Children In The Field

2. Children in the Amazon

CHRISTINE HUGH-JONES 2 Children In the Amazon It is a curious experience for a woman anthropologist to write about taking children to the field. The subject threatens the dual system, born of sweat and tears, into which we force our adult lives. Attitudes, emotions, time and place, verbal styles, and self-images are all "family" or "professional." Although we are unitary beings caught in a single stream of time, if we are no good at living out this conceptual divide, our careers disintegrate to the point where we cannot convince ourselves of their reality. We must struggle hard to keep off this slippery slope because our situation makes us experts in the nuances of self-doubt and might-have-beens. In writing about our own children and fieldwork , we not only have to integrate what we have so carefully differentiated, but those of us who have never written about our personal fieldwork experiences before have to undo the systematizing , analyzing, generalizing, and pruning that has transformed our remembered experience for professional purposes. We 27 28 Christine Hugh-Jones have to ret,reat from the social relations, ritual patterns, and economic structures back to the feels and smells and incidents of everyday life in another culture. Of course, there is a sense in which this is impossible because our memories themselves have been changed by the academic uses to which we have put them and, more important here, by the ways in which we have translated them to masquerade for answers to other people's questions. I am thinking of questions about what fieldwork was like and how our children reacted to it. I say masquerade because, from my own point of view, my replies are not answers. They share the quality ofall my attempts, grudging or willing, to reveal the less concrete aspects of fieldwork. I am privately overwhelmed by a rush of thoughts, memories, and feelings so disparate and complex as to make even the most considered answer a trite caricature . I suppose many other anthropologists must have rehearsed a battery of suitable short answers to questions such as "How long did it take to learn the language?" and "What did you do when you first arrived?" just as I have. If even these are fundamentally unanswerable, what about "What did Indians think of you?" or "Did your children like it in the jungle?" It must be the emotional distress generated by our inability to communicate our experiences that drives us to avoid intimate discussions of fieldwork with others. It is easier to talk with those who have also immersed themselves in a foreign culture. We are like teenagers who have a new and unique experience, and other members ofour own society are forced into the role ofalien adults who unwittingly widen the gulf and inspire unreasonable anger with their well-meaning curiosity. Nor are we free among most of our professional colleagues; this is because our fieldwork experiences are bound up with the raw information we bring home. The manner of professional certainty with which we have to present our material restrains and molds our account of fieldwork as it was lived through. So, yet again in writing about children in Children in the Amazon 29 the field, we are breaking the rules: This time, they do not concern the dual organization we have built for ourselves; they are the rules of reticence that let us keep highly emotive experience intact and private. There are all kinds of gains to be made from looking at this new subject. We will learn plenty about how adults react to fieldwork , as well as about how parents, rightly or wrongly, look at their children's difficulties and pleasures and at their own responsibilities . Perhaps it will be most useful for people thinking of taking their children on fieldwork, not so much as a source of advice, but as a demonstration of the range of thoughts and feelings and consequences accompanying such a dramatic decision. First, I should make the most relevant point. The fieldwork trip I made with my husband, Stephen, and our children, Leo, age eight (female and nothing to do with astrology), and Tom, age five, was the second for Stephen and myself. When I look back on the original fieldwork Stephen and I did, before our children were born, I cannot imagine that we would have achieved the same ends with children. Both the kind of fieldwork we did-itself partly dictated by the nature of the...