Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be

Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition

James D. Faubion, George E. Marcus, James D. Faubion, George E. Marcus

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801475115
• eBook ISBN: 9780801463587
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative models for professional training in fieldwork and its intellectual contexts.

The work done by contributors to Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be articulates, at the strategic point of career-making research, features of this transformation in progress. Setting aside traditional anxieties about ethnographic authority, the authors revisit fieldwork with fresh initiative. In search of better understandings of the contemporary research process itself, they assess the current terms of the engagement of fieldworkers with their subjects, address the constructive, open-ended forms by which the conclusions of fieldwork might take shape, and offer an accurate and useful description of what it means to become—and to be—an anthropologist today.

Contributors: Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jae A. Chung, Aalen University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Michael M. J. Fischer, MIT; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Jennifer A. Hamilton, Hampshire College; Christopher M. Kelty, UCLA; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Nahal Naficy, Rice University; Kristin Peterson, University of California, Irvine; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston-Clear Lake

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Part 1

REFLECTIONS ON FIRST FIELDWORK AND AFTER

1

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PHANTOM EPISTEMOLOGIES

Kristin Peterson

In 2001, I attended the annual African Studies Association meetings a few months after returning from dissertation field research in Nigeria. I went to a panel where a scholar gave a talk about Nigerian capital flight and transnational corruption. I wanted a copy of the paper for a couple of reasons. One is that even though I had just completed research on AIDS, development aid, and the intellectual property law that governs HIV treatment access, the paper and certainly my own fieldwork experience stimulated my thinking about a troubling Orientalist notion that distinguishes between legitimate (transnational business and aid practices) and illegitimate (internal state corruption) capital flight. A second reason I wanted the paper was because the author had quantified the level of capital flight—upwards of several trillion dollars over the last ten years. She presented numbers that sounded firm and confident when all I had heard while in and out of Nigeria was only speculative, though it indeed involved incredible and varying sums of money. How much was stolen out of Nigeria was anyone’s guess. I wanted to see what this certainty was all about.

The oral presentation critiqued the usual calculation of capital flight—calculations that ignore off-the-books or shadow economic dynamics. To put a value on capital flight, to explicitly calculate it, means to do so with information that can be accessed and abstracted. Such approaches cannot account for secret deals, hidden Geneva-based bank accounts, or the way fleeing capital comes back into the country to fund government privatization schemes or other lucrative deals. As such, the literature tends to fetishize calculable material objects and spaces such as the state treasury, which is described by Nigerians and outsiders (and I don’t dispute this) as being looted by state officials. The implication is that the “native” state alone possesses agency or that the state is a monolithic entity without internal contests over the fiscal management of any given political geography (Emeagwali 2001; Krugman 1998). The discourse here is about indigenous greed and not the many different national and international monetary and legal policies or European and North American banks and actors at work. The sole focus on indigenous activities contributes to a phenomenon that easily misses a form of state and transnational consumption held over from the days of indirect rule. What sort of analysis would be possible if the murky realms of capital movement were just as significant as the visible ones?

One of the objectives of the conference that launched this volume was to understand how apprentice ethnography largely encounters the “already known” while developing and crafting ethnographic training. Yet my feeling is that the “already known” has been overstated—data, results, and surprises are buttressed by pre-existing expectations, which empty the prospect of something not yet in view. To get at something else lying within our own methodological frameworks, I propose the idea of “phantom epistemologies.” Specifically, I refer to empirical elusiveness, unspoken common sense, a politics of (in)commensurability, and how the presence of any “ghost” becomes viewable to those who believe—these are the ethnographic entryways into what is knowable. Yet what is knowable will often lie in the realm of uncertainty; that is, the very thing of empiricism cannot be absolutely defined in the presence of phantoms and unknowable possibility. My thinking is partly informed by “shadows” theorized by Carolyn Nordstrom and James Ferguson. Both refer to “shadow” political economies that are liminal, hidden, or simply unaccounted for. James Ferguson writes:

A shadow is not only a dim or empty likeness. It also implies a bond and a relationship. A shadow, after all, is not a copy by an attached twin—a shadow is what sticks with you. Likeness here implies not only resemblance but also a connection, a proximity, an equivalent, even an identity. A shadow, in this sense, is not simply a negative space, a space of absence; it is a likeness, an inseparable other-who-is-also-oneself to whom one is bound. (2006, 17)

The desire here is directed toward recognition, not one marked by an empiricism that provides a finiteness or certainty of something, but a recognition of some hidden essence, implication, connection—one that sits, for a moment, underneath or beside our apprehension. While the shadow waits to become known in some concrete form, a phantom epistemology does not count on revelation. Rather than dismissing our quandaries of “not having all the data” that may not be gotten, a phantom can inhabit the data in ways that do not always desire the fullest of answers—one that allows the unknowable to remain as powerful an analytical figure as the known. That is, the phantom—the stuff of familiarity, yet also the stuff of the unknowable—is the ethnographic object of inquiry, rather than being some shadow whose materializing requires further patience and digging. Finding one’s way through (or even detecting at all) the presence of such ghosts is difficult, as the latter occur at different levels of scale, not only in fieldwork but at the level of interpretive circulation. Indeed, both capital flight and the conference paper I was seeking were “phantom indexes” of an AIDS epidemic in which capital and drugs were made scarce via political-economic processes that generated a common sense about political leadership, development aid, and elusive practices of governance.

After we both returned home from the meetings, I e-mailed the presenter asking for her paper. She responded by stating that I should get the original unpublished paper from which she derived her own talk—but she needed to get permission. Once that was done, I was told that I could not use the author’s real name or institutional affiliation. The author of the original paper claimed that due to the sensitive nature of the material many powerful people would be exposed, which would cause trouble for him and his place of work. I understood, agreed to these terms completely, and anxiously read the paper.

The truly remarkable aspect of this unpublished piece was that it recounted the same stories I had heard on the street from people selling fruit, from taxi and bus drivers, from the home of one of Nigeria’s wealthiest men, from Nigeria’s most senior UN officials and, indeed, in articles about post–military dictatorship Nigeria. These are stories such as: a governor of one of the oil producing delta states fears he could lose his bid for reelection and calls in a trusted ally, one of the transnational oil companies, for help. As soon as the polls close, the governor’s men are in place and clear the way for the oil company’s helicopter to land. The ballots are stolen, the helicopter flies them off to the governor’s mansion, and later that evening he is reelected. Or this one: a newly installed military general travels to Geneva, meets with a top bank official, and inside his office pulls out a gun and demands, “Give me the names of all of those from the previous regime with secret bank accounts!” The bank official drops to his knees and declares that he would rather die right there than trade away the identity of his clients. The gun-toting man then pulls out a suitcase filled with money in large denominations, puts his gun away, chuckles to himself, and says, “You can have my account and look after my money!”

The point of the paper was to argue that the sociopolitical truths about corruption are often anecdotal data; and, too often, the very definitions of corruption do not take into account its reciprocal role, one that begins to widen the predominant understandings of capital flight. That is, “what happens” in Geneva or London manages to circulate back to the Nigerian city and village street in a way that indicates something far more than the stereotypical idea that Nigeria is the most corrupt place on earth. Rather, Nigeria is an open society in terms of public political debates combined with long-term windfall oil profits where the state remains the primary form of accumulation. Such a scenario allows a view inside a more secretive and perhaps predominant form of capital mobility and accumulation that represents a huge proportion of the world’s wealth; this mobility is rarely accounted for, even though authors such as Graham Hancock (1994), Carolyn Nordstrom (2004), and William Reno (1999) have pointed us in these directions.

The empirical is difficult to tag here because realities and elusiveness exist in the same space. The reality is that capital flees Nigeria and international banks provide secretive and safe harbor, that state officials are investigated for corruption, that wealthy elites perform grandiose displays of their own material worlds in public places—in the view and earshot of those who have not eaten for days. Indeed, Daniel Smith (2006) has eloquently pointed out that the prevailing ideas and discourses of corruption are launched via inequalities on national, community, and individual levels. Hunger and the thin line between public/private performance together facilitate the circulation and scale of the stories themselves, and so do development workers and academics. Their elusiveness consists in their being stories resonating at the level of common sense, circulating in the most powerful ways, that have literally defined a sense of national public discourse and what it means to be Nigerian. Historian Luise White argues that the stories of rumor need to be taken at “face value, as everyday descriptions or ordinary occurrences” (2000, 5). In referring to accounts of bloodsucking during the colonial period in Africa she writes, “the inaccuracies of these stories make them exceptionally reliable historical sources as well: they offer historians a way to see the world the way the storytellers did, as a world of vulnerability and unreasonable relationships” (5). Stories of capital flight are equally instructive because they provide a space for ordinary people to narrate inequality and how they engage the state (see Gupta 1995), and, indeed, provide profound insight into the dynamics of both militarism and, more recently, civilian rule, often referred to as “democracy.” These “knowables” emerge in secondhand stories that reflect a reality that truly cannot be unreal. Yet, the contours of “reality” are also not always traceable.

These phenomena are distinct from partial or situated knowledge, which recognizes that the possibilities of knowing never lie within an imagined totality, that knowing can be achieved only in parts—and apprehending such parts is shaped by positionality and subjectivity. Douglas Holmes and George Marcus (2005) employ the term “para-ethnography,” with which they identify the ethnographic knowledge of central bankers such as Alan Greenspan—a knowledge that, more often than not, emerges in the form of anecdote. Anecdote, as a crucial form of data, is gathered by such experts in order to produce reports on the status of the national American economy, but it disappears as acknowledged data in the reports themselves. Para-ethnography functions at the level of both method and knowledge and, like phantom epistemologies, must determine and enter into the shadows of knowledge and systems. Phantom epistemologies do not seek out parts in order to fit into a whole that is imagined to exist out there somewhere. Rumor, anecdote, stories, evasiveness, and not being able to ever know are their own sets of data and knowledge. They point us not in the direction of desired concreteness, as in “facts,” but rather offer an analytical opening to something just as fascinating and analytically provocative as a traditional sense of the empirical. That is, the phantom asks us to rethink the very essence and contours of the “empirical” itself.

When the rumor on the street in Lagos, for example, is that forty percent of all Nigerian crude oil “goes missing” every year, it is not a matter of believing or not believing the numbers. Many of these numbers simply do not exist as something that has already been calculated; or if they do, the numbers are completely different among official and unofficial quarters for any given community, institution, or individual who has something at stake in them. For example, Benue state, located in the central part of the country, reported the highest percentage of HIV infection in 1999 at eighteen percent. The numbers did not garner any additional funding or declarations for special emergency relief. Rather, they created the stigmatization of an entire state. Two years later, Benue reported that its infection rates were below ten percent without providing an explanation of, or hypothesis for, the supposed decline.

Another example: Alhaji Umaru Dikko was a Nigerian minister and had the sole power to grant import permits. Wealthy expatriates took suitcases of money to his back door in order to keep their businesses going. Some say he collected over US$5 billion. Once Dikko’s Nigerian colleagues heard about the amount they were not getting, they set out forcibly to take their share (the trickle down of payments inside any business/government agency is expected and a standard procedure). After escaping across the Nigerian border (the anecdote: by tossing wads of cash out both windows as he approached armed border guards, distracting them and zipping on past into the Republic of Benin), he was eventually found and kidnapped in London (the anecdote: while an Israeli anaesthetist kept him unconscious—suspicious customs officials detected and found them inside a crate; it was suspected the Nigerian High Commission ordered the kidnapping). Nigeria requested his extradition on the grounds that he had stolen over US$5 billion. Publicly the United Kingdom invited Nigeria to submit the necessary paperwork to initiate extradition proceedings. But anecdotal knowledge and rumor claimed that if extradition procedures were commenced on the grounds that he stole money, the U.K. threatened to release the names of all those Nigerians holding more than US$5 billion in British banks. Dikko was never extradited and remains in London.1

While drawing on Foucault’s concept of epistemes and Thomas Kuhn’s notions of limits and paradigms, Nancy Scheper-Hughes has provocatively argued that the structure and norms of research are situated within naturalized paradigms of positivist research practices (Foucault 1973; Kuhn 1962; Scheper-Hughes 1997). She has called for a “demography without numbers” that would render both the social and the biological powerful analytical indicators and constraints to demonstrate what gets missed or passed over in conventional quantitative research. Yet not even numbers can always constitute the “factual.” Numbers can work the same way that stories and anecdotes do—capital flight and HIV infection rates calculated with only cursory sets of numbers do not take into account the shifting alliances that produce numerical data in the first place; and here it is productive to think about the relationship between secrets and official numbers or official numbers as secrets. Secrets are crucial data points because they must operate at public and private levels. As the Dikko story above shows, the implications inside the anecdotal knowledge are that capital flight, generated by corruption, is not condemned but highly encouraged. The secret is juxtaposed against an idea publicly articulated by banks and government that corruption is a no-no. Here, the anecdote reveals a productive tension between the allowable and the condemned. The tension functions as yet another shadow that masks a rarely accounted-for capital mobility. Therefore, numbers can often only remain inside the common sense of a national consciousness that seeks to explain the conditions of its own existence. This was the crux of the ethnographic challenge for me: not discerning what was newly knowable inside the givens, but figuring out how possible it was to discern the givens themselves.

Revisiting Multi-sited Ethnography for a Moment

Following elusive “facts” and the traveling fantasia of stories is one of the modes of operation that multi-sited ethnography proposed as its initial experiment. One of the great misunderstandings that I have encountered about multi-sited ethnography is that it is often viewed as a methodological approach that is purely spatial or simply a matter of scaling. That is, multiple physical sites of research tend automatically to count as a thorough rendering of any given object of analysis, which ultimately collapses the “comparative” with the “multi-sited.” This collapse misses the point of the Writing Culture debates in the 1980s and 1990s, which in large measure were responding to both 1970s critiques that linked anthropology to imperial...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword: Renewable Ethnography
• Introduction
• Part 1 REFLECTIONS ON FIRST FIELDWORK AND AFTER
• Part 2 ON THE ETHICS OF BEING AN ANTHROPOLOGIST (NOW)
• Part 3 TEACHING FIELDWORK THAT IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE
• Bibliography
• Contributors