Field Research: Rocking Out and Talking to Strangers

This is how you do field research.

It's a weekday. I wake up at 9:00 or 10:00 AM, depending on the weather outside (I spend all day underground but . . . rain, ew). I eat my cereal and jump in the shower, weighing the need for a shave today. (Monday is my nominal shaving day, but when this standard schedule is dispensed with, I must spend each subsequent day of a shave-less-Monday week debating whether my 8-, 9-, 10-day accumulation of facial hair is "scruffy", "beard-y", or "actively off-putting"). I reach my conclusions as to the scruff (generally something like, Ehh, fuck it, you look fine), throw on some jeans, and then proceed to arrange the morning rock-out.

The rock-out is not to be taken lightly. A successful day in the field is dependent almost entirely on how much gusto I have going on that day. My job is to introduce myself to random individuals (who will inevitably wonder why this foreigner is pestering them with his broken Spanish) while they're working in subway cars, and to entice them to come sit with me at a later point to be interviewed and tape-recorded. I am a sociology student, I say, and I just want to talk to you about the work you do down here. Doing this, frankly, takes some balls on my part, and the purpose of the rock-out is the building-up of said balls.

I throw some water on the stove to get my instant coffee going (I know that I'm usually kind of a coffee snob, and I do have this bangin french press in the apartment, but I kind of have a caffeine-induced anxiety problem, and when I have all that delicious french pressed coffee around I go a little overboard, and the instant is way cheaper, so why spend $30 pesos making myself all uppity and uncomfortable when I can spend $5 and avoid the palate for a second cup?) and set about choosing the day's soundtrack. Generally speaking, Third Eye Blind has proven an irreplaceable staple in this research stage, with the 1997 single Semi-charmed Life being just as popular in my bedroom today as it was when I was eleven. (I usually start from the beginning of the song's album, however, so that the coffee will have been brewed and the caffeine fully kicked in by the time iTunes gets to this track. This way I lose my inhibitions and feel buzzed and uppity enough to belt out The sky was goooold! / it was rose! / I was takin' sips of it through my nose . . . ! just like Stephan Jenkins, even though I'm just drinking instant coffee and not actually enjoying any of my day through nose-related inhalation activities.)

My spirits thus set firmly on an upswing, I set about preparing materially for my day. I pace around the room, mug in hand, bobbing my head to the music, re-centralizing the notebooks and knick-knacks that I scattered all over various pieces of furniture the day before. I dump out my backpack on the bed. I review the pile I've gathered:

Teeny notepad for my back jeans pocket. Check.
Two pens for my front jeans pocket. Check.
Red notebook with various project notes. Check.
Several copies of my questionnaire. Check.
Little business cards with my cell and email on them that refer to me as "estudiante/sociologo" (student/sociologist). Of course.
Several $2 peso bills for front jeans pocket to give to salespeople/performers for goods/performances to butter them up just prior to introducing myself. Check.
Digital voice recorder. Check.
Tic tacs. Just in case.
Etc.

Then comes the final stage of the field entry pregame rock-out. I combine the pacing and rocking-out with a clearer, more precise focus on the task at hand. Taped to one of my kitchen cabinets is a sheet of paper headlined "Preliminary Introductions (basic ideas)" featuring two paragraphs, each of which is a rough example of the sentences I'll be spitting out to potential study respondents as I introduce myself. I furrow my brow just slightly and slow my pace a hair, gulp down my coffee in deeper, braver swigs, motioning with my free hand as I speak aloud to my hypothetical one-man Argentine audience. . . . and so I'm just wondering if you'd be up for talking with me for a bit, I could buy you a cup of coffee, no big deal . . .

I pick up various copies of my questionnaire lying in the pile on my bed -- at this point in the study there are several questionnaires, depending on the occupation of the respondent, whether I've already spoken with him/her or if it's a new person, an impromptu interview -- and run my eye over these as well, declaring every few days or so that such-and-such-question doesn't make any sense, no one ever understands it, it doesn't really add anything to what I know, etc. I make sure I am comfortable with the questions, that the order is right, that none of them pry too deep or are likely to make a respondent uneasy. I consider whether I'm asking what I want to know. After a few minutes I am a storm of quick, informal Spanish, laying out my spiels rapid-fire and with myriad phraseologies. I know the study in my head and I get over the language barrier. I get in the zone.

I close the rock-out with a final upbeat anthem, which, again, varies from day to day, and then I am out the door and into the Subte, focused and unafraid.

Each day underground comes with its own goal. At first, I'm just riding around watching stuff, noting who I see working, at which stops workers tend to get on and off the train, etc. Once I have my final questionnaire in hand, the goals become more concrete. I spend a few days mapping out ideal interview locations (cafes, generally) outside of Subte stations (and taking note of a few that are actually inside the stations -- these are very informal, but bustling and un-sketchy, perhaps ideal for workers who are wary of wandering far with me). I start determining exact tasks to be completed on a given day: Today you must introduce yourself to at least one guy. You don't go home without having met one person. My small victories progress: Yesterday you met that guy playing music on the platform, but today you have to meet someone working in one of the actual train cars. And finally, You don't go home today without having established a concrete interview appointment. You have to keep going until you set that up.

I meet a bunch of people. I hang out with a magician I already know, go to a theater show he does a bit in, and interview him when he has a free afternoon. I receive a lot of mixed messages -- people who seem gung-ho interested in the study but never contact me, people who are sketched out by me but contact me anyway, sending mysterious text messages to my phone from numbers I don't recognize. The process is slow-going and sometimes frustrating, but I plug along and genuinely get a kick out of every new person who gives me the time of day. Interviews are still few and far between, but I am establishing a presence in my setting, and the data I am collecting in casual conversation (what's generally called "informal interviewing", in which I just let informants kind of spill out their random factoids at will rather than subject them to a structured questionnaire) is proving to be both fascinating and extremely valuable. There is a structure and a culture to Subte work, as I had hoped there would be -- and thank God this is proving to be the case, this is a huge weight off my shoulders -- and the workers themselves are quite aware of it; they are, in the lingo of qualitative research, "the experts" on the subject.

I befriend a troupe of actors. They turn out to be an extremely genial group, and after interviewing several of them at once (focus group-style) they invite me to observe during their shows, if I'd like. Hell yes, I'd like to. These people are upbeat and fun to be around, and their shows are clever and fearless. They march around the train cars in two's or three's, catching one another in amusing acts of indiscretion, declaring their love for unsuspecting old flings, working wonders with their wordplay. I am a fantastic audience, and I am constantly giggling to myself as I scribble frantically in my notepad during our rides. The other passengers, of course, love them, too.

I start to establish friendships with a few of these actors, and, in true anthropological style, we exchange small favors as signs of trust and appreciation -- I buy them coffee after one of their shifts (the day is divided into three four-hour turnos), and they invite me to an asado (a traditional Argentine barbeque) on the upcoming July 9th holiday. The leader of the pack (the actor who conceived of this ongoing project years ago) has a keen understanding of his place in the informal economy, and he shares with me a great deal of information about what's going on in the Subte as our friendship develops. The study is officially rolling along nicely, and my hands are finally dirty, plunged into something thick and tangible.

Then the swine flu. H1N1 hits even harder than before, people start to panic (Argentina, despite having been one of the later countries to tally a contamination, suddenly jumps to third place in flu deaths, after the U.S. and Mexico), and schools and city government offices in Buenos Aires close for at least two weeks. My acting troupe, furthermore, is formally banned from working in the Subte, lest they encourage the spread of la pandemia. My friends are left without a steady income and I am once again stalled in my efforts to effectively enter the field.

And that is how field research goes.

07/05/09

I'm Watching and Analyzing All of You, All the Time

Two weeks ago, the four other Buenos Aires-bound Fulbrights and I got together for a pot-luck dinner, to which I was woefully unable to contribute in any meaningful way, in culinary terms. Whatever. I cooked this tuna pesto thing (the leftovers of which I enjoyed for days) and anyway, I brought a bottle of wine. I have already explained our zest for alcohol.

Of the five of us, one is a PhD student, another already has her PhD, and another has her Master's. Only two of us are fresh out of undergrad. The conversation at dinner sort of bounces around from topic to topic, but at some point we spend a good chunk of time talking about academia and its virtues and flaws. Well, really we mostly talk about its flaws. The other recent graduate, Emily, is heading to med school in the fall, which is academic but not academia proper. I am thus the only one weighing the career move in my immediate future. I am the most naive and least versed in the politics of the whole endeavor, and the more experienced students tell me a lot about what to expect and what not to expect, and what I should and shouldn't do in preparation, as I seek out programs to apply to. The advice is all well-intentioned and constructive more than critical, but I nonetheless joke about how my idealism has been crushed by their jaded realism. This is not the first encounter I've had with unraveling the imperfections and challenges of graduate politics, and so I throw all this new information onto the ugly and growing heap of grad school impressions that sits somewhere towards the front of my mind's things-to-ponder department.

I am wrestling quite a bit with graduate school, right now. If I study anthropology, which I have felt in my gut lately is the field for me, I should (so I have been advised by numerous other students, professors, and grad school websites) consider not just the programs themselves but the professors with whom I would like to work. If a school can't be sure that your research interests match those of its professors, then they are less likely to risk accepting you, another PhD student told me this week. I have to have a clear idea of where I want to go, academically speaking, for the next 6-8 years. This means zeroing in on exact subfields, or sub-subfields, even. I need to have a project in mind. There's room for flexibility once I start school, but there's no avoiding a pretty clear direction -- my region of study, my country within the region, the phenomenon or group of people in the country, etc.

I have been swimming in a convoluted sea of informal economy articles and books for the past year or so, along with some occasional offshoots on things like Latin American political movements and urban studies generally. But the Subte thing is just the most visible of my interests, the only one that kind of mushroomed into a major life event. Two years ago, I rode the subway to class everyday. I noticed these people selling stuff in the cars, I asked around about who they were, and since nobody seemed to know who they were, I started asking more and different questions. I read some stuff, I wrote a proposal, and I won nine months' stipend to answer the questions myself. Sweet deal. But choosing a direction to follow for much longer than nine months -- for many, many years, potentially -- requires more cogitation than is typically possible in a 20-minute Subte ride.

So, recently I decided to wipe my slate clean, to start from academic scratch. I work on my study full-time as usual, but in my free time I'm brainstorming. I ignore my background. I'm in the U.S. I'm in grad school. I can be anywhere and I can be studying anything. What would I most like for that thing to be?

Having already decided anthropology (or a very qualitatively-oriented sociology program) as my broader focus, I have to next pick a region to study. Before I can peruse any subfields, I have to know where I'll be geographically.

U.S.
I sometimes forget that my first declared major in college was American Studies. And I loved that major. Although I tacked on a sociology major during my sophomore year, American Studies was where I really got to do a lot of the creative work I loved, where I got to wrestle with our culture in really flexible, abstract ways. AMST was in some ways a free-for-all: professors would show us bits and pieces of American culture in a new light, they would suggest little reinterpretations of our worlds to get us started, and then it was up to the student to kind of attack those bits and pieces, rearrange them and re-tell our stories so that the unspoken scripts we live by were made loud and visible. For me, a lot of that major was about making the intangible in our worlds tangible, and doing it myself, with just my wits and my eyes and my bare hands.

Sociology was less democratic. There wasn't a lot of investigating one could do from the undergraduate level. Sociology classes were usually spent debating other peoples' ideas instead of coming up with our own, and that made the major a little less engaging for me. Graduate school, however, would obviously be much more predicated on the pursuit of novel sociological research. I just can't say I've ever really done a sociology project in the U.S., and besides, I've already decided to take a more cultural turn.

I'm wondering now whether I want to wander away from studies focused on U.S. American culture. I love living and traveling in Latin America, and I love all the new things I get to learn here on a daily basis, but . . . you know the most interesting and challenging papers I've written have been about U.S. subcultures, not anything pertaining to Latin America. I'm good at U.S. culture. I know it, I watch it all day long at home, I pick it apart when I'm driving in the car or getting coffee with a friend. (I'm watching and analyzing all of you all the time, FYI.) And that constant picking-apart is something that I really like to do, it's a fun obsession for me.

And since that obsession makes me far more expert in our culture than I can ever be as an outsider in a Latin American country, I wonder if I really want to use my faculties trying to understand phenomena that are . . . interesting to me, but not necessarily as close to my heart, that don't belong to me as much as North American topics. I want to be able to diagram deep-seated, unexamined cultural meanings and practices that no one's noticed, that are hard to get at, and it's tough to even know where to look when you're coming from the outside. U.S. American culture is something that I'm already wrapped up in and that I can't see myself ever tiring of swimming through.

Latin America.
Maybe I'm misspeaking to say that Latin America isn't "close to my heart". The little porteno piece of America Latina that I know is becoming more of a home for me everyday. I love it here. I'm starting to feel like I belong. There's a flavor in daily life that I just haven't found in the U.S. and I can't imagine a better setting for my 2009 (and maybe for other years down the road, should I be lucky).

My field research is finally starting to pick up, and I will be doing my first interview later in the week. I'm spending a lot more time in the Subte, and to be honest I'm really kind of digging it. I like watching stuff, I like strategizing about how to best obtain interviews, where to do them, how to introduce myself, all of that. It's very hands-on intellectual work, what I imagine being at a dig would be like for an archaeologist. I only have this one contact (respondent) at the moment, but I'm feeling confident about where I am and where the project might head from here.

The mastery (if I can call it that) that I'm starting to develop over my physical setting (the Subte) and the project more generally is very exciting. As this mastery improves, I wonder what other kinds of projects like this I might come up with, where else I could get some work done in Latin America. If it turns out that I can in fact successfully write an ethnography on this phenomenon, then where else can I direct that newly developed skill? Should I try to further my expertise here and find another topic in Buenos Aires or Argentina, or, in the same line of thinking, try to spend some time learning the culture of another South American country that I might study? I'm hoping to take a Portuguese class when the (Argentine) spring semester starts up in August, just because Brazil is a place I'd like to check out. Might there be something there for me?

Wrapping it all up.
Part of the problem with dreaming about Brazil (or anything outside of Buenos Aires, really) is that since my experience is so limited, the planning process becomes very romanticized. When I gave my presentation at the Fulbright conference in Uruguay in April, the girl who sat next to me (the presentations were given panel-style, with five students presenting consecutively) and presented next was a geography PhD student living in the northern Brazilian Amazon. She lives along a dirt road that was built back in the 1960s but that now is set to be paved in order to transport soy beans (a major crop in both Brazil and Argentina) from southern Brazil to the Amazon River, where they can be exported internationally. Her project was extremely complex, but to be brief -- there is a lot of land conflict in Brazil, and small farmers who already farm along the northern parts of the road will be largely displaced, while farmers in the south of the country stand to gain (through corporate employment). She is more or less ethnographically exploring all of the different interests in the situation in order to understand how land rights and property use are understood in the Amazon. As an unintended consequence (or so it appeared to me), she seemed to be finding that there were large numbers of poor workers who stood to gain or lose on both sides of the debate -- the corporate and environmental implications notwithstanding -- and was torn trying to decide whether she supported or opposed the road.

I loved loved loved her project. It looked to be an extremely richly detailed conflict analysis. I'm not doing her justice in my explanation here, but I think the endeavor just sounds fascinating. At the same time, this girl lives toward the end of this poorly-traveled road (toward the Amazon River-end), has very little access to "modern" amenities like the Internet or hot water, and is in many ways socially isolated. I see ethnographic research like that and I salivate, I would love to see myself doing it. Her presentation at the conference had me sold. But I know from my early experiences in Argentina (particularly back in '07) that adjustments to foreign environments are tough and real, and to romanticize similar future experiences will only leave me unprepared. Furthermore, as I sit here typing and drinking tea in my warm apartment after a quick trip to the gym (located only a block away), I question whether I really have ever had anything remotely resembling the experiences I might have in a rural area of Latin America, or in less affluent urban areas in other countries.

Thus I find myself torn. I am a terrible decision-maker. There is more to this decision than I can concisely put in a single blog post, and all those extra things are running through my head as I wrestle with myself. My regional focus is only the first question in choosing a program. I know that I would be very happy studying U.S. American culture, but there's this promise of adventure that I get from keeping an eye on South America, and as over-romanticized as that promise might be, it does exist and I'm really hesitant to let it go. I also am beginning to speak some pretty bangin Spanish, and I can't see myself letting that fall by the wayside either. Languages (I am finding) don't really come easily to me, but I nonetheless consider learning Spanish to be one of the best things I've done with my life. It's only June and I already dread returning to an all-English existence.

Finally, the opportunity to study extensively in a foreign country is rare. As much as I love the humanities topics that I can find in my own (U.S.) backyard, I'm well-positioned to shed light on phenomena or groups of people that go unnoticed due to a more geopolitically fundamental lack of power. I wrote a paper on gay youth ideologies and social networking methods for an anthropology grad class at George Mason University this past fall; the ethnographic work was fascinating for me, I highly enjoyed the project overall, and the paper was very well-received by my professor. My thesis was about the existence of deep ideological conflict in gay culture that was largely overlooked by the academic literature. My prof said that that the topic could easily be developed into a Master's thesis if I wanted. Studying something like that would be really interesting, engaging for me. But . . . I feel that I would be somehow letting more deserving phenomena go unnoticed were I to spend years studying white, educated, upper-middle class men's ideological pissing contests. Is it presumptuous or naive to think that shedding light on some Latin American phenomenon would be more fulfilling?

I don't know how to make the big life decisions. I feel like I don't have enough life experiences to do so. Thoughts?

6/2/09

Argentine Researcher Jack and the Great Identity Crisis

Two weeks ago on a Sunday evening my plane touches down in Montevideo, Uruguay, for our Regional Fulbright Conference. Long-story-short, about 25 students of varying ages are flown in from Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil to sit in a big rectangular hotel conference room and watch each other give Powerpoint presentations. This is to be done for about two or three hours every morning, Monday through Wednesday, followed by three epic hours of Uruguayan beef-filled lunchtime, followed then by an additional two or three hours of presentations. This official schedule, in turn, is generally followed by similarly epic periods of alcohol consumption, during which our insatiable desires for trashy American-style hotel-room-partying are slowed only by the constant need for someone to return to the gas station for yet another three-pack of liter-sized beers. South America is not all about the thirty-pack, and we are thirsty and shortsighted.

Though nobody had really been looking forward to the conference, it turns out that the 25 of us are the most interesting and fun people ever assembled in a single hotel. People have fascinating projects, everyone is full of questions and interesting insights into my own work, and we're all so starved for some American cultural interaction that we kind of explode into this loud four-day self-love-fest. We are obsessed with ourselves, and it is a veritable orgy of intellectual backslapping and painfully funny critiques of such Latin American phenemona as the ubiquitous Chilean Fanny Pack. I also personally receive some criticism for wearing "mandals", which are apparently some very undesirable class of sandal that I have taken to wearing. Now I know.

After Uruguay, I return to Buenos Aires and meet up immediately with my friend/advisor/ex-boss (for whom I worked as a research assistant) Brian, who is in town for the weekend to celebrate defending his PhD dissertation (though this actually just happened on May 6 -- congrats to Brian!!). Brian is probably the easiest visitor one could hope for -- he's already seen Buenos Aires several times -- and so the weekend is smooth and slow, spent gorging on empanadas, wine, and coffee (though not all at once, generally). Brian is here for about four days, and then he's off on a plane back to the Mother Continent. I wake up last Tuesday alone and without the variety of loud American goings-on that I had been enjoying for the previous nine days. Oh right, I remember, I'm in Argentina . . . doing a . . . doing that thing with the subway people. Shit am I still doing that?

It is at this point that I begin my unanticipated readjustment to life in Argentina. I give myself a few days to decompress, come back down to Earth -- Tuesday I resolve not to leave my futon except for coffee-brewing activities, and Wednesday I devote most of my faculties to turning the apartment into a swine flu-proof bunker -- but eventually I must start to remember why I came here. I start reading some fresh methods stuff for the study, do a little general pondering, but I feel off. I throw myself into quasi-relevant things, like researching grad schools online and flipping through Spanish-language cookbooks (if I do not improve in the kitchen in the near future I may be forced to starve myself) and I even get pretty hyped up for these little activities.

The grad school search in particular is kind of exhilarating, and every now and then I come across a program that really hits the spot. (I get excited over an anthropology program that emphasizes critiques of neocolonialism and globalization the way normal people get excited over the possibility of a good lay on Saturday.) I dig through a few of these university websites, whipping myself up into little frenzies, seeing my whole future crack open like a once-dormant Pandora's Box, but a good Pandora's Box, one not filled with whatever unfortunate stuff that box was filled with [witty literary reference ends here] but with big, grand things, acceptance letters and assistanceships and fieldwork projects in exotic places that you've never been to but that you really must see to understand, to see what's going on, man, you know? I see myself getting the big picture, the one everyone is looking for but only a few ever really figure out.

These things all buzz around in my head and I get way ahead of myself, strategizing how best to present myself to these upper echelon anthropologist types, considering how endearing my references to having just returned from Argentina and oh yeah, I miss it a lot will be if and when I go to interview next winter. I self-aggrandize far more than one should but then am struck by a humbling proposition -- what if I don't get in? Then I go beyond this basic proposition and really start thinking about why I spend so much time dwelling on my future in the first place. It's a lamentable habit, even a little obnoxious (at least when I relate to the world that I'm doing it); what does it mean that I do it so profusely?

I get into a whole process of self-questioning in which I look around my room and wonder if all of these intellectual acquisitions -- the Noam Chomsky books, the novels in Spanish, the very boring treatises on things like 1920s Italian Marxists -- are just bullshit, just veneer on an identity that's disingenuous at best, or, at worst, a betrayal of who I really am, of the background I really come from. I stop for a minute and consider whether every interesting, esoteric book on my bookshelf is really just one more brick in the pathway to getting laid.

So what made you want to do research in Argentina?
Well, I figured if spending a year in South America wasn't going to get me laid, what was, you know?

Pardon?
I mean, now I'm at least 10 times as interesting as I was a year ago. My worth on the relationship/sex appeal market has increased exponentially. Down here, I'm just another foreigner, but once I'm back in the U.S. -- I'm a well-traveled intellectual. I'm interesting. You really can't beat interesting.

What about a love of culture, an interest in Spanish, or sociology, something like that?
Well, sure, that's there, too. You want me to run through that whole spiel, too? OK, uh . . . well I love the language, and it was such a great opportunity to, uh, to live in a foreign country, and . . . you know the Argentines are so friendly, and . . . I really hope to do qualitative research later in my career, so it was just a spectacular opportunity to get some experience doing that and . . . how am I doing?

You sort of veered off towards the self-aggrandizing thing again towards the end there.
Yeah, yeah, what can I say, I am prepared to get laid at all times, hard habit to break.

Is that what this whole thing is about?
Isn't that what everything is always about?

So you don't actually like 1920s Italian Marxist philosophers, you just read their books for the sex appeal?
Well, sure I like them! It's not a question of whether I'm really a nerd, it's just a question of how calculated the presentation of the nerd identity is. We all strive to present these casual, genuine images of ourselves as Thing X, but I feel myself getting caught up in the gaudiness of the presentation sometimes. The Fulbright is an extremely public endeavor -- its focus is a research project, an intellectual undertaking, but it is an extremely showy, everybody-look-at-what-I'm-doing type of intellectual undertaking. The implications for one's identity are subtle but huge.

Here, we'll do an analogy. Take a bunch of books sitting in a bookcase. There they are, these many shelves of books, sitting in an apartment or an office somewhere, not moving, not being motioned to by the dweller of this apartment/office, but at the same time screaming out, begging to be examined and judged by the visitor. Each book carefully chosen, placed, picked over some other book that would have been less thematically or aesthetically pleasing. A bookcase is one of the most insidious ways to communicate your identity without other people even realizing that you're doing it. Look, you know they'll think, he reads novels in Spanish. Must be an interesting guy. And though I make this calculation all the time -- a calculation, I would like to note as I bare this piece of my soul, that you are all guilty of as well, you with your bookcases and your designer tanktops and your . . . haircuts -- there's something about it that just doesn't sit right with me. I can't live with that bookcase staring at me. It's like the tell-tale heart.

And this has what to do with the Fulbright?
Well insofar as the Fulbright allows me to do research, it allows me to further build up my identity as an intellectual. And as I build that up, I feel increasingly disconnected from whatever I was before I started consciously pursuing this career/lifestyle and its accompanying identity. So after some period in which I was away from the day-to-day goings-on of the research process, returning to them was somewhat confusing. I came back to my research to find that there was no proof that I was anything other than this over-read worldologist (an excellently disparaging term coined by my namesake, Jack F. Mullee, for the record) and that there wasn't a non-academic self to regain touch with. There was no ground, no familiar self to go back to while I decompressed.

See, life abroad requires a lot of concentration. It takes a great deal of mental effort to experience an unusual environment -- from the foreigner's perspective -- as something completely normal and everyday. Introducing a whole lot of American culture (via Uruguay and Brian's visit) breaks that carefully developed concentration, throwing one back into a mini-culture shock once alone in the foreign environment again. And when you go through culture shock, you look for those things that remind you of who you are, of where everything stands, of how this place and this experience are normal. In my case, I looked around for all of those things but found that the only me that seemed to exist was Argentine Researcher Jack, instead of . . . you know, something more quintessentially American, something less constructed. And that experience of disorientation made me question some of my motives, question what I was really here for and how much of it was real versus how much was superficial bullshit. What's the difference between what I do and what I am? Which stuff is just veneer and which is really core substantive stuff? Where's the beef, you know?

I have no idea what you're talking about at this point, you've totally lost me.
I know, it's so complicated! This is what I mean when I say that my brain won't shut up. This is just the carefully written version of all those thoughts and processes, imagine having to listen to them bounce around incoherently at all times of day.

Must be difficult.
I live a troubled existence.

Except for the whole paid-to-research-whatever-you-feel-like-for-a-year thing.
Well, yes, there is that.

How's that working out for you?
Big things, big things are happening. I had an identity crisis. Think I got through it though.

Oh yeah?
Yup, cut back on the caffeine intake a bit, finished the Chomsky book.

Finished the book? What about the whole am-I-feigning-intellectualism thing?
Dunno, still had to finish the book.

So then you are an intellectual?
Could be. Or it could be that I didn't want to close the blog post by concluding that my life is a fraud.

Hm, good point, good point.
So we can never really know. Probably a whole lot of subconscious hullabaloo going on there, I suspect, a lotta' ins, a lotta' outs. Can't dig around in that muck forever.

Yeah, you can't, you really can't. And the getting laid?
This can really only help me.


[Inspiration for the unexplained interviewer-interviewee format comes from Dave Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001: Vintage Books), one of my favorite books. Only borrowed the general format, not the content, of course.]

And much thanks to everybody for your positive comments -- you're a fantastic audience. I am actually putting substantial effort into this now, haha. Hope everybody's doing well.

5/8/09

Doing Research

Last Monday. It is me and the stack of papers. We sit opposite each other -- I, in a chair at the foot of the bed, and the stack, (spread out into less formidable, thematically-based mini-stacks), all over the bed itself. I sip my coffee and look at the blank notebook page I've opened on my lap, trying to absorb something from the stack before I begin pondering things on paper. The stack doesn't cooperate. He's cold, lifeless, comfortable in how large he's grown. Hey, look at me, I'm so fucking big you couldn't even begin to cram all of me into a single backpack! We really aren't on great terms, the stack and I. I keep one eyebrow raised, considering him over the rim of my coffee mug as I sip. Neither of us moves. We are bandits, we're out west, we're fingering our six-shooters. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum . . .

I eventually wade through the stack, leafing over the streaks of yellow and orange. Thoughts are occurred to me, things are scribbled in the notebook, I put down any drivel that comes to mind, in an effort to just get the gears going. I get up, I re-heat my coffee, I return to the chair, I squint at the stack, I nod and then scribble when the stack offers two dots, connected, and I get up, re-heat again.

Eventually a pattern develops. I spend 20 or 30 minutes intimating the thoughts and feelings of the stack. My coffee gets cold, thus prompting the 15-foot walk to the microwave, followed by about 5 to 10 minutes of pacing the 20-foot length of the apartment as I wait for the handle of the coffee mug to cool (since I inevitably heat it for too long) so that I can pick it up and bring it back over to the stack. The pacing is not a waste, in fact is crucial to the research process, giving me forward motion to re-think everything I've just written, to talk to myself outside the earshot of the stack, to hear aloud how brilliant or utterly ridiculous all of the past 30 minutes' thoughts have been, to work out the ever-present jitters from the caffeine. I've been pacing since about sophomore year of undergrad, it's perhaps among the greatest research methods ever devised.

The ongoing thought process -- since that's what research is, I think, is one really long thought spread out over a period of weeks or months or years and then divided up into little subheadings and clever chapter titles -- unfolds healthily but remains very dense, a thicket of ideas that does its best to clump together. Is the informal economy this, or is it that? Why are you studying these people and not those people? Ethnography or grounded theory? Method is everything -- (or method is nothing! Method is irrelevant, data is what you make of it, everything is just out there in the ether, waiting for you to just . . . I don't know, shape it or something! Turn it into your own proverbial origami swan!) I spend the week pacing, debating all these things with myself. Mostly I annoy the hell out of myself (will you just stop asking that? It's ethnography, you jackass, it was always ethnography! . . . or was it?). I shuffle the stack around, flipping articles open and closed, paper clips flying everywhere, highlighting new bits when I re-read with newfound closeness (how could I have been so flippantly amateur, how could I not have read this part, this singularly relevant paragraph in the whole 15 pages?)

Eventually, as the week rolls on, I drag certain chosen pieces of the stack over to the computer, haphazardly building an elite little satellite stack. I type, I pace (now using a kind of triangular approach, moving from desk to microwave, microwave to bed, bed to desk . . . ) and I think I'm typing good things. I'm firm, I'm declarative, I'm taking a stand on all this informal economy business and dammit -- none of you are going to make a peep about it. I feel a bit like the 16-year-old kid who tries to buy beer, hiding behind his wimpy little 16-year-old mustache in an ingenious act of misdirection. If I just use strong language, I think, just write in a clear, no-funny-business kind of way -- there's nothing trivial about this topic, sir, nothing light or linguistically whimsical, fluffy, no colorful metaphors or clever allusions or any of that nonsense here, sir, no, no hanky panky in this paper -- whoever reads this will actually believe that I am a grown-up, and that the informal economy is this thing that I have so confidently declared it to be. (Of course! How could it be otherwise! His writing is so . . . dry, it must be true!)

I spend pretty much my whole week immersed in this pacing, typing, linguistic chestbeating process. I actually make some serious progress, correcting some of the earlier fundamental problems of the study. I manage to piece together a small re-proposal, in which I restate exactly what I theorize the informal economy to be (conceptual clarification) and specify exactly what I hope to find over the next nine months. By Friday I have turned the study upside down, expanding my subject population from Subte (subway) salespeople to salespeople in public space generally. I'm going to compare all these different types of people. In doing this, I sort of "sociologize" the project, making my research aims more amenable to hypothesis, overcoming a lot of my major theoretical stumbling blocks. My survey questions are different. The dry writing reassures me. I have a direction. Phew.

But then I start meandering through some of my methodological literature for the first time in a while. I read back over the adage that one must choose the method to fit the question, not the question to fit the method. In other words, ask something first, then decide how to answer it. I second guess myself for the 843rd time since considering applying for the Fulbright. Did I rebuild my study because I wanted an easier method, because I wanted to be able to declare Yes, worry not, I have a hypothesis, I am not a crazy person, this is an actual social scientific endeavor! ? Is my original question -- who are these people on the Subte?, how did they get here?, etc. -- still answerable if I more carefully construct my method? Should I . . . re-rebuild the study?

Panic, chaos ensue. Buildings collapse, children cry, survivors develop alcohol problems. Every fucking solution, I lament with my face in my hands on the following Monday, yesterday, is fucking wrong.

I go to the office, hoping to inspire myself by sheer, you know, bravado or something, having taken the initiative to actually travel all the way to the office, where I do some class of intellectual work that I cannot do in my apartment, apparently. I luckily find one of my professors there, Lula, who I manage to book for a half hour meeting the next day. What might I say to her? I don't really even know. But it seems time to make a move, to declare aloud that, yes, I am being swallowed by my own indecisive nitpicking, my own idiocy and/or brilliance.

On Tuesday I meet with Lula. I lay it all out there. No one understands why I am studying these people. I don't understand why I'm studying these people. This method won't answer this question, that method won't answer that question, and I'm losing sight of the reasons that I actually proposed this thing in 2007. I can go with Route A or Route B, chosen from among a much larger collection of possible Routes, and what do you think Lula I'm panicking and maybe crashing and burning and I have to make a presentation to a bunch of important people from the State Department in Uruguay next week aaaand . . . ?

I say all that, but far less maniacally, in a way that makes me appear to be just a quasi-stumped young researcher. My life is together, I exude, just complicated. I wear a polo shirt to emphasize my ability to dress office casual. (I also go without an undershirt, emphasizing my ability to dress like an Argentine in a polo shirt). Without really trying to be, Lula is extremely reassuring. She looks at the various things that I have typed up and sees that I am at a crossroads in terms of topic and method, but she doesn't really think I have a problem: she thinks most of the theoretical problems I was having early on can be solved by just going with this alternative method (called "grounded theory") that I started considering the other day. We end up talking for something like an hour, and I am surprised at how eloquently and clearly I'm able to explain my problems. She asks a whole bunch of questions about how much background literature I've read and in doing so makes me realize that she really knows what she's doing and, just as importantly, seems to know exactly what I am doing.

We conclude that I will go with grounded theory and will stick with the focus on the Subte, pending the development of a preliminary questionnaire in the next week or two. Something seems to have clicked into place, I feel. I wander out of the office exuberant. Next week I go to Uruguay (week-long Fulbright conference) and when I return I will finalize my questionnaire and begin looking for informants. The hands-on research begins in about two weeks. Out of the office and into the streets.

And that's what it feels like to do research.


[Aside: did I go a little over the top with the self-deprecating sarcasm? Too many italics? I'm trying to find my voice here so I enjoy whatever comments you have...]

Jack Kerouac Style

On Friday of last week I dispensed with the usual slew of pre-outing text messages, opting to take a night solo in the general spirit of adventure and meeting new people and what have you. I headed to a bar called Flux, a small basement place I'd met some Americans at a couple years ago, and in spite of it being midnight on a Friday the place was quiet, tranquilo. I sit myself down at the bar and after a minute start up a conversation with an Argentine to my left. His name is Luigi, and he quickly falls in love with me, as is the Latino courtship style, and though he leaves the bar after just a few minutes, he spends the rest of his weekend texting me. I'm ambivalent. I'm a friendly bar-goer, at best.

After Luigi rolls out I turn to my other side, where two mid-30s British guys are standing, and I strike up a conversation there as well. These guys, Matthew and Austin, are from London, honeymooning (apparently the gays are getting married in Britain, these days) and are wandering around South America for about three weeks. They make occasional sardonic references to Bush or Obama, to which whoever didn't make the potentially offending comment always says, "Oh, you had to take it there!" as though Americans are embarrassed by both of their major political parties (aren't we?). We get into the basics, what I'm doing here, what they're doing here, what we're doing back home, what music we listen to. Turns out that while in Rio the week before, on their way up to the Big Jesus, they happened to be riding (in a car? one of those trolley things? I don't know how you get up there) with a guy who runs the lights at Radiohead shows. Like me, one of them is a huge Radiohead fan, and it just so happens that the band is coming to Buenos Aires in the coming week (this past Tuesday, now). Tickets -- if not sold out -- are running at US$100 (far too much for my meager wages) but these guys manage to score a pair of free VIP passes from this trolley-traveling Jesus-seeking fellow. We run through the albums -- Kid A at the top of my list, The Bends (an older-school choice) at the top of Matthew's -- and then through Brit rock that's made it across the Atlantic generally. "From the floor of my room sophomore year," I tell them, "through those big Bose-style headphones, Champaign Supernova turned me into a stoner." It was a lame comment, but I couldn't help myself: it was the closest I'll get to personally thanking Oasis. And now I have to listen to a band called Pulp, because it's going to change my life.

The Brits know one of the bartenders here -- an English expat -- who recommends to them "an indie bar" about 15 blocks away. They ask if I want to come along and take care of translation needs, so we jump in a cab (15 blocks in this area isn't bad, but a distance like that at night is always wiser by car) and in 10 minutes we take to a sparsely populated dancefloor. They pick up a round of Budweisers (because I'm an American?) and we shift and sway and pass little messages from person to person like a game of international telephone. We scope and chat and Austin humorously waves his ring finger whenever the topic of marriage comes up. I cannot ascertain whether the gesture indicates ecstasy, exhaustion, or terror. My gut says ecstasy is the intention, but every time I see it I still think: terror.

I later catch the eye of a skinny, lightly-bearded Argentine, who smiles at me and laughs to himself when I smile back. Who laughs when you're flirting from across the room? Is this something people laugh at? I'm a pretty good audience, so the absurdity of this makes me chuckle, too. But I'm lost in a mob of people, on my way to get a round of drinks, so the laughter ends there, until I end up back at the Brits a few minutes later and the porteno (a porteno is a someone from BsAs) is there. The four of us talk for a bit -- the Brits share my love of Arrested Development, saying that when people say that Americans have no sense of humor (fuck, do people say that?) that's the show they point them to -- until the Argentine -- Andres -- and I end up talking off to the side. He speaks perfect English, studied law (for a semester) at Columbia (until the U.S. government kicked him out over a visa snaffu, though he was a legitimate student at the time) and has a norteamericano boyfriend from Seattle that lives in BsAs. He knows what Fulbright is. Argentines who know Fulbright are of a certain intellectual class, usually, and this speaks well of Andres. I tell him I'm tired of being hit on by transparent Argentines like Luigi, and that he should keep the boyfriend. We re-join with the Brits -- and the bartender from Flux who has now shown up -- and now, at 4:30, unable to last any longer, I head home solo to crash and burn asleep.

On Saturday night, I meet back up with Andres at a street corner in Palermo, and we catch a bus south towards Parque Centenario to check out a party his friend is throwing. It's 1:45 in the morning. To start any sooner, for the Argentines, would be incomprehensibly lame.

The party is in this slightly run-down, unoccupied little townhouse/apartment building thing. It's only a two- or three-floor set-up. Andres's friend's aunt owns the place and is looking to get rid of it, but as she apparently can't find a buyer, the home sits hollow as a cave, save for 100 inebriated Argentines who move and shake and light things on the rooftop. We all meander into little pockets where there's space to stand, shifting to the music, feeling a cool breeze under a surprising abundance of stars in the geographical center of a huge metropolis. As the night wears on, the air fills with the scent of sweat and harsh tobacco, and when the marijuana washes over us I am elsewhere, I am back in North America, I'm at RFK stadium and I'm 17 at a sunny HFStival, and I'm in Baltimore exhaling out over I-83 from a slanted rooftop on St. Paul Street. I am a million places and it's new and old and fresh and stale all at once. I am where I wanna be, like always.

Andres and I talk to a gay Aussie he knows who has been traveling South America for five months and leaves for London on Monday, to meander yet another continent. When we introduce ourselves, and he mentions going to London, he has to clarify that he's Australian -- I realize that Americans are probably in the habit of assuming he's British (as I had, at first). But I play it cool and don't make an ass out of myself. The guy is funny, kind of a ditz, and he spends five or ten minutes trying to relate the beat of an Argentine song he recently heard. He's looking for the song's title. The performance is pretty amusing but he doesn't get an answer out of anyone.

I drink a little red wine I found in the next room over (also open-air rooftop). I take it slow and enjoy another friend of Andres's who relates to us a number of humorous and self-deprecating stories about sociology professors she's slept with. Apparently sociologists are sexy. I plan to keep this in mind.

Hours pass and new people come and go through the crowd, and sometime after 5:00AM we begin to plot our exit. I leave with Andres, the Australian, and another Argentine. We wish the Aussie luck and he hops in a cab. Andres and I split our own taxi back to our neighborhood, I jump out at my block as he continues on, saying we'll meet up in a week. I crash at 6:00 in the morning.

I spend the following weekdays buried in research lit relating to my project, reading and reading and reading as much as I can. I feel lost, I feel heavy . . . occasionally there are minor breakthroughs, points where I not only highlight a passage but really highlight the shit out of this motherfucker . . . I'm throwin' an asterisk down on this guy! I do this all week long, absorbing as much of the dense Spanish writing as I can, and at the end of it I just hope that some point of synthesis is on the horizon. I don't know if I have too much background info, not enough . . . I might not have any idea what I'm doing. In fact . . . . I'm fairly certain that I have little idea what I'm doing. But I push through, trusting that all those asterisks will add up to enlightenment in the coming weeks.

I find a copy of Jurrasic Park in Spanish. Parque Jurasico. Sweet.

"But it's not a lizard," said Ellie.
"No. This is not a lizard: in 200 million years, not a single lizard with three toes has walked on this planet," said Grant.

But then what could it be, Dr. Grant?!