Anthropologists in the Field

Cases in Participant Observation

Lynne Hume, Jane Mulcock

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231509220
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

All too often anthropologists and other social scientists go into the field with unrealistic expectations. Different cultural milieus are prime ground for misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and interrelational problems. This book is an excellent introduction to real-world ethnography, using familiar and not-so-familiar cultures as cases. The book covers participant observation and ethnographic interviewing, both short and long term. These methodologies are open to problems such as lack of communication, depression, hostility, danger, and moral and ethical dilemmas—problems that are usually sanitized for publication and ignored in the curriculum. Among the intriguing topics covered are sexualized and violent environments, secrecy and disclosure, multiple roles and allegiances, insider/outsider issues, and negotiating friendship and objectivity.

PART I POSITIONED ENGAGEMENTS

Patty Kelly

CHAPTER 1

Awkward Intimacies

Prostitution, Politics, and Fieldwork in Urban Mexico*

In the early spring of 1999 the people of the ejido¹ Francisco I. Madero were seeking to reclaim their land—four hectares located at the end of a lonely dirt road, eight kilometers east of the bustling city center of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico. Since 1991, however, the once communally held agricultural lands had been occupied by nearly one hundred and fifty female prostitutes selling their services from within eighteen módulos, or barracks-style buildings, to men of the laboring classes. The land, now called the Zona Galáctica (Galactic Zone), is a “tolerance zone,” a legal brothel zone administered by Tuxtla’s municipal government. The ejidatarios (communal landholders) warned that if the city did not return their lands by April 2, they would “arrive well armed” and evict the inhabitants of the Zone, shedding blood if necessary. The Zona Galáctica was my fieldsite.

In this essay, I examine the trials of undertaking research in the Galactic Zone and explore the ways in which the personal and political challenges unique to this fieldsite enhanced my understanding of my informants and myself, ultimately providing me with new insights into anthropological theory and ethnographic practice. I suggest here that the process of fieldwork is as important as the final written product and that the “trials” of field research are as important as the “successes” (and sometimes even constitute the successes). In the struggle to write a cohesive and coherent account of field research, the moments of illumination that emerge from the challenges and awkward moments in the field can easily, but should not, be lost.

The Galactic Zone’s awkwardness had many dimensions: it was a brothel—a highly sexualized environment occupied by a population labeled deviant and dangerous by hegemonic norms and cultural moral codes. It was also a highly conflictual environment with extreme factionalism and shifting loyalties among and between Zone workers and staff. As one worker said, “Our daily bread here is arguing and gossip.” Fieldwork in the Zone required delicacy and a balance of neutrality and engagement. The awkwardness of the Galáctica was further compounded by its location within a city run by the right wing National Action Party (PAN), which placed itself in opposition to the entrenched ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in a militarized state in the throes of severe political, economic, and social turmoil.¹ It was under these conditions, further enhanced by global political-economic trends, that the ejido conflict erupted. The many awkward moments I experienced, including this event and the subsequent threatened loss of the Galáctica, had a pivotal impact upon my understanding of my fieldsite.

The Setting

Tuxtla is not a place for foreigners—the ugly new capital of Chiapas is without attractions. . . . It is like an unnecessary postscript to Chiapas, which should be all wild mountains and old churches and swallowed ruins and Indians plodding by.

—Greene (1939:194)

On New Year’s Eve 1994, a small army of Mayan peasants, calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), emerged from the jungle lowlands of eastern Chiapas to declare war upon the corrupt government of Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and upon the existing and unjust order of things, which kept most of Chiapas’ indigenous peoples living in serflike conditions. Following a few days of skirmishes, the EZLN retreated back to the jungle, where they remained. While this event propelled Chiapas, one of Mexico’s poorest states, to the forefront of the global political scene, the region was already well known to anthropologists, who had been working with the indigenous populations of the Highlands for decades. The Chiapas constructed in anthropological texts was indigenous, rural, and agricultural. This image was reinforced by media coverage of events following the 1994 uprising, which also highlighted the desperate poverty of the indigenous farmers trying to survive in a rapidly changing economic system that favored agribusiness over small-scale and subsistence production.

As capital of the state and known since 1994 as the birthplace of the New Mexican Revolution, Tuxtla Gutiérrez is not what one may think it should be. Unlike the Chiapas portrayed by the social scientists, Tuxtla is urban, ladino (mestizo), and relatively prosperous.² The city has a population of nearly half a million, only two percent of whom speak an indigenous language (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Información 1993:60). Most Tuxtlecos (residents of Tuxtla) earn their living in the commercial and service sectors; the city’s consumer culture is highly developed, with businesses such as McDonald’s, Sam’s Club (a Wal-Mart affiliated store), and the Plaza Cristal (an upscale shopping mall) dotting the urban landscape. While Chiapas is one of Mexico’s most impoverished states, Tuxtla is one of the nation’s least marginalized municipalities (Archivo Municipal de Tuxtla Gutiérrez [CIACH] 1997:7). The city attracts immigrants from Central America and southern Mexico who seek the economic prosperity they cannot find at home. Some seek this prosperity in the Galactic Zone. I arrived in Tuxtla to study something in the region that is not generally studied: urbanism, the nonindigenous population, and commercial sex. I settled in hot, lowland Tuxtla, the “ugly” city bypassed by researchers and tourists alike as they make their way to the temperate, pine-forested highlands or as close to the jungle as the military and migration authorities allow. In Tuxtla I thought I would escape the politics of land that so infused (and, in my mind, unbalanced) the anthropology of Chiapas. I would study sex and cities, not land and rebellion. And, in part, I did.

Into the Galactic Zone

Few social science researchers enter the contemporary brothel. Studies of sex work are often historical, the research done in the comparative safety of the past. There are, of course, reasons for this. As Ronald Weitzer (2000:13) notes, “This world [of commercial sex] does not offer easy access to the outsider, which helps to account for the paucity of research in many key areas; but gaining access should be viewed as a challenge rather than an insuperable barrier.”

Surprisingly, gaining access to the Galactic Zone and its inhabitants proved to be perhaps the least challenging part of the fieldwork experience—it was once I was in that things became difficult. To gain access to the Zone, I only had to endure weeks of countless lunches with a dear platonic friend who had worked there in the past, and who promised me he would give me the phone number of the doctor currently in charge at the brothel’s onsite health center, the Anti-Venereal Medical Service (SMAV). After many meals together, it slowly began to dawn on me that perhaps my dear friend was keeping the phone number from me so that we could continue to lunch together. Maybe he hoped for more than my company and chicken in pumpkin seed sauce. I grew agitated and finally kindly but firmly told him that I desperately needed to begin my fieldwork and that if he was not going to help me I would have to leave Tuxtla and work somewhere else. This was untrue but effective. By the next day I had an appointment with the Zone’s head doctor.

I next secured permission from the municipal government, led by the National Action Party (PAN). I feared that my contrasting political views would make me an unwelcome presence to city officials. My views never came up. I met with Tuxtla’s Director of Public Health, a panista (member of the PAN) and a gynecologist, who introduced me to the mayor, also a panista and a gynecologist. Young, charismatic, and handsome, the mayor extended a hand to me and modestly said in English, “Hello. I am the mayor.” I liked him immediately. I would be studying regulated prostitution in a city run by young, handsome, right-wing gynecologists.

Inside the brothel, I was somewhat shy at first. During the first weeks, not a day passed when I did not ask myself questions such as: “How dare I bother these people for my own selfish interests?” “How the hell did I end up here?” “Wouldn’t it be better if I just went home and took a nap?” In part, my concerns stemmed from the potential contradictions between feminism and field research and the ways in which the development of rapport in the field can ironically put research subjects at “greater risk of exploitation, betrayal, and abandonment by the researcher” (Stacey 1988:21). I did not want to approach the women, but found that I did not have to. Many of them came to me. I was first approached by Magda and Adriana, who sat me down and instructed me on how to go about my research. I must be friendly, they said, social. I must go out and drink with them. This was not a problem—I like to drink. But they also warned me that I must be careful, hinting at the divisiveness that I would later find permeated the Zone. Magda said that were I to associate with her too frequently, people might begin to talk, since she is a lesbian (one of many working the Galactic Zone). I shrugged and felt thankful for my upbringing—a childhood that included some brief but memorable times spent in bars chatting with diverse groups of people (my father was a bartender), and less than placid adolescent and college years. No amount of anthropological training or theory could have prepared me for the field as life had. As Watson (1999:4) suggests, while in the field “we use ourselves and our own personal experience as primary research tools.”

While entering the world of the brothel went relatively smoothly, its awkwardness as a fieldsite manifested in other ways. First, the women who worked there sold sex. In this culture purchasing sex is acceptable, but selling it is not, and the women of the Zone are stigmatized for doing so. During my year in the Galactic Zone I came to understand the terrible power of stigma.

My introduction to stigma and shame came early. I had returned to Tuxtla to do fieldwork after my first and only visit to the Galactic Zone the previous year. The first time, I was driven there in a private car. The second time, I was on my own. To get to the Zone—located at the end of a long isolated road dubbed by local newspapers the “Highway of Death” due to the occasional murders and assaults that happen there—it is necessary to drive or take one of the microbuses or “pirate” taxis that depart from the city center carrying sex workers, staff, and clients. Not owning a car, I found myself wandering Tuxtla’s busy downtown alone, searching for the rumored terminal from which the pirate taxis departed. I walked for a few hours, repeatedly passing the same butcher shop, flower sellers, and vendors. I thought myself a feminist, a woman able to endure and even shrug off the judgments of others, but I was unable to ask a stranger for directions to the Galactic Zone’s taxi terminal. I was not ready to bear the raised eyebrows and stares I feared would accompany any answer I received. I was silenced and disempowered.

Though with time the stigma had less of a hold on me, throughout the year it impacted on my actions and words. In Chiapas, and throughout much of Mexico, the gringa (foreign woman) is believed by many to be a highly sexual creature, and, in Tuxtla, a gringa who also has chosen to do work in the Zone could be accused of morbosidad, morbid perversity. While close friends knew the nature of my research, I often lied to neighbors and casual acquaintances, replying to their inquiries about my work with vague references to public health and social science. When outside the Zone, I preferred not to be too closely associated with it.

Due to stigma, sex workers often keep their work a secret, especially from those closest to them. When outside the Zone, sex workers never refer to the place by name; rather they refer to it euphemistically as allá, or “there.” As my relationships with the sex workers grew deeper and they invited me into their homes, I became responsible for maintaining their secrets, lying to their acquaintances and even to their children about how it was I came to know their mother or where I worked. Such lies produce a sense of alienation, create situations of inauthenticity in daily life, and are incredibly stressful to maintain.

When the false lives created by sex workers begin to crack and fissure, the results are sometimes painful. This became apparent at a birthday party I attended for Paula, the teenage daughter of Vivi, a prostitute who worked in a private house. The festivities began at La Palapa, a popular bar-restaurant. I was surprised and saddened to find that the people attending the party were largely affiliated with the Zone: taxi drivers, sex workers, a food vendor, and myself. The only other guests were Vivi’s younger daughter, Mari, and a friend of Paula’s. We ate botanas, small dishes of vegetables, meats, and cheeses, drank, and watched the show. I was impressed by Miguel, an elderly Zone food vendor, for drinking what appeared to be simply mineral water, and more impressed when I realized hours later that he had quietly been downing a large number of vodka tonics. Before we left the bar to head back to Vivi’s house for cake, she approached me in the bathroom and lowered her voice, saying of her daughters, “They don’t know what I do.” I reassured her that I would keep her secret.

At Vivi’s house we sat on the porch on rickety wooden chairs and continued to drink. More workers from the Zona arrived and we all, Vivi’s daughters included, gathered in a circle, talking. Miguel sat in his chair, concentrating, it appeared, on not falling out of it. He then began to talk as drunk people often do. His big watery brown eyes tried to focus upon me as he said loudly, “I love you. I love you more than anyone. I love you more than anyone in Mexico. I love you more than anyone in the Galactic Zone!” The last two words cut through the warm night air and everyone fell silent—it seemed a long and sobering silence. Finally someone shouted, “Miguel!” and scolded him. Even in his drunken state, he appeared to know he had done something very, very wrong. And as silent as it had been only moments before, conversation suddenly erupted everywhere, as we attempted to cover up the awkward moment.

Stigma controls, disempowers, and divides. Throughout my time in Mexico I witnessed again and again the difficulties experienced by women in similar situations. I also learned that I, a foreigner, an anthropologist, a feminist, an outsider, was not immune to the powerful effects of stigma, and I recognized how potentially devastating those effects could be.

Many awkward but productive moments were generated by my identity as a young woman new to the brothel whose role there was unclear to many. In the Zone, there were four types of women: sex workers, food vendors, SMAV staff, and landlords of the workers’ quarters. During my early days in the Zone, I was most often mistaken for a prostitute, which was not an unreasonable assumption. Propositions by clients and their reactions upon finding out I was not a sex worker were always illuminating. I learned about the distinction between a “decent” woman and a sex worker. When one potential client, an older gentleman, realized his error, he apologized profusely, paid my microbus fare back to the city center, and as we rode along proceeded to give me the standard tourist information on the sights of Tuxtla and Chiapas. He was embarrassed not simply for “insulting” me, but also for revealing himself to me as a purchaser of sexual services.³

Such awkward encounters offered me a glimpse into the strict boundaries of identity within the Zone and of the moral borders that are created and crossed there. The workers told me stories of “disrespectful” clients who would approach them while they were outside the brothel, in the city center, sometimes with their boyfriends or children. Outside the Zone, the women leave behind their identities as sex workers: they are mothers, daughters, girlfriends, and expect to be treated as such, even by clients. Yet these moral borders and categories of identity are often blurred, shifting, and subject to dispute. When exactly does Olivia, the mother of two, become Ximena, the sex worker who uses an alias? I recall one early morning ride in a pirate taxi to the Zone. It was a hot, humid day and the Volkswagen Beetle was crowded with workers and clients, our skin sticking to one another’s in the heat. Clients never propositioned workers in the taxi; the taxi served as an in-between place, the literal and figurative connection between the boundaries of moral order and the Zone. As we approached a red traffic light, I gazed out the window into the eyes of a man on the sidewalk who mouthed to me the following simple, powerful word: Cuanto? How much? I looked away. Again, his assumption was reasonable, but because his actions were spatially wrong, I felt extremely uncomfortable. His simple one-word question and the feelings it triggered helped me to identify these invisible moral borders between the Galactic Zone and the city.

I soon grew tired of would-be clients and was urged by a secretary in the SMAV to purchase and wear a labcoat, as she and the other staff did. In the Zone, the four roles occupied by women were dem...