Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally (review)

Editors Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner have selectively congregated authors who provide arresting narratives of their fieldwork experiences and insights. The fieldwork sites cover five continents, while their experiences range from the 1960s to the 2000s. Books like this, whose superbly readable narrative presents the considered insights of accomplished practitioners, are invaluable to anyone involved in conducting face-to-face interviews, whether in familiar or unfamiliar milieus. Being There follows in the (fairly) recent tradition of the ethnographic memoir subfield that details problems in the field, such as Joan Cassell's sometimes daunting anthology, Children in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) or Barbara Gallatin Anderson's First Fieldwork: The Misadventures of an Anthropologist (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1989), to cite just two. Closer to oral history, Bruce Jackson's Fieldwork (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) incorporates story after story of fieldwork issues and solutions (or misadventures) in his excellent methodological handbook. Experienced scholars relating the problems they confront in the messy and very human world of interviewing is both instructive and reassuring: from their anecdotes, readers come to understand that problems are inherent in any fieldwork context and that we all face them equally. While not all problems are equal in the field—some are merely cultural assumptions that prove embarrassingly wrong—they all document incidents that we all, as fellow fieldworkers in different disciplines, recognize.

All the narratives in this anthology are valuable, for their readability and their message. None of the fieldworkers' misunderstandings or miscues resulted in any dire consequence: no murder or assault occurred, although some presumably could have. What links them all is that each fieldworker developed insights that challenged his or her presumption about the society. Russell Leigh Sharman's insight was personal. He thought he was documenting Costa Ricans' folk Catholicism, but he found himself confronting his own deeply buried religiosity. Other authors realized ultimately that the people anthropologists study are themselves seeing and assessing us, just as we are out in the field seeing and assessing them—truly cocreating the narrative. For instance, Louise Brown came to realize that she was the pitiable, impractical, even unethical woman in the eyes of her Pakistani prostitute narrators. One author (Marjorie Shostak) pointedly showed how she allowed herself to become trite, petty, and annoyed with her narrators, while Sarah Davis showed how she finally just lost her temper and yelled at her primary contact in her Corsican village, realizing after the fact that she had simply reacted as a Corsican—someone trying to defend her reputation. Chris Boehm made cultural miscues among the Navajo, Montenegrin Serbians, and (going beyond the human context) an alpha chimp: in two of those miscues, his cultural naiveté could have caused his death.

The evil eye, dealing with native madmen, working with geishas, prostitutes, and native kin systems, these are stories of Westerners entering societies exotic to them with a true sense of humility and interest, yet eventually realizing that they entered as strangers in strange lands who were destined to make blunders, destined because they truly are outsiders, in every sense of the word, no matter how much they may have studied the society. What we as interviewers do not know about "the Other," whether that Other lives on Park Avenue, in a small Southern town, or in Costa Rica, is simply staggering, as these essays reveal. I suppose the ultimate message of this book is that fieldworkers should always assume that their assumptions are wrong and that they should always work vigilantly at being open to all possibilities.

A fascinating lesson oral historians can take away from this fine collection is how to write up one's field experience. The styles in this book are wonderfully varied. In the essay by husband and wife Philip Graham and Alma Gottlieb, each writes a paragraph that carries the linear narrative forward, although each with his or her own viewpoint, about their...