Showing papers in "Geographical Review in 2001"

Land‐Use Dynamics Beyond the American Urban Fringe*

Abstract: A deficiency common to both the historical debates over loss of agricultural land and the current discussions of urbanization and sprawl is a limited understanding of land‐use dynamics beyond the u...

"Do You Really Live Here?" Thoughts on Insider Research

Abstract: ********** One summer Saturday I was sitting at the living-room table in a run-down old house in the gold-mining ghost town of Bodie, a California State Historic Park located in the high-altitude desert east of the Sierra Nevada. Signs on the outside walls of the house identified it as an "Employees' residence." A nearby number post linked the building to the park's self-guided-tour brochure, which described it as "the Gregory House" and detailed the lives of the home's historic inhabitants. I was busy writing when small running footsteps approached: children, some of the 200,000 or so annual visitors to Bodie. A brown-haired girl of about eight and her towheaded kid brother strained to pierce the relative darkness inside the house. What they saw was me. Turning away from the window, the girl hollered to her parents, "There's a guy in there! And he's dead! Lie died writing!" Being taken for dead--and for a man--may seem shocking to some, but this was not the only time that I was seen as a ghost--or as a man--during the fourteen summers that I worked and did fieldwork in Bodie. (1) But experiences like this one led me to contemplate the interactions between my physical presence and my role as insider in the public place that I was trying to study. As a researcher I was interested in how visitors and staff understood Bodie's past and made room for it in their present, in how they made meaning in and from the landscape. But as a staff member and part of the Bodie community, I myself was part of that process. An important aspect of my work became understanding how I was a part of my own research and negotiating the challenges that being an insider" presented. STUDYING YOUR OWN COMMUNITY Because gaining perspective on something you're in the middle of poses distinct challenges, texts on qualitative research methods often advise students not to study communities or situations of which they are already part. Robert Bogdan and Sari Biklen warn that since qualitative researchers regularly focus on the taken for granted, starting with an insider's perspective can make research harder rather than easier (1998, 52). "You may fail to notice pertinent questions or issues because of the inability to step back from a situation and fully assess the circumstances," add Rob Kitchin and Nicholas Tate (2000, 29). The insider researcher may be "over-familiar with the community," leading to "too much participation at the expense of observation," cautions Mel Evans (1988, 205). Furthermore, that can lead to other problems: Anselm Strauss warns that those who literally "live" a study may "know too much experientially and descriptively about the phenomena they are studying and so [end up] literally flooded with m aterials" (1987, 29). Those with a preexisting role can find that role in contradiction with the separate status of researcher; the transition between roles may cause personal difficulties; and ethical issues may arise when studying coworkers, particularly if a researcher is in a position of power over them (Bogdan and Biklen 1998, 52). Flying in the face of all that good advice, some researchers, like me, find topics close to home, or close to our hearts--topics so compelling we can't leave them alone--and we try to find ways to use our "insider" status to help, not hinder, insights. Of course, the distinction between insiders and outsiders is not a simple one. (2) When anthropologists are "adopted" by their communities, they may be criticized for "going native" (Tedlock 2000), and warnings against this are probably even more prevalent than are those against studying one's own community (Strauss 1987; Reinharz 1992). To me, the difference seems significant: Those who "go native" begin as outsiders, whereas those of us who study our own communities start as insiders and are "natives" before the research begins--a distinction not widely acknowledged in the literature. Some writers who describe "complete participation" (Kearns 2000) or a "complete member researcher" (Ellis and Bochner 2000) fail to distinguish between researchers who start by studying their own communities and the really quite distinct circumstance of growing deeply involved in a community after research is begun. …

Counting farmers markets

Abstract: Farmers markets selling locally grown produce were once vital components of urban food systems. In the modern era an extended wholesale supply system has reduced markets to negligible importance in...

The field as here and now, not there and then*

Abstract: ********** I would emphasize in all of this, the success of the fieldwork hinged not so much on a determination to ferret out "the facts" as on a willingness to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted. ... It may be precisely by giving up the scientific detective's urge to know "everything" that we gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us. Liisa H. Malkki, 1995 Fieldwork is at once a political, personal, and professional undertaking. It provides crucial reference points and evidence upon which knowledge claims are made. Careful consideration, though, is required of one's own assumptions about the field, especially boundaries between here and there. I make three related arguments: that, as a researcher, one is always in the field; that by being in the field one changes it and is changed by it; and that field experience does not automatically authorize knowledge, but rather allows us to generate analyses and tell specific kinds of stories. I underscore the importance of field research as a basis for developing accountable analyses and theory with the caveat that the field is separate from the everyday spaces of home. In this essay I first examine essentialized notions of the field as bounded by time and place, drawing on the work of feminist geographers. With a clearer understanding of how the field may be conceptualized, I draw on my fieldwork to illustrate political and practical considerations. Finally, I illustrate howl have become part of the fields I purport to study and contend that, as field-workers, we are always in the field. INTERROGATING THE FIELD Gillian Rose has argued that fieldwork represents geographical masculinities in action (1993). Although the masculinist biases in geographical method and the production of geographical knowledge are well exposed, argument that fieldwork is inevitably a masculinist exercise is problematic (Moss 1993; D. Rose 1993; G. Rose 1993; Nast 1994; Sparke 1996; McDowell 1997). Insights from fieldwork provide a basis for constructing accounts of processes, places, and social relations. Fieldwork is a site "to critique, deconstruct, and reconstruct a more responsible, if partial, account of what is happening in the world" (Hyndman 1995, 200). As Margaret Walton-Roberts commented after reading an earlier draft of this essay, "It is important to consider the return to the empirical after the excesses of the cultural turn [in geography] where arguably there was no truth.... It is arguably a more masculinist practice to pontificate from on high than to plant oneself in the field and wring one's hands about the politics of doi ng so at the same time" (personal communication, 29 September 2000). Fieldwork potentially offers grounds for a more accountable theory, but it does not automatically generate geographical knowledge. There is no question that fieldwork embodies a politics of representation. It also serves to ground theory in power relations and political, economic, and cultural locations other than our own (Nast 1994). What constitutes "the field" is contentious: Is it merely a physical location, conveniently cordoned off from the life of the researcher? That conception is insufficient. "The 'field' is not naturalized in terms of 'a place' or 'a people'; it is instead located and defined in terms of specific political objectives that (as such) cut across time and space" (Nast 1994, 57). My own research recasts the field as a network of power relations in which I am a small link. My focus in the project I analyze here is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its humanitarian operations at its headquarters in Geneva, one branch office in Nairobi, and one suboffice in Dadaab, which administers three refugee camps in northeastern Kenya. …

Preserving cultural landscapes in America

Abstract: Historic preservation efforts began with an emphasis on buildings, especially those associated with significant individuals, places, or events. Subsequent efforts were expanded to include vernacular architecture, but only in recent decades have preservationists begun shifting focus to the land itself. Cultural landscapes-such as farms, gardens, and urban parks-are now seen as projects worthy of the preservationist's attention. To date, however, no book has addressed the critical issues involved in cultural landscape preservation. In Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick bring together a distinguished group of contributors to address the complex academic and practical questions that arise when people set out to designate and preserve a cultural landscape. Beginning with a discussion of why cultural landscape preservation is important, the authors explore such topics as the role of nature and culture, the selling of heritage landscapes, urban parks and cemeteries, Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New York City, vernacular landscapes in small towns and rural areas, ethnographic landscapes, Asian American imprints on the western landscape, and integrity as a value in cultural landscape preservation. Contributors: Arnold R. Alanen, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Luis Aponte-Peres, University of Massachusetts-Boston * Gail Lee Dubrow, University of Washington, Seattle * Richard Francaviglia, University of Texas, Arlington * Donald L. Hardesty, University of Nevada, Reno * Catherine Howett, University of Georgia, Athens * Robert Z. Melnick, University of Oregon * Patricia M. O'Donnell, Historic Preservation Consultant, Charlotte, Vermont * David Schuyler, Franklin & Marshall College

The uniqueness of the american religious landscape

Abstract: . The assemblage of objects that constitute the publicly visible religious landscape of the United States—houses of worship and a variety of church-related enterprises—deviates so markedly from its counterparts in other lands that we can regard its uniqueness as a significant argument for American exceptionalism. The diagnostic features in question include the extraordinary number and variety of churches and denominations, their special physical attributes, the near-random microgeography of churches in urban areas, and, most especially, their nomenclature and the widely distributed signage promoting godliness and religiosity. Such landscape phenomena suggest connections with much-deeper issues concerning the origin and evolution of American society and culture.

Biodiversity and land-use change in the american mountain west

Abstract: Conservationists have an admirable history of documenting the impacts of human land uses on biodiversity to better inform resource-management decisions. Considering all that, the state of our current knowledge about land-use changes in the Mountain West of the United States is less than satisfactory. Across the region, we work to diminish extractive and commodity-based industries, such as water development, logging, mining, and livestock grazing, but have largely failed to recognize the ecological consequences of our own actions, especially where we choose to live and play. While we devote much of our attention to the traditional consumptive land uses that characterized the "Old West," other threats to biodiversity become more pervasive each year with the emergence of a "New West." Urban sprawl and outdoor recreation, for example, are the second and fourth leading causes of the decline in federally listed threatened and endangered species (Czech, Krausman, and Devers 2000). The character of the New West is being shaped by a flood of immigrants seeking to enjoy the natural amenities and recreational opportunities of a region rich in public lands (Power 1996; Masnick 2001). Importantly, however, only half of the West is public lands; the most productive lands in the region are in private ownership (Scott and others 2001). This is critical, because the most profound land-use change in the New West is the conversion of private lands presently in ranching and farming to rural residential, or exurban, developments (Knight 2002). Unfortunately, conservationists have given scant attention to studying the ecological implications of this western land-use conversion. Addressed here are some of the ecological issues associated with land-use change in the Mountain West. For readers who are unfamiliar with the region's current status, we provide a brief review of the changes that are occurring with human population, dominant land uses, and growth patterns. We then examine an emerging strategy that is being implemented to protect biodiversity from these growth pressures. Testing the unstated assumptions of this new conservation strategy, we present the results of a comparison of bio diversity on the three principal land uses beyond incorporated city limits in the Mountain West: protected areas (areas protected from residential development),livestock ranches, and exurban developments. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for conservation. EXURBANIZATION OF THE MOUNTAIN WEST The Mountain West of the United States is experiencing a human population boom that rivals any in its history. Of the eight states that make up this region--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming--five are the fastest growing in the country (Figure 1). Metropolitan areas and their suburbs have accommodated much of this in-migration, but rural areas are growing at a faster rate (Heimlich and Anderson 2001). Driven by a mixture of economic and quality-of-life features, people are increasingly drawn to the rural Mountain West (Power 1996). Unlike previous booms driven by resource extraction and commodity production, the present period of growth is fueled by the expansion of service, recreation, and information industries and is marked by the conversion of private land use from agriculture to exurban development (Riebsame, Gosnell, and Theobald 1996; Sullins and others 2002). As a result, three of the principal land uses in the rural Mountain West today are protection, livestock ranching, and exurban development. Exurban development refers to low-density residential development that occurs beyond incorporated city limits (Nelson and Dueker 1990; Knight 1999). The main human use in protected areas is outdoor recreation and the protection of perceived natural values; on ranches it is livestock production; in exurban developments it is human residence. The amount of land in protection is relatively static, with little added annually. …

Feeling, reading, and making bodies in space*

Abstract: ********** My legs felt shaky, my stomach churned, and my heart jumped wildly on my first-ever day of field research, standing outside the offices of the organization that was crucial to my gaining access to a significant proportion of my research subjects. From the onset of the research project my body reminded me of its own unpredictable and inconvenient effects. Later, however, my body became more than just the site through which anxieties manifested themselves, it became a research tool, useful in accessing research subjects and their geographies (Parr 1998a, 1998b). The very words useful and tool may seem strange here) for we are, after all, talking about bodies, our own fleshy space, something normally taken for granted. However, as recent social and cultural writings have indicated, bodies are complicated geographies, not just fleshy, and not always easy to understand. Viewing bodies as organic entities curiously "far from being natural phenomena" in geographical research prompts questions and uncertainties, both theoretical and methodological, about corporeal states (Bell and Valentine 1995a, 26). These uncertainties can be understood as emanating from the inherent instability of the body, it being neither completely social nor completely natural. This lack of completeness has arguably contributed to a sense that bodies are dangerous sites, reservoirs of fluid emotion and messy substances, certainly not suitable or relevant for geographical enquiry. However, in the light of feminist and poststructuralist theoretical writing, bodies have been recovered as both sites for geographical analysis and embodied entities that inform, build, and are intrinsically part of geographical knowledge (Evans 1988; Dorn and Laws 1994; McDowell and Court '994; Bell and Valentine 1995b; Cream 1995; Longhurst 1995; McDowell 1995; Nast 1998; Parr 1998a, 1998b; Wilton 1999; Laurier and Parr 2000). This essay should be seen as contributing to current thinking about the body in geographical research, following upon some of my earlier work (P arr 1998a) and, in particular, making reference to the bodies of geographical researchers working in covert ethnographic field situations. Although this is largely an empirical piece, deliberately designed to provide examples of and brief reflections on complicated corporeal interactions in the field, the focus takes a critical view of the ethics of geographical research, and this will be briefly signaled toward the end of the essay. In the main, however, I think through how the unstable body can be analyzed and deployed in geographical research, particularly in ethnographic work. I also offer observations on how the social naturalness of the body can lead to fruitful, if messy, research encounters. Understandably, my first-person narrative draws examples from my own research. However, following feminist viewpoints, the story I tell is not just personal; it has wider ramifications for how the politics of fieldwork and fieldwork processes can be understood as embodied knowledge (England 1994). Despite academic geography's recent engagements with studies of the body, few researchers have highlighted the centrality of the corporeal to processes of investigation. A notable exception is the recent writing of Heidi Nast, in which provocative understandings about bodies as "places which field difference" are explicated (Nast 1998, 94). By using engaging examples from her fieldwork in Kano, Nigeria, Nast constructs interesting body-as-place-as-body-as-fieldwork reflections, which tell us much about the ways in which social and cultural difference is mapped and maintained through the corporeal. Taking pointers from these reflections, I navigate some of my own work, using examples that link bodies and spaces in ethnographic research involving such everyday public spaces of Western society as the street, the park, and the city square. OBSERVING/READING BODIES IN PUBLIC SPACE Nast reconstructs, quite empirically, how her body was marked as culturally different by the interactions and experiences she had with a variety of women in the Kano Palace, including royal slave women and royal concubines and wives (1998). …

China's Old Dwellings

Abstract: A comprehensive critical examination of China's folk architectural forms. Together with its companion volume, \"China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation\", it provides a study of the environmental, historical and social factors that influence housing forms for nearly a quarter of the world's population. Both books draw on the author's 30 years of fieldwork and travel in China, as well as on published and unpublished material in many languages. The work begins by tracing the interest in Chinese vernacular buildings in the 20th century. Early chapters detail common and distinctive spatial components, including the interior and exterior modular spaces that are axiomatic components of most Chinese dwellings as well as conventional structural components and building materials that are common in Chinese construction. Later chapters examine representative housing types in the three broad cultural realms - northern, southern and western - into which China has been divided. Knapp completes his survey with an exploration of China's old dwellings in the context of the rapid economic and social changes that are destroying so many of them.

Half a Century of Cropland Change

Abstract: You and I both know that suburban development is encroaching on productive agricultural land in the United States, because we have the evidence of our very own eyes. Each of us can think of former fields that have been converted to nonagricultural use. But how representative are our observations? Advocates of growth control argue that this country is losing farmland at an alarming and unacceptable rate (AFT 1997; Sorensen, Greene, and Russ 1997; Sierra Club 1998, 1999, 2000). Should we share their concern? We know that the use of cropland changes from year to year and that in any given year a significant fraction of our cropland, perhaps one-fifth to one-third, does not actually produce any crops at all. Drought, flood, storm, diseases, insects, and other destructive forces of nature can nullify the best-laid plans of farmers, but complete crop failure is only part, and usually quite a small part, of the explanation. Good farmers rotate their crops, and many rotations require that in some year of the rotation each piece of ground lie fallow, or be used only for pasture, or grow only cover crops that are not harvested. The inherent capability of soil and climate to produce crops is only one of many factors that influence the way farmers use cropland. Land may also lie uncultivated temporarily for idiosyncratic, nonagronomic reasons: family squabbles over inheritance or divorce, compliance with or circumvention of government farm programs, quirks of wealthy landowners who do not have to extract income from every acre they possess. The use of cropland is constantly changing, and changes from year to year or from census to census may be only short-term fluctuations that are little more than statistical "noise." A clear picture of cropland change in the United States requires an analysis of long-term trends that places the distractions of short-term noise in proper perspective. The dawn of a new century seems an appropriate time for a close examination of the geography of cropland change in the preceding half-century. Fifty years is time enough to provide a balanced view of long-term trends and patterns and a more robust and defensible base for judging whether suburban encroachment and development "threaten the future of our agricultural land base" (AFT 1997, xi). THE NATIONAL AGRICULTURAL LANDS STUDY The first major false alarm about "our vanishing farmland" was sounded in 1979, when the National Agricultural Lands Study (NALs) made scare headlines by asking, "Will there be Florida oranges, fresh milk from St. Johnsbury--and Michigan tart cherries? Florida--producer of more than half of the world's grapefruit and one-fourth of its oranges--will lose virtually all of its unique and prime farm land by the turn of the century if present land loss trends continue" (Fields 1979, 14). Serious students of land use immediately recognized that the NALS estimates were grossly exaggerated (Fischel 1982; Raup 1982). The NALS had derived these estimates from a comparison of two sample surveys made by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (scs) in 1967 and in 1975. The comparison was made even though the 1975 survey was conducted in great haste, had different objectives, used different procedures and a far skimpier sample, and was never intended to be comparable with the 1967 survey. In 1984 the U.S. Department of Agriculture essentially disavowed the NALS estimates (Gustafson and Bills 1984), but these inflated estimates still circulate, and some people persist in citing them (AFT 1997, xi). Florida illustrates the errors that an undersized sample can produce. James R. Anderson, head of the Office of Geographic Research at the U.S. Geological Survey, ever the cautious bureaucrat, was so concerned about the errors in the NALS data that he dispatched Richard Kleckner to the scs office at the Iowa State University Statistics Laboratory to compare the NALS estimates with other data on a county-by-county basis in an attempt to find the source of error. …

English as international language in geography: development and limitations

Abstract: Geographers wish to know about the world. Geographical knowledge is place specific, and most of it is possessed by persons who live in a rich fabric of cultures, in numerous linguistic communities. They write geographical studies for the most part in their own languages. A comprehensive survey in 1980 found that, over the years 1723-1979, 3,445 geographical periodicals and serials had been published in 107 countries in 55 languages (Harris and Fellmann 1980). Rare indeed is the geographer who can read or utilize more than a few of these languages. Languages of wider communication are needed to promote intercommunication among our communities. As a consequence, papers delivered at the quadrennial International Geographical Congresses sponsored by the International Geographical Union (IGU) have been limited to six principal languages. Since 1960 this number has been reduced to two. In recent decades English has increasingly become the medium of communication, both in international congresses and in geographical periodicals and serials published in many countries and distributed over all continents. The use of English is first assessed in the twenty-nine International Geographical Congresses held since 1871, excepting interruptions during the two world wars. The supplementary use of English in abstracts or texts of geographical periodicals or serials is then examined. INTERNATIONAL GEOGRAPHICAL CONGRESSES The number of languages used for communication at International Geographical Congresses has varied over time from six to two. Four principal languages--French, English, German, and Italian--were used in the first fifteen congresses (1871-1938). These four, plus Portuguese and Spanish, constituted the six languages of record in the next three congresses (1949, 1952, and 1956). But after 1960 only English and French were officially featured in International Geographical Congresses. Democracy of participation might suggest the use of many languages, but efficiency of intercommunication encourages the use of only a few. Indeed, efficiency of international communication is inversely related to the number of languages a geographer must master to understand the papers presented. Although six languages were used, French and later English generally predominated. At the first such congress, held in 1871 in Antwerp, Belgium, 79 percent of the communications were in French; 12 percent, in German; and only 6 percent, in English. In the century and a quarter since then, French has declined relatively and English has risen to become the global language of international communication (Volle 1996; Harris 1998). The early congresses had a markedly national or regional character, with a high proportion of the participants coming from the host country or nearby areas. The language of the host country was dominant. In the Paris congresses of 1875 and 1880, 100 percent of the papers were in French, whereas in the London and Washington congresses, held in 1895 and 1904, 55 percent and 82 percent were in English, and in the Berlin congress, held in 1899,56 percent were in German. Omitting congresses held in Francophone or English-speaking countries, the proportion of papers in English before World War I ranged from 5 to 19 percent. This increased to 13-31 percent between the two world wars (Table I). After World War II, with the rapid improvement in air transportation and in communications that facilitated worldwide participation and with the reduction of congress languages to two to improve intercommunication, English rose rapidly to a dominant position, from 76 percent in 1960 to more than 90 percent since 1980 (except for the 1984 congress, held in Paris). English and French have been the languages used for IGU business since its founding in 1922, with French the main language used by the Executive Committee and the secretary from 1931 through 1949 and English predominant since 1949. …

The geographer as voyeur

Abstract: w h e t h e r they are aware of it or not, I suspect that what has motivated the instigators of this special issue of the Geographical Review is no slight nervousness over the intellectual respectability of fieldwork within the geographical discipline. Well might they worry, at least in the short term, for the quantifiable facts are hardly comforting. But I must insist on taking the long view-indeed, an exceedingly long view-in reporting that the prognosis is not all that bleak. I base my argument on the uniqueness of the human creature. Homo sapiens is a mammal, but of a most special sort, being the only species with the capability of uttering fully developed languages. And the human brain that can engage in verbal wizardry can also devise an endless series of devices to separate us farther from the remainder of the animal kingdom. Unlike other creatures, which are inextricably tied to the here and now, to their immediate surroundings, human beings can transport themselves anywhere and anywhen mentally; and in physical terms they can sequester themselves within artificial or even “virtual” settings, shut off from the outer world. This duality of our existence, dwelling as we do in our own mental and material cocoons but also ultimately linked, like all other organisms, to the actualities of our planet, is what lies behind the current plight of the advocate of geographical fieldwork. At the moment, it is the fashionableness of the cerebral and the mechanical that puts the field-worker on the defensive. Eventually, however, we have no choice but to maintain awareness of our environs even as we invent new ways to rise above and beyond them, no choice but to accept that neither life nor scholarship can be satisfactory unless we reconcile the human superstructure in our legacy with the generic mammalian substructure. Well, then, just what is the status of fieldwork within the ranks of professional geographers today? How does it rate as a topic for serious cogitation, research, or pedagogy? The sad and simple answer is: Pretty much fallen off the screen. For a once-vaunted venture to spiral into such a lowly estate is a radical departure from days of yore. During the first centuries of the Modern Age, the heroic phase of West-

The languages of foreign fieldwork

Abstract: ********** Overseas investigation is today a diminished part of academic geography's self-image, in stark contrast to such fields as anthropology, where foreign fieldwork is acknowledged as a fetish. The minority of geographers who are fueled by curiosity to carry out a research plan in a distant land certainly constitute a kind of Humboldtian elite in the discipline. Like Alexander von Humboldt, those who leave hearth and home for expatriate research provide an empirical grounding for knowing the world, for finding the universal in the particular. Foreign fieldwork is no less about outsiders who, by choice of topic, particular points of view, special depth of knowledge, or precise ways of finding things out bring special qualities to bear on their research. Perspective comes in part from a sense of wonder about an exotic place in which difference, not familiarity; engages the critical mind. My own experiences have brought me to an understanding of foreign fieldwork as it relates to scholarly, or even popular, communication.(1) For an American, language acquisition is usually the critical hurdle standing in the way of gaining the cultural competence to "get one's story" in the non-Anglophone universe. Geographers have written little about either how they have dealt with language apprenticeships or why they choose to work abroad and what kinds of experiences they have had there. To be sure, descriptions of the aspects of fieldwork necessary to keep body and soul together are often shared orally and informally. But in the absence of accumulated written records about these experiences, geography can hardly be said to provide a body of knowledge about fieldwork from which subsequent generations of young scholars can benefit. ADVENTURES IN FIELD COMMUNICATION Both push and pull factors have influenced the relative diversity of my foreign experiences. Like Ishmael, who in the opening of Melville's Moby Dick is "growing grim about the mouth," I find myself periodically wanting to escape my own North American culture, to break up or avoid the long northern winter. With that comes a wish to renew the priceless perspective on home, tempered by detachment, that absence produces. An irresistible curiosity about a "problem" in a particular place leads to the formulation of a research question. The itch to know that pulls one abroad includes the need to overcome cultural-linguistic barriers by whatever means available. If braving the alien for the first time is scariest, it grows less so with successful repeated exposure. Curiosity steels the will to accept with equanimity the discomfort and risks of going to remote places. For me, this uncanny force, melding curiosity and resolve, is ultimately a more powerful motive for research and scholarship than is any do-gooder phil osophy, desire for career enhancement, or urge to please those who have invested in one's academic promise. Seeking scholarly bliss in the geographical nooks and crannies of our diverse planet requires communicating with locals, even when the data sought do not necessarily hail from human informants. Collecting data requires reading, observing, measuring, and-inevitably--conversation. For several projects I used scripted interview schedules, an efficient if soulless way of gathering information. But my first major, exotic, and independently conducted field experience marked me. It extended over eighteen months of dissertation research on the verticality of plant use among peasant farmers in one Andean valley (Gade 1975, 1999). Only when I actually arrived in the field did I fully appreciate how utterly useless English was going to be in executing the project. Language learning became top priority, and it was complicated by the presence of two vernaculars. Imbibing the Andean variant of Spanish was eased by the fact that for most rural folk in the study area, it was their second language, too. They had a working lex icon of fewer than 2,000 words, they spoke slowly, and they made some of the same grammatical errors that I did. …

Returning home and to the field

Abstract: ********** Last week I "returned from the field." Even though I am back home I certainly don't feel at home. I feel disoriented for all sorts of reasons. Because I came back during the sixth week of the semester, I feel like an outsider in my workplace, an empty shell moving through corridors and seminar rooms. (Was that me teaching that class a few months ago?) Where I live now seems foreign, perhaps because I've lived longer in Berlin than in any of my American homes during the last ten years. This blurring of home and the field reminds me of an experience last year when two of my Berlin research consultants gave lectures about their work at my "home" university. Due to various conversations and interactions, I unexpectedly had to face some of the moral issues and social relations of the field at home. I felt almost schizophrenic, torn between worlds, cultures, sets of social relations, and selves. A researcher cannot easily divide her research and personal selves into separate sites of home and the field. Although many geographers realize this in theory, in practice we often construct emotional, spatial, and temporal boundaries between personal and work lives, a here and there, a home and field. The dislocations I experienced in returning from the field or when the field invaded my home resulted from my attempts to protect myself from my work. Yet these very dislocations forced me to acknowledge that life in one place influences social relations in another. Home and the field are unstable categories that are designated by research conventions, the academy, and researchers in particular ways. By moving between ever-changing homes/fields and social relations, the researcher must acknowledge that research spaces are always hybrid; they are complex social spaces of dislocation. Furthermore, our identities are constantly made and remade through repetitive performances--performances that include research (Rose 1997). When we move back and forth between shifting homes and fields, our research agendas, relationships, and even our own understandings of ourselves as researchers will change because we can never know who we will become during the research process. As I describe below through personal vignettes about conducting follow-up research in Berlin, Germany, when we return and share our writings with research consultants, we are forced to challenge previously held assumptions and to negotiate new research relationships. Facing our unease in such settings may be diffi cult, but it may also lead to new insights and more empathetic geographies and histories. CONSTRUCTING HOME AND THE FIELD AS RESEARCH TERRITORIES To call attention to the power relations involved in the scholarly production of knowledge, anthropologists, geographers, and feminists have argued for more complex understandings of home and the field (PG 1994; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As Cindi Katz (1994) and members of the Women and Geography Study Group (Madge and others 1997) argue, we cannot dissociate our identities as academics from the places, contexts, and peoples where and with whom we do our research, write, and communicate. From this perspective, the "field" includes: the academy, where research is initiated, where the people we speak with live, and the social contexts and settings in which research is funded and made available to various audiences (Nast 1994). Individual understandings of the field, moreover, are positionally situated and always shifting. As Lila Abu-Lughod points out, every view and act of speaking must come "from somewhere" (1991). The "somewheres" from where we speak result from ever-shifting personal and scholarly understandings of home and the field. When we conduct research, we often bring our homes with us; sometimes the field becomes a home (Pile, personal correspondence; Oberhauser 1997). In my first research project, for example, I examined newly constructed, master-planned communities in southern Orange County, California. …

Talk Is Cheap: Cultural and Linguistic Fluency during Field Research

Abstract: ********** A great attraction of geography for many practitioners is an opportunity for the kind of field research that regularly takes us from our natal culture and plunks us, Cinderella-style, into places with significantly different pumpkins and coachmen. Our projects generate basic information, test the efficacy of current theory, and allow us to serve as bridges across cultures through our research, teaching, publications, and outreach. Field research serves as a vital check against the unguarded surety of theoretical abstraction. Frankly, the inductive/deductive cycle is seldom possible without field-based research that allows both the collection of data and the verification and analysis of existing explanatory models. All of this is possible only if we really understand what is going on around us and can ask questions. Successful field research and productive communication skills go hand in glove. Few scholars would disagree on this principle, but somehow intensive language training is less than a central goal of secondary education in the United States; nor are language courses well represented in the undergraduate and graduate geography curricula in many a Canadian and U.S. university. Beyond brushing up on the French, Spanish, or German learned in halcyon undergraduate days, two-year master's programs and four-year doctoral programs in geography seldom have "space" for four to six semesters of a language. Furthermore, seldom are opportunities seized to continue to upgrade language training once we find ourselves in the traces and hames of a professional career. Field research has to be fitted with on-the-job language training, for language classes are overlooked perhaps even more frequently than are courses on field-research methods. Yet language proficiency is a centerpiece of successful fieldwork, and achieving real co mpetence in language is the prerequisite for a kind of cultural fluency that allows a genuinely successful career. Lofty ideals, you may scoff, but the fact remains that for most of us cultural and linguistic fluency is a work in progress. Caring about the quality of our research, we continually improve our language skills. Well-considered strategies can facilitate language acquisition while bettering field research. Yes, the way to Carnegie Hall is via practice, practice, practice, but there are concrete strategies that simultaneously improve language skills and assure research of high quality. In this essay I take the ideals of linguistic and cultural fluency as givens for most successful field projects, but I wish to bridge the gap between this often end-of-career ideal--it's a lifelong process--and the reality many of us face. In short, how do we conduct a successful field project while improving our language and cultural fluency, so that our future projects are even better? Fieldwork is so personal, so tied up in who and what we are at the time of any given project, that generalizations risk being trite. Lest I slide headlong into a least favorite debate--the classic "ideographic/nomothetic tar pool"--what follows is specific to my own experiences, mostly in rural China but with one diversion to South Korea. Beginning in 1985, when I bungled through my first project in Taiwan, I've spent at least a month or two in China each year, conducting field projects largely related to agricultural aspects of rural development. Twice I've been able to stay for a year or longer. For each project I work with Chinese friends or acquaintances to design, administer, and analyze household surveys addressing issues such as crop-production efficiency, land-use decisions, or the evaluation of alternative cash crops. All of this isn't rocket science, but I look forward to the projects and trips each year--they let me live in China. Granted, not all of the ideas I propagate here will succeed for researchers in China or other locations. A number are nice touches I learned from the "Old China Hands" who work in rural China and have kindly shared their ideas. …

Fieldwork as commitment

Abstract: ********** To me, fieldwork is the heart of geography. I consider it the most magical, essential, and challenging part of being a geographer. Fieldwork is the ultimate mode of geographical exploration. It renews and deepens our direct experience of the planet and its diversity of lands, life, and cultures, immeasurably enriching the understanding of the world that is geography's core pursuit and responsibility. Fieldwork takes us beyond current frontiers of knowledge and preconception, enabling firsthand discoveries that no amount of theorizing or study of preexisting accounts or maps could ever reveal. Without fieldwork, geography is secondhand reporting and armchair analysis, losing much of its involvement with the world, its original insight, its authority, its contributions for addressing local and global issues, and its reason for being. This essay examines the rewards and responsibilities of long-term fieldwork with indigenous peoples that involves many rounds of returning to communities over many years. Such fieldwork is based on a continuing commitment to people and places. It is built on relationships and reciprocity, requiring a dedication to research that is as relevant to indigenous peoples' concerns as to academic ones. It demands time, sensitivity, and an involvement as much emotional as intellectual. In return, it makes possible research that differs fundamentally from short-term studies in depth and breadth of inquiry. The best fieldwork reflects a level of local knowledge, indigenous insight, and regional understanding attainable only through long relationships with a particular people and particular places. With this come new obligations and responsibilities that may reshape the direction of your career and the goals of your research. FIELDWORK AS A WAY OF LIFE My fieldwork revolves around indigenous communities and homelands. A quarter of my life over two decades has been spent in the Nepal Himalaya. Much of that work has focused on the Sherpa-inhabited areas of northeastern Nepal, including five years in the Khumbu Sherpa villages within Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and in the many Sherpa settlements of the lower-altitude Pharak and Katuthanga regions just to the south (Stevens 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1997, n.d.). I have worked in forty-five Sherpa villages in these three settlement areas (Figure 1). For twenty years I have returned annually for fieldwork on cultural ecology, political ecology, environmental history, conservation geography, and tourism studies. This work involves wide-ranging interviews, observations, household surveys, and mapping of many facets of local life, including: indigenous geographical, environmental, and agropastoral knowledge; agricultural and pastoral practices and forest use; community-based natural resource management and co nservation; interregional and trans-Himalayan trade; settlement, economic, environmental, landscape, and cultural history and recent change; tourism development and impacts; and the many issues created by the establishment and management of inhabited national parks and protected areas in indigenous homelands. In part, it was the opportunity to conduct such fieldwork that brought me to geography, and it has become the main focus of my time and work. For me, nothing can compare with the rewards of fieldwork--the intellectual excitement of firsthand discovery and of gaining increasingly deep local knowledge and regional understanding, the satisfactions and meaning of living and working for extended periods in remote and wild country and in magnificent places, the chance to learn from people whose ways of life and attitudes toward living you admire, the opportunity to experience rhythms of everyday life and community that are impossible to find at home in twenty-first-century America, and the way in which the work itself both demands and evokes alertness, resourcefulness, adaptability, self-reliance, judgment, compassion, and original thought and insight. …

No bad landscape

Abstract: ********** In an academic world continually threatened with budget reductions and evermore-relentless calls for a wholesale redirection of departmental funds into technological upgrades, it is difficult to do something manifestly orthodox. In a professional world in which there is an ever-more-constant drumming about your ears for increased scholarly productivity and grasping at national visibility, it is difficult to do something that involves fiscal or temporal start-up costs. And in a teaching world that seems enthralled with every possible digital enhancement of the spoken word, it is difficult to do something so plainly pedestrian as talking directly to and with small groups of students. In other words, these are very hard times to speak up in favor of a class in old-fashioned, locally focused, low-tech field geography. Conceding these academic realities, I'd nonetheless like to promote the academic and professional merit of stepping up to the motor-pool counter, ordering a van, and taking a dozen or so students out to do battle with the realities of the local world. No battle is more fun to win; few victories bring greater personal and departmental rewards. And, beyond that, there is no bad landscape. Let me explore these domains. DEPARTMENTAL DISINCLINATION TO SUPPORT LOCAL FIELDWORK The current rush in many a college and university is toward increased class size, experiments in distance learning, and--in a manner of contradiction--replacement of graduate teaching assistants in the classroom with ladder faculty whenever possible. The field class is a major problem in two of those three categories. It is as small as a seminar, and its content transports over uplink lines with less efficiency than any classroom lecture material. However, on the real-faculty-interacting-with-real-students front, it is perfect. In terms of class size, there is no arguing about its rich ratio and steep cost. However, there is an intensity in the interaction between faculty and students, both graduate and undergraduate, that has a value one can use to offset exhortations for increased class sizes. The weapons to be used are development and retention, two new terms that currently shadow virtually all university administration innovations. When students take on the task of participating in a local field class, they are casting aside the likelihood of being able to disappear behind a bland wall of other students who function as a buffer between the professor and the reluctant class members. In a field class--just as in a small-section foreign-language class--all students are confronted with a need for responsiveness, reaction, and participation in problem solving in every single class period. Although a student may not view this as good news, it is precisely class situations such as these that capture the mind and have the potential for growing into significant recollections of engaging college life. Such a teaching situation, especially in a large university, stimulates a connection with education that is almost never matched in traditional large lecture classes. The field class also has the potential for an impact on retention that ought to be pointed out in deanly or even university foundation discussions. In talking with students who have walked away from the university, you often hear that "no one there really cared whether I stayed or not." There are a hundred variants on this lament, but they swirl around the core difficulty college students have, particularly in their first years at the university, in finding a niche that seems both accommodating and satisfying. Large auditorium classes and endless sections with teaching assistants who may or may not be sympathetic to this loneliness do not generally solve such problems. A small field class can change everything. And such a change, such enhancement of student reaction and subsequent recollections, may mean real dollars in the context of both retention and development. …

Africa is coming to the cape

Abstract: After years of pretending that it was not part of Africa, Cape Town is finding that Africa is very much part of it. --Christopher Hope, 1998 Manifest Destiny: The phrase imputes inevitability to the march of Europeans across the North American continent from Eastern Seaboard to Pacific Ocean. It sounds today disquietingly triumphalist, reducing as it does any peoples already in its path to objects whose only role is to be brusquely shoved aside. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century Manifest Destiny was, nevertheless, a generally accepted public interpretation of U.S. westward expansion. When I first arrived in North America as a graduate student in 1970, this conventional view of courageous westering pioneers settling virgin land was being vigorously challenged by a popular book, Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). In it, Brown offered a different take on the grand saga of the U.S. West: that of the Native Americans who stood apprehensively on the land they believed to be theirs, with which they were one and inalienable, and who were looking grimly eastward toward an inescapable force majeure seemingly set to dispossess them. Postulate a parallel in the contemporary South African context: the millennium-long southward migration of Bantu-speaking peoples from north of the equator. Having been apparently stalled for some centuries in the Eastern Cape, this migration of Africans is now reenergized. One of the world's great population movements is currently reaching its conclusion at the Cape of Good Hope. Consider the position today of the mixed-race "Cape Coloured" people there, where they have existed for almost 350 years. Are many of them grimly looking northeastward, sensing that they are confronting the dispossession of "their" far corner of South Africa at the hands of an indeflectable Black African migration? Is the Cape, in other words, finally encountering its Manifest Destiny: that it is to be wedded to Africa? Yet, is not to draw this comparison in so portentous a manner to contrive a misleading, or even reactionary-spirited parallel? In the new, deracializing South Africa I am not aware, for example, of some triumphalist Black African "March to the Cape" historiography in the making. Nor are Coloureds staring at the face of forced removal, active impoverishment, and quasi-genocide, as did the Lakota or the Cherokee. I could indeed claim the very converse: that in the past decade Coloureds have in fact been liberated from forced removal, active impoverishment, and (with hyperbole) quasi-genocide. And the force that freed them from those cruel experiences of apartheid? In large part, Black nationalism. Still, there is much Coloured discontent at the Cape of Good Hope over burgeoning Black African numbers. Let us look at some of the sources of discontent in what an American journalist once dubbed "this city at the end of the world."(1) One could say that old-fashioned regional geography--simply, which features are where--lies at the back of all this. The tip of Africa is a climatic singularity.(2) It does not rain in the summer there, and as one moves inland it hardly rains at all. The Bantu-speaking agricultural peoples' migration down the pluvial east side of Africa came up against the aridity. Their staple foods were sorghum and millet, crops that needed reliable summer rainfall; but after a certain point in their southward migration there was not enough rain. Thus, although hunting parties scouted, penetrating far, the Bantu-speakers' migration apparently halted. So the winter-rainfall Western Cape,(3) at whose farthest southwestern extremity Cape Town now stands, was ringed landward by a steppe and desert buffer (Figure 1). Behind its protection dwelled the Khoikhoi pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers, who had been forcibly supplanted farther north and east by the approach of those same Bantu speakers. Yet at their rear guard, these "Khoisan" found themselves being occupied and then destroyed by what must have come three and a half centuries ago as an otherworldly invasion: that of light-skinned people from, of all places, the open ocean. …

Life as a field trip

Abstract: ********** I taught a course called "Environment and the Quality of Life" for a quarter-century, first at the University of Minnesota, then at the University of Wisconsin. Its basic question was: To what degree does the good life--by which I mean life of a quality commensurate with the human potential and not just survival--depend on the material setting? We examined different kinds of settings, from the least humanly modified (wild nature) to the radically transformed (a great metropolis). At each stop we paused to consider the quality of life, focusing on the good rather than on the bad--on, for instance, the amenities and rewards of city living rather than its hassles. I chose this emphasis in part to narrow the scope and in part because, whereas nature journalism can be counted on to show appreciation for its subject matter, city journalism all too often treats its subject matter with distaste. One may think that a course of this nature required fieldwork--and if not work, then the less sweaty trip or tour. Students expected at least bus tours, and they were somewhat bewildered that none was scheduled. At the first meeting I would try to assuage their anxiety by saying, "Feel at ease, for all of you have already satisfied one basic course requirement, which is a minimum of eighteen years of fieldwork. The challenge now is to make sense of what you have picked up in all that time." Eighteen years? They quickly realized that I was referring to their life span. They had been in the field all their life without knowing it, except periodically, when they were actively engaged in a project. "Environment and the Quality of Life" strove to register and understand the subtleties and complexities of human reality. The instrument best suited to do the registering is the human person--the total person rather than, as in specialized undertakings, primarily the eyes and the brain. Unfortunately--and this is the special challenge and paradox of doing humanistic geography--the total person (an instrument of incomparable sensitivity) is easily overwhelmed. It can and will crash unless, most of the time, filtering mechanisms operate to push information not needed for tasks at hand into deep, barely recoverable recesses of the mind. TASKS AT HAND In waking hours we live forward, which is to say that we have chores to do, projects to accomplish. Fieldwork is one such chore or project. Characteristic of it is focusing. Before we go, we already start to narrow our field by formulating a hypothesis. Once there, we may be obliged to constrict it further for technical reasons, such as the tools available and their limitations. Any scientific geographical enterprise, be it the study of landforms, of biotic communities, or of housing types, follows some such procedure. Sometimes, however, geographers go on "unstructured" field trips, just to see what's out there, with no prior questions in mind. An undertaking of this sort is believed to stimulate the imagination, leading one to ideas inspired by objects in the field rather than by words in a book. Does it? Each geographer will no doubt want to give his or her own answer. Mine is no. I cannot say that casual outings have made me wiser, or even much more knowledgeable. My memory of a typical unstructured trip goes something like this. The bus stops on a knoll. Students file out, I among them. Immediately we are bombarded by sensations, from buzzing bees and the smell of hay to the heat of the sun, and images, from garbage dump and church towers to the meandering river. To minimize disorientation and bewilderment we take out our cameras and dramatically reduce the flood of sensations and impressions by looking at a framed landscape through a tiny hole. Our leader, after a brave pause to soak up unstructured experience, proceeds to simplify reality for himself and us by drawing attention to a selection of landmarks. Field trips of this kind are little different from the rounds that tourists make. …

Your private sky : R. Buckminster Fuller, the art of design science

Abstract: "Bucky" was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of this century. As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur, poet, he was a quintessentially American, self-made man. But he was also an out-sider: a technologist with a poet's imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties ("more with less") and anticipated the globalization of our planet ("think global - act local"). This visual reader documents and examines Fuller's theories, ideas, designs, and projects. It also takes an analytical look at his ideology of technology as the panacea. With numerous illustrations, many published here for the first time, as well as texts by Fuller and the editors. The publication presents Buckminster Fuller's creations as a dazzling expression of this unconditionally optimistic technocrat whose vision of driverless Spaceship Earth led him to examine the principles of maximizing effects in the most diverse sectors of design and construction.

Playing with Children: Immediacy Was Their Cry (*)

Abstract: ********** I sit on the plaster ledge of a simulated cave in a museum and scratch vigorously under my arm (simulated animal skins are a bit itchy) before swinging off the bench and busying myself with bones strewn across the floor. I pile the bones up and then, unsatisfied, pull them apart before taking some pains to balance two or three of them in what I think is quite an intriguing sculpture. My back is to the entrance of the cave, enabling me to satisfactorily ignore my handler's entreaties to come and meet some new visitors. My handler, Lisa, plays the part of a spelunker, replete with hard hat and carbide lamp. Lisa is a real caver and a qualified museum interpreter who helps young children understand what it is like to live in a cave. I am not a real caveman, nor am I an interpreter, but today I am an important prop in Lisa's exhibit. She has brought a small group of young children (the oldest looks about five) to meet "Urg." That's me, with an eponymous title because that's all I say (Figure 1). Verbal reticence is part of my performance as a cave dweller who lived 4,500 years ago. (1) Five youngsters cower behind Lisa as they enter the room of the cave in which I am playing with the bones. Their caregivers and a newspaper photographer come in behind them. Lisa calls to me again, and I sniff the air. Then I slowly turn to face my audience. I can see that the children are interested in me but are too nervous to leave Lisa's protection. The photographer's camera flashes, and I give a start. Feigning terror, I scamper to the back of the cave and cringe behind a fake limestone formation. For some reason my actions embolden two of the children, who tentatively approach me and, taking my hand, lead me back into the center of the room. I am crouching at about the children's height, enabling one of them to throw her arms around my neck as if to ward off the advances of the photographer. The ensuing photo opportunity is spoiled by another child, who scolds the photographer for advancing to frighten me. And suddenly I am theirs: Lisa and their caregivers are forgotten as the children surround me with affectionate touches and protective, playful body language. I am not sure what I became in that simulated cave in my simulated animal skins--a pet, a plaything, a confidant, an ally against adults--but for the next half-hour I felt as though I were a trusted part of those children's world. We played with the bones, and then they took me out of the cave and showed me the rest of the museum. They explained how coke machines work and that the frightening skeleton of an Albertosaurus wouldn't hurt me. They showed me the museum exhibits and explained how they should be used. They got a kick out of using me to scare adults. I realized why the people in Goofy and Mickey Mouse suits at Disneyland have so much fun. I wondered whether I, like the Disney characters, was simply another commodified pretext for what should fill a child's world. I was an adult construction of new ways that children should learn--hands-on, festive, fun, playful--about worlds that certainly did not exist the way we were portraying them. But there was something different here that went beyond education , museums, or Disney. I was part of the play of children, and their trust enfolded me in an enticing and carefree space of belonging. It was as if, by doing nothing of any great importance, we were doing the most important thing that the particular moment could enable. When the children reluctantly left, I went back to my cave and waited eagerly for the next group. My encounter with those young children is an indelible part of how I now approach the study of children's geographies. At the time of my museum performance I was beginning a dissertation that drew in part from cognitive behavioral geography. It was nearly twenty years ago, and prevailing methods for studying children were heavily influenced by Jean Piaget's theorizing that children invariably experience life through a structured series of developmental stages (1952, 1954). …

From spy to okay guy: trust and validity in fieldwork with the police

Abstract: ********** Of the several sergeants in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) whom I accompanied during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in 1993 and 1994, one was an aspiring crime novelist. Not surprisingly, he set his stories in a police patrol division. After I accompanied him a few times, he introduced a character based on me into the novel he was writing. He told me that my character performed a useful narrative function: Conversations between the officers and the ethnographer al lowed him to introduce the essentials of police work into the story. Of great interest to me was the relationship between the fictional observer and the observed. Initially, the officers were suspicious. Because the ethnographer had received permission from the police chief to do the research, "Everyone thinks he's a spy," the author-sergeant told me. However, over time the ethnographer gained the trust of the officers. By the middle of the story, according to the sergeant, "Everyone thinks he's an okay guy." I came to believe that my fictional transformation from "spy" to "okay guy" mirrored reality. Initially wary and skeptical of my presence, most officers grew friendly and helpful with time. This transformation raises a number of interesting and important questions: Why were the officers initially wary? Did they behave differently in my presence; and if so, how? Why did the transformation occur? What do these dynamics, concerning as they do the shifting ground on which ethnographic relationships are established, say about the type of data I gathered and how I gathered them? These questions are important, in large measure because they point to one of the critical issues in ethnography--the acquisition of valid data. How can an ethnographer ever be sure that behavior witnessed is, in fact, natural in that setting? How to account for the effect of the ethnographer's presence on the behavior of those under study? And if their behavior is affected, should the ethnographer's data and conclusions be considered suspec t? It is validity that I explore here, in the context of my fieldwork experience. To do so, it is useful first to take a step back and assess where things stood when I entered the field. In the summer of 1993 the LAPD was a much-maligned and rigorously scrutinized organization. The beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991 had magnified long-standing concerns about police brutality, particularly in minority communities. Such concerns were legitimated by the so-called Christopher Commission, which exhaustively reviewed uses of force by the LAPD (Independent Commission 1991). The commission, named for its chairman, Warren Christopher, discovered that violent officers were insufficiently sanctioned, in keeping with an organizational culture that emphasized aggressive crime fighting. Public debate about the LAPD was further fueled by two well-publicized trials of the officers involved in the King incident and by the massive civil unrest that followed the officers' acquittals in the first trial. The mid-199os were, in other words, a propitious time for me to begin doing fieldwork with the LAPD. Because the LAPD was the subject of such scrutiny, I thought that my work would attract interest. But I was simultaneously afraid that officers would be reluctant to trust me and would modify their behavior in my presence. If they did, I was uncertain whether my data would be valid. Let me explain why my concern about validity eased over time, focusing on two primary points. The first has to do with how officers reacted to me. Reactions were, in fact, often fairly strong and expressed a range of puzzlement and worry. LAPD officers were unused to having people, especially academics, do ride-alongs. While I was with them in the field, officers were forced to decide how to respond to my presence--where to take me, what to tell me, and how to position me (literally and figuratively). But I came to see how they reacted to me not as obstacles to data but as data themselves. …

The four square laundry: participant observation in a war zone*

Abstract: ********** I awoke one morning to see him in my bedroom pointing [a submachine gun] at me. "Right," he said, "you're a Four Square Laundry job." This was an allusion to being an army spy. Frank Burton, quoted in Jeffrey A. Sluka, 1995 Thanks to his dangerous and frightening experiences in West Belfast, Frank Burton's ethnographic research on Northern Ireland is considered legendary. (1) At first glance the incident Burton describes would seem mad to anyone who has not spent time living and working in the Catholic ghettos of Belfast. However, as alarming as this event may seem, it speaks more to the rapport Burton established with his respondents than to the perils of fieldwork. In actuality this was a prank brought about by one of his Irish Republican Army (IRA) informants. The hazing of researchers is a common practice in Belfast, and anyone who conducts inquiries of this nature is bound to collect a few such "war stories" (Sluka 1989, 1995). The obvious reason for such a vetting is that the IRA feared that a British undercover operative disguised as an academic would infiltrate the organization. Having said that, I believe that researchers are not only checked out as potential spies but also tested to see whether they have the "salt" to stick it out when the political atmosphere makes day-to-day life difficult. In other words, the researcher has to prove that, when placed in a life-threatening situation, even for just a moment, she or he won't simply pack up and go home. There are obvious dangers in conducting participant observation in a violent social context. However, the researcher "not only observes the behavior of the group that she or he is studying, but also participates, as much as possible, in the daily lives of the community members" (Dowler 1999, 195). When I lived in Belfast, it was still a turbulent and violent study area. (2) The violence notwithstanding, uneventful encounters with one's respondents, even notorious ones, were the earmark of participant observation (Dowler 2001). When you live and work within a community for an extended period of time you acquire local knowledge. To my surprise, community members would often point out individuals who were "involved," which was usually accompanied with a humorous tale that, interestingly, never related to their status as an IRA volunteer. (3) A neighbor might point someone out as a volunteer but then proceed to tell how he or she sings off-key after "a couple of pints." Many former IRA volunteers readily identifi ed themselves to me once I started frequenting a local prisoners' club (a private club for former political prisoners). I heard about which university their children would attend in the fall and their holiday plans (Dowler 2001). Such open-ended interviews, rooted in respondents' everyday lives, are more productive than the highly sensationalized image of the researcher in a clandestine meeting, with hooded and armed men, an image adopted by reporters and some academics to introduce "how they made contact with the IRA. Although there is a great deal of research on how to put a respondent at ease, there is little discussion about how to make the interview comfortable and safe for the researcher. By getting to know my respondents in a mundane setting I felt far more comfortable delving into more political and personal areas, including reflections on their participation in political violence. I simply would have never asked these types of questions in a more threatening setting. Knowing my respondents, I shed my preconceptions of them as agents of violence. The irony is palpable: Conducting participant observation, one might expect to be living on the edge, but instead one simply lives with the threat of violence as part of workaday life. REPRESENTING THE FIELD Asked to include in this essay a photograph of myself in the field, I canvassed the images I had collected over the years. …

Working with young men

Abstract: ********** Sometimes, especially in the early stages of becoming a geographer, one of the most difficult questions to answer is, "What sort of research do I want to do?" Our discipline is so diverse and extensive and the possible range and mix of methods so large that sometimes this question seems almost impossible to answer. As you get older and build up experience, one piece of work tends to lead to another, and before you know it you are an "expert" in a particular field. But sometimes you may decide to start a project that would be considered outside your main interests; this is the case for the work I reflect on here. The combination of two sets of circumstances pushed me to my new interest: one set personal and the other broadly political. For many years now, I have been interested in the associations between socioeconomic change in Britain and the changing nature of gender relations. I have undertaken research and written books and papers on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical nature of these changes and have thought and written about what it might mean to try to do feminist research. I have been involved in various ways in policies to challenge contemporary assertions and assumptions about the position of women in contemporary Britain, assuming that, in most cases, girls and women have fewer opportunities and are discriminated against, compared with boys and men--while recognizing, of course, the ways in which divisions based, among other criteria, on class and ethnicity cut across and complicate this simple pattern. I supported single-sex education for girls, for example, and was active in local equal-pay campaigns. I also talked about my work at home and tried to live according to my beliefs. But then I had a son who, as he moved through the educational system, challenged almost everything I thought and said through his own experiences. Clearly this is not an uncommon experience for parents of teenagers; what was so challenging for me was that it was the girls in his class who were the privileged ones. By chance they outnumbered their male peers in his year group; they were lively, articulate, and well organized, they were good competitors inside and outside the classroom, and they generally seemed more content and at ease with themselves than did the lumpish, antisocial, and uncouth boys in their early and midteens who passed through my kitchen. Statistical proof of these evident gender differences seemed to be supplied by their respective results in the school-leaving exams that my son and his peers took at the age of sixteen. The girls outperformed the boys, not only in the subjects in which female success has been common--in languages and literature, for example--but also in math and science. Moreover, whereas most of the girls moved onto the local sixth-form college to continue their education, too many of the boys left school and, with varying degrees of success, started to look for employment. My personal experiences at home seemed to be paralleled all over the country. Since the mid-1990s a popular and political debate has emerged in Britain about "the problem with/for boys" (Phillips 1993; Griffin 2000; McDowell 2000a). In these debates, boys and young men appear in two related guises. They are, first, the loutish, troublesome youths who hang around on street corners and engage in various forms of antisocial or illegal behavior, now appearing as hooligans or yobs in policy proposals by the British government to counter antisocial public behavior. The same troublesome young men appear in a second form in educational debates as the "boys who fail," in which a growing gender gap in the educational performance of boys and girls has been identified (Griffin 2000). In some of these debates, schools, teachers, feminism in general, and even girls themselves are blamed for undermining the confidence of young men, letting them down and failing to nurture them. In the face of "girl power," it seems, all tha t boys are able to do is to fall back into antisocial "laddishness. …

Between “in camp” and “out of bounds”: notes on the history of fieldwork in american geography

Abstract: ********** Geography's recorded fieldwork tradition is as old as Odysseus and predated by much of prior humanity's recounted and remembered knowledge of places and environments revealed through mobility and interaction with one's surroundings. The origins of American geography's fieldwork traditions are not so mythically precise nor deeply diffuse. Nevertheless, the subsequent history has been mythologized in places, while remaining largely uncollected or unevenly recollected. As Felix Driver recently remarked, "It's striking how rarely we have reflected on the place of field-work in our collective disciplinary imagination.... Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the specifically geographical dimensions of fieldwork or to its history with the discipline.... Field-work has generally not been treated as a subject worthy of historical inquiry in itself" (2000, 267). He points to recent work twinning gender and fieldwork as a partial exception, to which I would add the growing critical literature on fieldwork and colonialism. Both of these terrains offer ideal subjects for "externalist" histories, informed by critical cultural theory. Here, however, my objectives are more "internalist" and less theoretically directed. I offer some notes on, and notions of, topics and issues that a larger history of American geographical fieldwork might delve into and develop more fully. Slightly more elaborate than field jottings but less polished than a research article, these are more assay s than a single essay. Like samples to be examined, they point to places where full-scale excavations might profitably be done, for either internalist or externalist ends. FOREIGN PRECURSORS Numerous explorers and travelers are claimed as precursors by American geography professionals, but no one figure directly inspired the beginnings of American geographers' (ad)ventures involving outdoor observations and systematic data collection. If, and then when, this history is written, various nineteenth-century figures, native and non-native, will be recognized as having laid the foundation. Alexander von Humboldt's tropical American travels and fieldwork (1799-1804) surely count as a start. These helped direct America's Enlightenment-republican vision toward national expansion and exploration. If not the "intellectual author" of the Lewis and Clark expedition--Thomas Jefferson clearly was--Humboldt became one of its godfathers after his 1804 visit to the United States. His stature grew over the next half-century, until mythically minded historians would see much of America's antebellum exploration and early geographical fieldwork as directly attributable to Humboldt's example and outlook. William Goetzmann even characterized the explorers and natural historians of the period as "Humboldt's children" (1986, 150-192). His energetic and exotic travels and researches expanded the scope of what might logically constitute advanced fieldwork in geography. By the same token, Humboldt did greatly increase the amplitude of scale and distance that individuals might envision as appropriate units and arenas for field research. His apparent choroconquest of sizable sections of South America and Mexico and his mastery of myriad problems using multiple field techniques set a high bar for those tempted to match his scientific accomplishments, but it also later helped set geographers' sights beyond local, or even continentally bound, questions and problems. There is still no single systematic study of Humboldt's influence on geography's disciplinary emergence in the nineteenth century. One obvious chapter will be his part in fomenting fieldwork, particularly in the United States. Friedrich Ratzel can also be credited with laying the foundation, if less directly than Humboldt. Ratzel's travels in the United States during 1873-1874 were undertaken as a journalist writing for the Kolnische Zeitung (Ratzel 1988). His dispatches at the time, or as collected, probably had little effect on geography per se. …

Of “loose” women and “guides,” or, relationships in the field*

Abstract: ********** Critiques emanating from postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism challenge objectivity in the social sciences and lay the groundwork for theories that rest on a complex of discourses, ideologies, social constructions, and power relations. Emerging from these critiques are provocative questions about how knowledge is constituted, with considerable attention devoted to the decisive role of a researcher's identity in field research (Crapanzano 1977; Smith 1988; Sidaway 1992; Herod 1993; England 1994; Enslin 1994). Less attention is accorded interpreter-assistants and to the relationship between a researcher and a research assistant. (1) Yet research assistants mediate research, particularly for those who do fieldwork in foreign settings. How a researcher is perceived by informants, the particular guise by which one enters a community, and the relationships formed with informants are all central to the process by which knowledge is generated (Bogdan and Biklen 1982). Research assistants influence these relationships, especially in their role of establishing contact with informants. This essay discusses the ways in which our relationship as researcher/interpreter-assistant and as wife/husband informed field research in Kerala, India (Figure 1). We draw on recent theories of the body and performance (Butler 1990), and on disciplinary interest in what has come to be known as researcher positionality, to discuss our relationship as it was mediated by local contingencies: We encountered a number of issues connected to our identities/bodies and our relationship that influenced the research we conducted, and together we both formed and adapted to others' constructions of ourselves to navigate "the field." Geographical research is not an innocent, objective process. Rather, it is constantly mediated by gender, class, ethnicity, identity, and relations of power--each and all inscribed on the bodies of researchers and research subjects. The identities they etch on our bodies and our own counterconstructions heavily influence how we relate to our research subjects, which then influences the generation of knowledge. In this essay we share some of our experiences conducting research together as a Western, white, female researcher and an Indian, male, research assistant, and speak to how our marriage midway through the research period modified perceptions yet again. Contained in this dynamic are at least two separate, if related, issues: How our relationship affected and was affected by the field--our movements to and from different research sites and those associated with general daily activities and errands--and the role our relationship played in research and interview events. Unlike most village-based fieldwork, during which a researcher lives and participates in the daily activities of one particular setting that constitutes her/his "field," we lived in the state capital and commuted to several places around the district that constituted field-research sites. For us the field comprised both the particular sites in which we conducted research (harbors, beaches, fish markets, fishing villages) and sites connected to our other daily life experiences (city streets, shops, residences). The particular issues that arose and the strategies we adopted in each of these two field settings differed in key ways. Devan, in particular, adopted strategies that stretched the boundaries of his identity, creating ambiguity about his positionality. He manipulated his position as insider/outsider in complex ways that were mandated by who we were and by local social contexts. This then facilitated the relationships that Holly developed with informants. By "manipulated" we do not mean a deliberate deception or misrepresentation of self. Rather, we draw on Erving Goffman's notion that different social contexts create distinct roles and selves. People, then, constantly select how to present themselves in their interactions (Goffman 1959; also Berreman 1972). …

Researcher, Informant, “Assassin,” me*

Abstract: ********** Nothing in my academic training prepared me for the methodological challenges I faced while conducting fieldwork in a setting of war. No graduate seminar had schooled me in "methods in the field of battle"; no workshop offered "techniques for researchers, terrorists, and native others." In this essay I examine methodological challenges inherent in being assigned a criminalized identity and labeled a terrorist assassin. Working from experiences in an environment of violence engendered by war, I argue for methodologies that recognize the researcher as an informant. Fieldwork can no longer be constrained to discovery and the study of an exotic Other. Trained as an anthropologist, I am acutely aware of that discipline's historical and continued efforts to reconcile its colonizing past (Asad 1973; James 1973). Social science researchers are participants in every ethnographic moment that constitutes fieldwork, and no longer can anyone claim the status of objective observer. Our experiences, subject positions, and complicated identities are integral not only to research but also to the interpretive process of analysis and representation. In viewing the researcher as an informant, we make visible the motivations, experiences, and perceptions that inform ethnographic data. I am not suggesting that our voices as researchers be trusted above the words of those whom we interview in the field. I do, however, believe that revealing the p athways of our analyses as we represent others is an important step toward integrity in research. Critically examining our motivations and experiences in researching particular peoples and communities is part of respectful scholarship based on equity and integrity. A Tamil woman, I was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and raised in North Borneo and Minnesota. Identity is central to my research and writing on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a social and political movement that works to advance the Tamil nationalist struggle in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. As an expatriate/transnational field-worker and academic, I became a subject of interest and suspicion. As a researcher, I look physically authentic, with dark skin, curly black hair, and wearing--by choice--the symbolic markers of a Hindu-Tamil woman: a thilakam or pottu (1) and a nose ornament that map Tamil identity onto my body. This authenticity is reduced if a suspicious interlocutor questions my objectivity as a native, my distance as an expatriate and immigrant to the United States, and my Otherness as a Tamil academic working from within the politicized spaces of nationalism and violence in Sri Lanka. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SETTING After decades of nonviolent protest and participation in diplomatic negotiations with successive Sri Lankan governments to secure the fundamental rights of citizenship, language, education, and employment, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), a political party, received the mandate of Tamil communities throughout the north and east in the 1977 general elections to create a separate state. (2) Emerging from a history of state-sponsored violence and discrimination, the LTTE currently leads the Tamil nationalist movement, pressing for the creation of a separate state called Tamil Eelam. In the United States we may be aware of the ongoing "ethnic conflicts" in faraway places like Sri Lanka, but we cannot imagine the material realities of people who live with war. The New York Times, National Public Radio, and the National Geographic Magazine have on occasion reported an eruption of violence as the Sri Lankan government "launched its campaign against Jaffna" while "the Tigers kept up their campaign of terror" (Vesilind 1997, 121). Little mention is made of the military checkpoints at every major intersection throughout Colombo, the capital city. All Tamils must, in fact, register their presence and identity with local police stations; national identification cards differentiate Tamils from Sinhalese, in a distinction exploited by military police who randomly detain people on the streets and conduct periodic "clearing operations. …

Within the river: collaboration and methodology*

Abstract: ********** The solidarity rally through the Narmada river valley arrives at Nisrapur, a village of 10,000 people near the banks of the river. This village is one of 62 slated for submergence as a result of the construction of dams along the Narmada.... People throng the streets. The beat of drums and metal thalis [plates] is interspersed with the trilling of flutes.... Slogans rend the air as flower petals rain down. Women and girls rush to apply red and yellow powder tilaks [devotional marks] to our foreheads. Rallyists swallowed by the crowd are swept along by the rhythm of the night, by the chanting, dancing, music-driven river of faces. The river swirls and eddies, flows forward and meanders. From the market square, long into the night, speeches, songs, and poems fill the air. Water is passed to slake our thirst. Like the Narmada river, it is water for life, not for the death that the dams will bring. A song of rebellion is taken up by the crowd and accompanied by rhythmic clapping.... Within it flows a message to a ll those who would sit back and bemoan the plight of the dispossessed and displaced of the world without doing anything to challenge it. It is simple: "So that there is no darkness to fear, so that life is not drenched with tears.... That is why we choose the path of struggle." This extract from my summer 1999 research journal captures a moment of fieldwork, describing a struggle in central India that was an indelible part of my field experience. Its embodied philosophy of collaborative engagement raises questions about the appropriate practice of research. For three months of that summer, I conducted preliminary research on the construction of a multidam project in the Narmada Valley, India, and participated in resisting its construction. THE RIVER The Narmada River runs for 1,289 kilometers through the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, passing though fertile plains and a series of hill ranges including the Vindhyas and Satpuras. The river valley is home to wealthy cash-crop farmers and adivasi (tribal) subsistence farmers such as the Bhil and Bhilala. The Narmada Valley has been home to these peoples for generations, and the river is itself one of India's most sacred. Daughter of the Hindu god Shiva, Narmada is worshiped in numerous temples located along her banks. For generations, devotees have undertaken a parikrama, a foot pilgrimage along both banks of the river that traditionally takes three years, three months, and three days. For forty years, since 1961, the distant central government has wanted to construct 30 large, 135 medium, and 3,000 small dams along the river to harness the waters of the Narmada and its tributaries in order to provide water and electricity for development. The Sardar Sarovar Dam is the largest, currently in operation at a height of 85 meters, with a final proposed height of 136.5 meters. More than fifty villages have already been submerged during its construction. The central government claims that the Sardar Sarovar Project will irrigate 1.8 million hectares, including the drought-prone areas of Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat. However, the dam already consumes 80 percent of Gujarat's irrigation budget, with only 1.6 percent of cultivable land in Kutch and 9 percent of Saurashtra's cultivable land in its command area. Most water will in truth irrigate the sugar farms of wealthy Gujarat farmers (Fisher 1995; Roy 1999). A spate of independent research on megadam projects documents them as ecological, economi c, and cultural disasters that deliver but a fraction of purported benefits (McCully 1996). When construction of the planned dams along the Narmada is completed, up to 15 million people (especially adivasis and peasant farmers) will eventually be displaced through flooding, the construction of a canal to divert water from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, and the establishment of construction colonies and wildlife sanctuaries. …

Theory in the field

Abstract: ********** In the more than thirty years since we began our graduate training we have singly and jointly conducted fieldwork in the United States, India, Canada, and Sri Lanka. Our discussion here is about our work in Bedford, New York, although what we say applies to our other field sites as well. Bedford is our focus because it is the place we know best, personally and professionally. Nancy grew up there and still has family and friends in town, and we return three times a year. Jim first conducted fieldwork there in the summer of 1971, Nancy wrote her dissertation on the area in the 1980s, and at present we are completing a monograph about the town. Our essay is divided into three parts. We discuss why we believe interviewing is a crucial component of fieldwork in cultural geography. Choosing to conduct interviews, or not, invokes theoretical debates about structure and conscious action and raises ethical questions of reinterpreting informants' interpretations. A second section addresses the use of theories in fieldw ork and our choice of various theoretical frameworks over the years. The final section discusses problems raised by our theoretical perspectives and the inevitable intimacy and obligations that arise when we work in a small place over many years. ON INTERVIEWING AS A THEORETICAL DECISION For some cultural geographers who study contemporary places, interviewing is integral to fieldwork; for many others it is not. There is a long tradition in cultural geography of visual and behavioral analysis, especially "reading the landscape" (Meinig 1979; Lewis 1983) and mapping observations (Foote, Hugill, and Mathewson 1994). The landscape-reading orientation has tended to steer researchers away from interviewing informants who have their own readings of the landscape and toward the cultural geographer's expert reading. (1) Such a choice often inadvertently, but perhaps not unexpectedly, dovetails with a degree of cultural reductionism, for the decision not to interview informants often reveals an unacknowledged belief in relatively homogeneous cultural reception. Although we conceive of cultures as systems of meanings, values, and practices that individuals within particular cultural groups share in some degree, we prefer to steer clear of reductive cultural determinism. Various national groups can be distinguished by shared assumptions and practices, but analysis need not operate at such a gross level. Any study based on generalized meaning inevitably masks the complexity and fragmentation that exist within overarching structures. This includes differences that members of a national group use to distinguish themselves from other members of the group along the lines of class, age, race, gender, taste, sexuality, place, occupation, and, within these, a still more vast array of individual and group characteristics. A number of useful theoretical frames capture the at once structured and improvised nature of meaning systems. To explore these, individual or group interviewing, participant observation, or, at the very least, written questionnaires are probably needed to open up a study's potential empirical richness. Oversimplification is a particularly great danger when cultural analysis is overly abstract and divorced from fieldwork. But reductionism in empirical fieldwork is a danger, too, especially when it is insufficiently sensitive to differences among informants, is based on small numbers, or assumes homogeneity where none exists. Extensive and intensive interviewing becomes not just one methodological choice but theoretically highly desirable when in the field. There are various general, abstract theoretical perspectives on the structure-- action relationship. Choosing among these is a matter of what Anselm Strauss calls "theoretical sensitivity" to the complexity, nuances, and unexpected contingencies of specific empirical data (1987, 11). This includes not only the immediate empirical context but also previous research and a researcher's life experience. …