my partner contracting COVID and bringing it to my field site weighed heavily on me. A Western researcher traveling abroad and bringing disease is not uncommon for a discipline like Anthropology, with its colonial roots.

Another concern during this time was about my own safety conducting research. While mask restrictions were still enforced in major cities, almost no one wore masks in the countryside. When my partner and I first arrived in my field site wearing masks, we were immediately told that we did not need them. As people who strictly followed CDC guidelines of masking in public places, it then became a question of when does one compromise their own safety practices or values to “fit in” with informants more? Wearing masks the entire time we were in my field site would have made us stand out even more and could have potentially been seen as a rude gesture[3].

Stavig raises the question of knowing when to stop in non-pandemic circumstances as well, detailing mental and physical health problems she encountered while conducting fieldwork[4]. My decision to go home and be with family after my sister’s accident was not easy. Even though I knew I needed to go home, I was still plagued with the thought that I was “wasting precious research time” being away. The precarity of funding during graduate school exacerbates the feeling of needing to make every possible moment in the field count, for fear of wasting time and subsequently money (that is hard to come by). These concerns and interruptions that I faced during fieldwork ultimately came together to shape the trajectory of my dissertation. 

In their piece about the complexities of conducting fieldwork, Billo and Hiemstra note how “Researchers – especially women – rarely talk about these practical, personal considerations, due to fear of seeming weak, of detracting attention from results, of not passing the ‘test’ of fieldwork, or concerns about appearing ‘serious[5]’”. Yet, it is women –especially BIPOC and/or queer-identifying – who experience the most professional, personal, and bodily vulnerabilities in the field.

I remember feeling frustrated and embarrassed with myself due to my fieldwork experiences. I was frustrated by the number of interruptions I experienced during field work and embarrassed that I did not believe I was making enough headway with my informants, and that I was still not feeling completely comfortable in my field site, despite the many times I returned. Before returning the final time to Ecuador, I had honest conversations with women of color and queer women researchers, who validated my experiences and feelings, and shared similar vulnerabilities from their own fieldwork. These conversations reminded me that as someone with intersecting marginalities, conducting research would always look different than my non-Black (especially male) counterparts.

As a Black woman researcher, I struggled to gain rapport and access to interviews and spaces during my years of fieldwork. This was something that white researchers who came to the same community (with little to no knowledge of the community’s complex socio-political terrain) had no problem gaining. I also experienced unwanted comments, and touching from men during my fieldwork experience. Even aligning myself with whiteness with the accompaniment of my white partner during my last field experience could not protect me from sexualized comments; in fact, I experienced the most sexualization from other men with my partner present. If my US citizenship, socioeconomic status, education, and white partner—all of which comes to be associated with social capital and whiteness—could not protect me from unwanted sexual advances or help me gain access to certain spaces and people’s time, then what did that say about the Black women’s position in and relationship to the field? I support anthropologist, Maya Berry’s assertation that Black women researchers must always prove their research capabilities and humanity[6] while working.

The conversations I had with these women of color and queer women researchers also gave me the permission to do something as a researcher I had been denying myself for years: the freedom to listen to my body when entering spaces, and actively surround myself with people that made me feel comfortable and safe enough to do the work I came to do. While that may sound obvious to most people (even writing it out feels like a big “duh”), I was taught (by a white man) that conducting fieldwork should feel uncomfortable and that doing something everyday that makes you uncomfortable will lead to major breakthroughs in your research. While this research strategy may work for some people, I did not feel like it considered the embodied un-comfortability that many marginalized researchers always feel. To me, a Black woman living and working in the uncomfortable wake of slavery and anti-Blackness, having the choice to choose to be uncomfortable felt like a privilege afforded to others.  

While there are systemic factors that will never change my embodied un-comfortability, I finally realized that there were parts of my research experience that I could control, to help mitigate the un-comfortability of being a Black woman researcher.  Thus, when I returned to Ecuador, I made my home base in large cities, rather than my rural field site. Not only did this change bring physical ease to me and my partner, but it also brought nuance to my work when I visited my field site, as well as an expanded “field site”.  This expansion of my field site to other parts of Ecuador reminded me of “...the materiality of the field, a constantly shifting landscape that appears static only in the proposal[7].”

As an anthropologist dedicated to participating in ethical research practices, being able to recognize and honor both my privileges and embodied vulnerabilities is vital. Conducting research does not happen in a vacuum; “Work and life come to be entangled in the embodied, situational, relational practice that constitutes ethnographic fieldwork[8].” As a US citizen in higher education and socioeconomically more advantaged than my informants, I come into this research with privileges. As a tall Black woman in a larger body, I also face gendered- racialized-sexualized disadvantages and violence in this work[9]. My privileges and vulnerabilities, as well as the global and personal crises I found myself in, influence how I showed up and conducted research.

As self-proclaimed feminist-activist anthropologists, Berry and her colleagues envision an anthropology “that holds us politically accountable to our interlocutors as well as to our own embodied reality, as part of the same liberatory struggle, albeit differentially located along the continuum of black and indigenous liberation[10] .” Thus, I strive to hold my multiple truths (privileges, corporeality, and crisis) up at once, in order to advance the path towards a more radical and decolonial anthropology. 

ENDNOTES

[1] You are allowed to stay in Ecuador for 3 months without a visa as a "tourist". After this period of time, you must apply for a visa extension that grants you an additional 90 days. Once these 6 months are over, you can apply for more permanent visas. The visa that I had planned to apply for would have allowed John and I to stay in the country for an additional 6 months- a year in total. However, this visa was randomly cancelled with no warning or explanation a few weeks before we were meant to apply for it. The only other options would have involved us coming back to the United States to apply for and could've taken months to receive.

[2] Lucía Isabel Stavig, “Tupananchiskama/Until We Meet Again,” Anthropology and humanism 46, no. 2 (2021):1.

[3] I was worried that wearing masks the entire time could have been taken that we did not trust my informants or thought they were carriers of the virus.

[4] Stavig, “Tupananchiskama/Until We Meet Again,” 3.

[5] Emily Billo and Nancy Hiemstra, “Mediating Messiness: Expanding Ideas of Flexibility, Reflexivity, and Embodiment in Fieldwork,” Gender, place, and culture: a journal of feminist geography 20, no. 3 (2013): 324.

[6] Maya J. Berry et.al, “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no.4 92017): 546.

[7] Billo and Hiemstra, “Mediating Messiness,” 314.

[8] Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki, Improvising theory: Process and temporality in ethnographic fieldwork (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6.

[9] In their article “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field,” Berry and her colleagues discuss the embodied vulnerabilities of marginalized researchers. With each author sharing personal ethnographic vignettes from their respective field sites, this piece aims to illustrate how racialized-sexualized-gendered violence is encountered, reproduced, and analyzed by women researchers during fieldwork.

[10] Berry et.al, “Towards a Fugitive Anthropology,” 558.