Reply: Dialogue on Methodologies for Caribbean Geographic Research

We are extremely grateful to Lydia Pulsipher, Ed Carr, and Beverley Mullings for providing three incisive commentaries. All three commentaries not only affirm but also further, in related yet different ways, our fundamental thesis: more theoretical discussion is required to adequately understand and respond to the methodological challenges of doing effective research in the Caribbean. Our reply is intended to address the respondents individually, to clarify our initial paper's main aims, reply to their various critiques, and try to avoid any possible misunderstandings. We begin by tackling Pulispher's pertinent query about whether "others, who have worked in this region and even in Jamaica, will find their own experiences accurately reflected in" our paper. Second, we affirm Carr's concern for theorizing the political ramifications of the researcher's positionality vis-à-vis the researched. Finally, we discuss Mullings's deft use of Franz Fanon's work as a way in which to explore how "geographical knowledge production might play in struggles against the further marginalization of the region and its people."

Reply to Pulsipher

Our paper tries to show how context, purpose, and goals profoundly shape research experiences and outcomes. Pulsipher responds by correctly noting that researchers will have better experiences and outcomes by committing to understand the Caribbean's historical, contemporary, and local politics and cultures. While we do not wish to diminish the significance of Pulsipher's thirty years of sustained Caribbean research, we would like to argue that context can matter in another way than Pulsipher suggests. Briefly, we are not surprised that Pulsipher's Caribbean research experiences have been unlike those we described. First, she has mainly worked on a smaller and less touristic island (Montserrat), whose culture is more intimate and markedly less aggressive than that of Jamaica. Second, much of her research has been conducted in rural settings that, even in Jamaica, are partially isolated from the hustle and bustle of the urban and/or mass tourism contexts we describe. Similarly, her research subjects have often been rural folk whom we too have found far more accommodating and welcoming than certain other interviewees encountered in more stressful settings. In essence, Pulsipher is describing other Caribbean "plateaus" that we would expect to differ from the ones we encountered.

Similarly, Pulsipher implies that some of our research challenges may have resulted from being inadequately prepared for our Caribbean experiences. We certainly did not study Caribbean scholarship for nine years prior to visiting the region. But many of the difficult situations we encountered arose before we were implicated in any kind of culturally ill-informed viewpoint. As our paper stresses, while walking down the street, along the beach, or into an office, we have frequently and immediately been categorized as anything but a researcher.

We applaud Pulsipher's suggestion that researchers insert themselves into the host society in various ways that involve locals not just as informants, but also as collaborators. But challenges of positionality can emerge from doing precisely what Pulsipher suggests. For example, Klak worked with Jamaicans over several years while examining Jamaican housing policy. In this case, collaboration included having office space within two housing agencies, regularly consulting with local housing specialists, and generating reports on housing costs and beneficiaries (Klak and Peterson 1990; Peterson and Klak 1990). It also included scholarly collaboration (Klak and Smith 1999). All of this local insertion, however, did not remove the kinds of tensions our paper describes, but rather further ensnarled the researcher into the class, party and bureaucratic politics of housing policy.

Klak's housing experience illustrates how positionalities are not simply we-they (outsider-local). There are divisions inside society and alliances that transcend nationality. The experienced tensions and divisions are not about being culturally illinformed, but about politics, power, class, public relations and much more. In short, it was less a problem of ignorance than perhaps knowing too much about where the money was going and why!

More broadly, our Caribbean experiences suggest that if a research project does not place the researcher into conflictual contexts, then he or she is less likely to experience the kinds of...