Commentary: Riddim Me This, Riddim Me That

Linking Plateaus and Whiteness to Fieldwork

In "Riddims of the Street, Beach and Bureaucracy: Situating Geographical Research in Jamaica," Paul Kingsbury and Thomas Klak have opened an ambitious effort to find a new way to think about our engagement with 'the field.' This effort is marked by two important moments, the idea of the 'plateau' as a site of situated researcher-researched interaction, and thinking about the ways in which a consideration of 'whiteness,' as thought through the critical geographic literature, might serve to decenter the researcher. If there is a regret I have about this paper, it is that the authors did not go as far as they might have to link these two moments into the important methodological critique for which I think they have opened a path. That is to say, the experience of moving through various plateaus as presented through the authors' 'riddims' serves to highlight the relational character of one's identity as a researcher, and as such serves to decenter this otherwise nonrelational identity and the politics that go along with it.

Kingsbury's and Klak's (2005, 252) presentation of the plateau as "a local space that regularly exhibits a distinctive combination of social forces" might, at first glance, seem unremarkable. Indeed, this definition seems quite similar to Doreen Massey's (1994, 120) definition of place as:

particular moments in . . . social relations, nets of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into wider relations and processes.

However, Kingsbury and Klak are after something other than a sense of place-the plateau is instead a useful means by which to think through these various forces not simply as acting upon those observed in the course of research, but also acting upon the researcher through the experience of these forces as they become articulated in a particular place. Rarely do we read of fieldwork as necessarily engaging with such things as desire, vulnerability and antagonism. Many of us who conduct fieldwork might be uncomfortable with these ideas as they imply an engagement with 'the researched' that certainly seems to prejudice the idea of objectivity. Further, perhaps because of the ever-present 'fieldwork myths' of communion with the Other that seem to shape our understanding of fieldwork, when we speak of fieldwork as marked by such things as vulnerability and antagonism, we seem to speak of failure. But the experience of these forces is only failure if we suppose that the researcher is somehow an objective outsider to that which s/he is studying, a supposition that is roundly rejected by the anthropological and geographic literatures (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Moore 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a,b; James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997). Therefore, the idea of the plateau, while building upon existing critiques of fieldwork epistemologies, moves into new territory, searching for spaces of engagement that engender the multiple identities already recognized in the critical fieldwork literature, and only loosely addressed in research based upon qualitative fieldwork (e.g., Escobar 2001).

But what is being decentered through the experience of a plateau? Here Kingsbury and Klak approach an understanding of the 'researcher identity' through the idea of whiteness, but I am concerned that this concept might muddy their central point. By focusing on whiteness, it seems to me that the authors run the risk of obscuring the most important idea they wish to draw from recent treatments of this concept-that there are situations in which particular identities are shaped non-relationally, and these situations breed particular politics and power relations that should be decentered and, wherever possible, addressed. This is not only true of white identity, but in the context of a discussion of fieldwork epistemologies it is true of 'the researcher.' I fear this point may be lost because the (white) authors are working in a 'non-white place,' where whiteness matters quite literally. However, this observation holds even in contexts where there is...