Most importantly, being part of the research project meant that I spent much time with very knowledgeable Chiquitano informants: my Chiquitano colleagues. Informal chats in the back of pick-ups, on the way to workshops, while relaxing in our hammocks, during breaks and in the evenings, were the most valuable sources of insights, which my thesis draws on heavily. In particular, my CEJIS team colleagues
became friends, as well as very patient informants. Also, other CEJIS staff in Concepción, Santa Cruz and Sucre provided me with many valuable insights. This generally took the form of analysis of, and comments on, the current Bolivian political situation, which was at times hard for me to grasp. Further, through the staff of the CEJIS Concepción and Santa Cruz offices, I learned about meetings of the lowland indigenous umbrella groups, planned protest action, and meetings of umbrella group leaders with state officials. Members of the CEJIS Santa Cruz team gave me lifts to such events, which allowed me to carry out observation and conduct some informal interviews.54
However, gathering data as part of a research team also threw up certain challenges, some of which closely related to those that collaborative researchers also may experience. Issues in collaboration and, in my case, cooperation, often emerge in areas of power and control, from decisions over methodology and practicalities of the research, to questions regarding ‘who has the right to represent whom and for what purposes and whose discourse will be privileged in the ethnographic text’? (Lassiter, 2005b: 102).
A first issue in collaboration is, that it may require that anthropologists give up a certain amount of power and control over their work. This may present a problem for their ego, or may be seen critical by the academic establishment itself (Lassiter, 2005b: 102).55 At times, I also felt that it was difficult to ‘give up control’. In my case, this was related to the fact that my ideas of what information was ‘relevant’ to the project or what might be classified as ‘thorough’ data collection strategies, sometimes diverged from those of the other researchers. Researchers might take a different approach to asking question or take differing care to ask follow-up questions. Further, I did not agree with the rigid filling-in-a-matrix approach employed in the CGTI-MV project. I reasoned that more space should be given to comunarios to record the data in they saw fit and that techniques should aim to collect more qualitative data. I also felt that the data generated in the CGTI-MV
54 I should also note that the CEJIS granted me the use of their library, where many publications and
projects documents on the struggle for the TCO Monte Verde, as well as other socio-political processes in (especially lowland) Bolivia are held. It also facilitated my access to APCOB’s library – which is also very comprehensive.
55 Lassiter points out that, depending on the attitude of the thesis committee, this may be especially
project contained a gender bias as most of the facilitators were male.56 The facilitators did not actively encourage women to take part in the discussion, and so women often would not. My raising this issue as a problem was largely ignored and all I could do was encourage women to participate in the sessions I facilitated.
I felt such issues more strongly during the CGTI-MV project than in the CEJIS project, because in the latter we had regular meetings that allowed us to discuss researcher’s observations’ and suggest ways of changing data collection strategies that would ensure sufficient depth of information. Again, such issues with data collection highlight the shortcomings of such structured approaches to data collection, and point to substitute or at least supplement them through ethnographic methods. Lastly, working with other researchers involves that you being dependent on their input and feedback and, more importantly, their timeframes. For example, sending results to head office in Santa Cruz, so that the researchers there could comment on the results and suggest changes to the question catalogue and methodology, led to great delays. After the first delays were threatening to jeopardize the project, project overseers agreed that field research team members could adapt questions and methods on their own accord in the reflexive meetings to avoid further delays.
Time delays, due to tight project deadlines, bad planning or external factors, such as bad weather, caused significant problems to the data gathering process. Arriving at a workshop late, meant that workshop sessions had to be rushed through, with fewer breaks which resulted in tiredness among staff as well as comunarios, affecting their willingness and ability to concentrate. After all, coca and sweets only helped to keep participants awake and concentrating to a certain degree. Further,
comunarios got fed up waiting for the project team to arrive in their respective comunidades. They gave up valuable time they could spend working on their field or
carrying out other necessary activities. Infringement on their time for no reason caused anger among comunarios and in two or three cases, where the team arrived late at a comunidad to collect the participants, they had gone off to their field. Finding replacements caused further delays to the start of the workshop.
56 Apart from my presence, there was one other female researcher, Lily, a Chiquitana sociologist in
her early twenties, hired by the CGTI-MV in the initial stages of the project to help with developing the project’s methodological framework.
A further issue emerged in the area of power balances. As other researcher have noted, while ideally collaborative research should involve ‘side-by-side work of all parties in a mutually beneficial research program’ (Lassiter, 2005b: 84), the very real issue of persisting power and knowledge (im)balances between researcher and collaborators might impede a true equal partnership. No matter how hard researchers adapt their personal positions, the micro-politics of their relations may still reflect the power relations prevalent in social and political relationships the boarder ‘system’ (David, 2002: 13; Lassiter, 2005b: 83). I also perceived such issues among the CEJIS researchers. They came to the fore, for example, in May 2007 when Margoth’s own commitment to multiple projects meant she had to attend meetings elsewhere. She was under much pressure and in haste, forgot twice, to inform the rest of the team of her absence. This caused her Chiquitano colleagues to feel that sometimes she was not pulling her weight.
The general complaints about this, fused with those of another nature: the Chiquitano team members felt that while they were meant to play a large role in developing the methodology, their opinions were not taken into consideration. They acted out their frustration by turning up late to set off to the workshop and by not pulling their weight during workshops, instead taking time out to socialise with other
comunarios. While this may have been an important social activity, allowing them to
share information about the activities of CEJIS, the central, and wider on goings in the political sphere of the country, this left the rest of the researchers with more responsibility and work than expected.
In hindsight, my Chiquitano colleagues’ feelings and reactions can partly be attributed to the fact that they felt a lack of control over some aspect of the project. Although in the initial research team meetings, the CEJIS team had stressed that their expertise was crucial to the research process. Instead the final decisions in the project were still made by non-Chiquitano mestizo people, who, in turn had to answer to
mestizo and foreign project funders, namely Oxfam. This links back to problems with
projects’ supposed collaborative or participatory nature and to questions whether this ideal can ever be achieved in a context where the project is ultimately aimed a satisfying the guidelines of funders. Nevertheless, the situation improved during the final two workshops, team members made an effort to socialise with each other, there was more story telling and joke making going on – likely because this contributed to
a feeling that this levelled out the differences between the researchers – and this improved the team morale.
Positionality/ Positioning in a Multi-Sited Context
The way I carried out research had implications for my positionality during fieldwork. That positionality (researcher place or origin, marital status, gender, race, class and cultural background etc) affected the researchers’ relationships and interaction, as well as structuring power relations in the field, has been considered by researchers more vigorously since the 1980s (Busher, 2009; Evans, 2008: 124; Haraway, 1991a, 1991b; Howard, 1997: 20; Robson, 1997; Walker, 2009).57 Disclosure of and reflection upon a researchers’ position enables readers to follow the conditions in which researchers carried out the research and how the researchers’ positionality affected the quality of the gathered data.58 In multi-sited fieldwork the issue of positionality becomes further complicated, as the fieldworker’s ‘identity’ requires re-negotiation in different sites. The fieldworker is likely to undergo ‘a constantly mobile, recalibrating practice of positioning’ (Marcus, 1995: 113). I also negotiated various identities depending on the context I was gathering data in: I was a PhD Student at the University of Liverpool carrying out anthropological fieldwork, a DED intern, a researcher for a CEJIS project and a workshop facilitator/ photographer in CGTI-MV research activities.
Fieldworkers have pointed to ethical dilemmas, emanating from a researchers’ positionality and the power relations which shape the fieldwork and the post fieldwork stages. Among these, are the previously-mentioned dilemmas faced by researchers following collaborative approaches, which centre on the inequalities in knowledge production but also the researchers’ ultimate control over the text (e.g.
57 Especially influential in this have been feminist scholars in anthropology as well as other
disciplines. See for example, Haraway (1991b) or Harding (1991).
58 First of all, I am female, at the time of fieldwork 28. Although not married, I have a long-time
partner who did not accompany me to the field. My nationality is German and I have lived in England since 1999. I speak German and Spanish with a noticeable German accent. To those who are familiar with foreign accents this makes it easy to detect my place of origin.
Field, 1999: 22; Walker, 2009: 3; Wolf, 1996).59 More recently, some researchers have addressed dilemmas linked to adapting, or being ascribed, different identities. Such issues include that the way a researcher is perceived may positively or negatively affect the identities of people he or she associates with (e.g. Busher, 2009).60 Researchers have also considered how adapting, or being ascribed, different positionalities or identities may interfere with the stance of University ethical clearance procedures, as well as ethical codes of the AAA, which ‘coincide in their recommendation that the ethnographer maintain complete transparency in field relations, avoiding deception and thus suspicion of subversion through complete disclosure of the terms of the study’ (Kovats-Bernat, 2002: 215). As a response, researchers have stressed that realities in the field, especially if they involve highly stratified or polarised social relations or conflict situations, may require a continued adaptation of research approaches and positionality, which may include ‘misrepresenting’ certain aspects of your identity. Generally researchers have done so, in order to behave ethically and minimised potential risks to self and, above all, others (also an AAA requirement) (see for example, Belousov et al., 2007: 156; Kovats-Bernat, 2002: 214; Sluka, 1995).
I suggest that, rather than considering hiding or misrepresenting part of your self as ‘ethical dilemma’, we can draw on the work of Georg Simmel (1906) and Gerald Berreman (1962) and recognise that ‘disguising part of yourself’ is inherent in all social interaction and that therefore the ethics of what can be revealed and concealed depend on the respective field site. Illuminating here is Gerald Berreman’s remark:
59
For example, Les Field points to the asymmetrical power differential between him and the consultants (mostly Nicaraguan artisans) he relied on for essays on indigenous culture, class, gender that he draws on in his book. He acknowledges that he as American intellectual, had the power to present ‘the last word about Nicaraguan cultural history’, which lets him to agree with Spivak that academic authors should not pretend that ‘the subaltern can speak’ though their work (1999: 22). Further, while the book advances his academic career, while the participants in his research ‘will not receive equal regards’ (1999: 22).
60 For example, Joel Busher found, that his own positionality also affected that of other people. This
created an ethical dilemma for him, as local leaders used their association with him to justify their own positions in a formalised organisational hierarchy, while he, as he notes, was there to ‘observe’ the organisation , not to instigate hierarchical change (2009: 4-5). A second dilemma he faced that he was associated with HIV/Aids given ‘the association that people often made between white researchers, orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and, consequently, HIV/AIDS’ (2009: 7). Consequently, his respondents might also be associated with the disease. Association may not even have to work through physical contact. For example Michael Walker notes that he was associated with the local priest because they share some social and physical characteristics, such as, having a beard, being white, speaking not only Portuguese but the Bantu language Shona etc. (2009: 1).
Every ethnographer, when he reaches the field, is faced immediately with accounting for himself before the people he proposes to lean to know. Only when this has been accomplished can he proceed to his avowed task of seeking to understand and interpret the way of life of those people. … Both tasks, in common with all social interaction, involve the control and interpretation of impressions, in this case those conveyed by the ethnographer and his subjects to one another (1962: 5).
This is because all social relationships are based around the condition that individuals know something about the other, in the most basic sense of that interaction between them may proceed in the way necessary (Simmel, 1906: 441). This involves ‘impression management’ from the side of individuals, not just revealing, but also concealing aspects of the self from others.61 In this process of revealing and hiding part of their ‘selves’ from each other, individuals may even lie.62 In fact, Simmel notes that ‘if there were such a thing as complete reciprocal transparency, the relationships of human beings to each other would be modified in a quite unimaginable fashion’ (1906: 447-448). Naturally then, as Berreman notes, ‘participant observation, as a form of social interaction, always involves impression management. Therefore, as a research technique it inevitably entails some secrecy and some dissimulation, unless the latter is defined very narrowly’ (1962: 12).
Two further aspects of impression management are relevant in the research process. Firstly, the recognition that impression management is a reciprocal process. Others’ perceptions of you will influence the role or identity that you can actually occupy, as they are likely to try to fit you into their social system. In the case of the
61
Also Gerald Berreman (1962) and Robert Murphy (1964) follow this argument. Berreman, usefully, draws in his analysis of ‘impression management’ in a highly stratified Himalayan village on Erving Goffman’s ‘dramaturgical approach’ as proposed in Goffmans’ (1959) ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. He conceives sets of social interaction in terms of ‘audience’, ‘performers’ and performance ‘teams’. Performance teams or ‘own teams’ cooperate in conveying a certain impression to the audience. In Goffman’s words: ‘We find a team of performers who cooperate to present to an audience a given definition of the situation. … We often find a division into back region, where the performance of a routine is prepared, and front region, where the performance is presented. Access to these regions is controlled in order to prevent the audience form seeing the backstage and to prevent outsiders from coming into a performance that is not addressed to them. Among members of the team we find that familiarity prevails, solidarity is likely to develop, and that secrets that could give the show away are shared and kept (quoted in Berreman, 1962: 11).
62
Simmel notes with respect to ‘lying’ that is one of the possible forms of concealing things (another form, for example being ‘secrecy’). Through a lie ‘our fellow-man of his own motion gives forth truth or error with reference to himself. Every lie, whatever its content, is in its essential nature a promotion of error with reference to the mendacious subject; for the lie consists in the fact that the liar conceals from the person to whom the idea is conveyed the true conception which he possesses. …. Veracity and mendacity are thus of the most far-reaching significance for the relations of persons with each other’ (1906: 447). He continues that as such then, ‘we must take care not to be misled, by the ethically negative value of lying, into error about the direct positive sociological significance of untruthfulness, as it appears in shaping certain concrete situations’ (1906: 448-449).
ethnographer this means that an initial response of those he or she encounters ‘is probably always an attempt to identify him [or her] in familiar terms; to identify him [or her] as the performer of a familiar role’ (Berreman, 1962: 13). Secondly, the impression that the ethnographer, or one of his associate, gives ‘will determine the kinds of validity of data to which he will be able to gain access and hence the degree of success of his work (Berreman, 1962: 11). As in this process both, researcher and researched, are intent to ‘convey to the other the impression that will best serve his interests as he sees them’, this involves over and under communicating facts or even distorting them (Berreman, 1962: 11). As Berreman notes, ‘this is just one phase of the general ethnographic problem of evaluating data in the light of informants’ vested interests, sources of information, attitudes toward the ethnographer, and many other factors’ (1962: 22). This means being ‘constantly alert to the likelihood of such deceptions, using cross checks, independent observation and the like for verification’ (1962: 16).
Of course, also in my different field-sites, actors were engaged in managing their ‘identities’ or ‘subject positions’. This can be illuminated by considering the following examples. CEJIS workers among themselves would outspokenly discuss national politics and their involvement in advising and supporting different indigenous and peasant social movements and their political activities. In contrast, CEJIS workers managed their representations of self towards many Concepceños, and also often other Cruceños, typically by refraining from mentioning the name of the NGO that they worked for and the work that they did. This was because CEJIS workers are at best viewed with suspicion by many individuals in Concepción, as