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

Preface to the English Edition

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION stevan harrell E thnography is an odd science. Fieldworkers spend relatively short amounts of time in familiar or alien communities, and attempt to write about their experiences for an audience much less familiar with the communities than the authors are. In the process of data collection and writing, fieldworkers raise unique epistemological, rhetorical, emotional, and ethical questions. In order to illuminate the ethnographic process through a somewhat unusual set of examples, four ethnographers have written a book together, each telling his or her own story. This book is an account of the intertwined professional research history of three anthropologists—Bamo Ayi, Ma Lunzy, and me— between 1987 and 2000. The research described in the book took place both in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, the home of the Nuosu and other ethnic groups, and in Seattle, Washington. One of the researchers was a complete outsider to the Liangshan Nuosu research context; one is a Nuosu “native” who grew up outside the native cultural context; and one is a Nuosu who grew up within the native cultural context. The book begins with short accounts by the principal authors of the process by which each became involved in anthropological field research, and then proceeds to accounts of the research itself, beginning with ix Bamo’s dissertation work and Harrell’s initial fieldwork in China, both in 1987–88. In 1991, the stories of the authors begin to connect, as Harrell and Ma, then Harrell and Bamo, and eventually Harrell, Ma, and Bamo’s younger sister, Bamo Qubumo, become active collaborators. The scene shifts in the course of the narrative from China to America, and the relationship between the authors shifts from distant, wary, and somewhat hierarchical to close, egalitarian, and reciprocal. The book ends with a brief essay by Harrell that relates the narrative to theoretical concerns about anthropological research. There is no structure, no argument, to the body of this book; the arrangement of material is chronological and not expository. Each author wrote his or her own field research history in several chapters, and then the chapters were interwoven to create a chronologically ordered account. Our ethnographic histories begin in the late 1980s, but the book as a book began in 1997, when I wrote a draft introduction to the more conventional ethnographic work later published as Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (Harrell 2001), pointing out some of the ways that I had encountered and dealt with the perpetual problems of doing ethnography. At the time, Bamo Ayi was living in Seattle as a scholarly exchange fellow of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, doing the field research on the Free Methodist Church described in chapter 16, and giving me intermediate-level lessons in the Nuosu language. On a snowy weekend, she had begun translating some of the substantive chapters of my book draft, and I asked both her and my then graduate student Ren Hai to read and comment on the introduction . Ren Hai, who had been very involved in an early episode of the story (see chapter 5), said that he would like to write a parallel story of his own, and soon Ayi had signed on to a three-way project. Since I had collaborated more closely with Ma Lunzy than with anyone else, and since he was also a friend of Ayi’s, we quickly enlisted him in the project, each of us intending to write a single narrative, to be combined between the covers of a book. Ren Hai later became busy with other projects, and decided not to contribute, though we salute him as the originator of the concept of the project. The original idea for the book encompassed only our work in Liangshan (chapters 4 through 14), and included three separate narratives, x preface overlapping in some but not all of the stories told from the diªerent authorial perspectives. But Ayi expressed an interest in writing about her Seattle fieldwork, and, as the book continued to take shape, it became clear that it would be even more interesting if it were not just about our interactions in China, where Bamo Ayi and Ma Lunzy were natives, and I an outsider, but also about our work in America, where the roles were reversed. This meant that we needed to deal not only with Ma Lunzy’s first impressions of America (chapter 15) and with...