Children In The Field

Conclusion

JOAN CASSELL Conclusion Despite differences in anthropologists' temperaments, experiences , family constellations, and research sites, the ten narratives in this book have a common characteristic: like Wordsworth's definition ofpoetry, each stems from emotion recollected in tranquillity . Fieldwork is a profound and emotional experience. Reaching out to "the other," we move deep within ourselves; learning foreign ways, we illuminate our native culture; studying strange assumptions, we confront our unexamined preconceptions . The anthropologist Rosalie Wax, who wrote a book on doing fieldwork eventually called just that, Doing Fieldwork, first titled it The Risk ofSelf. 1 In parenting, we also risk ourselves. Children are fragile links between our past and future, fears and hopes. We wish our children to be more than we, to have more, to learn more; we fear that they will be, have, learn less. In seeking their growth, we expose them to challenge and the possibility of failure. 257 258 Joan Cassell We are doubly at risk, then, when our children are in the field. In attempting to learn and grow, we risk failure and sorrow, our own and theirs. In exposing ourselves, we expose them. The Observer Observed The contemporary Western split between the personal and the professional cannot be maintained when the researcher's children come to the field. Our children make us as accessible to the people we study as they are to us. As a result, the anthropologist and those on whom anthropology is practiced cannot neatly be divided into observer and observed. Researchers who were parents before becoming fieldworkers may take this reciprocity for granted. This situation seemed natural to me when I arrived in Jamaica as a novice fieldworker; it was clear that my children and I were far more visible to the villagers I was supposed to be studying than they were to us. (My hope was that I would eventually"learn some ofthe techniques for observing them that they knew from the beginning for observing us.) Renate Fernandez was in a similar position when she arrived in a Spanish village with two toddlers; to find a suitable place to carry out anthropological observations, she observed the elderly villager observe her two year old, and act when necessary (pages 189-190). Infinite regress: We observe them observing us observing them. Perhaps there is always some element of a hall-ofmirrors in fieldwork. Children, however, increase the ricocheting tmages. Anthropologists who carried out research before they had children may have mixed feelings about the self-disclosure generated by children; personal information can no longer be rationed or "managed" when one's family is in the field (page 168). Although Conclusion 259 some may have an ambivalent reaction to this, as Dreher points out, it is surely a more egalitarian way to conduct research. The relationship between those who study and those who are studied becomes less interrogative, more dialogic. This mutual disclosure, where each is encouraged to observe, judge, and interpret "the other," can lead to more profound understanding and, consequently , to better social science. The Effect of Children on Fieldwork Whether the presence of children helps or hinders the researcher 's task depends, in part, on family constellation. Not surprisingly, a spouse who takes primary responsibility for child care simplifies research. If that parent also aids in data collection and, as some anthropological wives do, types her husband 's field notes, the task is further facilitated. This book describes the experiences of three female anthropologists, four male anthropologists, and two professional couples. Of these, five couples followed the "traditional" pattern: Nancy Scheper-Hughes was accompanied by a nonanthropologist husband, who assumed primary responsibility for child care; the four male anthropologists were accompanied by wives, all ofwhom took responsibility for the children; Renate Fernandez helped her husband carry out fieldwork as well. The conduct of research may be hindered by the lack of a nonresearcher spouse to help with child care. Melanie Dreher and Christine and Stephen Hugh-Jones, for example, found that their family responsibilities impeded their fieldwork. The Nichters and the Lobbans mention no such difficulties; like the HughJoneses , they seem to have shared child-care responsibilities, but 260 Joan Cassell their field situations were less arduous and dangerous-and in India and Egypt, unlike the Amazon, domestic help was available (it was probably available in the Sudan as well, although the Lobbans did not at first employ a helper). I did have someone to help me with the housekeeping (so, too, did Dreher); in fact, I knew no other way...