Fieldwork, Exchange, Debt
‘You’ve done well, Akwasi Bob.’ Akwasi Kɔntɔ uses my Twi name — the name by which I’m best known in Adwafo. We’re sitting in the village plaza with a few other young men, repairing fishing nets — an important skill I’ve just learned. ‘You live in our village, you eat the farmers’ food, and you do nothing in return. Very well done.’
I lived in a cement room in Adwafo for which the chief’s son refused to charge me rent. I ate with another of his sons food from fields which I had little hand in sowing and no hand in harvesting. Akwasi was technically wrong, I suppose: I provided Charles and Fausti with tomatoes, salt, rice, peanuts, chocolate, and other foodstuffs purchased from the city in exchange for the yam, cocoyam, cassava, corn, and tilapia that they gave me — we all ate better for it, and their farm was so new that they weren’t yet making enough of a profit to be able to buy these items. I paid our compound’s electricity bill regularly. I paid half the cost of improvements to the single-story building we shared. I raised funds in America which resulted in the construction of a village library with a couple hundred books.
But Akwasi’s comment hurt, and it hurt because there was an important sense in which I knew he was right: Never, never was I able to feel comfortable with what I contributed to Adwafo or to my hosts. I lived in a district where the average household per annum income was US$123. Every month, between books, cybercafé fees, and cell phone cards, I spent about $111. A good Ghanaian son who gets the opportunity to come over here to Aburokyire regularly sends money home. In my two years in the United States, I haven’t sent so much as a Christmas card. And, of course, there’s that most-hoped-for boon: There’s no way I can help anyone get a job in this country. Complain all you want about the tediousness of liberal guilt, but how can we ignore the structural inequalities from which we profit?
Ruth Behar has me captivated.
I wrote, a few months back, about my discomfort with that confidently heterosexual masculine voice that seemed de rigueur in ethnography — that veni vidi vici in which an omniscient researcher claimed to have mastered a topic, and, often, in which a woman or man who had spent the past several months in constantly humiliation took a little psychic revenge against her or his ethnographic subjects by comicalising them. (I do not consider myself at all innocent of this.)
But where confident irony is the most common literary mode of the ethnography, Behar substitutes anxious pathos. Too much pathos, perhaps, sometimes (though, despite her references to telenovelas, never does her work become melodrama). I just finished Translated Woman, yesterday morning, hot on the heels of The Vulnerable Observer. Nowhere is the contrast between Behar and the average ethnographer more striking than in her representations of her conversations with Esperanza: the latter finds cause for laughter in every question posed so earnestly to her by her biographer/ethnographer/comadre, who is so intent on her serious anthropological work.
The role of straight woman is one that is thrust on most anthropologists anyhow, but Behar’s sobriety makes this role inevitable. In July, 1988, Ruth and Esperanza had known each other for about three years, but the anthropologist still only knew the existential conditions of her subject’s life through interviews. Finally, she asked for permission to follow Esperanza in her peddling. Esperanza’s poverty suddenly became far more real: ‘She is voyaging around the city to make a pittance, I say to myself, and there I’ve just spent a minor fortune on some books at Sanborns, a store that would certainly cast Esperanza out if she miraculously found her way there and even conceived of entering.’ But then:
Even as I think my guilty gringa thoughts, I know Esperanza is not one to accept pity from anyone. Walking down the arcade of the Ipiña building, Esperanza points to some men selling jewelry spread out on the floor. “How do they survive? That’s what you ask yourself when you see people like that,” Esperanza whispers to me. “And they see me, and they must say, and how does she survive? But thanks to God, I don’t lack for anything. I’ve got enough to eat.” (239)
But there is, nonetheless, some very material exchange:
I would be misrepresenting the terms of our exchange if I failed to say that Esperanza’s textual border crossing, like that of Mexican laborers, also carries with it the hope of obtaining more prosaic things from “the other side.” After our first conversations, she asked me for a radio-cassette player, and her son Mario wrote several times to remind me. When I gave it to her, she turned happily to Mario and said “We got our wish!” (¡Se nos concedió!); I felt like a fairy godmother. She wrapped up the gift in her shawl as though it were a baby and promised not to let anyone know she had gotten it from me, for if word got around there would surely be bad feelings among our other friends in the town. After our return to the United States, Mario wrote to say that they would soon have electricity and that my comadre would like a television. When I gave Esperanza the television, she reacted in the same way she had before, “Hijo, we got our wish!” (245)
In today’s market-oriented economy, information is a commodity and often has a price. Personally, I think anthropologists should pay for information whenever they can and whenever it’s appropriate. If we pay informants nothing (or almost nothing) and then sell the information at a value-added price when we return from the field, we deny our informants a fair share of the value of the information. The problem, of course, is to decide what a fair price should be. Obviously, it will vary with circumstances — yours and your informant’s. As a student, you can afford to pay less that when you are a paid professional. Don’t be surprised if your informants know that and charge you more as your own wealth increases.
— H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology, 179
But what if you’re an anthropologist who wishes to destroy that market-oriented economy?
I just walked down to Haight Street, while in the middle of writing about Ruth Behar, above. I’ve made a couple hundred dollars over the past few days, thanks to consulting gigs, and rent and food are now secure. I haven’t eaten out in a long time, and I thought I could justify buying a mocha and settling down with Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan at Café International. Crossing the street after visiting the ATM, I ran across an ageing Rastafari I’d spoken with before — a guy whom I’ll call Marcus, here. ‘How are you doing?’ I asked. He shrugged. ‘How you doing?’ ‘I’m all right.’
I was about to continue on my way (yes, yes, must talk with potential informants, but… mocha…), but Marcus stopped me. ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, young man: I need to talk to you.’ I followed him back to the corner, where he sat on a milk crate, accompanied by a black satchel and an open hard-cover dictionary that must have weighed at least ten pounds. Marcus is homeless. He pulled a stapled packet of papers out of his satchel and offered it to me. ‘Take a look at this and tell me what you think.’ It was the collection of his poems that I bought from him a month ago. ‘I actually already have this… It’s good stuff.’
He leans back, half shocked. ‘How do you already have that?’ ‘I bought it from you about a month ago.’ ‘Then how come I don’t remember you?’ I shrug: ‘I can head up to my house and bring my copy down as proof if you don’t believe me.’ ‘Nah, nah… I ain’t like that; I’m a human. All right, then. So I met you before. In that case, step into my office.’ Marcus stood up with a flourish, pirouetted, and reached into his satchel, pulling out a padded envelope. He extracted four sheets of paper (still bordered by the tidbit evidence of spiral notebook origin), and handed them to me. ‘Read this. Tell me what you think.’ A poem: ‘I Don’t Hate Anybody That Much’. The loosed-leaf was dated today. I read it, and told him it was good, which was an exaggeration, but it was better than mediocre. Better than a fair bit of what gets published.
Marcus took the papers back from me. ‘Now, let me read for you, because I’m a beggar, and I’m an actor, and in order to put something in my cup, I got to act.’ ‘Hey, I don’t have anything I can give you, right now.’ ‘That’s okay. Pay me now. Pay me tomorrow. Pay me in a couple hours.’ ‘I’ll get you in a couple hours.’ Marcus nodded, and began reading the poem aloud: His father sells fruit down at the United Nations Plaza farmers’ market. The old man thinks ill of Mr. Chen, who sells dead fish: he thinks he’s selfish. (’Not because he sell dead fish, though. That’s not in the poem, but it’s true.’) But in his true father’s house, there’s no place for one man to judge or hate another. Wasn’t the first war between two brothers? He prays that there will never be a World War III: ‘I don’t hate anybody that much.’ He reeled and stomped as he read, threw his voice into foreign octaves. He didn’t smell it, but he was acting drunk.
I applauded. ‘What you clapping for?’ ‘For the performance.’ ‘The performance… The act… It didn’t do nothing. It didn’t stop the war, did it? It didn’t put anything in my cup.’ ‘But it will.’ Then he started to applaud. ‘Why are you clapping?’ I asked him. ‘For you. You going to do more to stop the war than I can, here on this corner. I’m just the messenger.’
I got up, and we shook hands. I said ‘I’ll be back in a couple hours.’ ‘It don’t matter.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I’m bringing something.’ ‘Now that do matter!’
But.
When I first moved to Adwafo, most everyone was pretty thrilled with the idea of an oburoni — a white person — coming to their forgotten hamlet. I was offered land, asked to marry (so that my descendants might comingle with those of the people of Adwafo, seeding the bloodstream with white success), and generally made to feel very welcome. But not everyone was glad to have me there. The red-eyed town drunk, Boafoɔ, was especially vocal about his disdain. He disliked me, and I was afraid of him, so we avoided each other, to the extent possible, for the first couple months.
Then came the rains. Adwafo is perched on a rapidly eroding slope above the shores of the crater Lake Bosomtwe. Every time it rains, probably hundreds of pounds of silt are washed into the lake, and the foundations of mud huts little by little stream away. It’s not the sort of weather to be caught in, and everyone takes shelter in the nearest thatched awning or corrugated tin roof. On one such occasion, Boafoɔ and I found ourselves together, waiting out a storm. After a few minutes’ silence, I decided to extend an olive branch. ‘What’s that flashing light?’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘What flashing light?’ ‘The flashing light in the sky… What’s it called?’ He grinned briefly, amused, perhaps, by this grown white man’s childish questions about lightning.
But then the grumpier Boafoɔ was back. ‘There’s no point in my telling you; you’ll just forget.’ It was true. I would. ‘I won’t.’ ‘We’ll make a bet, then. I’ll tell you, but if you don’t remember, tomorrow, you owe me 5,000 cedis.’ About US75¢. ‘Well, what if I do remember?’ ‘I’ll give you two fish.’ I had no need for fish. No interest in fish. I hated fish. Many of my most harrowing memories from Adwafo involve trying to hide fish that I didn’t want to eat. ‘It’s a deal.’
Ayerɛmo.
I remembered. The next day, I waited to be challenged, but Boafoɔ must have forgotten about our bet. Just before supper, when we crossed paths in the village’s one road, I threw up the fist that one worker uses to greet another, and shouted ‘Ayerɛmo!‘ Dude owed me two fish.
For the coming week, every time I saw Boafoɔ, I greeted him the same way: ‘Ayerɛmo! Ayerɛmo! Ayerɛmo!‘ and reminded him of his debt. Boafoɔ was never one of my informants, but by the time I left Adwafo, he was one of my closest friends.