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Appendix One. Suitcases, Jump Ropes, and lo espiritual: Methodology a la cubana
- University of Texas Press
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Appendix 1 Suitcases, Jump Ropes, and lo espiritual: Methodology a la cubana Revolutionary Cuba1 has been termed a “politically-inspired forbidden research terrain ,”2 one that has dissuaded many social scientists from pursuing research on the island (Fuller 1988, 100). In traveling back and forth to Cuba, suitcase packing and jumping rope become useful metaphors to discuss methodology in this forbidden research terrain. The more I learned from the Cubans, the more I deliberated over which items I would pack—or leave out—to meet the forty-four-pound weight limit for the trip. The suitcase contents changed dramatically after my first visit to Cuba, and what I brought back from Cuba each time evolved too. In this chapter I open my suitcase and unpack what I brought home from the field: new perspectives about research methods in a politically sensitive context, and a better understanding of revolutionary Cuba and myself. An identity marker of self and other, suitcase packing represents both the traveler and the target culture. In addition, I use the metaphor of jumping rope to show the difficulty of entering and maintaining a connection with new cultural rhythms and practices. Together, these metaphors aid in discussing the intersections of my informants ’ and my perspectives.Through this discussion I hope to offer new methodological ideas for researchers on Cuba and other politically charged and materially strapped contexts. Researchers are often discouraged by the established parameters of conventional ideological discourse from adopting novel intellectual perspectives in framing and analyzing their research problems. To navigate the logistical and political obstacles bounded by Castro’s ideology, I relied on the guidance of my primary informants. This collaboration yielded new strategies for conducting an ethnographic inquiry about one of Cuba’s more sensitive research sites and topics, the school—generator and meter of ideologically explicit values. Following my informants’ suggestions, I focused on the historical, highlighting the changing referent, “antes” (before) and the operative mechanisms of “lo material ” and “lo espiritual” (spiritual, as in humanitarian) since the beginning of the Special Period. Consequently, our collaboration yielded some novel considerations regarding data collection, reciprocity, identities, and access, as well as data analysis. My suitcase of stories about the Cuban people and myself is filled with the rich 220 Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values detail and transformational experiences of ethnographic research. Our interaction and learning from and about one another and the subsequent transformation were all part of the phenomenological process of continual co-creation that ethnography offers. Instead of studying people, the ethnographer learns from them. When people are merely studied, observed, and questioned as subjects or respondents, the investigator may be detached. When “subjects” become teachers who are “experts in understanding their own culture, the relationship between investigator and informant becomes quite different. The investigator will ask those who he studies to become his teachers and to instruct him in the ways of life they find meaningful” (Spradley and McCurdy 1972, 12). Ethnography is a textual genre that can be evocative in a literary sense without sacrificing representational realism. Thus, I chose ethnography to chronicle peoples’ feelings, values, and beliefs in everyday life to capture the state of conciencia in presentday Cuba. In detailing the investigative process, I use stories from the field to explore the shifting and sometimes contradictory suitcase contents of my research experience. ImagesThat Led Me to My ResearchTopic I was drawn to Cuba because, as a schoolteacher, I had noticed children becoming more self-absorbed and seemingly insatiable consumers. I wondered whether children in a noncapitalist society could truly be socialized to be more altruistic and socially responsible. On my first visit to Cuba, in 1995, I pursued documents and first-person accounts of the 1961 National Literacy Campaign.This campaign was a massive event, which made finding informants a relatively easy endeavor. This project ultimately set me up for dissertation data collection later in 1998–1999. The process of interviewing the former Literacy Campaign brigadistas3 caused me to reevaluate my identity as a U.S. citizen and the act of conducting social science research in Cuba. During this fieldwork I was not fully aware of what I represented as an Anglo from the United States. Patria, an educational administrator at the municipal level, helped me understand the depths of my own positioning and location.4 Patria was an honored revolutionary and, at 55 years of age, a guest speaker at education events. Oddly, she had asked to use a friend’s apartment for our meeting. It was...