Diagrama de Gantt

After I had been in the field for three and a half months I was asked to take over the running of the project ‘Menos Días Aquí’ alongside another member of NAR. This carried out a daily count of those who had died as a result of extreme violence in Mexico (see Box 5 for more details). I had already counted for the project a number of times before being asked to do so, but taking charge represented a new level of activist commitment for me (which has continued to this day). I did not hesitate to accept the offer when it was made. By that time, I had come to identify with the concerns of my participants so much that just being there as an anthropologist was simply not enough. I needed to feel that I was actively participating and contributing in some way. This means, however, that at the same time I seek routes of analysis for my data, I am active in co-producing it (Falzon 2009: 10; Law and Urry 2004: 393; Merry 2005: 249,250). In this section I discuss the complications which the position of researcher/activist presented for my analysis.

Adam Reed describes how he felt so numb when conducting his fieldwork in a Papua New Guinean prison that “accounts of violent or disturbing events after a while left me completely unmoved”. He describes how, “when I heard about the stabbing and death of a prisoner with whom I had worked closely I was surprised that I felt nothing” (2003: 55). His analysis was “in part an attempt to recover that missing emotion, to convey the fears, the shock and the pain of these encounters and express what I couldn’t feel at the time” (Reed 2003: 55). I experienced the reverse of this both whilst in the field and after having left it. The emotional content of the issues my

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participants worked with, and the intensity with which I engaged in them, made it extremely difficult for me to extricate my analysis from that emotion. I would find myself caught up in the narrative content and discursive analysis used by my participants in the field, rather than looking for the insights which my own anthropological analysis could provide. It took me quite some time after having left the field to be able to begin to distance myself from an activist perspective (which requires direct political critique, and which I shared with my informants), and approach my data in a different, more analytical, way (Green 2005:123,1240). In this way, I became caught up in the rhetorical movement of shared emotional narratives with my participants (Carrithers 2005). At the same time that such expressions formed a part of their own transformations, I was also being transformed by them (Carro-Ripalda 2009).

When I began analysing my interview recordings and fieldnotes, I would write in emotional tones similar to those used by my participants. I was so embroiled in activist practice that I unquestioningly accepted their behaviours and political discourses without realising they were productive points of analysis. I was “repeating their views as social theory” (Berglund 1998: 148). The result was an inability to “separate data and analysis” (1998: 28). Such an account simply rendered the opinions of my informants back to them rather than providing an analysis which incorporated my own insights (Strathern 1987: 18). Riles picks up on this difficulty in her study of transnational women’s rights activists. She argues that when anthropologists reproduce the words of our participants as social theory, “anthropological analysis is reduced to restatement, to repetition, to generating reflexive modernity’s ‘doubles’…. This does not transform the subject, however, as we imagine academic analysis transforms ‘data,’ so much as it replicates the work this ‘data’ already has done” (2001: 5). In non-auto-ethnographical accounts, Strathern argues that “indigenous reflection is incorporated as part of the data to be explained, and cannot itself be taken as the framing of it, so that there is always a discontinuity between indigenous understandings and the analytical concepts which frame the ethnography itself” (1987: 18). The problem for my analysis lay in working out “how to render the familiar accessible ethnographically” (Riles 2001: 6). I

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needed to gain from my data “some sense of the productive activity which lies behind what people say, and thus their own relationship to what has been said” (Strathern 1987: 19).

Berglund discusses how she went through such a process during her analysis of environmentalists in Germany. She realised that “to have analysed Mittelstadt’s civic action groups’ weekly rituals, would have required me to ignore the most striking thing that the field research itself provided: activists’ frequent and sometimes anxious concern for self-understanding” (1998: 197). Similarly, Riles argues that we should not “treat cultural phenomena as uninteresting or undeserving of analysis because they are already understood, elaborated on, and even critiqued by those who used to provide the raw “data” of our analyses.”(2001: 4). In seeking to apply this kind of perspective to my data, I tried to distance myself enough in order to view it from a different angle. I found that by doing so I was able to keep activism “as an ethnographic category” in the same way that Candea argues we should do for anthropological studies of politics. By trying to suspend my sympathies with my participants, I was able to see those behaviours and discourses which were most salient in revealing the process of emergence for forms of privileged migrant activism. (2011: 14). I learned to look at the spaces produced between those discourses and who was producing them, and why; to make the emotional and political self an ethnographically salient object of study. As Riles describes, “one could also state the ethnographic problem in reverse: when phenomena are too well known to be described, what is needed is not greater detail but a selective erasure thereof, as, for example, the abstractions of modem art have brought modernity itself into view.” (2001: 20). By distancing myself from the emotional narratives and activist discourses of my participants, I was able to understand the implications of what they were doing and saying, as well as the motivations behind them. Focusing on activists’ experiences with a researcher’s eye made the emotional states of my participants an ethnographically interesting phenomenon.

Finding a space for ethnography within my data did create its own problems. Precisely because I was so immersed in participating in the activism of my participants, I experienced the processes of analysis as a site of intense guilt. Interpreting my informants’ narratives from a

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distance meant that I couldn’t help feeling I had betrayed them in some way (Jean-Klein and Riles 2005a: 184; Jean-Klein and Riles 2005b: 174). I worried about being criticised by them for focusing on their personal experience rather than the topics of their activism (Hale 2006: 100; Tate 2007: 23). However, this thesis should be seen as an additional account of my participants’ worlds, one which can co-exist alongside their own interpretations and arguments. It should not be seen as a belittling or abandonment of the social problems which my participants sought to remedy through their activism (Strathern 1987: 26 - 33). Instead, it should be seen as an account which seeks to make the gaps, discordances, and agreements between the things that people say and do productive points of analysis. Jean-Klein and Riles argue that “relevance to the world comes if anthropologists manage in a disciplined manner to make the world truly relevant to themselves, to their own objectives”. Therefore, “exercising care toward subjects such as violence and rights by no means entails ceasing to care for anthropology as a discipline or exercising discipline in ethnographic practice. On the contrary.” (2005b: 190). By coming to understand this, I have been able to inhabit a contradictory yet essentially productive position of methodological activism and ethnographic analysis (Hale 2006: 108). Those feelings of guilt which I experienced are assuaged in some way by continuing to run Menos Días Aquí. This means I do not feel that I have abandoned all direct engagement for academic analysis (both of which are nonetheless important and valid positions). I would argue that the duality is one which is inherent to the combination of activist engagement and the production of an anthropological knowledge which seeks to escape folk categories of analysis. Whilst such a duality is difficult - if not impossible - to overcome, that does not mean it cannot be productively embraced.

In the next section, I move on to discuss the difficulties of conscience I initially suffered when studying a privileged sector of the Mexican population. I describe how my participants’ discourses made me question the way in which anthropology has approached the study of elite groups, and to face my own prejudices. I discuss my position as someone belonging to each of the groups and yet still existing ‘in-between’ them. I describe how this often made people willing to

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comment upon the behaviour of other activists and other groups, revealing to me the multiplicity of political opinions which existed within a relatively small group of privileged migrants.