But in the end, crying through laughter might just be the best way to go out.

Field notes January 23, 2015:

As I walked out of my nearly empty room and as people started gathering on my porch to help load the taxi and see me off, I lost it.  I started crying.  Hawama, in what I’m sure was her attempt to make me feel better, started dancing.  This clownish act worked, for I then began the ridiculous process of crying through laughter. 

But in the end, crying through laughter might just be the best way to go out.

Freshly dressed in my parting gift of a beautiful smock, I sit and pose with the community elders

Here I pose in yet another beautiful smock gifted to me by the people of my other field site

And a final parting pose with my adoptive family

A year ago yesterday, I finished fieldwork and left life as a fieldworker in Upper West Ghana. Approximately 3 months ago I think I mostly recovered from fieldwork and life as a fieldworker.  This is not unusual.  It seems that most people returning from extended fieldwork have a phase of weirdness upon return.  As academic drones, we’re not necessarily in a non-weird state going into the field.  I bet most returnees would agree that this weirdness is something different than reverse culture shock.  I did not have to feign disappointment at my ability to binge watch Netflix.  Nor did I find myself missing a daily dose of slimy okra soup or non-stop dust seeping into every pore or maggoty latrines.  I sure as hell didn’t regret returning to anonymity in my whiteness.   Being anonymous is my jam as the kids say. And being white is a damn luxury.

I borrow from The New Pornographers by admitting that my 9 months of recovery were Adventures in Solitude.  Even though I found myself  finding perfect solace, if not completely cracked out on narratives guided by female protagonists exploring new contexts in ethnographic ways, I could not fully acknowledge that I was in something—some contemplative and computational phase of reintegration.  I figured my adventuring in solitude spoke to a flare up of introvertedness that fosters skepticism of and is unfulfilled by large places and small talk.  It wasn’t until I found myself confessing to a friend that I missed laughing that I realized something else was at play. 

I was adventuring in solitude because very few people could or would adventure through my fieldwork processing with me. And that makes sense. Non-anthropologists often assumed I was on a peachy keen long travel escapade. As for my fellow anthropologists, everyone’s projects are very different and everyone’s field sites are very different. However, given that long term fieldwork is the thing that defines anthropology, I find it odd that we really don’t talk about it as a practice regardless of the inherent variation.  When we do talk about fieldwork as a practice, it’s full of bravado and a little bit of cowboyesque bull shittery. We try to one up one another with what life comforts we lacked, how many tropical illnesses we acquired, or how we came to hold our own in the local liquor. I am sure many would disagree with me, but to a large extent we still glorify the adventure of the exotic.

I had a dearth of cowboy stories.  Is it exciting that instead of getting malaria I got a stye and an ear infection because I was taking so many anti-biotics to prevent malaria that I pillaged my microbiome and made myself vulnerable to any standard infection?  Not a sexy story. Worthy of an O. Henry award, perhaps, but not going to impress people who pride themselves on surviving the unusual.

I was expected to perform certain kinds of fieldwork stories for those who inquired.  People would give marginal attention to my accounts of dealing with a triumvirate of persistent male harassers in Accra, an audience getter largely because this very issue of women harassed in the field is now, thankfully, part of a larger scholarly dialogue.  But no one wanted to hear any of my stories on the theme of mining--how I couldn’t deal with the ongoing guilt I felt for being a data miner or how compromised and incapacitated I felt when my 14 year old friend ran off to a mining camp to conduct, presumably, business that 14 year old girls can conduct in mining camps to earn money for school. 

My “a snake that I’m pretty sure was a black mamba almost got into my house!” story was the one that garnered interested audiences and thus became my go-to account. The antics of my 10 year old friend Jeremiah also won over crowds.  But to be fair, I really do enjoy telling people about Jeremiah.  I miss that creative kid like crazy.

Jeremiah making fun with a mosquito net

Not surprisingly, people don’t want to hear about anything that does not evoke laughter or some sort of badassness.  And that’s not to say that those aren’t fun or relevant stories to share.  It’s that all the other stories need to be shared too so that we can be better fieldworkers, cognizant that the things that we feel in the field are relevant to our experience and are the very barometer of our ability to interpret what is going on and to maybe re-interpret how we should approach it.  So since I felt like a giant walking buzz kill-kill joy, I internally digested.

 But I hope that future returned fieldworkers do have the space to be giant walking buzz kill-kill joys if they need to be. Those bummer stories ARE fieldwork.  And the more disjointed the world becomes in terms of gross inequities in resources and well-being, and the more anthropology seeks to explain the causes and consequences of such inequities, the more bummerish these stories will become.  I’m worried about us as practitioners if these stories do not bother us. I’m worried that we let our ongoing quest to be knighted by the “harder” sciences as a legitimate science discourage self-reflectivity.  I’m pretty sure we can be better scientists by being self-reflective and being consistently thoughtful about our positionality as researchers. There’s probably even some science on that.

My 9 months of digestion was also long conversation with myself to consider what the hell I did in Ghana for 18 months, why it should matter, and most importantly, how do I move forward as an engaged citizen and not just as an eager beaver academic with journal impact factors defining my concept of impact.  I needed time to not just reflect but to project. I needed room to split the difference between an interpretation of fieldwork as an incredibly challenging chapter of personal growth and as “very important research that will transform the world.” These 9 months have largely been spent trying to understand what, exactly, I can do with data that can tell a story about how it feels to be vulnerable to climate change, to pressures of urbanization, and to marginalization from national and global economies.  Who needs to hear this story so that this story can germinate into reaction and action?  How do I get it there?  This remains a challenge. 

These 9 months of solitude were also spent remembering to laugh despite feeling irate. It is jarring to in the span of 36 hours, travel from a remote corner of the Ghanaian savanna, where people are legitimately worried about whether their children will receive an education through the 5^th grade to the microcosm of university life in Athens, GA, where people generally worry (which is a polite word for whine) about not getting an A on C quality work that at large state schools inflates to a B+. I wanted to hiss at anyone demonstrating unrecognized privilege.  This included me and does, I suspect, explain the etiology of my no laughing illness.

Hawama, ever the hero, the lone 60+ plus dancer at a wedding
full of dancers in their 20s.  

So, these 9 months were also spent reminding myself that I can still exist as modestly comfortable as I am in my context without drowning in guilt or outrage for bearing witness to and understanding what goes on in other contexts--that I could, in a way, continue to cry, but most self-sustainably through laughter.  And taking a lesson from Hawama, dancing has seemed to be a very relevant catalyst. I definitely lack her smooth moves, but I know she’d approve that I’ve been taking every advantage to dance my way through the blues of writing a dissertation based on very depressing realities.

Thanks for reading my fieldwork musings.  Thanks to those who emailed and WhatsApped me while I was in Ghana.  Thanks to all who enable me to dance and belly laugh through my final PhD chapter.  Thanks to TV on the Radio for the song Killer Crane, which is oddly the perfect soundtrack to a sun setting on the savanna, the perfection of which stands as the metric confirming my choice of field site.

But most of all, thanks to the 148 Ghanaian men and women who shared their lives with me, who challenged me in ways that the formalities of a classroom never can or will, who cultivated me into a damn fine fieldworker, and who in the process helped confirm a gut and heart instinct to continue formal training in anthropology even though my brain instinct has said “no!” many a time. May I do some modicum of justice to what they have given.

Relying on God

If an understatement could be made about Ghana, it would be to say that it is a religious

nation.  Usually, my non-religious self finds this exhausting.  More and more, I’m trying to find it pertinent to my understanding of how people cope with life as marginalized subsistence farmers.

Christianity predominates in Ghana and Islam takes a close second.  Though both religions exist in both the north and the south, the country is generalized as being a population of southern Christians and northern Muslims.  Here in the Upper West, Catholicism retains a strong presence despite the ongoing evangelization of the rest of Christian Ghana.  The Catholic church is referred to as “Holy Father” or the more chuckle worthy, “The Church Where You Can Still Drink.” Catholic missionaries were the first non-colonial authorities who made it to this region in the early 20^th Century.  The church is widely respected for building the educational system long before colonial powers took part.  In and around Wa, the largest urban center in the Upper West, Islam predominates.   Islam has a much longer history in the region. The region’s most commonly visited tourist sites are the phenomenally beautiful and traditionally constructed mosques dating to as early as the 17th Century.  Despite the dominance of these monotheistic systems, traditional belief practices remain fairly vibrant and intersect quite seamlessly with the two dominants.

While Ghanaians are devout, it truly does not matter what belief system you practice.  Christians marry Muslims. Traditionalists are not outcast from predominantly Christian or Muslim communities.  Children within one family might be Evangelical Christians, Muslims and traditionalist, as is the case at my landlord’s house where in the evenings some of the kids are dashing off to the mosque for prayers and others are singing Christian gospel songs. What makes religious adherence in Ghana compelling, especially for someone who hasn’t found doctrine too inspiring, is belief is something that can be mixed and matched.  During the most recent Eid Al-Adha celebration, both the Muslims and non Muslims celebrated the New Year holiday.  My landlord is a polygamous Christian.  The predominantly Muslim community where I reside is now trying to resolve a land dispute with a neighboring community through traditional religious practices. The oracles are being consulted. 

All that matters in Ghana is that you believe and apply your belief. I’m beginning to sense that belief helps rationalize the complicated and trying context that many Ghanaians live in.  This is not any kind of groundbreaking ethnographically originating suggestion.  It’s just my own “Aha” in the field moment.

In my ongoing quest to learn how people cope with stress, in particular the anxiety associated with poverty, a common coping strategy reported is “giving everything to God”.  When this maxim has been used in my own day to day experimentation in living in Ghana (i.e. “When will the 1:00 bus be here?”  “God willing, by 4:00”), I have cast it aside as a cop-out phrase meant to appease foreigners. However, in settling in a particular community and getting to know particular people and how and why their circumstances are stressful, it seems that giving things to God is more than an excuse.   Believing in a greater order of cause and effect seems to help keep a brain from thinking itself into overwhelmedness, a futile exercise well practiced by my own brain.

Understanding local cosmology is a cornerstone of anthropology, part and parcel of any introductory level course. Cosmological studies are right up there with kinship studies as far as anything “classically” anthropological.  As a student of the 21^st Century I’ve blithely tried to distance myself from these cornerstones.  My Gob Bluth-esque response to approaching my own research with these lenses was “Yeah, right, like the 21^st Century anthropologist is going to go to Ghana to study traditional religion and do a kinship diagram?  Come on!” And now in the waning hours of my fieldwork, I find myself desperately wishing I had the time left to do kinship diagrams and to better understand the complicated hybridity of belief systems.  Do I want people to understand how financial God/s can have as much power as spiritual God/s in determining fates?  Indeed.  But do I need to understand how the construction of complicated belief systems can help ease the stress of life? Most definitely.  To heed the advice of James Ferguson, a deity of my own in the anthropological realm:

The lesson I draw from this is not that analysts of Africa ought to focus on “political economy” instead of “culture” (as if economic inequalities were somehow non-cultural or cultural differences were somehow immaterial or apolitical).  It is, rather, that the question of cultural difference itself is (everywhere, no doubt, but perhaps especially in contemporary Africa) tightly bound up with question of inequality, aspiration and rank in an imagined “world.”  (page 19, Introduction to Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order)

The longer I stay in this country, the more I come to see how remaining assuredly faithful is not about staying blissfully ignorant of causality. It’s about taking whatever control you might have over a situation and enacting that sense of control.   I’ve recently learned that a ram is soon to be sacrificed to protect my community from Ebola.  Given that the local hospitals are not properly supplied to even set a broken leg, let alone set up a contamination unit, I’m placing my own faith in the ram’s ability to appease and or negotiate with the ancestors to keep that hellacious virus outta here. I’ve got more faith in the ancestors right now than I do in the power of scientific solutions to transcend the labyrinth of social and economic barriers that determine access to health care services.   

Harvesting Food. Harvesting Fellowship.

Two months ago my research assistants (a married couple) told me fond stories about their home community’s annual yam festival held in September. As a lover of festivals—from my hometown’s Oktoberfest to New Orlean’s lesser known but still fantastic festival that celebrates the mirliton—I eagerly told them we should plan to go.  We did just that a few days ago.  We traveled to a small community just outside of the city Kintampo in the Brong Ahafo Region.  The Brong Ahafo represents an ecological transition zone.  This is where elements of the southern humid forests collide with the savanna of the north.  The region is suited for growing a lot of different crops in 2 rainy seasons.  Perhaps because of this fortuitous agro-ecological setting, this is a zone archaeologically shown to be one of the hotbeds of the origins of agriculture in West Africa.

At the most fundamental level, the yam festival is a celebration of the yam harvest.  It’s a time when yams are ready to come in from the farm and start feeding a household eager to start eating fresh yams.  If you’ve read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, yams are a centerpiece of that narrative.  The West African yam is a bit of a beast.  It’s not at all similar to the orange fleshed tuber we in the States call a yam. These yams are huge and hairy and the flesh is pretty purely white. If the soil is fertile and the rains consistent, as the Brong Ahafo is fortunate to still experience, these yams can grow to be the size of a baby. 

Worthy of a festival

To continue with this infant metaphor, the yams are cultivated in large mounds that serve as wombs to the growing yam.  In addition to building large mounds, tending to this crop involves staking the mounds so that the yam foliage has something to grow up and mulching so as to keep the sun from penetrating the mound too much. It’s a crop that many farmers consider to be the most labor intensive.  It’s also a foodstuff that many people consider to be their favorite. The West African yam is eaten steamed with various stews, fried as any tuber is fried, as well as pounded excessively into a dish that is perhaps the most ubiquitous of the West African staple meals—fufu. At the start of the yam festival, it is tradition to eat the yam lightly mashed with shea oil, salt and onion.  Once this has been consumed, people turn to fufu. I was served two fufu meals in the span of 45 minutes.

The mounds where the yams grow

And that's how you peel a yam

Mashed yam

Pounding yam for fufu--the mortars are shorter and the pestles longer than the ones used in the Upper West

My first fufu meal--served with a pumpkin seed soup and giant pieces of smoked fish from the nearby Black Volta river

The festival also represents important economic customs. The festival marks the time when farmers can start selling yams at the market.  This, I speculate, is a mechanism that helps ensure stable yam prices for farmers and consumers.  The economic purpose of the festival is also seen in each farming household  paying yams as tribute to the chief in thanks for the use of the land.  As is the case throughout Ghana, customary land rights are still widely employed in agricultural communities.  If you can farm and use the land well, you are given access to the land free of charge, minus a few token yams.

What became pretty evident to this festival lover was that the yam festival was about harvesting fellowship just as much as it was about harvesting food. People from the community who now live elsewhere return home to celebrate.  The festival marks social reunions and social traditions.  As we waited for a car to take us to the community, the station was quite abuzz, much like an airport on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  I got to witness my research assistants reunite with their friend who recently had a baby.  I further witnessed extended families having meetings to discuss how their social unit will give thanks to the land for another harvest.  

My friend's friends reunite and meet a new friend

Though we missed the most official social element of the yam festival, the chiefs dressed in their chiefly regalia to mark the start of what is a five day festival, my departure was marked with an exchange strengthening social and economic bonds.  The families of my assistants brought me a goat, a chicken and a basin of yams that I’m guessing weighed 100 pounds.  As an outsider (reportedly the first outsider to attend the yam festival), my friends’ families were honored that I came to participate in the festival.  The gifts were their way of showing that honor.  However, as an employer of their children in an economic context where securing any kind of steady pay is challenging, I’m sure these gifts mark thanks for my ability to employ their children.  As uncomfortable as such gifts may make me feel (I can’t enjoy being held responsible for a goat’s impending death, nor do I enjoy being a temporary employer),  to deny such tributes would be perhaps the most culturally insensitive thing I could do.  So, my screaming goat and squawking chicken and I boarded a cramped vehicle and rode back to the Upper West, one of us more satisfied than the others. 

Privilege and the Privileging of Emotions

“In privileging the emotions elicited by fieldwork I want to convey to my audiences that in ethnography, the anthropologist is the instrument.”

Eric Gable

I’m at that point in my fieldwork where I suspect I should be feeling sad for my nearing departure.  I don’t feel sad about leaving.  I try to savor daily moments that I genuinely enjoy in my settled life here—such as 10 year old Jeremiah gliding past my house on a bicycle with his feet up on the handlebars as he screams “Good morning Jessica Mwinikubu”.  Mwinikubu is my given Wale name.  I will equally miss shouting “Good morning Jeremiah Mwinikubu,” a return greeting that no matter how routine it becomes is one that makes him throw his head back in laughter because Mwinikubu is not his given Wale name. This I will miss dearly even though Jeremiah draws reprehensible images of me. 

Snapshots of daily life such as these are ones that I will comfortably file away in my brain bank.  They will be memories that I will savor for a long time.  But, I don’t feel sad to be leaving.  I feel damn ready. The emotions of fieldwork have sucked me dry.  And as Eric Gable recently asserted in a piece titled The Anthropology of Guilt and Rapport: Moral Mutuality in Ethnographic Fieldwork, these emotions are part of the ethnographic experience.  They exist in my journal but they deserve to exist outside my journal as well because they do more than explore my feelings and reactions. The emotional drainage I am contending with on a daily basis in my fieldwork experience speaks to how global relationships are interpreted and negotiated.

I am a US citizen.  I have to deal with how Ghanaians understand what that means for my own well being as well as how it relates to their own well being. Simply put, because I am from the US of A, I am the regional delegate for Western wealth and Western power. My “But I’m a poor student!” card doesn’t work here.  Just as Africa is a homogenous unit of warfare, epidemics and starvation in the Western imagination, The West, for people whose lives are so far removed from it, is a homogeneous unit of ideal, equitable, and comfortable living.  Try as I might to incorporate some world systems and dependency theory into my dialogues with people to explore the nuances of the movement of wealth and power, my mere presence in Ghana betrays me.  I do posses a degree of privilege.  I’m privileged to travel to places relatively easily.  I’m privileged to be pursuing an advanced degree. How can someone who can find the means (even if it is through 3 years of research design and grant writing) to get on a plane to Ghana not be seen by Ghanaians who don’t possess the same opportunities as privileged? 

There’s a reason why Bill Gates works as a philanthropic overlord and doesn’t work on the ground.  I’ve always presumed that reason was because Bill Gates probably doesn’t want to live without indoor plumbing.  Now I’m more inclined to think that really he’s just very smartly avoiding the prospect of daily confrontations that very uncomfortably acknowledge global inequalities.  How would Bill Gates deal with living in a community where he would be expected to part not with excess wealth that exists in fantastical and intangible amounts, but rather the very possessions on his body?  How would he contend with being someone who is directly confronted with his privilege by people who live day to day?  I imagine it would be awkward. I try to make the encounter super awkward in my head so I have something to laugh about.  I need something to laugh about. 

I’ve written before about how exasperating it can be to be asked for things on a daily basis.  I believe that some of the asking is born out of standard social protocol for establishing reciprocal relations.  I’ve been involved in some of these reciprocal relationships.  Some of the asking is also to just get my goat in a friendly, joke driven way that does help build rapport between outsider and insider. But most of the requests do not fit into these categories. Daily requests-- for my sandals, for my clothes, for my camera, for Peace Corps volunteers, for fertilizer, for my plastic storage container, for my earrings, for adopting children, for medicine, for visas to any country that is not located in Africa, for my rubber bucket, for the cold soda that is often the only thing my oft nauseated stomach can stomach—are requests to remind me that the identity I apply to myself, as an anthropologist, is not the identity by which I am seen. I am not seen as an inquisitive ethnographer.  I am seen as a delegate of the West, a place that people understand through our Western films, our Western philanthropy, and our Western institutions.

I ask people questions to try and make a case for the consequences of global inequality.  They, in turn, ask for my shoes as a way to acknowledge global inequality.  With gratitude for Eric Gable’s assessment of his own ethnographic experience in Guinea Bissau, I am starting to see how these interactions are a way for my interlocutors to attempt to guide my research by enlisting sympathy, an interaction Gable describes as building moral mutuality between outsider and insider.  Moral mutuality, he affirms, is a condition instilled via the coproduction of shame, anger and guilt--emotions that seem to be the only ones I’m getting dealt in fieldwork. I do not feel like I’ve built many genuine relationships with my fellow community members via the more presumed emotional routes of rapport or empathy.  That I’m not getting this feeling as an anthropologist is uncomfortable.  It’s profoundly uncomfortable to be the spokesperson for the privileged world in my attempt to be the spokesperson for the have nots.

But I think I should be grateful for it.  If I wasn’t made to feel so damn guilty and so damn angry every day, perhaps I would lose sight of the institutions and actors that are more culpable in perpetuating a world of gross inequity.  If I was running high on rapport and felt that I was understood to be the mostly well intentioned, if not a somewhat self serving PhD student, it would perhaps be easier to forget about the actions of the International Monetary Fund, an entity that is more responsible for the movement of wealth and power than a data hungry PhD student. But because I’m irate, I’ve got quite the eye on the IMF, an institution that has recently reintegrated into the Ghanaian economy.  Ghana  once the star player of the “Rising Africa” narrative, is now set to be bailed out by a loan by the IMF, a loan that will inevitably chain the country  not only paying back the loan, but tailoring the national economic policies and institutions to fit the neo-liberal paradigm favored by the IMF.  (Richard Peet’s Geography of Power: The Making of Global Economic Policy, a very accessible and tight book that explores how and why the IMF and the World Bank do what they do and is helping me think on how these processes should be interpreted as I start to analyze my fieldwork experience as it relates to a bigger picture.)

If I ever meet Bill Gates I’m going to politely greet him and politely answer any questions. Then, just as I feel the transaction has politely finished, I’m going to politely demand his watch.  It’s not that I actually want or need his watch, or that I think by having his watch the world is suddenly made more equitable.  The point is not that rich people should bequeath their luxury to the less fortunate. The point is to make people squirm a bit and to feel like an instrument.   Squirming is perhaps the best verb to describe my fieldwork experience.  The squirming is making me think. If we were all made to do a little more squirming, I’m fairly sure we’d start having more honest conversations about the ways that we can bring more equitable conditions to places like the Upper West Ghana, not to mention Ferguson, MO.  

The Importance of Being Modern

Modernity is a topic drowning in theoretical discussion.  Foucalt brought the knowledge and power to the party.  I sense I can trace a lot of what I’m thinking about now to his original thinking.  I hope to read his original thinking (and revisit that of his disciples) when I’m procrastinating with my dissertation (which is not supposed to be about modernity at all) and later on as an unemployed Dr. who can’t write prescriptions and who can’t stomach the idea of tweaking another cover letter. For now I release some pent up thoughts on how I see the quest for modernity shaping people’s lives in the Upper West.  

I’ve spent the week engaging how I most love to engage in and out of fieldwork: talking with old people. In particular I’ve been talking with elder women about changes in dietary practice.  A repeated and telling statement rationalizing perceived change is: “Well, we are trying to be modern now”.  The traditional mixes with the modern here in numerous and consistently observable ways.  People still use traditional medicine alongside Western medicine. People wear contemporary Western styles alongside more local ways of dressing.  Modern and traditional exist on a spectrum here, just as they do everywhere.  However, never in the middle does anyone admit to want to be.  People don’t discuss ways to preserve the traditional as much as they explicitly express the desire to be modern.   

Particular kind of tree bark that is boiled and taken as a tea to improve stomach ailments

Vitamin packed syrup meant to attract the well dressed and modern Ghanaian familiy. 

In the context of the Upper West, the young adult population is only 3 generations removed from initial contact with colonial authorities who justified rule because of the non-modern ways of the local people. Then came an era of post-WWII development where modernity (aka science and technology) was the framework for identifying, defining and solving the ongoing problems of tradition or newly established problems where modernity already derailed.  I can only imagine what it does psychologically to a population to be told repeatedly that your ways of being and doing are wrong and reform is necessary. When I consider how colonial authority was imposed, it’s not too difficult to see why doing things “the modern way” is important to self and peer perception.  Shame might not be a genetic trait, but it’s surely one that has passed from family to family from colonialism onward.

The adage “you are what you eat” is proving pretty resoundingly apt in my current quest to learn about dietary change. What people are often trying to be through their diet is modern. When it comes to what food ingredients are used, certain ingredients from the wild can identify you as someone who is languishing in the land of the traditional.  During one chat, one woman pointed to a tree and said that no one will eat the leaves from that tree anymore because the tree is too public—meaning the tree represents a traditional food source that people can’t risk being seen taking leaves from to cook with.  Modern people don’t get their food from the wild, but from the market even though the wild foods can be incredibly nutritious and trees and bushes don’t charge you for taking the leaves.

"Modern" folks in one of my fieldsite don't eat leaves from this tree.  "Traditional" folks who live in my other fieldsite still do

"Modern" folks are supposed to use Maggi bullion cubes to flavor soups, a modern item that simultaneously sells  modern ways of  what it means to be a woman 

Maggi also discourages using the local (and protein rich) soup flavoring known as dawa dawa

Additionally, the preparation of the modern staple maize porridge is one that requires more expensive extraction of the maize kernel’s shell (or pericarp?? or more??) in the milling process so as to eliminate nutritional components (protein? fiber?) that make the meal more healthful but less aesthetically pleasing to the modern eye. Modern porridge is very pure white in color and very soft in texture. This is the food that will impress guests with your modernity.  If whole grain maize porridge is served--maize that looks slightly brown and is harder-- they will know you are poor and backwards.  This is despite the fact that the whole grain maize porridge is largely considered to be more satisfying and better for the body. Wonder Bread had its day and still lingers in the States.  The same process of technology influencing the aesthetics of food is at work here.  

What’s particularly interesting about the achievement of modernity through diet are the geographical layers that can be analyzed.  People in the fieldsite where I live are striving to be like the people in the nearby urban center Wa.  Associations with certain wild foods or ways of preparing food that are considered too traditional are associated with my other field site, a smaller, more rural community only 5 kilometers away.  Meanwhile, the urban folk of Wa are adopting ways of eating that could be considered less regional and more standardized Ghanaian, with more reliance on food items that come from outside the country.  My assistant and I had a very frustrating go around recently where he insisted that because perfumed Thai rice was the same price as the locally produced rice I should just buy the perfumed Thai rice.  His theory was that the Thai rice, being from the outside, was obviously better than any locally produced product.  Steeped in my “I buy local when I can” zeal, I kept trying to convince him that buying local rice made more sense because it supported the local rice farmers and that I found the local rice to better accompany the local flavors used.  He didn’t buy my theory*. 

Cowboy Rice from the US of A.  The US also floods its subsidized Jazz rice in the Ghanaian market alongside Thai and Vietnamese rice.  Local rice struggles. 

Local rice

I don’t suggest that Ghana has no need for modern consumer goods from around the world or technologies that can enhance productivity or provide essential services. The point is that it is disconcerting to see that alongside the access to such modern goods and ways of consuming, is the assumption that it is better simply because it comes from the outside and that anything locally produced must be inferior. 

As if this aspect of becoming modern weren’t exasperating enough to witness, the efforts to become more modern here are costly.  I do a lot of uncomfortable shifting in my seat as I listen to how being modern inevitably results in further integration into a cash economy, largely on the consumer end.  People have plenty of opportunities to be modern through what they buy, but incredibly limited opportunities to be modern through how and what they earn. Historical memory and contemporary world membership encourages modern consumption, but jobs that help support such a modern lifestyle are minimal and require levels of formal (and expensive) educational attainment that farmers don’t and can’t have.  That is why tertiary education is now priority for everyone here and why school fees sometimes trump food needs.

So in addition to feeling pulled into modernity, farmers are often forced to become more modern in their attempts to close this discrepancy between “things one must have” and “ways to earn money to have those things”.  Though elders are prone to categorize all change as that which occurs to be less traditional, a lot of dietary change is not due to choice.  Beans are a food item that my observation and interviews assert as not cast into the traditional category. People describe plenty of interest in wanting to eat more beans.  However beans have fallen long by the wayside in the diet because beans are more expensive than other foodstuffs.  Women would be inclined to cook more beans and less rice if they weren’t compelled to balance food needs with school fees or health insurance or small business activity that keeps their purchasing capabilities afloat. 

Similarly, there would probably be more beans in the household if men weren’t so prone to favor of the commercial crop appeal of groundnuts.  The standard argument is that commercial crops lead to higher income and the ability to purchase rather than grow diverse food stuffs.  But that argument is based on the idea that an equitable commodity chain exists and farmers are getting fair prices for their crops.  That often doesn’t happen in many places in the world and isn’t happening here.  Men sell groundnuts to buy fertilizer, an outside technology that is just as often described as necessary for keeping up socio-economic appearances as it is for soil enhancement.  Men need fertilizer because maize is a very nutrient hungry crop and won’t grow here without fertilizer.  Men direct attention to maize rather than focus on the more traditional (and higher protein and less nutrient needy) grains millet and sorghum because it has a faster maturation time.  Faster maturation time is needed to get food into a house that is hungry because cash is tight and farming challenged by changing rainfall patterns. Maize also has more earning potential on the Ghanaian market.   Men don’t sell groundnuts to buy beans.  Men sell groundnuts to ensure that the cheaper maize porridge can consistently be eaten 2-3 times a day at the cost of a more diverse diet.

Recently harvested maize to put an end to the really food insecure JuneJuly period in this household

Groundnut harvest--a good harvest.  This will make a dent on the cost of ag inputs for next year as well as school fees.

Sorghum foreground and millet background--indigenous grains that are losing out to greater ecological and economic forces. 

The citizens of the Upper West are still trying to prove themselves through the achievement of modernity that they are both pushed and pulled into. The templates and processes that guide this push and pull are produced by the outside progenitors of what it means to be modern. This is pretty exasperating to witness and makes my brain want to explode, especially since many people who reside in places that determine what is modern think that the templates and processes are malfunctioning. As Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman get Westerners to forage for their food and buy local food to sustain local economies, Ghanaians contend with a historical legacy that deems such actions backwards and membership in a contemporary world that still benefits from exploiting rather than enhancing livelihoods.  This region can now boast of being more modern, but it can also boast of having a less diverse diet.  That is whack.

*He also didn’t get why I felt guilty for buying a pair of $2 red knock off Tom’s in Scotland. He didn’t get why I should feel guilty for having to buy cheap goods made by cheap labor when I should be celebrating my ability to buy a pair of shoes so cheaply.  Unfortunately he also failed to see the irony of wearing knock off Tom’s in Ghana, a place where authentic Tom’s are supposed to be improving people’s lives.  And so that’s why I tag it on here.

The Shame

The hardest part about fieldwork is acknowledging that I exist as a willing, eager and accepting anthropologist integrating into a new context, but also as a human undeniably still part of my own, non detachable cultural context.  I call this The Superhero Syndrome.  I blame the origin of this syndrome on the superhero ethnographers who integrate themselves into their books as individuals who give 110% to their field site and are void of any discomfort.  They do things like learn to play local instruments in their spare time and are fluent enough in the local language to make jokes.

I do things like read my Kindle in my spare time. I’ve read an alarming amount of books.   

My inefficiencies in mastering different tones in a tonal language are the joke in my rudimentary language skills. In Wale, the words for breast and sleep are the same.  I like to bid people adieu in the evening by telling them to “breast well”.

When I compare myself to this mythological creature, one mostly created in my head, I feel like a failure.  I call the primary emotional ailment of this syndrome The Shame. 

The Shame creeps in when I decide to sit inside the minibus waiting to fill up with people rather than wait outside under the mango tree with the men.  The Shame creeps in even though it is raining outside and being inside the minibus makes more sense than sitting under the semi-protection of the mango tree.   The Superhero ethnographer would be out there with the men, being drizzled on and would not have to ignore emotional exhaustion about suggested betrothals or requests to take children back to the US with her.  Nothing breaks through the culturally relativistic armor of a superhero.

Avoiding interactions with men that are irritating and sad.

The Shame creeps in when I find myself hideously uncomfortable and bored in my participant observation activities and yearning for my ipod. The Superhero ethnographer would find 8 hours of groundnut harvesting as intellectually stimulating and enriching as any other method of data collection.  And she wouldn’t whine about the biting ants or have to use a 5 year old as her metric for successful rate of harvest.

My pal Mazu-helps prove the theory that all 5 year old children will eat more of what they harvest than put in the bowl for taking home

The Shame creeps in when I deny the omnipresent children access to my room.  The Superhero ethnographer wouldn’t intentionally leave her door without an outside handle in order to prevent those 10 and under from barging in whenever they want.  The Superhero would have an open door policy and wouldn’t need time to read or write in her journal about her failures as an anthropologist because she’s not a failure and doesn’t ever need to be alone.  This Shame is paradoxical because it also emerges when I do decide to goof around with kids instead of focusing on my research questions.

My pal Fadila trying to break in

The Shame creeps in when I decide that I need to work on managing my data rather than collecting more.  The shame marches in when I decide to blog rather than collect data.

Entering data.  Not collecting it. 

The Shame creeps in when my 10 year old pal Jeremiah draws a picture of me (under my commission) and in the resulting image he shows a woman carrying water on her head—a woman with the face that is inexplicably reminiscent of a chicken.  I feel shame because I feel like he has captured the true me—the anthropologist who does not collect her own water but rather pays girls in small change or bananas to fetch water for her.  He knows my shame.  That’s why my face is that of a chicken.  The superhero ethnographer would master heading her water from the borehole to the house so that it wouldn’t be an activity that could potentially take 2 hours of the day.

Me as a chicken heading water from the borehole

The Shame creeps in when I decide to eat biscuits for dinner rather than go over to my landlord’s house for what will most likely be maize porridge and orka soup, a meal I can’t pretend to like.

The Shame creeps in when I have to meet my research assistant teary eyed because my BBC app just informed me that Robin Williams committed suicide. The Shame tells me that I shouldn’t be emotionally attuned to the suicide of a comic when I’m in the midst of people doing their best to not let their own worries about food and money get the best of them. The Shame creeps in even though I am a researcher researching mental health and he suffered with one of the most complicated mental health issues in the world today.  

The Shame is a stupid and very minor demon in my head that I eviscerate through journaling and an ongoing attempt to make mindfulness and meditation more of a practice in my life so that when I return to the grad school climate, where fiercer demons exist, I can be more vigilant. I’m not failing at anything in fieldwork other than harvesting the same amount of groundnuts as those who should be my true gauge for success--14 year olds. I’m a human, not a superhero.  We’re all humans, not superheros and being human is hard.  I don’t know what demons existed in Robin’s head and how they got there and why they wouldn’t go away.  But I hope that with the death of someone who made a decent living making people laugh, something he seemed destined to do, we turn a new page in integrating discussions on the complex genetic, psychological and cultural causes of depression to a healthier place.   Russell Brand recently wrote a piece in The Guardian honoring Williams.  He questions:

Is it melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must be broken?  To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our times?  No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end their lives.

This academic does sign onto that theory. This is pretty much the theory this anthropologist is using in her research.   I didn’t plan on integrating mental health in my PhD pursuit, but once I started reading and thinking about it, I didn’t see how I couldn’t study it.  Our metrics of success are wonky.  We’re a world of extremes.  There’s no way that our current climate (social, economic, atmospheric) is not leading to mental health issues. But it takes more people to accept these issues as problems than deny them before a more honest discussion of depression can emerge. 

There Will Be Blog (Otherwise Titled: I'm Still Perturbed and Disturbed by David Brooks)

These words are a work in progress. Ending global inequality is a work in progress.  This road to one of my fieldsites is one hell of a work in progress. 

David Brooks recently wrote about character development as the ingredient missing from attempts to break the poverty trap. This irked me.  Greatly.  I made use of Facebook to announce my disgruntledness.  Interesting conversation ensued that was quite helpful for me to see beyond my fury.  And I’ve tried to take insight from that conversation to figure out more thoughtfully why this Brooks’ piece still greatly irks me.

My primary beef with the column was (and remains) that he ignored the bigger picture of causality. Does any permutation of character cause the poverty trap?  No.  Do permutations of character integrate into the poverty trap equation? Perhaps, but not in the simplistic equation he presents. He waters down social science research on character that has merit in its own right, but is not intended to trigger a  “AH HA, THE solution to breaking the poverty trap” response.  Anytime any one thing is heralded as ending poverty we should all be skeptical. Any one thing that is attempting to end poverty is patchwork development. Patchwork development isn’t wrong, but it just patches. It doesn’t fix.  I am a proponent of people reaching out to other people. Good things can come of this. Lives can improve—both the helper’s and the helpee’s.  Maybe some even escape their marginalized circumstances.  But as long as the system that actually causes the poverty is in place, someone else is going to fall right down to the spot of the escapee.  So while certain cycles of poverty might be broken (or at best interrupted or paused), other cycles begin.  That’s not doing anything to resolve a world of some people with a whole, whole lot and a whole, whole lot of people with only bits and pieces.  Furthermore, if David Brooks wants to bring character into the conversation, why doesn’t he talk about the character of the corporate world or the political world, the people who circulate back and forth to make the world the shitty playing field it is?  I’d like to be an AmeriCorps volunteer working on developing some performance character on Wall Street or Congress. They make rash, impulsive decisions that affect many more lives than any one individual who decides to buy cigarettes instead of kale.

His dismissal of the bigger picture is dangerous, but perhaps what’s more dangerous is that what he’s watering down  sets the stage so that people who are chomping at the bit to blame poor people for their poverty can have an accredited voice to turn this itch into policy. Brooks’ outline rests on many of our day to day assumptions about why poor people stay poor—because they make stupid decisions because they lack self-control/will power. What’s a good way to kill our remaining social welfare programs (that already don’t do justice for the amount of need)?  Make people pre-qualify with a character assessment.  But of course in the Brooksonian world, the needy folks would have been offered a free online course on character enhancement (perhaps run by a subsidiary of Haliburton) or had their neighborhood AmeriCorps mentor train them how to become pre-approved for social assistance.

I’m allowed to be critical of AmeriCorps.  I was a volunteer.  Twice.

And that’s what gets me so damn fired up about this Brooks piece. I was an AmeriCorps volunteer twice. I also spent a year working on a public health project giving voice to the experience of uninsured Missourians and all the while was not offered health insurance by my non-profit employer. I’ve done empirical research on food and health issues in Uganda and Malawi. I spent an extra year in New Orleans after AmeriCorps Term 2 working several part time jobs just so I could keep immersing myself in learning how a city’s social and economic history resulted in the devastating and divergent destruction unleashed by a hurricane as well as the bizarre and disparate process of rebuilding the city. Currently, I try to learn about lives and livelihoods of stressed out farmers in Ghana and how a cycle of poverty and stress perpetuates in deleterious ways both socio-economically and biologically. I have, and continue to, live and learn amongst the population whose circumstances I hope to critically and thoughtfully interpret so as to address the hows and whys of human suffering.  All the while I’ve never eeked out a living above the poverty level, but I’ve got pre-approved credit cards, student loans, and parents who won’t let their daughter drive an unsafe car (or go without the occasional good haircut) on my side to keep me wading in the kiddie pool of poverty.

And yet because I’m a pie chart of insecurity (woman, graduate student, Midwesterner) I hesitate to say what is mine even though I present a decade’s worth of experience immersing myself in and thinking about the causes and consequences of poverty. I think, well I haven’t quite had enough experiences yet to have a voice.  I’ve worked some jobs and learned some stuff, and maybe I reached some people with my genuine interest in their lives and not just their need.  But even in the moment of my effort to help improve lives, I was frustrated that I was doing was temporary, peripheral, patchworky. I knew the social services I hooked the elderly up with in St. Louis were fragile services that could just as easily disappear as appear.  And as a volunteer match make in New Orleans I helped visitors find places to help in the rebuilding process, but I was helpless to address the fact that the city was rebuilding long standing racial and economic divides with a brand new dash of gentrification. Despite the pride I had for the narratives I helped collect on the experience of living without health insurance, when I marched in and out of Congressional offices in Jefferson City, disillusionment quickly set in when I saw just how little elected officials cared about what we had to say about their constituents’ physical and mental well being.

Then there’s the very upsetting fact that I’m not even close to figuring out how to dismantle and remantle a healthier, more equitable economic system like I cheer for.  

What I’m starting to realize is that smarter people think on how to fix the bigger picture.  What I’m starting to realize is that those of us who do have experience in being in some trenches as teachers, as AmeriCorps volunteers, as social workers, need to start finding our voices and sharing our experiences more to say that what we do helps but we see the bigger picture and we’d like to work on that too so that the seams of our patchwork finally get some reinforcement. We don’t need a new needle or thread.  We need some new material and a giant new sewing machine. If the David Brooks’ of the world, the ones who’ve not embedded themselves anywhere, ever with marginalized populations, are going to say what is theirs then sure as hell the ones of us who have need to stand up and question that and start saying what is ours.  

As an anthropologist invested in theoretically and empirically understanding the poverty trap, this is what is mine: To truly understand the poverty trap, it takes understanding the coping mechanisms employed even if such coping mechanisms are not congruous with seemingly rational or sound decision making.  In my current research, sometimes I observe someone who has just informed me that they are only eating 2 meals a day and are pretty damn worried about potential medical emergencies, drop 10 cents on beer or 50 cents on gin.  When I see this I don’t think “Shit, another bad move on their part. No wonder they’re so poor and so worried.”  I think, “Oh yeah.  This local beer is like a meal in a calabash.  They probably didn’t have breakfast so their kids could have breakfast.  That beer might be their breakfast.”  Or, “That 50 cents of gin is going to make her worries feel a little less worrisome.  And I know she’d have to save 50 cents everyday for 6 days to have enough money to buy all the ingredients she needs for a somewhat decent soup.  Today she must only have 50 cents.  Maybe her charcoal didn’t sell at market.  Maybe she did sell all of her charcoal but had to spend all of the profit on medicine.” I think those things because I’ve learned those things by talking with people about their experience. The same framework can and should be used in the States.  I am someone who has qualified for food stamps for 10 years.  And I buy beer. 

A calabash of local brew-if Guinness is a meal in a can, pito is a meal in a calabash

When people are living lives that fall into the “scraping by” category, the maybes that explain decision making patterns are INFINITE.  As an anthropologist I seek to understand what can lead people to divert money from one thing to another thing. The very people who I may observe spending money on booze and not food might also be diverting money from food to education because in their world it makes more sense to get your kid schooled than well fed. A malnourished, but educated child has a better chance of having better job opportunities and helping out elderly parents than a well fed, but un-educated kid.  The farmer who sells the food from the house so he can buy fertilizer for the farm isn’t making an uncalculated move either.  He knows that his wife can pick up the slack with her income earning activities until the new crop are harvested.  The poor think about their immediate and long term future a whole hell of a lot more than we give them credit for. There’s a very popular slogan here (and perhaps throughout West Africa and maybe even beyond): “Who Knows Tomorrow?”  Poor people never know their tomorrows.  Tomorrow your roof might blow off in a storm and the money you saved for fertilizer will have to fix the roof.  Tomorrow you might be paid for labor you performed 2 years ago and you might be able to buy a bag of maize for your family and your wife can then divert her income to investments.  These are actual scenarios I’ve learned about within my sample population.  Who knows how many unknown tomorrow stories I haven’t captured in just one community in just one corner of a country whose economy is falling apart in a very tragi-comic manner?

What do you think when you see this house? 

Does your opinion change when you see they have a satellite dish?   

From what I’ve seen and heard in various spots around the globe, you don’t survive impoverished circumstances unless you’re smart, full of gumption, and able to navigate daily decisions that require constant assessment of present and future costs and benefits.  Human psychology plays a role in the decisions we make.  But human psychology is not an isolated thing.  Our psychologies exist within complex domestic spheres and social relations and our individually complex domestic and social spheres exist within an even more complex and interconnected global system. Character is something within all of us humans wherever we may fall on the spectrum of having or having not. It’s something we build within ourselves and through our interactions with one another. Maybe we can become better, more accomplished humans through our character development.  But the development of our character does not determine our ability to succeed or fail in providing quality lives for ourselves and our future generations.  For that we get a lot of help from the social and economic structures that entangle the most of us.

David Brooks needs to sit under more trees with people and just listen to them like I am here with my research assistant.  

If the David Brooks of the world want to pontificate about poorness and why people are poor, they need to actually start LISTENING to poor people rather than relying on tired assumptions about poor people.  This takes empathy, a trait, perhaps of character, that is also making a splash in the inequality debate. I cordially invite David Brooks to come hang out with me in Ghana. Hell, bring Nick Kristoff, too. We’ll roam town and talk with people.  But like the rest of us here, he’s going to have to learn to drop his deuces in the latrine or the bush.  Hopefully then he can then use his column for more well thought out analysis.