In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

41 Chapter Two The Researcher as Participant: Method, Theory and Limitations Introduction Investigating peri-urban land transactions presents difficulties because of the official position that characterize such transactions as ‘illegal’. Participants are sometimes reluctant to talk openly about the transactions except where there is sufficient trust. This chapter provides an account of my research by narrowing on the means by which the investigation that informs this book was carried out. It highlights the problems encountered and how I attempted to address them empirically and analytically through my role as researcherparticipant . For this reason, it will be seen that this chapter highlights the fact that actors’ behaviour in peri-urban land transactions is studied in everyday contexts, rather than under experimental conditions generated explicitly for the research. The selling and buying of land are in essence practical actions informed by practical reasoning of the actors as they live their ordinary life. Hence, this chapter wrestles with questions about how individuals interacting with other individuals through existing institutions in their everyday life exercise choice, and create and maintain opportunities for the smooth conduct of such land transactions. For this very reason, although this book builds on a whole range of sources, ethnographic fieldwork provides the bulk of its findings. The data arises from sustained observation, participation in everyday life and conversations with the research participants. This aspect is made explicit in the first part of this chapter where I have dwelt on the main methodological components of the study. I have drawn on theoretical ideas like the everyday life, agency, and social networks. In my treatment of these notions I do not make clear cut distinction between method and theory given that the two build on each other in varied and complex ways. My description of the approach used here is followed by a more detailed discussion of my fieldwork. Here focus is on the identification of the participants and the actual collection and analysis of my data. Ethical issues, the relevance and limitations of the study are presented thereafter. In a nutshell, this chapter attends to three specific issues, among significant others, namely: What 42 sources of data were employed? What analytical techniques were used? And, what were the relationships between the researcher and the people studied? (cf. Hammersley 1990:30). Everydayness of peri-urban land transactions Initially, my goal was to investigate patterns and change in rural livelihoods portfolios62 in Malawi. With some exceptions, many people in rural Malawi are not able to engage productively, and so many families experience food insecurity between the months of December and February, a period which is also accompanied by financial distress (Chirwa et al 2006; Kulemeka 2000). Very often desperation leads to liquidation of productive assets, one of which is land. As land is the meeting space for various sociocultural and socioeconomic relations as pointed out in the first chapter, periurban land transactions present multiple symbolic and material realities and meanings, which have not been adequately explored. For some time, land in the selected peri-urban villages has been governed by matrilineal family norms. Yet, in the present dispensation land is sold by the villagers, men and women alike. The transactions are sometimes disguise using traditional symbols. My fieldwork served as a vehicle towards understanding such transactions as one of the ordinary realities, primarily from the everyday practices. For de Certeau everyday practices are ways of operating or doing things (de Certeau 1984). Therefore everyday practices are not obscure background of social activity in everyday life. As a theoretical construct the notion of everyday life is also central to Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology (Nasu 1999; Natanson 1986) and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (Psathas 1999). In essence everyday life is the lived actuality (Highmore 2002) but also the taken-for-granted arena within which social reality is constructed as meaningful experience (Goffman 1959; Prakash 2008; Vannini 2009). The everyday life is also unquestioned space of 62 My focus on land transactions was influenced by the feedback in the context of the 2009 Winter School in Basel and a few months later in the Mittwoch Kolloquium. Chambers and Conway’s (1992) suggest that livelihoods comprise of capabilities, assets, and activities, while Scoones (2009) point that livelihoods is a mobile and flexible. It can be attached to other concepts to construct fields of development research and practice, for instance, locales (rural or urban livelihoods), occupations (farming, pastoral or fishing livelihoods), social difference (gendered or age-defined livelihoods), directions (livelihood pathways or trajectories), and dynamic patterns (sustainable...

Share