Summary of readings and videos

RESEARCH

METHODS IN

ANTHROPOLOGY
FOURTH EDITION

Qualitative and

Quantitative Approaches

H. Russell Bernard

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bernard, H. Russell (Harvey Russell), 1940-
Research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches / H.

Russell Bemard.-4th ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7591-0868-4 (cloth: alk. paper)­
ISBN 0-7591-0869-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Ethnology-Methodology. I. Title.

GN345.B36 2006
301 ‘.072-dc22 2005018836

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Contents

Preface vii

l . Anthropology and the Social Sciences 1

2. The Foundations of Social Research 28

3. Preparing for Research 69

4. The Literature Search 96

5. Research Design: Experiments and Experimental Thinking 109

6. Sampling 146

7. Sampling Theory 169

8. Nonprobability Sampling and Choosing Informants 186

9. Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 210

10. Structured Interviewing I: Questionnaires 251

11. Structured Interviewing II: Cultural Domain Analysis 299

12. Scales and Scaling 318

13. Participant Observation 342

14. Field Notes: How to Take Them, Code Them, Manage Them 387

15. Direct and Indirect Observation 413

16. Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis 451

17. Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 463

18. Qualitative Data Analysis II: Models and Matrices 522

V

549 19. Univariate Analysis

20. Bivariate Analysis: Testing Relations 594

21. Multivariate Analysis 649

Appendix A: Table of Random Numbers 697

Appendix B: Table of Areas under a Normal Curve 700

Appendix C: Student’s t Distribution 703

Appendix D: Chi-Square Distribution Table 704

Appendix E: FTables for the .05 and .01 Levels of Significance 706

Appendix F: Resources for Fieldworkers 710

References 711

Subject Index 771

Author Index 791

About the Author 803

13

♦

Participant Observation

P
articipant observation fieldwork is the foundation of cultural anthropol­
ogy. It involves getting close to people and making them feel comfortable

enough with your presence so that you can observe and record information
about their lives. If this sounds a bit crass, I mean it to come out that way.
Only by confronting the truth about participant observation-that it involves
deception and impression management-can we hope to conduct ourselves
ethically in fieldwork. Much more about this later.

Participant observation is both a humanistic method and a scientific one. It
produces the kind of experiential knowledge that lets you talk convincingly,
from the gut, about what it feels like to plant a garden in the high Andes or
dance all night in a street rave in Seattle.

It also produces effective, positivistic knowledge-the kind that can move
the levers of the world if it gets into the right hands. Nancy Scheper-Hughes
(1992), for example, developed a nomothetic theory, based on participant
observation, that accounts for the tragedy of very high infant mortality in
northeast Brazil and the direct involvement of mothers in their infants’ deaths.
Anyone who hopes to develop a program to lower the incidence of infant mor­
tality in that part of the world will certainly have to read Scheper-Hughes’s
analysis.

And participant observation is used in product development and other direct
applications research-that is, where the object from the start is to solve a
human problem. Brigitte Jordan and her team of ethnographers at Xerox cor­
poration determined the information flow and the hierarchy of interactions in
the operations room of a major airline at a metropolitan airport (Jordan
1992b ). And when credit-card readers were first installed on gasoline pumps
in the early 1990s, consumers avoided using the technology. John Lowe and a
team of participant observers figured out why (Solomon 1993).

342

343 Participant Observation

Romancing the Methods

It used to be that the skills for doing fieldwork were mysterious and
unteachable, something you just learned, out there in the field. In the 1930s,
John Whiting and some of his fellow anthropology students at Yale University
asked their professor, Leslie Spier, for a seminar on methods. “This was a
subject to discuss casually at breakfast,e” Whiting recalls Spier telling him, not
something worthy of a seminar (Whiting 1982:156). Tell this story to seasoned
anthropologists at a convention, and it’s a good bet they’ll come back with a
story of their own just like it.

It’s fine for anthropologists to romanticize fieldwork-vulcanologists and
oceanographers do it, too, by the way-particularly about fieldwork in places
that take several days to get to, where the local language has no literary tradi­
tion, and where the chances are nontrivial of coming down with a serious ill­
ness. Research really is harder to do in some places than in others. But the
fact is, anthropologists are more likely these days to study drug use among
urban African Americans (Dei 2002), the daily life of the mentally retarded in
a common residence (Angrosino 1997), the life of police in Los Angeles
(Barker 1999), army platoons in Britain (Killworth 1997), consumer behavior
(Sherry 1995), gay culture (Herdt 1992; Murray 1992), or life on the mean
streets of big cities (Bourgois 1995; Fleisher 1998) than they are to study iso­
lated tribal or peasant peoples. It would take a real inventory to find out how
much more likely, but in a recent collection of 17 self-reflective studies of
anthropologists about their fieldwork (Hume and Mulcock 2004), just three
cases deal with work in isolated communities. (For more on street ethnogra­
phy, see Agar 1973, Weppner 1973, 1977, Fleisher 1995, Lambert et al. 1995,
Connolly and Ennew 1996, Gigengack 2000, and Kane 2001.)

And while participant observation in small, isolated communities has some
special characteristics, the techniques and skills that are required seem to me
to be pretty much the same everywhere.

What Is Participant Observation?

Participant observation usually involves fieldwork, but not all fieldwork is
participant observation. Goldberg et al. ( 1994) interviewed 206 prostitutes and
collected saliva specimens (to test for HIV and for drug use) during 53 nights
of fieldwork in Glasgow’s red light district. This was serious fieldwork, but
hardly participant observation.

So much for what participant observation isn’t. Here’s what it is: Partici­
pant observation is one of those strategic methods I talked about in chapter

344 Chapter 13

1 -like experiments, surveys, or archival research. It puts you where the
action is and lets you collect data . . . any kind of data you want, narratives
or numbers. It has been used for generations by positivists and interpretivists
alike.

A lot of the data collected by participant observers are qualitative: field
notes taken about things you see and hear in natural settings; photographs of
the content of people’s houses; audio recordings of people telling folktales;
videotapes of people making canoes, getting married, having an argument;
transcriptions of taped, open-ended interviews, and so on.

But lots of data collected by participant observers are quantitative and are
based on methods like direct observation, questionnaires, and pile sorts.
Whether you consider yourself an interpretivist or a positivist, participant
observation gets you in the door so you can collect life histories, attend rituals,
and talk to people about sensitive topics.

Participant observation involves going out and staying out, learning a new
language (or a new dialect of a language you already know), and experiencing
the lives of the people you are studying as much as you can. Participant obser­
vation is about stalking culture in the wild-establishing rapport and learning
to act so that people go about their business as usual when you show up. If
you are a successful participant observer, you will know when to laugh at
what people think is funny; and when people laugh at what you say, it will be
because you meant it to be a joke.

Participant observation involves immersing yourself in a culture and learn­
ing to remove yourself every day from that immersion so you can intellectual­
ize what you’ve seen and heard, put it into perspective, and write about it con­
vincingly. When it’s done right, participant observation turns fieldworkers
into instruments of data collection and data analysis.

The implication is that better fieldworkers are better data collectors and bet­

ter data analyzers. And the implication of that is that participant observation
is not an attitude or an epistemological commitment or a way of life. It’s a
craft. As with all crafts, becoming a skilled artisan at participant observation
takes practice.

Some Background and History

Bronislaw Malinowski ( 1884-1942) didn’t invent participant observation,
but he is widely credited with developing it as a serious method of social
research. A British social anthropologist (born in Poland), Malinowski went
out to study the people of the Trobriand Islands, in the Indian Ocean, just
before World War I. At the time, the Trobriand Islands were a German posses-

345 Participant Observation

sion, so when the war broke out, Malinowski was interned and could not return
to England for three years.

He made the best of the situation, though. Here is Malinowski describing
his methods:

Soon after I had established myself in Omarkana, Trobriand Islands, I began to
take part, in a way, in the village life, to look forward to the important or festive
events, to take personal interest in the gossip and the developments of the village
occurrences; to wake up every morning to a new day, presenting itself to me more
or less as it does to the natives …. As I went on my morning walk through the
village, I could see intimate details of family life, of toilet, cooking, taking of
meals; I could see the arrangements for the day’s work, people starting on their
errands, or groups of men and women busy at some manufacturing tasks.

Quarrels, jokes, family scenes, events usually trivial, sometimes dramatic but
always significant, form the atmosphere of my daily life, as well as of theirs. It
must be remembered that the natives saw me constantly every day, they ceased
to be interested or alarmed, or made self-conscious by my presence, and I ceased
to be a disturbing element in the tribal life which I was to study, altering it by my
very approach, as always happens with a newcomer to every savage community.
In fact, as they knew that I would thrust my nose into everything, even where a
well-mannered native would not dream of intruding, they finished by regarding
me as a part and parcel of their life, a necessary evil or nuisance, mitigated by
donations of tobacco. (1961 [1922]:7-8)

Ignore the patronizing rhetoric about the “savage communitye” and “dona­
tions of tobacco.” (I’ve learned to live with this part of our history in anthro­
pology. Knowing that all of us, in every age, look quaint, politically incorrect,
or just plain hopeless to those who come later has made it easier.) Focus
instead on the amazing, progressive (for that time) method that Malinowski
advocated: Spend lots and lots of time in studying a culture, learn the lan­
guage, hang out, do all the everyday things that everyone else does, become
inconspicuous by sheer tenaciousness, and stay aware of what’s really going
on. Apart from the colonialist rhetoric, Malinowski’s discussion of participant
observation is as resonant today as it was more than 80 years ago.

By the time Malinowski went to the Trobriands, Notes and Queries on

Anthropology-the fieldwork manual produced by the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland-was in its fourth edition. The first edi­
tion came out in 1874 and the last edition (the sixth) was reprinted five times
until 1971.

Thirty-five years later, that final edition of Notes and Queries is still must
reading for anyone interested in learning about anthropological field methods.
Once again, ignore the fragments of paternalistic colonialism-“a sporting

346 Chapter 13

rifle and a shotgun are . . . of great assistance in many districts where the
natives may welcome extra meat in the shape of game killed by their visitor ”
(Royal Anthropological Institute 1951:29)-and Notes and Queries is full of
useful, late-model advice about how to conduct a census, how to handle pho­
tographic negatives in the field, and what questions to ask about sexual orien­
tation, infanticide, food production, warfare, art. . . . The book is just a trea­
sure.

We make the most consistent use of participant observation in anthropol­
ogy, but the method has very, very deep roots in sociology. Beatrice Webb
was doing participant observation-complete with note taking and informant
interviewing-in the 1880s and she wrote trenchantly about the method in her
1926 memoir (Webb 1926). Just about then, the long tradition in sociology of
urban ethnography-the “Chicago School “-began at the University of Chi­
cago under the direction of Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (see Park et al.
1925). One of Park’s students was his son-in-law, Robert Redfield, the anthro­
pologist who pioneered community studies in Mexico.

Just back from lengthy fieldwork with Aborigine peoples in Australia,
another young anthropologist, William Lloyd Warner, was also influenced by
Park. Warner launched one of the most famous American community-study
projects of all time, the Yankee City series (Warner and Hunt 1941; Warner
1963 ). (Yankee City was the pseudonym for Newburyport, Massachusetts.) In
1929, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published the first of many ethno­
graphies about Middletown. (Middletown was the pseudonym for Muncie,
Indiana.)

Some of the classic ethnographies that came out of the early Chicago
School include Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929) and
Clifford Shaw’s The lack-Roller (1930). In The lack-Roller, a 22 year old
named Stanley talks about what it was like to grow up as a delinquent in early
20th-century Chicago. It still makes great reading.

Becker et al.’s Boys in White (1961)-about the student culture of medical
school in the 1950s-should be required reading, even today, for anyone try­
ing to understand the culture of medicine in the United States. The ethnogra­
phy tradition in sociology continues in the pages of the Journal of Contempo­
rary Ethnography, which began in 1972 under the title Urban Life and
Culture. (See Lofland [1983e] and Bulmer [1984e] for more on the history of
the Chicago School of urban ethnography.)

Participant observation today is everywhere-in political science, manage­
ment, education, nursing, criminology, social psychology-and one of the ter­
rific results of all this is a growing body of literature about participant obser­
vation itself. There are highly focused studies, full of practical advice, and
there are poignant discussions of the overall experience of fieldwork. For large

347 Participant Observation

doses of both, see Wolcott (1995), Agar (1996), and C. D. Smith and Korn­
blum (1996), Handwerker (2001), and Dewalt and Dewalt (2002). There’s still
plenty of mystery and romance in participant observation, but you don’t have
to go out unprepared.

Fieldwork Roles

Fieldwork can involve three very different roles: (1) complete participant,
(2) participant observer, and (3) complete observer. The first role involves
deception-becoming a member of a group without letting on that you ‘re
there to do research. The third role involves following people around and
recording their behavior with little if any interaction. This is part of direct
observation, which we’ll take up in the next chapter.

By far, most ethnographic research is based on the second role, that of the
participant observer. Participant observers can be insiders who observe and
record some aspects of life around them (in which case, they’re observing
participants); or they can be outsiders who participate in some aspects of life
around them and record what they can (in which case, they’re participating
observers).

In 1965, I went to sea with a group of Greek sponge fishermen in the Medi­
terranean. I lived in close quarters with them, ate the same awful food as they
did, and generally participated in their life-as an outsider. I didn’t dive for
sponges, but I spent most of my waking hours studying the behavior and the
conversation of the men who did. The divers were curious about what I was
writing in my notebooks, but they went about their business and just let me
take notes, time their dives, and shoot movies (Bernard 1987). I was a partici­
pating observer.

Similarly, when I went to sea in 1972 and 1973 with oceanographic
research vessels, I was part of the scientific crew, there to watch how oceano­
graphic scientists, technicians, and mariners interacted and how this interac­
tion affected the process of gathering oceanographic data. There, too, I was a
participating observer (Bernard and Killworth 1973).

Circumstances can sometimes overtake the role of mere participating
observer. In 1979, El Salvador was in civil war. Thousands fled to Honduras
where they were sheltered in refugee camps near the border. Phillipe Bourgois
went to one of those camps to initiate what he hoped would be his doctoral
research in anthropology. Some refugees there offered to show him their home
villages and Bourgois crossed with them, illegally, into El Salvador for what
he thought would be a 48-hour visit. Instead, Bourgois was trapped, along with
about a thousand peasants, for 2 weeks, as the Salvadoran military bombed,

348 Chapter 13

shelled, and strafed a 40-square-kilometer area in search of rebels (Bourgois
1990).

Mark Fleisher (1989) studied the culture of guards at a federal penitentiary
in California, but as an observing participant, an insider. Researchers at the
U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons asked Fleisher to do an ethnographic study of
job pressures on guards-called correctional officers, or COs in the jargon of
the profession-in a maximum-security federal penitentiary. It costs a lot to
train a CO, and there was an unacceptably high rate of them leaving the job
after a year or two. Could Fleisher look into the problem?

Fleisher said he’d be glad to do the research and asked when he could start
“walking the mainline” -that is, accompanying the COs on their rounds
through the prison. He was told that he’d be given an office at the prison and
that the guards would come to his office to be interviewed.

Fleisher said he was sorry, but he was an anthropologist, he was doing par­
ticipant observation, and he’d have to have the run of the prison. Sorry, they
said back, only sworn correctional officers can walk the prison halls. So, swear
me in, said Fleisher, and off he went to training camp for 6 weeks to become
a sworn federal correctional officer. Then he began his yearlong study of the
U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc, California. In other words, he became an observ­
ing participant in the culture he was studying. Fleisher never hid what he was
doing. When he went to USP-Lompoc, he told everyone that he was an anthro­
pologist doing a study of prison life.

Barbara Marriott (1991) studied how the wives of U.S. Navy male officers
contributed to their husbands’ careers. Marriott was herself the wife of a
retired captain. She was able to bring the empathy of 30 years’ full participa­
tion to her study. She, too, took the role of observing participant and, like
Fleisher, she told her informants exactly what she was doing.

Holly Williams (1995) spent 14 years as a nurse, ministering to the needs
of children who had cancer. When Williams did her doctoral dissertation, on
how the parents of those young patients coped with the trauma, she started as
a credible insider, as someone whom the parents could trust with their worst
fears and their hopes against all hope. Williams was a complete participant
who became an observing participant by telling the people whom she was
studying exactly what she was up to and enlisting their help with the research.

Going Native

Some fieldworkers start out as participating observers and find that they are
drawn completely into their informants’ lives. In 1975, Kenneth Good went to
study the Yanomami in the Venezuelan Amazon. He planned on living with
the Yanomami for 15 months, but he stayed on for nearly 13 years. “To my

349 Participant Observation

great surprise,” says Good, “I had found among them a way of life that, while
dangerous and harsh, was also filled with camaraderie, compassion, and a
thousand daily lessons in communal harmonye” (Good 1991:ix). Good learned
the language and became a nomadic hunter and gatherer. He was adopted into
a lineage and given a wife. (Good and his wife, Yarima, tried living in the
United States, but after a few years, Yarima returned to the Yanomami.)

Marlene Dobkin de Rios did fieldwork in Peru and married the son of a
Peruvian folk healer, whose practice she studied (Dobkin de Rios 1981). And
Jean Gearing (1995) is another anthropologist who married her closest infor­
mant on the island of St. Vincent.

Does going native mean loss of objectivity? Perhaps, but not necessarily. In
the industrialized countries of the West-the United States, Canada, Germany,
Australia, Germany, England, France, etc.-we expect immigrants to go
native. We expect them to become fluent in the local language, to make sure
that their children become fully acculturated, to participate in the economy
and politics of the nation, and so on.

Some fully assimilated immigrants to those countries become anthropolo­
gists and no one questions whether their immigrant background produces a
lack of objectivity. Since total objectivity is, by definition, a myth, I’d worry
more about producing credible data and strong analysis and less about whether
going native is good or bad.

How Much Time Does It Take?

Anthropological field research traditionally takes a year or more because it
takes that long to get a feel for the full round of people’s lives. It can take that
long just to settle in, learn a new language, gain rapport, and be in a position
to ask good questions and to get good answers.

A lot of participant observation studies, however, are done in a matter of
weeks or a few months. Yu (1995) spent 4 months as a participant observer in
a family-run Chinese restaurant, looking at differences in the conceptions that
Chinese and non-Chinese employees had about things like good service, ade­
quate compensation, and the role of management.

At the extreme low end, it is possible to do useful participant observation
in just a few days. Assuming that you’ve wasted as much time in laundromats
as I did when I was a student, you could conduct a reasonable participant
observation study of one such place in a week. You’d begin by bringing in a
load of wash and paying careful attention to what’s going on around you.

After two or three nights of observation, you’d be ready to tell other patrons
that you were conducting research and that you’d appreciate their letting you

350 Chapter 13

interview them. The reason you could do this is because you already speak
the native language and have already picked up the nuances of etiquette from
previous experience. Participant observation would help you intellectualize
what you already know.

ln general, though, participant observation is not for the impatient. Gerald
Berreman studied life in Sirkanda, a Pahari-speaking village in north lndia.
Berreman’s interpreter-assistant, Sharma, was a Hindu Brahmin who neither
ate meat nor drank alcohol. As a result, villagers did neither around Berreman
or his assistant. Three months into the research, Sharma fell ill and Berreman
hired Mohammed, a young Muslim schoolteacher to fill in.

When the villagers found out that Mohammed ate meat and drank alcohol,
things broke wide open and Berreman found out that there were frequent inter­
caste meat and liquor parties. When villagers found out that the occasional
drink of locally made liquor was served at Berreman’s house “access to infor­
mation of many kinds increased proportionately” (Berreman 1962:10). Even
then, it still took Berreman 6 months in Sirkanda before people felt comfort­
able performing animal sacrifices when he was around (ibid.:20).

And don’t think that long term is only for foreign fieldwork. It took Daniel
Wolf 3 years just to get into the Rebels, a brotherhood of outlaw bikers, and
another couple of years riding with them before he had the data for his doc­
toral dissertation (Wolf 1991).

The amount of time you spend in the field can make a big difference in
what you learn. Raoul Naroll ( 1962) found that anthropologists who stayed in
the field for at least a year were more likely to report on sensitive issues like
witchcraft, sexuality, political feuds, etc. Back in chapter 3, I mentioned David
Price’s study of water theft among farmers in Egypt’s Fayoum Oasis. You
might have wondered then how in the world he was able to do that study. Each
farmer had a water allotment-a certain day each week and a certain amount
of time during which water could flow to his fields. Price lived with these
farmers for 8 months before they began telling him privately that they occa­
sionally diverted water to their own fields from those of others (1995: 106).
Ethnographers who have done very long-term participant observation -that
is, a series of studies over decades-find that they eventually get data about
social change that is simply not possible to get in any other way (Kemper and
Royce 2002).

My wife Carole and I spent May 2000 on Kalymnos, the Greek island
where I did my doctoral fieldwork in 1964-1965. We’ve been visiting that
island steadily for 40 years, but something qualitatively different happened in
2000. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but by the end of the month I real­
ized that people were talking to me about grandchildren. The ones who had
grandchildren were chiding me-very good-naturedly, but chiding nonethe-

351 Participant Observation

less-for not having any grandchildren yet. The ones who didn’t have grand­
children were in commiseration mode. They wanted someone with whom to
share their annoyance that “Kids these days are in no hurry to make families”
and that “All kids want today . . . especially girls . . . is to have careers.e”

This launched lengthy conversations about how “everything had changede”
since we had been our children’s ages and about how life in Greece was get­
ting to be more and more like Europe (which is what many Greeks call Ger­
many, France, and the rest of the fully industrialized nations of the European
Union), and even like the United States. I suppose there were other ways I
could have gotten people into give-and-take conversations about culture
change, gender roles, globalization, modernization, and other big topics, but
the grandchildren deficit was a terrific opener in 2000. And the whole conver­
sation would have been a nonstarter had I been 30 instead of 60 years old. It
wasn’t just age, by the way; it was the result of the rapport that comes with
having common history with people.

Here’s history. In 1964, Carole and I brought our then 2-month-old daugh­
ter with us. Some of the same people who joked with me in 2000 about not
having grandchildren had said to me in 1964: “Don’t worry, next time you’ll
have a son.e” I recall having been really, really annoyed at the time, but writing
it down as data. A couple of years later, I sent friends on Kalymnos the
announcement of our second child-another girl. I got back kidding remarks
like “Congratulations! Keep on trying . . . . Still plenty of time to have a boy!”
That was data, too. And when I told people that Carole and I had decided to
stop at two, some of them offered mock condolences: “Oh, now you ‘re really
in for it! You’ 11 have to get dowries for two girls without any sons to help.”
Now that’s data!

Skip to 2004, when our daughter, son-in-law, and new granddaughter Zoe
came to Kalymnos for Zoe’s first birthday. There is a saying in Greek that
“the child of your child is two times your child.e” You can imagine all the
conversations, late into the night, about that. More data.

Bottom line: You can do highly focused participant observation research in
your own language, to answer specific questions about your own culture, in a
short time. How do middle-class, second-generation Mexican American
women make decisions on which of several brands of pinto beans to select
when they go grocery shopping? If you are a middle-class Mexican American
woman, you can probably find the answer to that question, using participant
observation, in a few weeks, because you have a wealth of personal experience
to draw on.

But if you’re starting out fresh, and not as a member of the culture you’re
studying, count on taking 3 months or more, under the best conditions, to be

352 Chapter 13

accepted as a participant observer-that is, as someone who has learned
enough to learn. And count on taking a lifetime to learn some things.

Rapid Assessment

Applied ethnographic research is often done in just a few weeks. Applied
researchers just don’t have the luxury of doing long-term participant observa­
tion fieldwork and may use rapid assessment procedures, especially partici­
patory rapid assessment, or PRA. PRA (of agricultural or medical practices,
for example) may include participant observation.

Rapid assessment means going in and getting on with the job of collecting
data without spending months developing rapport. This means going into a
field situation armed with a list of questions that you want to answer and per­
haps a checklist of data that you need to collect.

Chambers (1991) advocates participatory mapping. He asks people to
draw maps of villages and to locate key places on the maps. In participatory
transects, he borrows from wildlife biology and systematically walks through
an area, with key informants, observing and asking for explanations of every­
thing he sees along the transect. He engages people in group discussions of
key events in a village’s history and asks them to identify clusters of house­
holds according to wealth. In other words, as an applied anthropologist, Cham­
bers is called on to do rapid assessment of rural village needs, and he takes
the people fully into his confidence as research partners. This method is just
as effective in organizations as in small villages.

Applied medical anthropologists also use rapid assessment methods. The
focused ethnographic study method, or FES, was developed by Sandy Gove
(a physician) and Gretel Pelto (an anthropologist) for the World Health Orga­
nization to study acute respiratory illness (ARI) in children. The FES manual
gives detailed instructions to fieldworkers for running a rapid ethnographic
study of ARI in a community (WHO 1993; Gove and Pelto 1994 ).

Many ARI episodes turn out to be what physicians call pneumonia, but that
is not necessarily what mothers call the illness. Researchers ask mothers to
talk about recent ARI events in their households. Mothers also free list the
symptoms, causes, and cures for ARI and do pile sorts of illnesses to reveal
the folk taxonomy of illness and where ARI fits into that taxonomy. There is
also a matching exercise, in which mothers pair locally defined symptoms
(fever, sore throat, headache . . . ) with locally defined causes (bad water, evil
eye, germs . . . ), cures (give rice water, rub the belly, take child to the
doctor . . . ), and illnesses.

The FES method also uses vignettes, or scenarios, much like those devel-

353 Participant Observation

oped by Peter Rossi for the factorial survey (see chapter 10). Mothers are pre­
sented with cases in which variables are changed systematically (“Your child
wakes up with [milde] [stronge] fever. He complains that he has [a headachee]
[stomach achee] ,” and so on) and are asked to talk about how they would han­
dle the case.

All this evidence-the free narratives, the pile sorts, the vignettes, etc.-is
used in understanding the emic part of ARI, the local explanatory model for
the illness.

Researchers also identify etic factors that make it easy or hard for mothers
to get medical care for children who have pneumonia. These are things like
the distance to a clinic, the availability of transportation, the number of young
children at home, the availability to mothers of people with whom they can
leave their children for a while, and so on. (For an example of the FES in use,
see Hudelson 1994.)

The key to high-quality, quick ethnography, according to Handwerker
(2001), is to go into a study with a clear question and to limit your study to
five focus variables. If the research is exploratory, you just have to make a
reasonable guess as to what variables might be important and hope for the
best. Most rapid assessment studies, however, are applied research, which usu­
ally means that you can take advantage of earlier, long-term studies to narrow
your focus.

For example, Edwins Laban Moogi Gwako (1997) spent over a year testing
the effects of eight independent variables on Maragoli women’s agricultural
productivity in western Kenya. At the end of his doctoral research, he found
that just two variables-women’s land tenure security and the total value of
their household wealth-accounted for 46% of the variance in productivity of
plots worked by women. None of the other variables-household size, a wom­
an’s age, whether a woman’s husband lived at home, and so on-had any
effect on the dependent variable.

If you were doing a rapid assessment of women’s agricultural productivity
elsewhere in east Africa, you would take advantage of Laban Moogi Gwako’s
work and limit the variables you tested to perhaps four or five-the two that
he found were important and perhaps two or three others. You can study this
same problem for a lifetime, and the more time you spend, the more you’ll
understand the subtleties and complexities of the problem. But the point here
is that if you have a clear question and a few, clearly defined variables, you
can produce quality work in a lot less time than you might imagine. For more
on rapid ethnographic assessment, see Bentley et al. ( 1988), Scrimshaw and
Hurtado (1987), and Scrimshaw and Gleason (1992). See Baker (1996a,
1996b) for a PRA study of homeless children in Kathmandu.

354 Chapter 13

Validity-Again

There are at least five reasons for insisting on participant observation in the
conduct of scientific research about cultural groups.

1. Participant observation opens thing up and makes it possible to collect all kinds
of data. Participant observation fieldworkers have witnessed births, interviewed
violent men in maximum-security prisons, stood in fields noting the behavior of
farmers, trekked with hunters through the Amazon forest in search of game, and
pored over records of marriages, births, and deaths in village churches and
mosques around the world.

It is impossible to imagine a complete stranger walking into a birthing room
and being welcomed to watch and record the event or being allowed to exam­
ine any community’s vital records at whim. It is impossible, in fact, to imagine
a stranger doing any of the things I just mentioned or the thousands of other
intrusive acts of data collection that fieldworkers engage in all the time. What
makes it all possible is participant observation.

2. Participant observation reduces the problem of reactivity- of people changing
their behavior when they know that they are being studied. As you become less
and less of a curiosity, people take less and less interest in your comings and
goings. They go about their business and let you do such bizarre things as con­
duct interviews, administer questionnaires, and even walk around with a stop­
watch, clipboard, and camera.

Phillipe Bourgois (1995) spent 4 years living in El Barrio (the local name
for Spanish Harlem) in New York City. It took him a while, but eventually he
was able to keep his tape recorder running for interviews about dealing crack
cocaine and even when groups of men bragged about their involvement in
gang rapes.

Margaret Graham (2003) weighed every gram of every food prepared for
75 people eating over 600 meals in 15 households in the Peruvian Andes. This
was completely alien to her informants, but after 5 months of intimate partici­
pant observation, those 15 families allowed her to visit them several times,
with an assistant and a food scale.

In other words: Presence builds trust. Trust lowers reactivity. Lower reactiv­
ity means higher validity of data. Nothing is guaranteed in fieldwork, though.
Graham’s informants gave her permission to come weigh their food, but the
act of doing so turned out to be more alienating than either she or her infor­
mants had anticipated. By local rules of hospitality, people had to invite Gra­
ham to eat with them during the three visits she made to their homes-but

355 Participant Observation

Graham couldn’t accept any food, lest doing so bias her study of the nutri­
tional intake of her informants. Graham discussed the awkward situation
openly with her informants, and made spot checks of some families a few days
after each weighing episode to make sure that people were eating the same
kinds and portions of food as Graham had witnessed (Graham 2003: 154 ).

And when Margaret LeCompte told children at a school that she was writ­
ing a book about them, they started acting out in “ways they felt would make
good copye” by mimicking characters on popular TV programs (Lecompte et
al. 1993).

3. Participant observation helps you ask sensible questions, in the native language.
Have you ever gotten a questionnaire in the mail and said to yourself: “What a
dumb set of questions”? If a social scientist who is a member of your own cul­
ture can make up what you consider to be dumb questions, imagine the risk you
take in making up a questionnaire in a culture very different from your own!
Remember, it’s just as important to ask sensible questions in a face-to-face inter­
view as it is on a survey instrument.

4. Participant observation gives you an intuitive understanding of what’s going on
in a culture and allows you to speak with confidence about the meaning of data.
Participant observation lets you make strong statements about cultural facts that
you’ve collected. It extends both the internal and the external validity of what
you learn from interviewing and watching people. In short, participant observa­
tion helps you understand the meaning of your observations. Here’s a classic
example.

In 1957, N. K. Sarkar and S. J. Tambiah published a study, based on ques­
tionnaire data, about economic and social disintegration in a Sri Lankan vil­
lage. They concluded that about two-thirds of the villagers were landless. The
British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, did not accept that finding (Leach
1967). He had done participant observation fieldwork in the area, and knew
that the villagers practiced patrilocal residence after marriage. By local cus­
tom, a young man might receive use of some of his father’s land even though
legal ownership might not pass to the son until the father’s death.

In assessing land ownership, Sarkar and Tambiah asked whether a “house­
hold ” had any land, and if so, how much. They defined an independent house­
hold as a unit that cooked rice in its own pot. Unfortunately, all married
women in the village had their own rice pots. So, Sarkar and Tambiah wound
up estimating the number of independent households as very high and the
number of those households that owned land as very low. Based on these data,
they concluded that there was gross inequality in land ownership and that this
characterized a “disintegrating village ” (the title of their book).

Don’t conclude from Leach’s critique that questionnaires are “bad,e” while

356 Chapter 13

participant observation is “good.e” I can’t say often enough that participant
observation makes it possible to collect quantitative survey data or qualitative
interview data from some sample of a population. Qualitative and quantitative
data inform each other and produce insight and understanding in a way that
cannot be duplicated by either approach alone. Whatever data collection meth­
ods you choose, participant observation maximizes your chances for making
valid statements.

5. Many research problems simply cannot be addressed adequately by anything
except participant observation. If you want to understand how a local court
works, you can’t very well disguise yourself and sit in the courtroom unnoticed.
The judge would soon spot you as a stranger, and, after a few days, you would
have to explain yourself. It is better to explain yourself at the beginning and get
permission to act as a participant observer. In this case, your participation con­
sists of acting like any other local person who might sit in on the court’s proceed­
ings. After a few days, or weeks, you would have a pretty good idea of how the
court worked: what kinds of crimes are adjudicated, what kinds of penalties are
meted out, and so forth. You might develop some specific hypotheses from your
qualitative notes-hypotheses regarding co variations between severity of punish­
ment and independent variables other than severity of crime. Then you could test
those hypotheses on a sample of courts.

Think this is umealistic? Try going down to your local traffic court and see
whether defendants’ dress or manner of speech predict variations in fines for
the same infraction. The point is, getting a general understanding of how any
social institution or organization works-the local justice system, a hospital,
a ship, or an entire community-is best achieved through participant observa­
tion.

Entering the Field

Perhaps the most difficult part of actually doing participant observation
fieldwork is making an entry. There are five rules to follow.

1. There is no reason to select a site that is difficult to enter when equally good sites
are available that are easy to enter (see chapter 3). In many cases, you will have
a choice- among equally good villages in a region, or among school districts,
hospitals, or cell blocks. When you have a choice, take the field site that promises
to provide easiest access to data.

2. Go into the field with plenty of written documentation about yourself and your
project. You ’11 need formal letters of introduction- at a minimum, from your
university, or from your client if you are doing applied work on a contract. Let-

357 Participant Observation

ters from universities should spell out your affiliation, who is funding you, and
how long you will be at the field site.

Be sure that those letters are in the language spoken where you will be
working, and that they are signed by the highest academic authorities possible.

Letters of introduction should not go into detail about your research. Keep
a separate document handy in which you describe your proposed work, and
present it to gatekeepers who ask for it, along with your letters of introduction.

Of course, if you study an outlaw biker gang, like Daniel Wolf did, forget
about letters of introduction (Wolf 1991).

3. Don’t try to wing it, unless you absolutely have to. There is nothing to be said
for “getting in on your own.” Use personal contacts to help you make your entry
into a field site.

When I went to Kalymnos, Greece, in 1964, I carried with me a list of peo­
ple to look up. I collected the list from people in the Greek American commu­
nity of Tarpon Springs, Florida, who had relatives on Kalymnos. When I went
to Washington, D.C., to study how decision makers in the bureaucracy used
(or didn’t use) scientific information, I had letters of introduction from col­
leagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (where I was working at the
time).

If you are studying any hierarchically organized community (hospitals,
police departments, universities, school systems, etc.), it is usually best to start
at the top and work down. Find out the names of the people who are the gate­
keepers and see them first. Assure them that you will maintain strict confiden­
tiality and that no one in your study will be personally identifiable.

In some cases, though, starting at the top can backfire. If there are warring
factions in a community or organization, and if you gain entry to the group at
the top of one of those factions, you will be asked to side with that faction.

Another danger is that top administrators of institutions may try to enlist
you as a kind of spy. They may offer to facilitate your work if you will report
back to them on what you find out about specific individuals. This is abso­
lutely off limits in research. If that’s the price of doing a study, you’re better
off choosing another institution. In the 2 years I spent doing research on com­
munication structures in federal prisons, no one ever asked me to report on
the activities of specific inmates. But other researchers have reported experi­
encing this kind of pressure, so it’s worth keeping in mind.

4. Think through in advance what you will say when ordinary people (not just gate­
keepers) ask you: What are you doing here? Who sent you? Who’s funding you?
What good is your research and who will it benefit? Why do you want to learn

358 Chapter 13

about people here? How long will you be here? How do I know you aren’ t a spy

for ______? (where the blank is filled in by whoever people are afraid

of) .

The rules for presentation of self are simple : Be honest, be brief, and be

absolutely consistent. In participant observation, if you try to play any role

other than yourself, you ‘ ll just get worn out (Jones 1 973) .

But understand that not everyone will be thrilled about your role as a

researcher. Terry Williams studied cocaine use in after-hours clubs in New

York. It was “gay night” in one bar he went to. Williams started a conversation

with a man whose sleeves were fully rolled, exposing tattoos on both arms.

The man offered to buy Williams a drink. Was this Williams ‘ s first time at the

bar? Williams said he’ d been there before, that he was a researcher, and that

he just wanted to talk. The man turned to his friends and exploded: “Hey, get

a load of this one. He wants to do research on us. You scum bag ! What do we

look like, pal? Fucking guinea pigs?” (Williams 1 996:30) .

After that experience, Williams became, as he said, “more selective” in

whom he told about his real purpose in those after-hours clubs.

5 . Spend time getting to know the physical and social layout of your field site. It

doesn’ t matter if you’ re working in a rural village, an urban enclave, or a hospi­

tal. Walk it and write notes about how it feels to you. Is it crowded? Do the

buildings or furniture seem old or poorly kept? Are there any distinctive odors?

You’d be surprised how much information comes from asking people about

little things like these. I can still smell the distinctive blend of diesel fuel and

taco sauce that’ s characteristic of so many bus depots in rural Mexico . Asking

people about those smells opened up long conversations about what it’ s like

for poor people, who don’ t own cars, to travel in Mexico and all the family

and business reasons they have for traveling. If something in your environ­

ment makes a strong sensory impression, write it down.

A really good early activity in any participant observation project is to

make maps and charts-kinship charts of families, chain-of-command charts

in organizations , maps of offices or villages or whatever physical space you’re

studying, charts of who sits where at meetings, and so on.

For making maps, take a OPS (global positioning system) device to the field

with you. They are small, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. OPS devices

that are accurate to within 10 meters are available for under $200 (see appen­

dix F for more). What a OPS does is track your path via satellite, so that if

you can walk the perimeter of an area, you can map it and mark its longitude

and latitude accurately . Eri Sugita (2004) studied the relation between the

359 Participant Observation

washing of hands by the mothers of young children and the rate of diarrheal
disease among those children in Bugobero, Uganda. Sugita used a GPS device
to map the position of every well and every spring in Bugobero. Then she
walked to each of the water sources from each of the 51 households in her
study and, wearing a pedometer, measured the travel distance to the nearest
source of clean water. (You can also make maps using multidimensional scal­
ing. See chapter 21. For more on pedometers, see Tudor-Locke et al. 2004.)

Another good thing to do is to take a census of the group you’re studying
as soon as you can. When she began her fieldwork on the demography and
fertility in a Mexican village, Julia Pauli (2000) did a complete census of 165
households. She recorded the names of all the people who were considered to
be members of the household, whether they were living there or not (a lot of
folks were away, working as migrant laborers). She recorded their sex, age,
religion, level of education, marital status, occupation, place of birth, and
where each person was living right then. Then, for each of the 225 women
who had given birth at least once, she recorded the name, sex, birth date, edu­
cation, current occupation, marital status, and current residence of each child.

Pauli gave each person in a household their own, unique identification num­
ber and she gave each child of each woman in a household an I.D. number­
whether the child was living at home, away working, or married and living in
a separate household in the village. In the course of her census, she would
eventually run into those married children living in other households. But
since each person kept his or her unique I.D. number, Pauli was able to link
all those born in the village to their natal homes. In other words, Pauli used
the data from her straightforward demographic survey to build a kinship net­
work of the village.

A census of a village or a hospital gives you the opportunity to walk around
a community and to talk with most of its members at least once. It lets you be
seen by others and it gives you an opportunity to answer questions, as well as
to ask them. It allows you to get information that official censuses don’t
retrieve. And it can be a way to gain rapport in a community. But it can also
backfire if people are afraid you might be a spy. Michael Agar reports that he
was branded as a Pakistani spy when he went to India, so his village census
was useless (1980b ).

The Skills of a Participant Observer

To a certain extent, participant observation must be learned in the field. The
strength of participant observation is that you, as a researcher, become the
instrument for data collection and analysis through your own experience. Con-

360 Chapter 13

sequently, you have to experience participant observation to get good at it.
Nevertheless, there are a number of skills that you can develop before you go
into the field.

Learning the Language

Unless you are a full participant in the culture you’re studying, being a par­
ticipant observer makes you a freak. Here’s how anthropologists looked to
Vine Deloria (1969:78), a Sioux writer:

Anthropologists can readily be identified on the reservations. Go into any crowd
of people. Pick out a tall gaunt white man wearing Bermuda shorts, a World War
II Army Air Force flying jacket, an Australian bush hat, tennis shoes, and packing
a large knapsack incorrectly strapped on his back. He will invariably have a thin,
sexy wife with stringy hair, an I.Q. of 191, and a vocabulary in which even the
prepositions have eleven syllables …. This creature is an anthropologist.

Now, nearly four decades later, it’s more likely to be the anthropologist’s
husband who jabbers in 11-syllable words, but the point is still the same. The
most important thing you can do to stop being a freak is to speak the language
of the people you’re studying-and speak it well. Franz Boas was adamant
about this. “Nobody,e” he said, “would expect authoritative accounts of the
civilization of China or Japan from a man who does not speak the languages
readily, and who has not mastered their literatures” (1911:56). And yet, “the
best kept secret of anthropology,” says Robbins Burling, “is the linguistic
incompetence of ethnological fieldworkerse” (2000 [ 19 84e] :v; and see Owusu
[1978e] ; Werner [1994e] ; Borchgrevink [2003e]).

That secret is actually not so well kept. In 1933, Paul Radin, one of Franz
Boas’s students, complained that Margaret Mead’s work on Samoa was super­
ficial because she wasn’t fluent in Samoan (Radin 1966 [1933e] :179). Sixty-six
years later, Derek Freeman (1999) showed that Mead was probably duped by
at least some of her adolescent informants about the extent of their sexual
experience because she didn’t know the local language.

In fact, Mead talked quite explicitly about her use of interpreters. It was not
necessary, said Mead, for fieldworkers to become what she called “virtuosos ”
in a native language. It was enough to “usee” a native language, as she put it,
without actually speaking it fluently:

If one knows how to exclaim “how beautiful!” of an offering, “how fat!” of a
baby, “how big !” of a just shot pig; if one can say “my foot’s asleep” or “my
back itches” as one sits in a closely packed native group with whom one is as yet
unable to hold a sustained conversation; if one can ask the simple questions: “Is

361 Participant Observation

that your child?” “Is your father living?” “Are the mosquitoes biting you?” or
even utter culturally appropriate squeals and monosyllables which accompany
fright at a scorpion, or startle at a loud noise, it is easy to establish rapport with
people who depend upon affective contact for reassurance. (Mead 1939: 198)

Robert Lowie would have none of it. A people’s ethos, he said, is never
directly observed. “It can be inferred only from their self-revelations,e” and
this, indeed, requires the dreaded virtuosity that Mead had dismissed (Lowie
1940:84ff). The “horse-and-buggy ethnographers,” said Lowie, in a direct
response to Mead in the American Anthropologist, accepted virtuosity-that
is, a thorough knowledge of the language in which one does fieldwork-on
principle. “The new, stream-lined ethnographers,e” he taunted, rejected this as
superfluous (ibid.:87). Lowie was careful to say that a thorough knowledge of
a field language did not mean native proficiency. And, of course, Mead under­
stood the benefits of being proficient in a field language. But she also under­
stood that a lot of ethnography gets done through interpreters or through con­
tact languages, like French, English, and pidgins . . . the not-so-well kept
secret in anthropology.

Still . . . according to Brislin et al. ( 1973:70), Samoa is one of those cultures
where “it is considered acceptable to deceive and to ‘put on’ outsiders. Inter­
viewers are likely to hear ridiculous answers, not given in a spirit of hostility
but rather sport.e” Brislin et al. call this the sucker bias, and warn fieldworkers
to watch out for it. Presumably, knowing the local language fluently is one
way to become alert to and avoid this problem.

And remember Raoul Naroll’s finding that anthropologists who spent at
least a year in the field were more likely to report on witchcraft? Well, he also
found that anthropologists who spoke the local language were more likely to
report data about witchcraft than were those who didn’t. Fluency in the local
language doesn’t just improve your rapport; it increases the probability that
people will tell you about sensitive things, like witchcraft, and that even if
people try to put one over on you, you’ll know about it (Naroll 1962:89-90).

When it comes to doing effective participant observation, learning a new
jargon in your own language is just as important as learning a foreign lan­
guage. Peggy Sullivan and Kirk Elifson studied the Free Holiness church, a
rural group of Pentecostals whose rituals include the handling of poisonous
snakes (rattles, cottonmouths, copperheads, and water moccasins). They had
to learn an entirely new vocabulary:

Terms and expressions like “annointrnent,” “tongues,” “shouting,” and “carried
away in the Lord” began having meaning for us. We learned informally and often
contextually through conversation and by listening to sermons and testimonials.
The development of our understanding of the new language was gradual and

362 Chapter 13

probably was at its greatest depth when we were most submerged in the church
and its culture …. We simplified our language style and eliminated our use of
profanity. We realized, for example, that one badly placed “damn” could destroy
trust that we had built up over months of hard work. (Sullivan and Elifson
1996:36)

How TO LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE

In my experience, the way to learn a new language is to learn a few words
and to say them brilliantly. Yes, study the grammar and vocabulary, but the
key to learning a new language is saying things right, even just a handful of
things. This means capturing not just the pronunciation of words, but also the
intonation, the use of your hands, and other nonverbal cues that show you are
really, really serious about the language and are trying to look and sound as
much like a native as possible.

When you say the equivalent of “hey, hiya doin”‘ in any language-Zulu
or French or Arabic-with just the right intonation, people will think you
know more than you do. They’ 11 come right back at you with a flurry of words,
and you’ll be lost. Fine. Tell them to slow down-again, in that great accent
you’re cultivating.

Consider the alternative: You announce to people, with the first, badly
accented words out of your mouth, that you know next to nothing about the
language and that they should therefore speak to you with that in mind. When
you talk to someone who is not a native speaker of your language, you make
an automatic assessment of how large their vocabulary is and how fluent they
are. You adjust both the speed of your speech and your vocabulary to ensure
comprehension. That’s what Zulu and Arabic speakers will do with you, too.
The trick is to act in a way that gets people into pushing your limits of fluency
and into teaching you cultural insider words and phrases.

The real key to learning a language is to acquire vocabulary. People will
usually figure out what you want to say if you butcher the grammar a bit, but
they need nouns and verbs to even begin the effort. This requires studying lists
of words every day and using as many new words every day as you can engi­
neer into a conversation. Try to stick at least one conspicuously idiomatic
word or phrase into your conversation every day. That will not only nail down
some insider vocabulary, it will stimulate everyone around you to give you
more of the same.

A good fraction of any culture is in the idioms and especially in the meta­
phors (more about metaphors in the section on schemata in chapter 17). To
understand how powerful this can be, imagine you are hired to tutor a student
from Nepal who wants to learn English. You point to some clouds and say

363 Participant Observation

“clouds” and she responds by saying “clouds.e” You say “very goode” and she
says “no brainer.e” You can certainly pick up the learning pace after that kind
of response.

As you articulate more and more insider phrases like a native, people will
increase the rate at which they teach you by raising the level of their discourse
with you. They may even compete to teach you the subtleties of their language
and culture. When I was learning Greek in 1960 on a Greek merchant ship,
the sailors took delight in seeing to it that my vocabulary of obscenities was
up to their standards and that my usage of that vocabulary was suitably robust.

To prepare for my doctoral fieldwork in 1964-1965, I studied Greek at the
University of Illinois. By the end of 1965, after a year on the island of Kalym­
nos, my accent, mannerisms, and vocabulary were more Kalymnian than
Athenian. When I went to teach at the University of Athens in 1969, my col­
leagues there were delighted that I wanted to teach in Greek, but they were
conflicted about my accent. How to reconcile the fact that an educated for­
eigner spoke reasonably fluent Greek with what they took to be a rural, work­
ing-class accent? It didn’t compute, but they were very forgiving. After all, I
was a foreigner, and the fact that I was making an attempt to speak the local
language counted for a lot.

So, if you are going off to do fieldwork in a foreign language, try to find an
intensive summer course in the country where that language is spoken. Not
only will you learn the language (and the local dialect of that language), you’ll
make personal contacts, find out what the problems are in selecting a research
site, and discover how to tie your study to the interests of local scholars. You
can study French in France, but you can also study it in Montreal, Martinique,
or Madagascar. You can study Spanish in Spain, but you can also study it in
Mexico, Bolivia, or Paraguay.

You’d be amazed at the range of language courses available at universities
these days: Ulithi, Aymara, Quechua, Nahuatl, Swahili, Turkish, Amharic,
Basque, Eskimo, Navajo, Zulu, Hausa, Amoy . . . . If the language you need is
not offered in a formal course, try to find an individual speaker of the language
(the husband or wife of a foreign student) who would be willing to tutor you
in a self-paced course. There are self-paced courses in hundreds of languages
available today, many of them on CD, with lots of auditory material.

There are, of course, many languages for which there are no published
materials, except perhaps for a dictionary or part of the Judeo-Christian Bible.
For those languages, you need to learn how to reduce them to writing quickly
so that you can get on with learning them and with fieldwork. To learn how to
reduce any language to writing, see the tutorial by Oswald Werner (2000a,
2000b, 2001, 2002a, 2002b).

364 Chapter 13

WHEN NOT TO MIMIC

The key to understanding the culture of loggers, lawyers, bureaucrats,
schoolteachers, or ethnic groups is to become intimately familiar with their
vocabulary. Words are where the cultural action is. My rule about mimicking
pronunciation changes, though, if you are studying an ethnic or occupational
subculture in your own society and the people in that subculture speak a dif­
ferent dialect of your native language. In this situation, mimicking the local
pronunciation will just make you look silly. Even worse, people may think
you’re ridiculing them.

Building Explicit Awareness

Another important skill in participant observation is what Spradley
(1980:55) called explicit awareness of the little details in life. Try this experi­
ment: The next time you see someone look at their watch, go right up to them
and ask them the time. Chances are they’ll look again because when they
looked the first time they were not explicitly aware of what they saw. Tell
them that you are a student conducting a study and ask them to chat with you
for a few minutes about how they tell time.

Many people who wear analog watches look at the relative positions of the
hands, and not at the numbers on the dial. They subtract the current time (the
position of the hands now) from the time they have to be somewhere (the
image of what the position of the hands will look like at some time in the
future), and calculate whether the difference is anything to worry about. They
never have to become explicitly aware of the fact that it is 3: 10 P.M. People
who wear digital watches may be handling the process somewhat differently.
We could test that.

Kronenfeld et al. (1972) report an experiment in which informants leaving
several different restaurants were asked what the waiters and waitresses (as
they were called in those gender-differentiated days) were wearing, and what
kind of music was playing. Informants agreed much more about what the wait­
ers were wearing than about what the waitresses were wearing. The hitch:
None of the restaurants had waiters, only waitresses.

Informants also provided more detail about the kind of music in restaurants
that did not have music than they provided for restaurants that did have music.
Kronenfeld et al. speculated that, in the absence of real memories about things
they’d seen or heard, informants turned to cultural norms for what must have
been there (i.e., “what goes with what” ) (D’Andrade 1973).

You can test this yourself. Pick out a large lecture hall where a male profes­
sor is not wearing a tie. Ask a group of students on their way out of a lecture

365 Participant Observation

hall what color tie their professor was wearing. Or observe a busy store clerk
for an hour and count the number of sales she rings up. Then ask her to esti­
mate the number of sales she handled during that hour.

You can build your skills at becoming explicitly aware of ordinary things.
Get a group of colleagues together and write separate, detailed descriptions of
the most mundane, ordinary things you can think of: making a bed, doing
laundry, building a sandwich, shaving (face, legs, underarms), picking out
produce at the supermarket, and the like. Then discuss one another’s descrip­
tions and see how many details others saw that you didn’t and vice versa. If
you work carefully at this exercise you’ 11 develop a lot of respect for how
complex, and how important, are the details of ordinary life. If you want to
see the level of detail you’re shooting for here, read Anthony F. C. Wallace’s
little classic “Driving to Worke” (1965). Wallace had made the 17-mile drive
from his home to the University of Pennsylvania about 500 times when he
drew a map of it, wrote out the details, and extracted a set of rules for his
behavior. He was driving a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle in those days. It had 12
major mechanical controls (from the ignition switch to the windshield wiper­
yes, there was just one of them, and you had to pull a switch on the instrument
panel with your right hand to get it started), all of which had to be handled
correctly to get him from home to work safely every day.

Building Memory

Even when we are explicitly aware of things we see, there is no guarantee
that we’ll remember them long enough to write them down. Building your
ability to remember things you see and hear is crucial to successful participant
observation research.

Try this exercise: Walk past a store window at a normal pace. When you
get beyond it and can’t see it any longer, write down all the things that were
in the window. Go back and check. Do it again with another window. You’ll
notice an improvement in your ability to remember little things almost imme­
diately. You’ll start to create mnemonic devices for remembering more of
what you see. Keep up this exercise until you are satisfied that you can’t get
any better at it.

Here’s another one. Go to a church service, other than one you’re used to.
Take along two colleagues. When you leave, write up what you each think you
saw, in as much detail as you can muster and compare what you’ve written.
Go back to the church and keep doing this exercise until all of you are satisfied
that (1) you are all seeing and writing down the same things and (2) you have
reached the limits of your ability to recall complex behavioral scenes.

Try this same exercise by going to a church service with which you are

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familiar and take along several colleagues who are not. Again, compare your
notes with theirs, and keep going back and taking notes until you and they are
seeing and noting the same things. You can do this with any repeated scene
that’s familiar to you: a bowling alley, a fast-food restaurant, etc. Remember,
training your ability to see things reliably does not guarantee that you’ll see
thing accurately. But reliability is a necessary but insufficient condition for
accuracy. Unless you become at least a reliable instrument of data gathering,
you don’t stand much of a chance of making valid observations.

Bogdan (1972:4 1) offers some practical suggestions for remembering
details in participant observation. If, for some reason, you can’t take notes
during an interview or at some event, and you are trying to remember what
was said, done’t talk to anyone before you get your thoughts down on paper.
Talking to people reinforces some things you heard and saw at the expense of
other things.

Also, when you sit down to write, try to remember things in historical
sequence, as they occurred throughout the day. As you write up your notes
you will invariably remember some particularly important detail that just pops
into memory out of sequence. When that happens, jot it down on a separate
piece of paper (or tuck it away in a separate little note file on your word proc­
essor) and come back to it later, when your notes reach that point in the
sequence of the day.

Another useful device is to draw a map-even a rough sketch will do—of
the physical space where you spent time observing and talking to people that
day. As you move around the map, you will dredge up details of events and
conversations. In essence, let yourself walk through your experience. You can
practice all these memory-building skills now and be much better prepared if
you decide to do long-term fieldwork later.

Maintaining Naivete

Try also to develop your skill at being a novice-at being someone who
genuinely wants to learn a new culture. This may mean working hard at sus­
pending judgment about some things. David Fetterman made a trip across the
Sinai Desert with a group of Bedouins. One of the Bedouins, says Fetterman,

shared his jacket with me to protect me from the heat. I thanked him, of course,
because I appreciated the gesture and did not want to insult him. But I smelled
like a camel for the rest of the day in the dry desert heat. I thought I didn’t need
the jacket. … I later learned that without his jacket I would have suffered from
sunstroke …. An inexperienced traveler does not always notice when the temper-
ature climbs above 130 degrees Fahrenheit. By slowing down the evaporation
rate, the jacket helped me retain water. (1989:33)

367 Participant Observation

Maintaining your naivete will come naturally in a culture that’s unfamiliar
to you, but it’s a bit harder to do in your own culture. Most of what you do
“naturally” is so automatic that you don’t know how to intellectualize it.

If you are like many middle-class Americans, your eating habits can be
characterized by the word “grazinge”-that is, eating small amounts of food
at many, irregular times during the course of a typical day, rather than sitting
down for meals at fixed times. Would you have used that kind of word to
describe your own eating behavior? Other members of your own culture are
often better informants than you are about that culture, and if you really let
people teach you, they will.

If you look carefully, though, you’ll be surprised at how heterogeneous
your culture is and how many parts of it you really know nothing about. Find
some part of your own culture that you don’t control-an occupational cul­
ture, like long-haul trucking, or a hobby culture, like amateur radio-and try
to learn it. That’s what you did as a child, of course. Only this time, try to
intellectualize the experience. Take notes on what you learn about how to

learn, on what it’s like being a novice, and how you think you can best take
advantage of the learner’s role. Your imagination will suggest a lot of other
nooks and crannies of our culture that you can explore as a thoroughly untu­
tored novice.

WHEN NoT TO BE NAIVE

The role of naive novice is not always the best one to play. Humility is
inappropriate when you are dealing with a culture whose members have a lot
to lose by your incompetence. Michael Agar (1973, 1980a) did field research
on the life of heroin addicts in New York City. His informants made it plain
that Agar’s ignorance of their lives wasn’t cute or interesting to them.

Even with the best of intentions, Agar could have given his informants away
to the police by just by being stupid. Under such circumstances, you shouldn’t
expect your informants to take you under their wing and teach you how to
appreciate their customs. Agar had to learn a lot, and very quickly, to gain
credibility with his informants.

There are situations where your expertise is just what’s required to build
rapport with people. Anthropologists have typed documents for illiterate peo­
ple in the field and have used other skills (from coaching basketball to dispens­
ing antibiotics) to help people and to gain their confidence and respect. If you
are studying highly educated people, you may have to prove that you know
a fair amount about research methods before they will deal with you. Agar
(1980b:58) once studied an alternative lifestyle commune and was asked by a
biochemist who was living there: “Who are you going to use as a control

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group?e” In my study of ocean scientists (Bernard 1974), several informants
asked me what computer programs I was going to use to do a factor analysis
of my data.

Building Writing Skills

The ability to write comfortably, clearly, and often is one of the most
important skills you can develop as a participant observer. Ethnographers who
are not comfortable as writers produce few field notes and little published
work. If you have any doubts about your ability to pound out thousands of
words, day in and day out, then try to build that skill now, before you go into
the field for an extended period.

The way to build that skill is to team up with one or more colleagues who
are also trying to build their expository writing ability. Set concrete and regu­
lar writing tasks for yourselves and criticize one another’s work on matters of
clarity and style. There is nothing trivial about this kind of exercise. If you
think you need it, do it.

Good writing skills will carry you through participant observation field­
work, writing a dissertation and, finally, writing for publication. Don’t be
afraid to write clearly and compellingly. The worst that can happen is that
someone will criticize you for “popularizinge” your material. I think ethnogra­
phers should be criticized if they take the exciting material of real people’s
lives and tum it into deadly dull reading.

Hanging Out, Gaining Rapport

It may sound silly, but just hanging out is a skill, and until you learn it you
can’t do your best work as a participant observer. Remember what I said at
the beginning of this chapter: Participant observation is a strategic method
that lets you learn what you want to learn and apply all the data collection
methods that you may want to apply.

When you enter a new field situation, the temptation is to ask a lot of ques­
tions in order to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. There are
many things that people can’t or won’t tell you in answer to questions. If you
ask people too quickly about the sources of their wealth, you are likely to get
incomplete data. If you ask too quickly about sexual liaisons, you may get
thoroughly unreliable responses.

Hanging out builds trust, or rapport, and trust results in ordinary conversa­
tion and ordinary behavior in your presence. Once you know, from hanging
out, exactly what you want to know more about, and once people trust you

369 Participant Observation

not to betray their confidence, you’ll be surprised at the direct questions you
can ask.

In his study of Comerville (Boston’s heavily Italian American neighbor­
hood called North End), William Foote Whyte wondered whether “just hang­
ing on the street comer was an active enough process to be dignified by the
term ‘research.’ Perhaps I should ask these men questions,e” he thought. He
soon realized that “one has to learn when to question and when not to question
as well as what questions to ask” (1989:78).

Philip Kilbride studied child abuse in Kenya. He did a survey and focused
ethnographic interviews, but “by far the most significant event in my research
happened as a byproduct of participatory ‘hanging out’, being always in
search of case material.” While visiting informants one day, Kilbride and his
wife saw a crowd gathering at a local secondary school. It turned out that a
young mother had thrown her baby into a pit latrine at the school. The Kil­
brides offered financial assistance to the young mother and her family in
exchange for “involving ourselves in their . . . misfortune.e” The event that the
Kilbrides had witnessed became the focus for a lot of their research activities
in the succeeding months (Kilbride 1992: 190).

THE ETHICAL DILEMMA OF RAPPORT

Face it: “Gaining rapport” is a euphemism for impression management,
one of the “darker arts” of fieldwork, in Harry Wolcott’s apt phrase
(2005:chap. 6). E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the great British anthropologist, made
clear in 1937 how manipulative the craft of ethnography really is. He was
doing fieldwork with the Azande of Sudan and wanted to study their rich tradi­
tion of witchcraft. Even with his long-term fieldwork and command of the
Azande language, Evans-Pritchard couldn’t get people to open up about
witchcraft, so he decided to “win the good will of one or two practitioners and
to persuade them to divulge their secrets in strict confidence” (1958
[1937e] :151). Strict confidence? He was planning on writing a book about all
this.

Progress was slow, and while he felt that he could have “eventually wormed
out all their secrets” he hit on another idea: His personal servant, Kamanga,
was initiated into the local group of practitioners and “became a practising
witch-doctor ” under the tutelage of a man named Badobo (ibid.). With Bad­
obo’s full knowledge, Kamanga reported every step of his training to his
employer. In tum, Evans-Pritchard used the information “to draw out of their
shells rival practitioners by playing on their jealousy and vanity.e”

Now, Badobo knew that anything he told Kamanga would be tested with
rival witch doctors. Badobo couldn’t lie to Kamanga, but he could certainly

370 Chapter 13

withhold the most secret material. Evans-Pritchard analyzed the situation care­
fully and pressed on. Once an ethnographer is “armed with preliminary
know ledge,e” he said, “nothing can prevent him from driving deeper and
deeper the wedge if he is interested and persistente” (ibid.: 152).

Still, Kamanga’s training was so slow that Evans-Pritchard nearly aban­
doned his inquiry into witchcraft. Providence intervened. A celebrated witch
doctor, named Bogwozu, showed up from another district and Evans-Pritchard
offered him a very high wage if he’d take over Kamanga’s training. Evans­
Pritchard explained to Bogwozu that he was “tired of Badobo’s wiliness and
extortion,e” and that he expected his generosity to result in Kamanga learning
all the tricks of the witch doctor’s trade (ibid.).

But the really cunning part of Evans-Pritchard’s scheme was that he contin­
ued to pay Badobo to tutor Kamanga. He knew that Badobo would be jealous
of Bogwozu and would strive harder to teach Kamanga more about witch­
doctoring. Here is Evans-Pritchard going on about his deceit and the benefits
of this tactic for ethnographers:

The rivalry between these two practitioners grew into bitter and ill-concealed
hostility. Bogwozu gave me information about medicines and magical rites to
prove that his rival was ignorant of the one or incapable in the performance of
the other. Badobo became alert and showed himself no less eager to demonstrate
his knowledge of magic to both Kamanga and to myself. They vied with each
other to gain ascendancy among the local practitioners. Kamanga and I reaped a
full harvest in this quarrel, not only from the protagonists themselves but also
from other witch-doctors in the neighborhood, and even from interested laymen.
(ibid.: 153)

Objectivity

Finally, objectivity is a skill, like language fluency, and you can build it if
you work at it. Some people build more of it, others less. More is better.

If an objective measurement is one made by a robot-that is, a machine that
is not prone to the kind of measurement error that comes from having opinions
and memories-then no human being can ever be completely objective. We
can’t rid ourselves of our experiences, and I don’t know anyone who thinks it
would be a good idea even to try.

We can, however, become aware of our experiences, our opinions, our val­
ues. We can hold our field observations up to a cold light and ask whether
we’ve seen what we wanted to see, or what is really out there. The goal is
not for us, as humans, to become objective machines; it is for us to achieve
objective-that is, accurate-knowledge by transcending our biases. No fair
pointing out that this is impossible. Of course, it’s impossible to do com-

371 Participant Observation

pletely. But it’s not impossible to do at all. Priests, social workers, clinical
psychologists, and counselors suspend their own biases all the time, more or
less, in order to listen hard and give sensible advice to their clients.

Laurie Krieger, an American woman doing fieldwork in Cairo, studied
physical punishment against women. She learned that wife beatings were less
violent than she had imagined and that the act still sickened her. Her reaction
brought out a lot of information from women who were recent recipients of
their husbands’ wrath. “I found out,” she says, “that the biased outlook of an
American woman and a trained anthropologist was not always disadvanta­
geous, as long as I was aware of and able to control the expression of my
biases” (Kreiger 1986:120).

Colin Turnbull held objective knowledge as something to be pulled from
the thicket of subjective experience. Fieldwork, said Turnbull, involves a self­
conscious review of one’s own ideas and values-one’s self, for want of any
more descriptive term. During fieldwork you “reach inside,e” he observed, and
give up the “old, narrow, limited self, discovering the new self that is right
and proper in the new context.e” We use the field experience, he said, “to know
ourselves more deeply by conscious subjectivity.” In this way, he concluded,
“the ultimate goal of objectivity is much more likely to be reached and our
understanding of other cultures that much more profound” (Turnbull
1986:27). When he was studying the Ik of Uganda, he saw parents goad small
children into touching fire and then laughing at the result. It took everything
he had, he once told me, to transcend his biases, but he managed (see Turnbull
1972).

Many phenomenologists see objective knowledge as the goal of participant
observation. Danny Jorgensen, for example, advocates complete immersion
and becoming the phenomenon you study. “Becoming the phenomenon,e”
Jorgensen says, “is a participant observational strategy for penetrating to and
gaining experience of a form of human life. It is an objective approach insofar
as it results in the accurate, detailed description of the insiders’ experience of
life ” (Jorgensen 1989:63). In fact, many ethnographers have become cab driv­
ers or exotic dancers, jazz musicians, or members of satanic cults, in order to
do participant observation fieldwork.

If you use this strategy of full immersion, Jorgensen says, you must be able
to switch back and forth between the insiders’ view and that of an analyst.
To do that-to maintain your objective, analytic abilities-Jorgensen suggests
finding a colleague with whom you can talk things over regularly. That is,
give yourself an outlet for discussing the theoretical, methodological, and
emotional issues that inevitably come up in full participation field research.
It’s good advice.

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OBJECTIVITY AND NEUTRALITY

Objectivity does not mean (and has never meant) value neutrality. No one
asks Cultural Survival, Inc. to be neutral in documenting the violent obsceni­
ties against indigenous peoples of the world. No one asks Amnesty Interna­
tional to be neutral in its effort to document state-sanctioned torture. We rec­
ognize that the power of the documentation is in its objectivity, in its chilling
irrefutability, not in its neutrality.

Claire Sterk, an ethnographer from the Netherlands, has studied prostitutes
and intravenous drug users in mostly African American communities in New
York City and Newark, New Jersey. Sterk was a trusted friend and counselor
to many of the women with whom she worked. In one 2-month period in the
late 1980s, she attended the funerals of seven women she knew who had died
of AIDS. She felt that “every researcher is affected by the work he or she
does. One cannot remain neutral and uninvolved; even as an outsider, the
researcher is part of the community” (Sterk 1989:99, 1999).

At the end of his second year of research on street life in El Barrio, Phillipe
Bourgois’ s friends and informants began telling him about their experiences
as gang rapists. Bourgois’s informants were in their mid- to late 20s then, and
the stories they told were of things they’d done as very young adolescents,
more than a decade earlier. Still, Bourgois says, he felt betrayed by people
whom he had come to like and respect. Their “childhood stories of violently
forced sex,e” he says, “spun me into a personal depression and a research cri­
sis ” (1995:205).

In any long-term field study, be prepared for some serious tests of your
ability to remain a dispassionate observer. Hortense Powdermaker (1966) was
once confronted with the problem of knowing that a lynch mob was preparing
to go after a particular black man. She was powerless to stop the mob and
fearful for her own safety.

I have never grown accustomed to seeing people ridicule the handicapped,
though I see it every time I’m in rural Mexico and Greece, and I recall with
horror the death of a young man on one of the sponge diving boats I sailed
with in Greece. I knew the rules of safe diving that could have prevented that
death; so did all the divers and the captains of the vessels. They ignored those
rules at terrible cost. I wanted desperately to do something, but there was noth­
ing anyone could do. My lecturing them at sea about their unsafe diving prac­
tices would not have changed their behavior. That behavior was driven, as I
explained in chapter 2, by structural forces and the technology-the boats, the
diving equipment-of their occupation. By suspending active judgment of
their behavior, I was able to record it. “Suspending active judgment” does not
mean that I eliminated my bias or that my feelings about their behavior

373 Participant Observation

changed. It meant only that I kept the bias to myself while I was recording
their dives.

OBJECTIVITY AND INDIGENOUS RESEARCH

Objectivity gets its biggest test in indigenous research-that is, when you
study your own culture. Barbara Meyerhoff worked in Mexico when she was
a graduate student. Later, in the early 1970s, when she became interested in
ethnicity and aging, she decided to study elderly Chicanos. The people she
approached kept putting her off, asking her “Why work with us? Why don’t
you study your own kind?” Meyerhoff was Jewish. She had never thought
about studying her own kind, but she launched a study of poor, elderly Jews
who were on public assistance. She agonized about what she was doing and,
as she tells it, never resolved whether it was anthropology or a personal quest.

Many of the people she studied were survivors of the Holocaust. “How,
then, could anyone look at them dispassionately? How could I feel anything
but awe and appreciation for their mere presence? . . . Since neutrality was
impossible and idealization undesirable, I decided on striving for balancee”
(Meyerhoff 19 89 :90).

There is no final answer on whether it’s good or bad to study your own
culture. Plenty of people have done it, and plenty of people have written about
what it’s like to do it. On the plus side, you’ll know the language and you’ll
be less likely to suffer from culture shock. On the minus side, it’s harder to
recognize cultural patterns that you live every day and you’re likely to take a
lot of things for granted that an outsider would pick up right away.

If you are going to study your own culture, start by reading the experiences
of others who have done it so you’ll know what you’re facing in the field
(Messerschmidt 1981; Stephenson and Greer 1981; Fahim 1982; Altorki and
El-Solh 1988). (See the section on native ethnographies in chapter 17 for more
about indigenous research.)

Gender, Parenting, and Other Personal Characteristics

By the 1930s, Margaret Mead had already made clear the importance of
gender as a variable in data collection (see Mead 1986). Gender has at least
two consequences: (1) It limits your access to certain information; (2) It
influences how you perceive others.

In all cultures, you can’t ask people certain questions because you’re a
[womane] [mane]. You can’t go into certain areas and situations because you’re
a [womane] [mane] . You can’t watch this or report on that because you’re a

374 Chapter 13

[womane] [mane] . Even the culture of social scientists is affected: Your credibil­
ity is diminished or enhanced with your colleagues when you talk about a
certain subject because you’re a [womane] [mane] (Scheper-Hughes 1983;
Golde 1986; Whitehead and Conaway 1986; Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Warren
1988).

Sara Quandt, Beverly Morris, and Kathleen DeWalt spent months investi­
gating the nutritional strategies of the elderly in two rural Kentucky counties
(Quandt et al. 1997). According to De Walt, the three women researchers spent
months, interviewing key informants, and never turned up a word about the
use of alcohol. “One day,e” says DeWalt,

the research team traveled to Central County with Jorge Uquillas, an Ecuadorian
sociologist who had expressed an interest in visiting the Kentucky field sites. One
of the informants they visited was Mr. B, a natural storyteller who had spoken at
length about life of the poor during the past sixty years. Although he had been a
great source of inforrnation about use of wild foods and recipes for cooking game
he had never spoken of drinking or moonshine production.

Within a few minutes of entering his home on this day, he looked at Jorge
Uquillas, and said “Are you a drinking man?” (Beverly whipped out the tape
recorder and switched it on.) Over the next hour or so, Mr. B talked about com­
munity values concerning alcohol use, the problems of drunks and how they were
dealt with in the community, and provided a number of stories about moonshine
in Central County. The presence of another man gave Mr. B the opportunity to
talk about issues he found interesting, but felt would have been inappropriate to
discuss with women. (De Walt et al. 1998:280)

On the other hand, feminist scholars have made it clear that gender is a
negotiated idea. What you can and can’t do if you are a man or a woman is
more fixed in some cultures than in others, and in all cultures there is lots of
individual variation in gender roles. While men or women may be expected to
be this way or that way in any given place, the variation in male and female
attitudes and behaviors within a culture can be tremendous.

All participant observers confront their personal limitations and the limita­
tions imposed on them by the culture they study. When she worked at the
Thule relocation camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Rosalie
Wax did not join any of the women’s groups or organizations. Looking back
after more than 40 years, Wax concluded that this was just poor judgment.

I was a university student and a researcher. I was not yet ready to accept myself
as a total person, and this limited my perspective and my understanding. Those
of us who instruct future field workers should encourage them to understand and
value their full range of being, because only then can they cope intelligently with
the range of experience they will encounter in the field. (Wax 1986: 148)

375 Participant Observation

Besides gender, we have learned that being a parent helps you talk to people
about certain areas of life and get more information than if you were not a
parent. My wife and I arrived on the island of Kalymnos, Greece, in 1964 with
a 2-month-old baby. As Joan Cassell says, children are a “guarantee of good
intentions” ( 1987:260), and wherever we went, the baby was the conversation
opener. But be warned: Taking children into the field can place them at risk.
(More on health risks below. And for more about the effects of fieldwork on
children who accompany researchers, see Butler and Turner [1987e].)

Being divorced has its costs. Nancie Gonzalez found that being a divorced
mother of two young sons in the Dominican Republic was just too much.
“Had I to do it again,e” she says, “I would invent widowhood with appropriate
rings and photographse” (1986:92).

Even height may make a difference: Alan Jacobs once told me he thought
he did better fieldwork with the Maasai because he’s 6 ‘5″ than he would have
if he’d been, say, an average-sized 5’ 10″.

Personal characteristics make a difference in fieldwork. Being old or young
lets you into certain things and shuts you out of others. Being wealthy lets you
talk to certain people about certain subjects and makes others avoid you.
Being gregarious makes some people open up to you and makes others shy
away. There is no way to eliminate the “personal equation” in participant
observation fieldwork, or in any other scientific data-gathering exercise for
that matter, without sending robots out to do the work. Of course, the robots
would have their own problems. In all sciences, the personal equation (the
influence of the observer on the data) is a matter of serious concern and study
(Romney 1989).

Sex and Fieldwork

It is unreasonable to assume that single, adult fieldworkers are all celibate,
yet the literature on field methods was nearly silent on this topic for many
years. When Evans-Pritchard was a student, just about to head off for Central
Africa, he asked his major professor for advice. “Seligman told me to take ten
grains of quinine every night and keep off women” (Evans-Pritchard 1973: 1 ).
As far as I know, that’s the last we heard from Evans-Pritchard on the subject.

Colin Turnbull (1986) tells us about his affair with a young Mbuti woman,
and Dona Davis (1986) discusses her relationship with an engineer who vis­
ited the Newfoundland village where she was doing research on menopause.
In Turnbull’s case, he had graduated from being an asexual child in Mbuti
culture to being a youth and was expected to have sexual relations. In Davis’s
case, she was expected not to have sexual relations, but she also learned that

376 Chapter 13

she was not bound by the expectation. In fact, Davis says that “being paired
offe” made women more comfortable with her because she was “simply break­
ing a rule everyone else broke” (1986:254).

With changing sexual mores in our late industrial society, anthropologists
have become more open about the topic of sex and fieldwork. Several antholo­
gies have been published in which researchers discuss their own sexual experi­
ences during participant observation fieldwork (Kulick and Willson 1995;
Lewin and Leap 1996; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999). Proscriptions against
sex in fieldwork are silly, because they don’t work. But understand that this is
one area that people everywhere take very seriously.

The rule on sexual behavior in the field is this: Do nothing that you can’t
live with, both professionally and personally. This means that you have to be
even more conscious of any fallout, for you and for your partner, than you
would in your own community. Eventually, you will be going home. How will
that affect your partner’s status?

Surviving Fieldwork

The title of this section is the title of an important book by Nancy Howell
(1990). All researchers-whether they are anthropologists, epidemiologists,
or social psychologists-who expect to do fieldwork in developing nations
should read that book. Howell surveyed 204 anthropologists about illnesses
and accidents in the field, and the results are sobering. The maxim that
“anthropologists are otherwise sensible people who don’t believe in the germ
theory of disease ” is apparently correct (Rappaport 1990).

One hundred percent of anthropologists who do fieldwork in south Asia
reported being exposed to malaria, and 4 1 % reported contracting the disease.
Eighty-seven percent of anthropologists who work in Africa reported expo­
sure, and 31 % reported having had malaria. Seventy percent of anthropolo­
gists who work in south Asia reported having had some liver disease.

Among all anthropologists, 13 % reported having had hepatitis A. I was hos­
pitalized for 6 weeks for hepatitis A in 1968 and spent most of another year
recovering. Glynn Isaac died of hepatitis B at age 47 in 1985 after a long
career of archeological fieldwork in Africa. Typhoid fever is also common
among anthropologists, as are amoebic dysentery, giardia, ascariasis, hook­
worm, and other infectious diseases.

Accidents have injured or killed many fieldworkers. Fei Xiaotong, a student
of Malinowski’s, was caught in a tiger trap in China in 1935. The injury left
him an invalid for 6 months. His wife died in her attempt to go for help.
Michelle Zimbalist Rosal do was killed in a fall in the Philippines in 19 81.

377 Participant Observation

Thomas Zwickler, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, was
killed by a bus on a rural road in India in 1985. He was riding a bicycle when
he was struck. Kim Hill was accidentally hit by an arrow while out with an
Ache hunting party in Paraguay in 1982 (Howell 1990: passim).

Five members of a Russian-American team of researchers on social change
in the Arctic died in 1995 when their umiak (a traditional, walrus-hided
Eskimo boat) was overturned by a whale (see Broadbent 1995). The research­
ers included three Americans (two anthropologists-Steven McNabb and
Richard Condon-and a psychiatrist-William Richards), and two Russians
(one anthropologist-Alexander Pika-and the chief Eskimo ethnographic
consultant to the project-Boris Mumikhpykak). Nine Eskimo villagers also
perished in that accident. I’ve had my own unpleasant brushes with fate and I
know many others who have had very, very close calls.

What can you do about the risks? Get every inoculation you need before
you leave, not just the ones that are required by the country you are entering.
Check your county health office for the latest information from the Centers
for Disease Control about illnesses prevalent in the area you’re going to. If
you go into an area that is known to be malarial, take a full supply of antima­
larial drugs with you so you don’t run out while you’re out in the field.

When people pass around a gourd full of chicha (beer made from com) or
pulque (beer made from cactus sap) or palm wine, decline politely and explain
yourself if you have to. You’ll probably insult a few people, and your protests
won’t always get you off the hook, but even if you only lower the number of
times you are exposed to disease, you lower your risk of contracting disease.

After being very sick in the field, I learned to carry a supply of bottled beer
with me when I’m going to visit a house where I’m sure to be given a gourd
full of local brew. The gift of bottled beer is generally appreciated and heads
off the embarrassment of having to turn down a drink I’d rather not have. It
also makes plain that I’m not a teetotaler. Of course, if you are a teetotaler,
you’ve got a ready-made get-out.

If you do fieldwork in a remote area, consult with physicians at your univer­
sity hospital for information on the latest blood-substitute technology. If you
are in an accident in a remote area and need blood, a nonperishable blood
substitute can buy you time until you can get to a clean blood supply. Some
fieldworkers carry a supply of sealed hypodermic needles with them in case
they need an injection. Don’t go anywhere without medical insurance and
don’t go to developing countries without evacuation insurance. It costs about
$60,000 to evacuate a person by jet from central Africa to Paris or Frankfurt.
It costs about $50 a month for insurance to cover it.

Fieldwork in remote areas isn’t for everyone, but if you’re going to do it,
you might as well do it as safely as possible. Candice Bradley is a Type-I

378 Chapter 13

diabetic who does long-term fieldwork in western Kenya. She takes her insu­
lin, glucagon, blood-testing equipment, and needles with her. She arranges her
schedule around the predictable, daily fluctuations in her blood-sugar level.
She trains people on how to cook for her and she lays in large stocks of diet
drinks so that she can function in the relentless heat without raising her blood
sugars (Bradley 1997:4-7).

With all this, Bradley still had close calls -near blackouts from hypoglyce­
mia -but her close calls are no more frequent than those experienced by other
field researchers who work in similarly remote areas. The rewards of foreign
fieldwork can be very great, but so are the risks.

The Stages of Participant Observation

In what follows, I will draw on three sources of data: (1) a review of the
literature on field research; (2) conversations with colleagues during the last
40 years, specifically about their experiences in the field; and (3) 5 years of
work, with the late Michael Kenny, directing National Science Foundation
field schools in cultural anthropology and linguistics.

During our work with the field schools (1967 -1971), Kenny and I devel­
oped an outline of researcher response in participant observation fieldwork.
Those field schools were 10 weeks long and were held each summer in central
Mexico, except for one that was held in the interior of the Pacific Northwest.
In Mexico, students were assigned to N::!hfiu-speaking communities in the
vicinity of Ixmiquilpan, Mexico. In the Northwest field school, students were
assigned to small logging and mining communities in the Idaho panhandle. In
Mexico, a few students did urban ethnography in the regional capital of
Pachuca, while in the Northwest field school, a few students did urban ethnog­
raphy in Spokane, Washington.

What Kenny and I found so striking was that the stages we identified in the
10-week field experiences of our students were the same across all these
places. Even more interesting-to us, anyway-was that the experiences our
students had during those 10-week stints as participant observers apparently
had exact analogs in our own experiences with yearlong fieldwork.

1. Initial Contact

During the initial contact period, many long-term fieldworkers report expe­
riencing a kind of euphoria as they begin to move about in a new culture. It
shouldn’t come as any surprise that people who are attracted to the idea of
living in a new culture are delighted when they begin to do so.

379 Participant Observation

But not always. Here is Napoleon Chagnon’s recollection of his first
encounter with the Yanomami: “I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen
burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn
arrows! . . . had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my
fieldwork then and theree” (Chagnon 1983:10-11).

The desire to bolt and run is more common than we have admitted in the
past. Charles Wagley, who would become one of our discipline’s most accom­
plished ethnographers, made his first field trip in 1937. A local political chief
in Totonicapan, Guatemala, invited Wagley to tea in a parlor overlooking the
town square. The chief’s wife and two daughters joined them. While they were
having their tea, two of the chief’s aides came in and hustled everyone off to
another room. The chief explained the hurried move to Wagley:

He had forgotten that an execution by firing squad of two Indians, “nothing but
vagrants who had robbed in the market,” was to take place at five P.M. just below
the parlor. He knew that I would understand the feelings of ladies and the grave
problem of trying to keep order among brutes. I returned to my ugly pension in
shock and spent a night without sleep. I would have liked to have returned as fast
as possible to New York. (Wagley 1983:6)

Finally, listen to Rosalie Wax describe her encounter with the Arizona Japa­
nese internment camp that she studied during World War IL When she arrived
in Phoenix it was 110° . Later that day, after a bus ride and a 20-mile ride in a
GI truck, across a dusty landscape that “looked like the skin of some cosmic
reptile,” with a Japanese American who wouldn’t talk to her, Wax arrived at
the Gila camp. By then it was 120° . She was driven to staff quarters, which
was an army barracks divided into tiny cells, and abandoned to find her cell
by a process of elimination.

It contained four dingy and dilapidated articles of furniture: an iron double bed­
stead, a dirty mattress (which took up half the room), a chest of drawers, and a
tiny writing table- and it was hotter than the hinges of Hades …. I sat down on
the hot mattress, took a deep breath, and cried …. Like some lost two-year-old,
I only knew that I was miserable. After a while, I found the room at the end of
the barrack that contained two toilets and a couple of wash basins. I washed my
face and told myself I would feel better the next day. I was wrong. (Wax 1971: 67)

2. Culture Shock

Even among those fieldworkers who have a pleasant experience during their
initial contact period (and many do), almost all report experiencing some form
of depression and shock soon thereafter-usually within a few weeks. (The

380 Chapter 13

term “culture shock,e” by the way, was introduced in 1960 by an anthropolo­
gist, Kalervo Oberg.) One kind of shock comes as the novelty of the field site
wears off and there is this nasty feeling that research has to get done. Some
researchers (especially those on their first field trip) may also experience feel­
ings of anxiety about their ability to collect good data.

A good response at this stage is to do highly task-oriented work: making
maps, taking censuses, doing household inventories, collecting genealogies,
and so on. Another useful response is to make clinical, methodological field
notes about your feelings and responses in doing participant observation
fieldwork.

Another kind of shock is to the culture itself. Culture shock is an uncom­
fortable stress response and must be taken very seriously. In serious cases of
culture shock, nothing seems right. You may find yourself very upset at a lack
of clean toilet facilities, or people’s eating habits, or their child-rearing prac­
tices. The prospect of having to put up with the local food for a year or more
may become frightening. You find yourself focusing on little annoyances­
something as simple as the fact that light switches go side to side rather than
up and down may upset you.

This last example is not fanciful, by the way. It happened to a colleague of
mine. When I first went to work with the Niihii.u in 1962, men would greet me
by sticking out their right hand. When I tried to grab their hand and shake it,
they deftly slid their hand to my right so that the back of their right hand
touched the back of my right hand. I became infuriated that men didn’t shake
hands the way “they’re supposed to.e” You may find yourself blaming every­
one in the culture, or the culture itself, for the fact that your informants don’t
keep appointments for interviews.

Culture shock commonly involves a feeling that people really don’t want
you around (this may, in fact, be the case). You feel lonely and wish you could
find someone with whom to speak your native language. Even with a spouse
in the field, the strain of using another language day after day, and concentrat­
ing hard so that you can collect data in that language, can be emotionally
wearing.

A common personal problem in field research is not being able to get any
privacy. Many people across the world find the Anglo-Saxon notion of privacy
grotesque. When we first went out to the island of Kalymnos in Greece in
1964, Carole and I rented quarters with a family. The idea was that we’d be
better able to learn about family dynamics that way. Women of the household
were annoyed and hurt when my wife asked for a little time to be alone. When
I came home at the end of each day’s work, I could never just go to my fami­
ly’s room, shut the door, and talk to Carole about my day, or hers, or our new

381 Participant Observation

baby’s. If I didn’t share everything with the family we lived with during wak­
ing hours, they felt rejected.

After about 2 months of this, we had to move out and find a house of our
own. My access to data about intimate family dynamics was curtailed. But it
was worth it because I felt that I’d have had to abort the whole trip if I had to
continue living in what my wife and I felt was a glass bowl all the time. As it
turns out, there is no word for the concept of privacy in Greek. The closest
gloss translates as “being alone,e” and connotes loneliness.

I suspect that this problem is common to all English-speaking researchers
who work in developing countries. Here’s what M. N. Srinivas, himself from
India, wrote about his work in the rural village of Ramapura, near Mysore:

I was never left alone. I had to fight hard even to get two or three hours absolutely
to myself in a week or two. My favorite recreation was walking to the nearby
village of Kere where I had some old friends, or to Hogur which had a weekly
market. But my friends in Rarnapura wanted to accompany me on my walks.
They were puzzled by my liking for solitary walks. Why should one walk when
one could catch a bus, or ride on bicycles with friends. I had to plan and plot to
give them the slip to go out by myself. On my return, however, I was certain to
be asked why I had not taken them with me. They would have put off their work
and joined me. (They meant it.) I suffered from social claustrophobia as long as
I was in the village and sometimes the feeling became so intense that I just had
to get out. (1979 :23)

Culture shock subsides as researchers settle in to the business of gathering
data on a daily basis, but it doesn’t go away because the sources of annoyance
don’t go away.

Unless you are one of the very rare people who truly go native in another
culture, you will cope with culture shock, not eliminate it. You will remain
conscious of things annoying you, but you won’t feel like they are crippling
your ability to work. Like Srinivas, when things get too intense, you’ll have
the good sense to leave the field site for a bit rather than try to stick it out.
(For more about culture shock, see Furnham and Bochner 1986, Mumford
1998, and Bochner 2000.)

3. Discovering the Obvious

In the next phase of participant observation, researchers settle into collect­
ing data on a more or less systematic basis (see Kirk and Miller 1986). This
is sometimes accompanied by an interesting personal response-a sense of
discovery, where you feel as if informants are finally letting you in on the
“good stuffe” about their culture. Much of this “good stuffe” will later tum out

382 Chapter 13

to be commonplace. You may “discover,e” for example, that women have more
power in the community than meets the eye or that there are two systems for
dispute settlement-one embodied in formal law and one that works through
informal mechanisms.

Sometimes, a concomitant to this feeling of discovery is a feeling of being
in control of dangerous information and a sense of urgency about protecting
informants’ identities. You may find yourself going back over your field notes,
looking for places that you might have lapsed and identified an informant, and
making appropriate changes. You may worry about those copies of field notes
you have already sent home and even become a little worried about how well
you can trust your major professor to maintain the privacy of those notes.

This is the stage of fieldwork when you hear anthropologists start talking
about “their ” village, and how people are, at last, “letting them ine” to the
secrets of the culture. The feeling has its counterpart among all long-term par­
ticipant observers. It often spurs researchers to collect more and more data; to
accept every invitation, by every informant, to every event; to fill the days
with observation, and to fill the nights with writing up field notes. Days off
become unthinkable, and the sense of discovery becomes more and more
intense.

This is the time to take a serious break.

4. The Break

The mid-fieldwork break, which usually comes after 3 or 4 months, is a
crucial part of the overall participant observation experience for long-term
researchers. It’s an opportunity to get some distance, both physical and emo­
tional, from the field site. It gives you a chance to put things into perspective,
think about what you’ve got so far, and what you need to get in the time
remaining. Use this time to collect data from regional or national statistical
services; to visit with colleagues at the local university and discuss your find­
ings; to visit other communities in other parts of the country. And be sure to
leave some time to just take a vacation, without thinking about research at all.

Your informants also need a break from you. “Anthropologists are uncom­
fortable intruders no matter how close their rapport,e” wrote Charles Wagley.
“A short respite is mutually beneficial. One returns with objectivity and
human warmth restored. The anthropologist returns as an old friend” who has
gone away and returned, and has thereby demonstrated his or her genuine
interest in a community (Wagley 1983: 13). Everyone needs a break.

5. Focusing

After the break, you will have a better idea of exactly what kinds of data
you are lacking, and your sense of the problem will also come more sharply

383 Participant Observation

into focus. The reason to have a formally prepared design statement before

you go to the field is to tell you what you should be looking for. Nevertheless,
even the most focused research design will have to be modified in the field. In
some cases, you may find yourself making radical changes in your design,
based on what you find when you get to the field and spend several months
actually collecting data.

There is nothing wrong or unusual about this, but new researchers some­
times experience anxiety over making any major changes. The important thing
at this stage is to focus the research and use your time effectively rather than
agonizing over how to save components of your original design.

6. Exhaustion, the Second Break, and Frantic Activity

After 7 or 8 months, some participant observers start to think that they have
exhausted their informants, both literally and figuratively. That is, they may
become embarrassed about continuing to ask informants for more informa­
tion. Or they may make the supreme mistake of believing that their informants
have no more to tell them. The reason this is such a mistake, of course, is that
the store of cultural knowledge in any culturally competent person is enor­
mous-far more than anyone could hope to extract in a year or two.

At this point, another break is usually a good idea. You ’11 get another oppor­
tunity to take stock, order your priorities for the time remaining, and see both
how much you’ve done and how little. The realization that, in fact, informants
have a great deal more to teach them, and that they have precious little time
left in the field, sends many investigators into a frenetic burst of activity dur­
ing this stage.

7. Leaving the Field

The last stage of participant observation is leaving the field. When should
you leave? Steven Taylor, a sociologist at the Center for Human Policy, says
that when he starts to get bored writing field notes, he knows it’s time to close
down and go home. Taylor recognizes that writing field notes is time consum­
ing and tedious, but it’s exciting, too, when you’re chasing down information
that plugs directly into your research effort (Taylor 1991:243). When it stops
being exciting, it’s time to leave the field.

Don’t neglect this part of the process. Let people know that you are leaving
and tell them how much you appreciate their help. The ritual of leaving a place
in a culturally appropriate way will make it possible for you to go back and
even to send others.

Participant observation is an intensely intimate and personal experience.

384 Chapter 13

People who began as your informants may become your friends as well. In the
best of cases, you come to trust that they will not deceive you about their
culture, and they come to trust you not to betray them-that is, not to use your
intimate knowledge of their lives to hurt them. (You can imagine the worst of
cases.) There is often a legitimate expectation on both sides that the relation­
ship may be permanent, not just a 1-year fling.

For many long-term participant observation researchers, there is no final
leaving of “the field.e” I’ve been working with some people, on and off, for 40
years. Like many anthropologists who work in Latin America, I’m godparent
to a child of my closest research collaborator. From time to time, people from
Mexico or from Greece will call my house on the phone, just to say “hi” and
to keep the relationship going.

Or their children, who happen to be doing graduate work at a university in
the United States, will call and send their parents’ regards. They’ll remind you
of some little event they remember when they were 7 or 8 and you came to
their parents’ house to do some interviewing and you spilled your coffee all
over yourself as you fumbled with your tape recorder. People remember the
darndest things. You’d better be ready when it happens.

Many fieldworkers have been called on to help the children of their infor­
mants get into a college or university. This is the sort of thing that happens 20
years after you’ve “left” the field. The fact is, participant observation field­
work can be a lifetime commitment. As in all aspects of ordinary life, you
have to learn to choose your relationships well. Don’t be surprised if you make
a few mistakes.

The Front-Edge: Combining Methods

More and more researchers these days, across the social sciences, have
learned what a powerful method powerful participant observation is at all
stages of the research process. The method stands on its own, but it is also
increasingly part of a mixed-method strategy, as researchers combine qualita­
tive and quantitative data to answer questions of interest.

Laura Miller (1997) used a mix of ethnographic and survey methods to
study gender harassment in the U.S. Army. Keeping women out of jobs that
have been traditionally reserved for men is gender harassment; asking women
for sex in return for a shot at one of those jobs is sexual harassment. (Gender
harassment need not involve sexual harassment, or vice versa.)

Miller spent nearly 2 years collecting data at eight army posts and at two
training centers in the United States where war games are played out on simu­
lated battlefields. She lived in Somalia with U.S. Army personnel for 10 days,

385 Participant Observation

in Macedonia for a week, and in Haiti for 6 days during active military opera­
tions in those countries. Within the context of participant observation, she did
unstructured interviewing, in-depth interviewing, and group interviewing. Her
group interviews were spontaneous: over dinner with a group of high-ranking
officers; sitting on her bunk at night, talking to her roommates; in vehicles,
bouncing between research sites, with the driver, guide, protocol officer, trans­
lator, and guard (Miller, personal communication).

It turns out that “forms of gender harassment ” in the U.S. Army is one of
those cultural domains that people recognize and think about, but for which
people have no ready list in their heads. You can’t just ask people: “List the
kinds of gender harassment. ” From her ethnographic interviews, though,
Miller was able to derive what she felt was just such a list, including:

l . resistance to authority (hostile enlisted men ignore orders from women officers) ;
2. constant scrutiny (men pick up on every mistake that women make and use those

mistakes to criticize the abilities of women in general) ;
3. gossip and rumors (women who date many men are labeled “sluts,” women who

don’t date at all are labeled “dykes,” and any woman can easily be unjustly
accused of “sleeping her way to the top”);

4. outright sabotage of women’s tools and equipment on work details; and
5. indirect threats against women’s safety (talking about how women would be vul­

nerable to rape if they were to go into combat).

This list emerges from qualitative research-hanging out, talking to people
and gaining their trust, and generally letting people know that you’re in for
the long haul with them. If you are trying to develop programs to correct
things that are wrong with a program, then this list, derived entirely from par­
ticipant observation, is enough. An education program to counter gender
harassment against women in the U.S. Army must include something about
each of the problems that Miller identified.

Although ethnographic methods are enough to identify the problems and
processes-the what and the how of culture-ethnography can’t tell you how

much each problem and process counts. Yes, enlisted army men can and do
sabotage army women’s tools and equipment on occasion. How often? Eth­
nography can’t help with that one. Yes, men do sometimes resist the authority
of women officers. How often? Ethnography can’t help there, either.

Fortunately, Miller also collected questionnaire data-from a quota sample
of 4,100 men and women, Whites and Blacks, officers and enlisted personnel.
In those data, 19% of enlisted men and 18% of male noncommissioned offi­
cers (like sergeants) said that women should be treated exactly like men and
should serve in the combat units just like men, while just 6% of enlisted
women and 4% of female noncommissioned officers agreed with this senti-

386 Chapter 13

ment. You might conclude, Miller says, that men are more supportive than
women are of equality for women in combat roles. Some men with whom
Miller spoke, however, said that women should be given the right to serve in
combat so that, once and for all, everyone will see that women can’t cut it.

Are men really what Miller called “hostile proponents” of equality for
women? Could that be why the statistics show so many more men in favor of
women serving in combat units? Miller went back to her questionnaire data:
About 20% of men in her survey said that women should be assigned to com­
bat units just like men were-but almost to a man they also said that putting
women into combat units would reduce the military’s effectiveness.

In other words, the numerical analysis showed that Miller’s concept of
“hostile proponent of equality” was correct. This subtle concept advances our
understanding considerably of how gender harassment against women works
in the U.S. Army.

Did you notice the constant feedback between ethnographic and survey data
here? The ethnography produced ideas for policy recommendations and for
the content of a questionnaire. The questionnaire data illuminated and vali­
dated many of the things that the ethnographer learned during participant
observation. Those same survey data produced anomalies-things that didn’t
quite fit with the ethnographer’s intuition. More ethnography turned up an
explanation for the anomalies. And so on. Ethnographic and survey data com­
bined produce more insight than either does alone.

For more on participant observation fieldwork, see Bogdan 1972, Lofland
1976, Spradley 1980, Stocking 1983, Kirk and Miller 1986, Woods 1986, Fine
and Sandstrom 1988, Fenno 1990, Burawoy 1991, Behar 1996, Smith and
Kornblum 1996, Gummerson 2000, DeWalt and DeWalt 2002, Anderson
2003, and Wolcott 2005.

o NE Tntroduction

THE ROAD FROM SAN MIGUEL 1

Tt is early April aJl(f our group is leaving the Triqui village of San Miguel i11

the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico/ each 0/11s wearing dark-colored, long­

sleeved clothes and carrying n small, dark-colored backpack with one change of

clothes, 11 plastic bag with coyote fur and pine sap made by n Triqui healer for

protection and called a suerte [luckL along with many totopos [smoked,

handmade tortillns/ and dried beans to eat. 1 was instructed by Mncario to

bring these things. Each of us carries between $1,000 and $2,000 to pny for the

bus ride to the border, for food at the border, for rides on either side of the bor­

der, and some for tlte coyote {border-crossing g11ide].

Our journey begi11s with 11 two-hour trip i11 n Volksw11ge11 van from San

11Iig11el to tlte nearby mestizo1 town of Tlaxiaco. After b11ying our bus tickets,

we walk around the town’s rnarket, buying food to share with each other on the

bus. Joaquin chooses mangoes, Macario oranges and peanuts, nnd I miniature

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
E-book, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013, https://hdl.handle. net/2027/heb33915.0001.001.

i iDownloaded on behalf of Flor da Internat onal University, Miami, FL

2 CHAPTER T

sweet bananas. Macario buys a slingshot to use against rattlesnakes in the des­

ert and asks if I want to carry one, but l don’t have much experience with

slingshots. When we return to the bus, the two mms fro,n San Miguel are

waiting to wish us well as we board. The younger nun explains to me that they

go there every weekend to pray for the border crossers.

The bus ride in itself is exhausting. The bus is packed with people, mostly

men, all headed to tire border except a half dozw who plan to go to Baja

California to l,arvest tomatoes. We ride from yoo P.M. 011 Saturday 11ntil our

arrival in Altar at 4:00 P.M. on Monday, a total of forty-nine ho11rs. We pass

tlrrough five army c/1eckpoints between the state of Oaxaca and the border. The

checkpoints all have signs that say in Spanish, “Permanent Campaign Against

Narcotraffic.” Before each c/1eckpoin t, the bus driver or his assistant announces

loudly that all the bus riders should say that they are going to Baja California

to work so that tire stop would not take too 11mch ti111e with questions about

crossing tile border into tile United States. Each time, tlie driver tells me to say

tliat l was just liitchliiking to tire next tourist tm011-Mazatlrin, Hermosillo, .e
Guadalajara, depending 011 wlrere we are at the time. Before eaclr c/1eckpoi11t,

tlie b11s becomes quiet, and people seem nervo11s about tlie possibility of being
interrogated or sent back south. Two or three soldiers board the bus each time

in green army fatigues and ask a few seerningly random people for identifica­

tion and search a Je1.o bags while other soldiers look through the windows with

rifles over their shoulders.

Interestingly, there are three army soldiers riding the bus with us, going

to their base in northern Mexico. They, as well as everyo11e else, play along

witlr the story. Tlie oldest of the soldiers, seated next to me, is convinced T

am the coyote leading my friends to a job i11 the U11ited States. He explains

to me tliat these military checkpoints are paid for by the U.S. Drug

Enforcement Agency in order to stop drug smuggling across the border and

to stop undocumented immigration to t/Je United States. /-le tells me to

take the driver’s assistant to “El Norte” for free since he is so nice to every­

one on the bus. The driver’s assistant-who collects Jares Jro111 the passen­

gers, enforces the schedule at the food stops, and makes sure everyone

rnakes it back on board after meals-siinply smiles in response. 1 reply that

I am not a coyote. Tlie soldier laughs and asks i11 Spanish, “Then ,,u/1y are

you taking all these guys?”

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3 INTRODUCTIOI:

FIELDWORK ON THE MOVE

For one and a ha! f years fu II-time, followed by shorter field visits, I used

the classic anthropological research method of participant observation in

order to understand the complicated issues of immigration, social hierar­

chy, and health. This method involves long-term immersion in the every­

day lives and practices of people while often including more specific

tape-recorded conversations and interviews. Due to my interests in inter­

actions and perceptions among different groups of people, T also col­

lected media accounts of migration and reviewed clinical charts of

migrant patients. This book corresponds to the “follov,r the people”

multisited fieldwork outlined by George Marcus as one way to do

ethnography that takes seriously the interconnections inherent in the

contemporary ,,vorld.4

For the first several years after 2000, I actively searched for an interest­

ing and important ethnographic project to undertake. Given the critical

social, political, and health issues related to U.S.-Mexico migration, T

chose to work in this context. James, director of a nonprofit organization
working with migrant laborers in the Skagit Valley of Washington State

and an acquaintance through mountaineering neh-vorks, encouraged me

to work with the Triqui people from San Miguel, Oaxaca. He explained

that this group of people was especially interesting and important

because they had only recently begun migrating to the United States, had

a reputation for being violent, and lived and worked in unhealthy envi­

ronments in Washington State and California.

Tn spring 2003, T decided to visit San Miguel, the rural hometown in

the state of Oaxaca of many Triqui migrants in Washington and

California. San Miguel is located at an elevation of almost nine thousand

feet and has approximately three thousand inhabitants. During most of

the year, however, almost half of them are in the United States, working.

Upon arriving in Tlaxiaco, the nearest primarily mestizo city, l was told

by several residents not to go to San Miguel. By long-term Protestant

missionaries, waiters, and drivers of suburbnns (eight-passenger vans

providing rides between towns), I was told explicit and detailed stories

of people being kicked out of San Miguel, being shot, or having their cars

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
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�

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CHAPTER T4

C A N A D A q

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PACIFIC

OCEAN

Migration fieldwork beginning in 2003 in northwestern Washington State through
central California to rurnl Oaxaca St;:ite in Mexico ;:ind back again in 2004.

stolen. After getting off the suburban and walking up the several-mile

dirt road to San Miguel, l approached In presidencia (the town hall). l told

the four m.en there that I was a friend of James, the social worker and

chaplain in Washington State. I was greeted with cold silence, followed

by the authorities speaking quickly in Triqui that I was not able to follow,

and then one of them asked, ” 2,Cual Jaime?” (Which James?). Nhen they

seemed convinced ,ve knew the same James, the man with the white

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5 INTRODUCTIOI:

plastic sombrero invited me to his house to eat. We walked up the dusty
hill in silence, as l wondered what l had gotten myself into. I tried vari­
ous questions like, “For how long have people from San Miguel been
going to the U.S.?” “Have you heard of a social movement called the
MUU’ here?”” “When was the first time you went to the U.S.?” I was
greeted with dusty wind and silence. The whole meal proceeded the
same way, in silence. Afterward, T thanked the man and his wife for the
food and returned to the main road, where T would catch the next pass­
ing suburban.

After returning to the United States and processing this experience, I
remembered Eric Wolf’s article describing “closed corporate communi­
ties” in Mesoamerica.6 According to Wolf, due to pressures from Spanish
conquerors, indigenous groups separated themselves from each other in
language, dress, and trust. Latin American indigenous communities
became suspicious of all outsiders. I decided it would not be easy, perhaps
impossible and even dangerous-as several people had suggested-to
begin my fieldwork in San Miguel.

VVith the help of James and one of my childhood neighbors who now
lived in the Skagit Valley, I began my fieldwork in northwestern
Washington State. My childhood neighbor had become the pastor of
the church attended by the president of one of the larger farms in the
region. She helped me get permission from the farm’s president to live
and work on the berry farm. James and his coworkers introduced me to
several families of Triqui, Mixtec, and mestizo Mexican migrants in the
area. With this tenuous entree, I moved into my one-room shack in the
farm’s largest migrant labor camp in early summer 2003. I lived there
the rest of the summer and fall, surviving the labor camp conditions
described by one close friend as “one inch above squalor,” squatting
do,,vn all day picking berries with the rest of the people from the camp,
slowly getting to know migrant workers and other farm employees,
and observing and interviewing migrant clinic workers and other area
residents.

ln November l accompanied an extended family of twenty-three
Triqui people as they drove from Washington to the Central Valley of
California. We drove below the speed limit in a caravan all night, eating

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
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6 CHAPTER T

homemade tacos and napping at rest stops along the way. We spent a

v,,eek homeless in Madera, California, sleeping in our cars and washing

ourselves in city parks. Each day we drove the town’s street grid looking

for housing until we found a three-bedroom, one-bathroom slum apart­

ment. That winter, nineteen of us shared this apartment, looked for vvork,

visited the local migrant clinic and Department of Social and Health

Services, and occasionally found work pruning grapevines.

T spent spring 2004 living in San Miguel, Mexico. T lived in a partially

constructed house with the extended family of Samuel: his father, who

did not knov,r his exact age but considered himself old (viejo); his

n,venty-eight-year-old sister; and his nieces and nephews, who were

considered too young to cross the border with their parents. The house

,vas made of plain concrete slabs built piecemeal with money sent by

Samuel, who remained working in California. Along ,,vith Samuel’s

family, I used the snake-inhabited latrine, visited the government

health center when sick, carried water from the well, harvested and

planted corn and beans, and took the bulls and sheep to pasture. During

this time, I experienced more intimately the “closed corporate commu­
nity” aspect of this tovm. This rural Triqui town proved to be very sus­

picious of and unfriendly to me early on. I was repeatedly v.rarned

about violence by to,,vnspeople themselves as wel I as accused of being

a spy for the U.S. police. A handful of times, l vvas threatened with

being kidnapped and put in jail explicitly because “gnbnclws [ white

Americans] should not be here.”

In April 2004, I accompanied a group of nine young lriqui men from

San Miguel as they prepared to cross the border (In U11en), trekked across

the desert into Arizona, and were apprehended by the Border Patrol and

put in Border Patrol jail. They were deported back to Mexico, and I was

eventually released with a civil offense and a fine. I spent the rest of the

month conducting interviev.rs with border activists, Border Patrol agents,

border residents, and vigilante members. in May l met up with my Triqui

companions in Madera, California, after all but one of them had success­

fully recrossed the border. l spent the rest of May living in Central

California in another slum apartment with Samuel and his extended

family, and then we all migrated back to Washington State. I spent that

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
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7 INTRODUCTI 0 1′

The author, Macario, and their Triqui companions in the border desert. Photo
cou rtesy of Seth M. 1 lolmes.

summer living in the same shack in the same labor camp as the year
before. As l continued in my medical training and worked on this book
over the next several years, l returned to visit my Triqui companions in
Washington, California, and Oaxaca on numerous short trips and kept in
touch over the phone.

TRAVELINC TO THE BORDER

Three tirnes a day, the bus stops. Two stops a day for food, each time for thir�J

minutes at a roadside restaurant 1 would never choose to visit. The restau­

rants are dirty, with flies all over and a few workers trying frantically to get

food for all of 11s. 1 begin feeling sick before 1 even eat the food bemuse of the

smells a11d unsanitary sights. There are two or three choices of food tllat all

entail meat, rice, a11d soda. Each time, I eat witll four of my Triqui compan­

ions from San 1’/Iiguel, i11cluding Macario and Joaquin. We take tums buying

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0
0 CHAPTER T

menls for each other and then eat all together, 11sunlly standing up since there

isn’t enough room to sit. The driver nnd his nssistant are given free meals in

exchange for bringing all of us to these restnurnnts. Tile conversntion during

these menls rnost often revolves nround past experiences of violence and suf­

fering on the border. Everyone appenrs to be on edge, nervorts nbout whnt

migltt lie ahend. People talk about wltetlier or not we will be caugltt by the

Border Patrol nnd wltctlier or not we will die tryi11g to cross.

Once a day, we stop to fill the bus with gns as we all attempt to use tltc rest­

roorn ns fnst as possible. These restrooms most often hnve two stalls for a bus

f11ll of over thirty men. As I sit on the toilet, people often sny to me, recogniz­

ing ,ny shoes under the stall door, “Hurry up, gnbncho!” or “Finish, nlrendy ! ”

They say the snme things to anyone else they recognize by their shoes. Some of

the stnlls have no doors such that the line of waiting people directly fnces the

person on the toilet. The bus drives throughout the night, and we all try to

sleep ns 1m1ch ns we can since we know we will need nll tlte energy possible for

the upcoming desert trek. The /ms is rcminisce11t of one that may ltavc bee11

owned by Crcyliound decades earlier, tlie sents reclining 011ly two or tliree

inches. It is crnmped, full of people and small bnckpncks, as well ns fear and

anxie�J-

S U F F E R I N G T H E B O R D E R

During the first year of my fieldwork, over five hundred people died in

the Tucson sector of the border alone. 1!Jost died of heat stroke and dehy­

dration, some from direct violence. Migrants face many mortal dangers

in the borderlands. There are Mexican and American assailants and kid­

nappers after their money; heat, sun, snakes, and cacti after their bodies;

armed American vigilantes after their freedom; and Border Patrol agents

after their records.

My Triqui companions often explain their everyday lives in terms of

sufrimiento (suffering). But one of the sites of sufrimiento most fre­

quently described by Triqui migrants is crossing the border from Mexico

into the United States.7 Many times throughout my fieldwork, my

migrant companions told me stories of their harrovving experiences.

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9 INTRODUCTIOI:

One of my friends was kidnapped for ransom with her four-year-old

boy. They escaped with one other hostage through a window from the

house where they were held captive for several days in Phoenix,

Arizona. They found a pay phone and called their relatives in California,

who immediately drove to pick them up. One young man I know

described burns on his skin and in his lungs after being pushed by his

coyote into a chemical tank on a train. Another man explained that he

was raped by a Border Patrol agent in exchange for his freedom. All my

migrant com pan ions have multiple stories of suffering, fear, danger, and

violence at the border.

Early in my fieldwork, I realized that an ethnography of suffering and

migration would be incomplete without witnessing firsthand such an

important site of suffering for Latin American migrants. I had read sev­

eral pmverful accounts of border crossings.8 Hovvever, there have been

very few firsthand accounts since the significantly increased militariza­

tion of the border after 9/ J 1, and most of these are rather limited. For

example, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Enrique’s Journey” published in

the Los Angeles Times in 2002 (September 29) involved powerful photo­

graphs and stories from a train ride through Mexico to the border, but the

photographer and his team did not actually cross the border with the

Mexican and Central American migrants.

l began asking Triqui friends what they thought of the possibility of

my crossing the border. They warned me of robbers, armed vigilantes,

rattlesnakes, and heat. At the same time, they reminded me that the

border crossing is a principal experience of sufri1niento that I should

understand and began introducing me to people who might let me

cross with them. In addition, I conuneunicated with lawyers in the

United States about this idea. They warned me about death by dehy­

dration and sunstroke, death by kidnapping and robbery, and death by

rattlesnake bite, as well as the possibility of being mistaken for a coy­

ote and charged with a felony. One of the lawyers from Arizona, who

specializes in immigration and the border, told me sternly not to cross

but gave me her cell phone number in case l decided to try. Finally,

I spoke with my family and friends. My mother shared my desire

to understand inequalities and to work toward their amelioration.

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C H A P T E R T10

At the same time, she became quite scared for me. She made me prom­
ise to call her immediately after crossing so she would know l was
still alive and safe. After considering the dangers and risks, I began
looking for a group of Triqui people whom I could accompany across
the border.

S P R I N G l N S A N M I G U E L

In March 2004 I was invited to cross the border into the United States
v.rith a group of Tri qui men. We planned to start together in the village of
San Miguel, take a bus north through Mexico, and then trek through the
border desert into Arizona. The group included nine young men from
San Miguel and one from a neighboring Triqui village. ‘l-vo of the men
,vere in their late teens, hoping to enter the United States for the first
time. One of these young men was the nephew of the coyote we planned
to meet at the border for the final leg of the journey. The remainder of the
men were in their mid- to late twenties and vvere returning to California.
These men left their families in different agricultural areas of Central
California to return home to San Miguel, share money with their rela­
tives, help v.rith the corn harvest, and attend the village’s patron saint
festival in November.

One of these men, Macario, was my neighbor in the labor camp shacks
in Washington the previous summer. He was a twenty-nin e -year-old
father of three, with a reputation for being one of the fastest strawberry
pickers. I remember being invited, during the first few months of my
time in the labor camp, to his baby daughter’s baptism party outside his
shack. Macari o’s h,vo youngest children, born in the United States, ,,vere
in Madera, California, with his wife. His h,vo older children lived in San
Miguel with his parents to attend elementary school there until they
,vere old enough to cross the border themselves. Over the few weeks
prior to our departure, Macario introduced me to several of the others in
the group. Joaquin was Macario’s good friend and planned to return to
his wife and baby boy in a berry-growing region along the coast of
Central California, close to ,Natsonville.

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INTRODUCTIOI: IT

I had already tried unsuccessfully to join other groups from San

Miguel crossing the desert into the United States. One coyote told me a

time to meet him to go with his group on a ,,veekend morning, but when

I arrived at his house it was locked and empty. I heard from my Triqui

friends later that this man had wondered if I might be a spy for the U.S.

Border Patrol and decided to leave without me.

Every Saturday in March and April, a full bus of border-crossing

hopefuls leaves the small town of Tlaxiaco. Each of these buses includes

one or two groups of five to ten people from San Miguel planning to

cross. As I left San Miguel to start the journey north, almost all the Triqui

people I knew from Washington and California had already returned to

the States. Most people-including all the vwmen and children – attempt

to cross before the desert gets too hot in late April and May. Our trip was

saturated with anxiety and fear, and it was under rather ideal circum­

stances: trekking with all healthy, young, fast hikers. Many groups with

older or younger migrants from San Miguel hike three to five days

through the desert. In addition, my Triqui friends are fortunate to cross

with coyotes from their hometowns, people they know, sometimes
extended family members. In general, this brings more trust and safety.

Those who arrive at the border-for example, from South or Central

America-and search for a guide in one of the border towns cannot know

if they will find a coyote or a con man.

THE MEXICAN SIDE OF THE BORDER

Altar, the desert town where we stop in northern Mexico, is small, with several

hundred residents and probably two thousand others preparing to cross tlie bor­

der. As t/Je bus approaches Altar, the b11s driver tells everyone to get their back­

packs and get ready to disembark. 011tsirle of town, at an abandoner/ gas station,

he rnnkes nil of us quickly jwnp off nnrl walk into town because “Altar estrf cnli­

ente” [Altar is /wt}. Mncnrio says to no one in particular, “De par si, Altar es

caliente” [That’s haw it is, Altar is hot}. This brings nervous chuckles from those

within earshot. “Caliente” in this context means both “hot” anrl “dangerous.”

Laug/1ing quietly, perhaps to cover up our anxiety, we enter tlie scorching

sun, curse the bus driver for dropping us off so far away, and follow one of the

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I:! CHAPTER T

yo11ng men in our group, who is the nephew of the coyote we plan to r neet in

town. My skin is already peeling from the dry, hot wind in the bus and the sun

that cnme in thro1tgh the winriow. Now, 1 begin sweating profusely.

This town scares me. It’s impossible to know which person dressed in riark

clothing is an assailant wanting money fro111 easy targets and which is a per­

so11 hoping to cross t/ze border. Macario tells me to guard my money well. He

remarks, “People know how to take your money witlio11t you evm noticing.” T

puslt an empty soda bottle i11 my pocket above my money, and T feel a bit safer.

There are people, mostly rnen, front all over Mexico and Latin America; some

appear to be chilangos [people from Mexico Ci�;) but most look like

campesinos from rural Mexico. The only shops in town are small moneyclwng­

ers, a Western Union, a Jew restaurants, grocery stores with aisles full of water

bottles and Gatorade, and open-air markets full of dark-colored clothing and

small backpacks. 1 try to figure 01tt when to mail the three anthropology text­

books T carry in my backpack to my address in tlie United States so T won’t

ltave to carry tlzem on t/1e trek.

The Catholic cl1urcl1 at t/ze center of town Jzas Jzand-drawn posters alo11g t/ze

inside walls facing the pews describing the many dangers in crossing the

border: rattlesnakes, scorpions, desert insects, several species of cacti,

dehydration, heat, and assailants. Each poster asks in bold, red letters in

Spanish, ,, ls it worth risking yo1tr life ? ” The church has a small sirie room

where people light can riles and pray for safe passage. Macario and 1 plan to do

this b1tt run out of time.

Everything is so clearly and obviously set up for border crossers in tltis town.

l wonder to myself wlzy tl1e whole operation hasn’t been sl111t down by the U.S.

Border Patrol if tlzeir primary goal is really to stop undoc11me11ted entry.

E X T E R N A L I Z A T I O N A N D E X T R A C T I O N

As described by the sociologist Michael Burawoy,9 systems of migrant

labor are characterized by a physical and temporal separation of the

processes of reproduction of the labor force and the production from

that labor force. The migrant laborer can survive on low wages while

contributing to economic production in one context because the family,

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit. Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
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INTRODUCTIOI:

community, and state in the other context provide education, health care,

and other services necessary for reproduction. In this Vlay, the host state

externalizes the costs of labor force renewal and benefits even further

from the phenomenon of labor migration. In the case of my lriqui com­

panions, this analysis holds well, as primarily healthy young men and

women come to the United States to work after being raised and edu­

cated in Oaxaca. Beyond Burawoy’s analysis, my Triqui companions

often return to their hometown when they are unable to vvork due to old

age, sickness, or injury. Thus that which is necessary for both reproduc­

tion and convalescence is provided in Mexico, and the United States pro­

vides only what is necessary while the migrants are working.

The separation of these processes is not a natural or a voluntarily

chosen phenomenon but must be enforced through the meeting of con­

tradictory political and economic forces. Systems of labor migration

involve economic forces inviting and even requiring the cheap labor of

migrants at the same time that political forces ban migrants from enter­

ing the country. Such systems must include a set of political and legal

mechanisms that presuppose that the migrant is without citizenship

rights and has only limited power in the state of employment. The

reproduction of a system of migrant labor hinges on the inability of the

migrants, as individuals or as a group, to influence the institutions that

subordinate them to the other fractions of the labor force and to the

employer. Ever renewed and updated legal, political, and symbolic

separations produce the maximal extraction of labor as well as the

inherent suffering and danger linking one side of the border to the

other. Such separations include Proposition 187 in California and simi­

lar initiatives in Arizona and Colorado that make it legal for U.S. com­

panies to pay workers only enough for daily survival and illegal for

government money to go tm,vard their health care, education, or other

social services.

FROM BORDER TOWN TO BORDER

The man leading our group takes us down a residential street several

blocks and the11 into n doorwny. lt opens into n one-room npnrtme11t with no

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14 C H A P T E R T

f11rniture. This is where we will stay until our coyote arrives. The damp

concrete floor is coverer/ in several places by swaths of old, grimy carpet,

presumably for sleeping. The bathroom has no water service and reeks of

old garbage and urine. The shower behind the apart111ent is made of a hose

connecteri to an iron rod with wet sheets for minirnnl privacy anri a 111uri floor.

Tl,e shower is shnred by several npartments wit/, back doors to the same yard.

We eat our food in tire bnckyard on tl,e cement tl,at lras stains a11d pieces of rot­

ten food. A skinny yellow cat meows at us, /roping for hnndouts.

As we sit in the hot, srnelly apartment, every /,our or two sorneone walks

in unannounced. First, 011r coyote, who lrari been working in the United

States, arrives and greets everyone in a mixture of Triq11i anri Spanish. He

explains that we will leave the next evening, anri then he goes out to get us

nll food. lvlacario goes with him to explain who 1 rzrn and why 1 m11 there. 1

m11 nervous, wonriering if this might be the end of my journey with the

group. Macario returns later nnd tells me that he explained that l am n stu­

dent wl,o wa11ts to experience for /1imself how the poor suffer. T/1e coyote

agrees to let me come along and says Ire will not charge me since l am trying

to do this to cooperar [lit., “cooperate,” though with more of a tnngible, nw­

terial meaning, like rioing one’s part or paying one’s share for a group ex­

pense] with those wl,o suffer.

Later comes a rnirldle-ageri lvlexican mnn who tells us that he owns tire

place, asks which coyote we are with, and tells us we have to pay hi111 to stay

there. One man pnys him; the rest of us keep our money /ridden anri tell him

our coyote will pay him. As he walks out, l,e asks if we nre /rot, and a few reply

in the affirmative. He turns on the hollowed-out air conditioner which is now

just a see-throug/1 fan with no protection from the spinning blndes. Another

,nan walks in a couple times and asks where our coyote is by nmne. One of us

asks who he is, and he replies, “Your rai tero [driver] for tomorrow.” He asks

1ne who I am several times and seems nervous about my being tl1ere. He tells

rny friends that they cannot be sure that 1 am not a spy for the migra [Border

Patrol] or the police.

1 silently ponder words. Raitero, the word used to denote our va11 driver,

sounds 1111nervi11gly like ratero, which mea11s “assaila11t” or “robber.e” Theese­

mantic confllsion co1ni11gles in my mind with my tnngible uncertai11ty about

t/1e identities and inte11tions of everyone we meet.

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INTRODUCTIOI:

Severn/ hours after we go to sleep-in the wee ho11rs of the morning-three

young men walk in, t11rn on tire bare lightbulb /ranging from the ceiling, and

talk lo11dly to each other for what feels like ho11rs. I hide under my blanket to

avoid drawing attention to my white self In the 111orning, one of tlte111 announc­

es that they are from Miclwacdn, that they tried to cross the day before and were

deported. One slept on the seat from a van in the 111iddle of thefloor. They are

much louder tlian any of my Triqui friends, who watch them in silence. The men

from Michoncd11 clw11ge tile TV clwmel from tile 011e we had been watching,

and T speak up; their disrespect of my companions pisses me off Later, Macario

tells me they are rateros and that is why they net so r11de. .Ve did not rest well.

After our forty-nine-hour b11s ride and this night of intrusions, I an1 fatigued

and wonder if this desert trek is do01ned before we even begin walking.

T!te next riay, we walk through town, so111e in our group call their relatives

asking the111 to wire money because they do not have enou:zh, and we all buy

gallons of water and Gatorade. Our coyote directs us to buy rnnyo11naise to put

our money in so that it is l1idden if we are attacked by rateros along the way.

Apparently, we are not tlie only group rioi11g this since tlie grocery store has

aisles and aisles of each offive sizes ofsmall mayonnaise jars. Every time we

nm into other peoplefrom our bus frorn Tlaxiaco, they wave or greet me. T/1ey

all seem to think I am a coyote, and several ask me when I will take people

north. Macnrio and his friends tell me to joke around with the others and

offer to drive them to Arizona for two thousand dollars. l am too focused and

nervous for tltis kinrl of game. After tile preparations, we wait-trying to play

cards- for our ride.

111 the nftemoo11, a man I don ‘t know comes in suririenly and tells us to run

out the back of the apartment for our ride. The man who snirl I migi,t be a spy

earlier looks at the driver of the tan van beliinrl the apartment and says in

Spanish, pointing at me, “See what I mean?” The driver is a tall, light-skinned

Mexican nran wearing a cowboy hat, clean jeans, and a button-down shirt. Tl,e

ten ofe11s pile into the farthest back sent of a twelve-passenger van already hold­

ing thirteen people, for a total of twenty-three ariult passe11gers. Joaquin finris

an old teen tabloid magazine behind the sent, rearis it out loud, and laughs.

That lightens tl,e mood some.

We drive very fast, without air conrlitio11ing or vents, for approximately

three hours alo11g dirt roads through tile desert sun. Dust from the desert road

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C H A P T E R T16

filters in through the top of the closed windows and Jaruis on 011r sweaty skin

and clothes, turning us slowly more beige from head to toe. During this tirne,

we pass at least two buses, ten other vans, and a handful of cars and pickups

headed back toward town. Tlte driver tells us it is caliente today and that he is
nervous about getting c1111ght.

Suddenly, after three hours on the road, the driver swerves off the road into

the cacti 1111d drives even more quickly through soft sand. He stops at a small out ­

post of 11 few ho11ses made of bricks, cardboard, and tin piled together witlwut

mortar. Outside, there are several liglzt-skimred mestizo men with cowboy hats

and large pistols talking in the sun, squatting on concrete blocks and overturned

buckets. I feel like I am entering the Mad Max rnovie with Tina Turner and crazy

motorcycle cage fighting: 1111 outpost of lawless rebel gangs with large guns and

rnakeshift shelter. Some of the 111en turn and watch rne as I get out of tile van. 1

clearly stand out. 1 move into the s/r11de, hoping to hide from the sun and their

watciling eyes.

Our coyote leaves with the driver for about a /111/f lwur without explaining

to us what is lzappening. We stand together silently, waiting, thinking. Again,

l worry about the identity and intentions of everyone we meet. vTlzic/1 of tire
men outside is trustworthy? Whiclr is an armed ratero ready to steal our

1noney, knowing that we eaclr carry 11 large sum of cash ? Could this whole situ­

ation be a set11p?

Without explanation, our coyote motions for us to pile into the back of an

old pickup truck with two other men. The floor has several cracks and holes

large enouglt for us to see tltrouglt clearly to tlte desert below. We ride standing

up, looking alternately ahead and thro11gl, tl,e floor below for over 1111 ho11r.

Every once in 11 while zve seem to /Je followed by a110tl1er car. Tlze pickup seems

to take several unnecessary detours only to return to tl,e main road once again.

At this point, there is no option but to go forward.

A few minutes after we drop off the two otlrer men at a smaller outpost, a

camo-colored Humvee of the Mexican Grupo Beta (the Mexican Army orga­

nization whose mission it is to stop border violence against migrants) stops

and asks us-especially me-questions. Luckily for me, one of the Grupo

Beta soldiers is from Oaxaca and knows that 1 answer all the geographic

questions about wlzere I was in Oaxaca correctly. My friends from San

Miguel support my story as well. Tlze soldier looks at my passport and

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INTRODUCTIOI:

seems satisfied: “To my countrymen, good luck; to rny friend from our sister

country, God bless.”

T N D T V T D U A L T S M T N M T G R A T T O N S T U D T E S

Traditional studies of migration focus on the motivations for an indi­

vidual to choose to migrate. These motivations are often categorized as

“push” and “pull” factors. “Push” factors are understood to be located

in the “sending community” and include such things as poverty or rac­

ism in the hometown of the migrant. Conversely, “pull” factors are

located in the “receiving community” and include such aspects as

social networks and economic opportunities. Many experts who study

vvhat are called “risk behaviors” in the field of public health might say

that these push and pull factors are ,,veighed in the individual’s “deci­

sional balance” when this person chooses whether or not to engage in

a risky behavior.10 Such a view assumes a rationally acting individual,

maximizing her self-interest and having control over her destiny

through choice. Minimized in these analyses is a focus on the central

importance of structural context and the ways in which structural

forces constrain and inflect individual choice and direct the options

available to people.

As discussed further in the concluding chapter, much of traditional

migration studies assumes a dichotomy between voluntary, economic,

and 1nigrant on the one hand and forced, political, and refugee on the

other. The logic behind this dichotomy states that refugees are afforded

political and social rights in the host country because they were forced to

migrate for political reasons. Conversely, migrants are not allm,ved these

rights because they are understood to voluntarily choose to migrate for

economic reasons. The “push” and “pull” factor school of migration

studies tends to assume that labor migration is entirely chosen, volun­

tary, and economic.

However, my Triqui companions experience their labor migration as

anything but voluntary. Rather, they have told me repeatedly that they

are forced to migrate in order for themselves and their families to

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
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CHAPTER T18

survive. At one point during our trek across the border desert, Macario

told me, “There is no other option left for us.”

CROSSING

The pickup drops us off in the middle of the desert. We thank the driver and

walk over to the tall cacti to hide in their partial shade. Our coyote sneaks

ahead for several minutes, then comes back and tells us there is a lot of Border

Patrol activity and we need to wait here. We sit in a circle, a few people pull

out t/ieir food, and we all share t/ieir totopos and dried beans. It feels good to

share food with each ot/1er. It feels like family, solidarity, almost like a co111m11-

nion rit11al before a dangerous trial of biblical proportions. Two people in our

group have diarrhea and ask 111e for antidiarrheal pills 1 have in ,ny bag. One

sprained lzis ankle the week before on a hill by his house and asks for ibuprofen.

Each time we hear the sound of an automobile, we know it could be assailants

or other migrants planning to cross. We sit silently on edge. Macario pulls

garlic cloves out of his bag and rubs one 011 his boots. He instructs me to do the

same to keep away the rattles/lakes. After an hour of nerve-wracking waiting,
we put on our backpacks and follow the coyote in a single-file line farther into

tl1e desert, toward the north. I can see another single-file line of border-crossing

hopef11ls walking in the distance as the sun begins to set. Deep in rny pocket, I

hold my suerte tight.

The coyote tells 11s to duck down and wait. He walks ahead, then motions

down low ·with one arm, and we all nm as fast as we ca/I to and through-mostly

11J1der-a seven-foot barbed-wire fence. lNe nm across a sand road and through

anot/1er barbed-wire fence and keep nmni11g uJ1til we cannot breathe anymore.

Now we walk quickly. Tt is around 6:30 P.M., and the sun just finished setting. lNe

do this at least ten more times-t/irough, under, and over tall wood and barbed­

wire fences. Though I am a runner and backpacking guide in the summers, we

rnove faster than I have ever moved without taking breaks. My 111011th gets dry

quickly as 1 hike, and 1 drink through a gallon of water every few hours. 1 carry

five gallons of water and several bottles of Gatorade and Pedialyte.

We continue walking and running, occasionally ducking under or climbing

over fences. We pull cnctus spines out of our sllins from cacti we did not see in

tlie dark night. We walk wit/10ut talking, just breathing loudly and thinking. l

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INTRODUCTIOI:

The au thor and Triqui men in the border desert. Photo courtesy of Seth M. Tlolmes.

think of the mountains to our right and how the desert might be beautiful

wider differellt circumstances. l /iear a dog bark and think of tlie towns to our

left and how tile people living there are likely asleep and comfortable. Macnrio

tells me we are in Arizona 110w. T see 110 difference.

After hiking several more hours, we stop i11 a dried-up creek bed. T am

thankful that there are 110 liidden cactus spines when I sit down. Again, we sit

in a circle, three people pull 011t food, and we all share. We rub garlic on our

shoes again and a few of us ready slingshots in our hands. The moon is almost

full, and the desert is eerily quiet.

After hiking and running another lwur, we /tear a helicopter. 1 try to hide

under tall cncti. Joaquin tells me not to look at the chopper because it can see

my eyes. T remember that Triq1ti l11111ters in the mountains of Oaxaca use j1ash­

liglzts at dusk to find the eyes of rabbits in order to shoot them. I feel like a rab­

bit, vulnerable and hunted. Macario hides under a cact1ts that lzas a rattlesnake

rattling at him, but he does not move for fear of being seen. The helicopter flies

off into the distance until we barely hear it.

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20 CH A PT ER T

Triqui men sleeping under garbage bags in ,1 dry creek bed in the border desert.
Photo by Seth :M. TTolmes.

After two more hours of hiki11g, we stop again in a dry creek. One of tlie

younger 1nen enlists help pulling large cactus spi11es from one of liis legs. We

sit in a circle sharing food. Two people share cooked grasshoppers from tile

open-air rnnrket in Tlaxiaco. The tastes link 11s to loved ones and Oaxaca.

After we /,ave hiked through blisters for many miles and I have shared all

1ny ibuprofen with the others, we stop to rest in a large, dry creek bed under

the cover of several trees. We fall asleep, using torn-open plastic trash bags as

blankets. Our coyote leaves to talk with his contact on a nearby Native

American reservation about giving us a ride past the second border check­

point to Plwenix. He returns, a11xious, telling us his co11tact no longer gives

rides because of the increased Border Patrol activity. We discuss pooli11g our

money and buying a car to drive ourselves or looking for someo11e else to

drive us. Two of the men try to convince me to drive them into Phoenix, past

the internal Border Patrol checkpoints. 1 tell then, that would be a felony and

would mean l would go to prison and lose the ability to work. They seemed

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INTRODUCTIOI: 2T

satisfied by my response, respecting the need to be able to work. After we

decide to look for another ride, our coyote sneaks off to look for a different

driver. We wait for a few hours. We rest quietly, drink Gatorade, and brush

our teeth in the creek bed.

Suddenly, our coyote runs back speaking quickly in Triqui. Two Border

Patrol agents -one black and one wllite-appear running through the trees,

jump dowll into our creek bed, and point guns at us.

F R A M I N G R T S K O N T H E B O R D E R

As l rested in the creek bed, I remember being haunted by the church’s

posters. “Is it ,vorth risking your life?” At first blush, it seems clear that

for the thousands who cross the border to work in the United States, the

answer is a resounding “Yes.” However, taking this question at face

value misses an important opportunity to question its framing. As Judith

Butler points out,11 frames shape our perceptions of an entity. Frames

allm,v an entity to break from its original context in order to be meaning­

ful in other times and spaces.

Like much of the media discourse about migrant deaths in the border­

lands, the question “ls it vvorth risking your life?” frames the crossing of

the border as an individual choice, a choice to take on mortal risk. In the

United States, this framing is used regularly to justify a lack of grief for

those who die and a lack of action to achieve meaningful equality and

change.

However, the reality of survival for my Tri qui companions shows that

it would be riskier to stay in San Miguel without work, money, food, or

education. ln this original context, crossing the border is not a choice to

engage in a risk behavior but rather a process necessary to survive, to

make life less risky.

APPRE HENDED

Tile agents tell us in Spanish to put our hands up and not to move. Tiley

instruct 11s to take out any pens, knives, and toothbrushes from 011r bags

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22 CHAPTER T

and leave them on the ground and then raise our hands in the air. The

agents separate rne from my friends anrf lead 11s all toward the road,

leaving scatterer/ pens, nail clippers, toothbrushes, and other items

littering the desert.

We wait on the curb Olltside a church to be taken to Border Patrol jail. The

white Borr/er Patrol agent says to me in English, “This doesn’t look :zood for

you, with a b1111ch of illegals. ” He asks who Team, a11d T explai11 T am a medical

and anthropology student working on my thesis and show him tl1e letters T

brought from sc/1001 and my passport.

The agents call their supervisor to let him know that they caught a

“U-S-C” [ U .S. citizen] with a “group of illegals.” The supervisor arrives

thirty minutes later and interrogates me. /- le stands above me and raises his

eyebrows, re111inrfing 111e of an angry, patronizing schoolteacher. He puts me

in the back of one Border Patrol truck and my frie11ds in another. My truck

stops once to pick up two Guatemalan men who were just apprehender/, once

to let us urinate on the side of the road at my req11est, and once to take one

of the two agents to the nearby Tndian Health Service hospital to be treated

for a rattlesnake bite lie sustained as he chased 11s. The air-conditioning unit
is not working in the back cell of our tmck, and it feels like we are baking

inside . Wln’fe we wait in the back of the truck at the Indian 1- /ealth Services

hospital, I bang on t/1e windows anrf ask the agent who is walking by to do

something about the rising heat. He cracks open the back door and secures it

with lwnrfcuffs.

As we are led into the jail, Border Patrol agents shake their heads at 111e

and ignore my companions walking by. An older man, who appears to be in

clwrge, stares me in the eyes and asks, “Do you really think your thesis is

worth breaking federal law?” Part of me wants to say that it is not just for

a thesis, but to understand our globalizing world and help work for positive

social change. Part of me wants to explain that I consulter/ with irnmigra­

tion lawyers anrf knew all the legal rmnijications of my actions and decider/

ahead of time it was worth it. 1 lower 111y gaze and say sileepishly, “1 guess

not.e” 1 don’t want to rnake him angrier tlran lie already seems to be since he

is in control now. He tells 111e they are booking me for “alien smuggling,e”

and if that does not hold tlley will get me for a $5,000 fi11e for “Entry

Witllout Inspection. ”

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23 l NT ROD UC T l O 1′:

l know the charge of alien sm11ggling is unlikely to stick, but it freaks me

out. 1 know Entry Nithout Inspection is a civil offense and am not too wor­

ried about that on my record. As though reading my thoughts, the agent tells

me that Entry Without luspection is what drug smugglers are charged with

and that will 111ake it difficult for 111c to travel ever again. I wonder to myself

w!ty t!te agents seem so focused on and angry at me when there seem to be

much more clearly dangerous criminals i11 tire borderlands on whom they

could focus their time a11d energy. T wonder wiry they are charging me with

alien s111uggli11g if tlrey all seem to admit they k11ew T was doing this “for my

thesis.” After all, l think to myself, what crazy smuggler wo11ld carry heavy

anthropology textbooks as well as letters from university officials explaining

his plans?

Once in jail, my Triqui friends are put in one cell and I alone in another.

After being held in my cell for a feiv hours and quietly singing childhood

Sunday School songs to try to distract myself, I notice that my Triqui co111pan­

ions are being led single-file past the front desk, bei11g fingerprinted, a11d /,av­

ing their photos taken. T wonder what this will do to their possibilities of apply­

ing for green cards in thee.future.

l remenrber reading in the pamphlet given to us by Grupo Beta that l have

the right to one phone call as well as food and drink every six hours. l decide

I want to call one of the immigration lawyers with whom I /Jad already

spoken. 1 look at n female red-headed age11t t/1roug!t the window and motion

like 1 nm talking on the phone. The agent simply forms her mouth in the

shape of “110” and looks away. 1 rnake the same motion to a young male

agent, and he quickly shakes his head and furrows his brow. Three

different times, agents walk up to my cell mid shake their l1eads at me

exaggeratedly mid walk away. One tells me not to look at the cell where my

friends are sitting. Apparently, he is afraid of wlrat we might comnumicate

witlr 011refaces. At one point, l count fourteen agents looking on as one of

then, rununages through rny backpack, examining my camera, tape recorder,

anthropology books, passport, and letters fro1n people in San Miguel to loved

ones in the United States.

1 read the scrntc/1es on the door in my cell. Ma11y are from wo111en to their

loved ones. Many of the messages are addressed to specific people: sisters,

friends, husbands, children. I wish T had a pen and paper to write them all

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit. Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
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24 CHAPTER T

down. Instead, I read tlie-m over and over, trying to mernorize them. I see many

versions of the same Spanish phrases “100% Mexican” or “proud to be

Mexican/’ along with statements likee” don’t lose hope/’ “God will care for

you, 1
1 “don’t let t/zem get you down. 11 There are nlso mnny messages of re tum

such as ‘Tl/ be bnck ns soon ns they drop me off” or “see you in

Chicago. 11 Unexpectedly, these messages co111fort me.

vThen a you11g Latino age11t comes to my cell to ask permission to look at the

pictures in my digital camera, T tell him T should be allowed to talk witl1 my

lawyer. He takes me to the front desk and fi11gerprints me i11 front of the other

cells of apprehended migrants. Several agents look on idly as I call the Arizona

lawyer with whom I cons11lted earlier. She lets me know she will come in the

next day to meet with rne. She says the Arizona co11rts are overloaded, and it

,nay be a month before I haveen hearing and am al/cnued nnotiler phone call. She

offers to call my friends and family. 1 start giving lier phone numbers for mot/zer

and father, brother, another lawyer, and a few of my closest frie11ds. 1 begi11 to

cry, exhausted, imagini11g life in prison as T wait for the legal system to process

my case. 77111t is the last moment rny friends from San Miguel see me. As T cry

on the phone, they are take11 away, put 011 aelms, and deported back to Mexico.

After my phone call, I ant taken back to my cell. I wonder how my Triqui

friends are being treated. I mn forced to look at t/1e wall on tfte other side of my

cell and not allowed to look out rny cell’s window, even after my Triqui corn­

panions are gone. 1 want to use the toilet but avoid it since the toilet is in the

open for everyone to see at the end of my cell. Besides, there is no toilet pnper in

the cell. In addition, 1 am starting to feel hungry and thirsty. Again, 1 remem­

ber reading that Border Patrol detainees have the right to food a11d drink every

six hours during detentio11. I look at tlte clock 011 tl1c wall. Tt has been over

eight hours. I remember tile cold responses I received asking for my phone call

tlrro11g’1 tlie window and decide not to try.

I am deeply reliever/ when an agent comes to ,ny cell and lets me know they

decided not to prosecute me wit’1 smuggling and would be giving me sirnply

the $5,000 fine for Entry Without inspection. I wonder to 111yself wlw mnde

this decision and want to thank them for being rensonable, saving their own

tirne and ,nine. 1 ask for something to drink nnd eat nnri some toilet pnper. He

comes back with six crackers and a ti11y bottle of an orange-colored dri11k (with

0% juice, accordi11g to tlte lnbel), no toilet paper.

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25 l NT ROD UC T l O 1′:

On my way out, I file a formal complaint against the two officers who did

not let me cnll my lawyer. T/1e manager taking my complaint asks me three

times, “You do understand the nature of your crime, right?” It seems that she

feels the need to remind me that 1 a111 the one in the wrong, not the Border

Patrol agents. 1 wonder why law enforce111ent officers seem often to lack respect

for the otlier human witiI who111 they are interacting. 1 wonder how 1 will pay

the fine. l wonder how my Triqui friends are doing and how it would feel to

know you had to attempt the long trek again.

” r s I T W O R TH R I S K I N G Y O U R L I FE ? ”

In much public health and global health discourse, as in the case of border

death, the focus remains on individual risk behaviors. ln much of the

mainstream media, migrant workers are seen as deserving their fates, even

untimely deaths, because they are understood to have chosen voluntarily

to cross the border for their own economic gain. However, as pointed out

above, my Triqui companions explain that they are forced to cross the bor­
der. In nddition, the distinction beh,veen economic and political migration

is often blurry in the context of internntionnl policies enforcing neoliberal

free markets as well ns active military repression of indigenous people

who seek collective socioeconomic improvement in southern Mexico.

Especially important is the U.S.-initiated North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA) banning economic barriers, including tariffs,

between signatory countries. Thus, the Mexican government was forced

to erase tariffs, including that on corn, the primary crop produced by

indigenous families in southern Mexico. However, NAFTA and other

free trade policies do not ban government subsidies. Thus the U.S. gov­

ernment was allowed to increase corn subsidies year after year, effec­

tively enncting an inverse tariff ngainst Mexican corn. fn addition, such

subsidies are only possible for relatively wealthy countries and could not

be enacted by the relatively poor Mexican government. During my field­

work in San Miguel, l watched genetically engineered, corporately

grown corn from the U.S.e1vlidwest underselling local, family-grown corn

in the same village.12

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26 CH A PT ER T

How can the immense dangers on the border be worth the risk? On

the other side of the equation are heartless global politics and economic

markets. At this point, staying in San Miguel means not having enough

money for food and not being able to buy the school uniforms required

to allow your children to attend public schools. The calculus involves

slow but certain death on one side of the equation and immense risks

on the other. Staying in San Miguel without sending a family member

north involves a slow, communal death by the unequal, “free” market.

Staying in San Miguel today means putting your life at risk, slowly and

surely.

It is critically important for anthropologists as well as global and pub­

lic health professionals to reframe suffering, death, and risk to incorpo­

rate analyses of social, political, and economic structures. In order to

ameliorate suffering and death in the borderlands, we must focus

together on the legal and political apparatuses that produce labor migra­

tion in the first place. Policies that shore up inequalities, like NAFTA and

the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CA FTA), must be renegoti­

ated and health reform legislation must be broadened to include struc­
turally vulnerable populations, such as migrants. Without this refram­

ing, we will continue to see not only an externalization of the costs of

reproduction but also an individualization of risk and responsibility.

When risk and blame are individualized, the solutions imagined and

interventions planned focus on changing the behavior of the individual.

However, attempting to intervene on individual behavior in such con­

texts draws attention away from the structural forces producing 1nortal

danger and death in the first place. Without reorienting our understand­

ing of risk and our subsequent interventions, we will continue to witness

hundreds of human beings dying each year in the borderlands and suf ­

fering throughout the rest of their migration circuits.

AFTER BETNG R E L E A S E D

After calling nn acquaintance in Phoenix, 1 walk through the deserted town in

tl1e dark to a Greyl1011nd bus station nnd catch a Pl10e11ix-bo1rnd bus. I rest

tliree days in tire house of this acquaintance-who, ironically, studies nnd

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
E•book, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013, https://hdl.handle. net/2027/heb33915.0001.001.

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27 INTRODUCTIOI:

writes about border death-recovering from the trip physically and emotion­

ally. There is an intense tlwnderstonn ·with downpours of rnin and flooding,

and I worry for t/Je safehJ and /Jealtlt of my friends if they are again in the des­

ert. Not knowing what else to do, 1 fly back to California a few days later.

1 wait in California, calling Macario’s cell phone every Jew days to see if 1

can reach him. One of my anthropology c/ass111ates offers to throw a fund-rais­

ing party for me to ltelp me pay off my fine. The party never ltappws, but the

offer feels supportive. After a week, my Triq1ti co111pa11ions arrive in Madera,

California. One of t/ze yo11nger men doesn’t make it back d11ring 111y fieldwork

because he did not have money to pay the coyote and drivers a second time.

Instead, lie returned to his family in Oaxaca.

When Macario and I meet again in Madera the next week, /Je tells me

that he suffered a lot crossing the seco11d time. He briefly speaks of blisters

and more rattlesnakes, but he does not wa11t to talk much about it because he

is afraid others would make fun of him for not being tougher. He shows 111e

tlte large, popped blisters on his feet 1111d tl1e !toles i11 his socks. He tells me

tltat a co11ple of the g11ys in the group blamed me for bringing bad luck. He

also says that just as they were being deported, arrivi11g at tlie border in
Nogales, Arizona, the driver of the Border Patrol bus turned around. f- le

took t/Jern back to the station and /Jad them sign a statement in English that

t/Jey could not read. T/Jey were told it said t/Jat I was their friend, had lived

in their ho111etow11, and was not a coyote. They finally arrived in Mexico

well after dark.

B O O K O R G A N I Z A T I O N

Although I have written this book with the primary format of substantial

chapters, I attempt to present the unfolding narrntive nature of the expe­

rience of migrntion. This strntegy demonstrntes the everyday joys and

suffering involved in migration as well as the bodily experiences of

multisited fieldv,rork in transit. Conversations, interviews, and quotes

are based on either tape recordings or my own handwritten and typed

notes. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. VVhile I have

changed the names of the people and some places described in this book

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
E-book, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013, https://hdl.handle. net/2027/heb33915.0001.001.

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28 CH A PT ER T

to protect the idenhhes of those who entrusted me with entree into their

lives, l maintain to the best of my ability the details and richness of real

experiences and observations throughout.

In Chapter 2, I explore the critical significance of understanding U.S.­

Mexico migration as well as the importance of an ethnography that

focuses not only on the bodies of the people under study but also the

body of the anthropologist. Tn Chapter 3, T describe firsthand the labor

segregation in American agriculture that leads to highly structured hier­

archies of ethnicity, citizenship, and suffering. Here T use ethnicity not as

a genetic or biological given but as a somatic and social category. As

described by Mary Weisman tel and others, 13 the social and economic his­

tories of people not only reshape their bodies over ti1T1e but also shape

the perceptions of those bodies in such a vvay as to establish their ethnic­

ity. ln addition, ethnicity can be understood to be something akin to

Althusser’s concept of interpellation, 14 in ,,vhich a human subject is posi­

tioned by social and economic structures in a specific category within

power hierarchies and simultaneously recognizes oneself and others to

be members of these specific categories. Sickness as the embodiment of

violence is the focus of the fourth chapter, drawing on the experiences of

three Triqui migrant laborers to show that illness is often the manifesta­

hon of structural, symbolic, and political violence, as well as, at times,

resistance and rebellion. Chapter 5 endeavors to make sense of the aeon­

textual lenses through which physicians and nurses see the plights of

their migrant patients and, thereby, inadvertently add insult to injury by

blaming the victims of structural inequalities.

Chapter 6 considers the crucial issue of how such hierarchies become

taken for granted by analyzing the nonnalization of social and health

inequalities as an example of symbolic violence.15 For those at each rung

of the social ladder, perceptions and assumptions naturalize the position

of those above, of those below, and- perh<1ps more disturbingly- of

one’s own group and oneself. This chapter prompts worries about repre­

sentations of marginalized people, keeping in mind the important cri­

tiques of the “culture of poverty.” However, along with Philippe

Bourgois, 16 I believe it is important to portray marginalized people as full

human beings, showing the odds and prejudices they are up against. In

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
E-book, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013, https://hdl.handle. net/2027/heb33915.0001.001.

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29 l NT ROD UC T l O 1′:

line with Laura Nader’s call to “study up” -to analyze the powerful and

not just the marginalized-this book takes a “vertical slice,” exploring

every level of the social hierarchies related to the farm.’7 The conclusion

of this book deals with the future for Triqui migrants, the possibility of

hope, and the difficulty of resistance and change. It issues a call to listen

to migrant laborers, enact solidarity with their social movements, and

work tovvard equality at multiple levels from micro farm practices to

macro global issues.

I attempt to portray and analyze the lives and experiences of Macario

and my other Tri qui companions in order to understand better the social

and symbolic context of suffering among migrant laborers. I hope that

understanding the mechanisms by which certain classes of people

become written off and social inequalities become taken for granted vvill

play a part in undoing these very mechanisms and the structures of

which they are part. Tt is my hope that those who read these pages will

be moved in mutual humanity, 1 8 such that representations of and policies

toward migrant laborers become more humane, just, and responsive to

migrant laborers as people themselves. The American public could begin

to see Mexican migrant workers as fellow humans, skilled and hard

workers, people treated unfairly with the odds against them. I hope these

recognitions vvill change public opinion and employer and clinical prac­

tices, as well as policies related to economics, immigration, and labor. ln

addition, 1 hope this book will help anthropologists and other social sci­

entists understand the ways in which perception, social hierarchy, and

naturalization work more broadly. With these hopes in mind, I invite

you, the reader, into the journey of migration along with me, Macario,

and the other indigenous Mexican farmworkers in these pages.

Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers In the United States.
E-book, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013, https://hdl.handle. net/2027/heb33915.0001.001.

i i iDownloaded on behalf of Flor da Internat onal Univers ty, Miami, FL