Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America

9. Almost Real Fieldwork, 1993

9 ALMOST REAL FIELDWORK, 1993 stevan harrell I n January 1993 I flew from Hong Kong to Chengdu once again, and was met by Director Zhou. From my past two experiences, I had expected to spend at least a week or two in the dismal provincial capital , getting permissions and seeing the people I had to see, so I was delighted when Zhou told me we would be going to Xichang in two days, and to Yanyuan not long after that. Sure enough, on the morning of January 9, having taken the overnight train to Xichang, Zhou and I, along with Gaga Erri, Ma Lunzy, and several of the latter’s relatives , piled into an ancient Land Cruiser for the trip up and down and up the mountains. After one night in the county guest house, meals with a few o‹cials, and a shopping trip to buy vegetables—unavailable in the countryside—we were on our way to Baiwu to begin fieldwork. We rented some rooms in a little local hotel, hired a young village woman to cook for us after an attempt or two at preparing our own meals, and we were ready to collect data. Gaga didn’t last very long. Although he was a fine writer and archival researcher in two languages, I think he felt somewhat superfluous in this field location, and after a few days even stopped coming along when Ma and I went to interview someone. So after about a week, he decided 103 to go home to his native Ganluo for the Han New Year, and left the local guy and the professor on their own. Altogether, the two of us spent three weeks in Baiwu, and another two in and about other parts of Yanyuan and neighboring Ninglang. This period was extraordinarily productive. We interviewed every family in the two villages attached to Baiwu Town—the Nuosu Hongxing and the ethnically mixed Lianhe. We also censused all the families in Yangjuan, a village about a forty-minute walk away, where Ma (whom I learned to call by his Nuosu birth-order name, Vurryr, pronounced “vu-jr”) had grown up and where his father, formerly the young scion of a slave-owning family but now an ordinary peasant, and several of his eight siblings still lived. We traveled to a Prmi village called Changma, and interviewed there. We went to two Han, one Prmi, and three Nuosu weddings, plus a Nuosu funeral. We observed local elections and interviewed at the local primary and secondary schools. We copied agricultural and population statistics, and interviewed local cadres about various aspects of their work. We went with Han families to sweep the tombs a few days after the New Year, something that Vurryr had never done before. We recorded basic vocabularies in as many languages as local people could remember, and recorded a Prmi genealogy that Vurryr said would have been impossible for him, a local Nuosu, to record alone. We participated in the celebration of the electrification of the town (but not yet the attached villages, let alone the outlying ones), and we even received a visit from County Party Secretary Yang Zipo (Atu Nzypo), who had brought Wu Ga (Luovu Vugashynyumo), a Nuosu graduate student from the University of Michigan, to visit the tall, bald American, who Wu Ga had rightly guessed was me. After a week in Baiwu, I had a free afternoon, and climbed one of the hills next to the town, where I could see the checkerboard pattern of the walls around the newly planted apple orchards, punctuated by the institutional one- and two-story buildings of the township government , the schools, and the various o‹ces. A week in a place like that lulled one into the misleading feeling of being in a traditional society, a little community, with customs undisturbed by forty years of revolution . I wrote: 104 stevan harrell This is no place for bandits, or for lovers Where would either one find shelter here? Not in the bubble hills, among the spindly pines Not beneath bare apple branches, on the winter plain Not even tucked in corners of the mud-wall grid. Surely the wind would give them up, or the slanting sun. No, this place is not for outlaws To flee the socialist order Or the stricter net of custom It’s far too cold outside. Only the floor-hearth warms With glowing...