On Being Bad and Geography
It’s been a rotten couple of weeks. Rotten month, actually. Kind of a lousy year. Hasn’t been this bad, though, since the week in Adwafo in which I realised that I hated Asante culture and myself. (I did, for the record, learn to have a certain respect and affection for both.)
I feel constrained against talking about what’s made these past two weeks so absolutely lousy by propriety — others are involved, and it would be a betrayal of others’ privacy to explain, here. Too bad I wasn’t that blogically aware in June.
Part of the rottenness is shame — shame at effing up as an ethnographer and as a human being. I don’t feel bad about having written the things I’ve put down about Marcus, or about unnamed homeless people. These have been public interactions, largely scripted, and of an impersonal nature. They were interactions which, in our shared culture, I don’t think one can expect to keep private. Further, there’s been no continuity, names are all pseudonyms, and it would be impossible for even a person living on my corner to track the people mentioned down. But there were a couple of occasions on which I wrote things Malibu told me which he had every right to expect were private matters. Right now, this doesn’t matter to him, or so he says, but I know I screwed up. I’ve severed relationships with people for doing similar things to me.
I knew better, as people usually do, but did what I did out of a different kind of shame — that of being a terrible ethnographer. In Adwafo, it was simple. I brought the customary bottle of Schnapps and a letter of introduction from Tech to the chief, asked for permission, and just started in. Made introductions, got to know a few people, and then went to their houses to ask to conduct interviews. Hung around the town plaza, watched people, took notes very publicly, and regularly translated them upon request. Here, there’s no local authority. I need permission from every individual, and I feel like I have to invest in a personal relationship in order to be able to ask that permission. And I have to take the opportunity to interact with regular potential informants every time I see them — I have no control over timing.
This is where the geography problem begins: One of the difficulties I have is that I can never find people when I’m looking for them. The other day, when I went back to find Marcus, pay him for his recitation, and ask him to be an informant, he wasn’t there. I’ve seen him once, since then, but I was on the bus. I met another guy four days ago, and agreed to meet him on a corner where he was supposed to sell books two hours hence. He never showed. Malibu was supposed to come by the house to do an interview one week ago yesterday. He didn’t show. He left a message on the machine the following day, asking me to be at home that evening. I haven’t heard from him since. Because these people have no fixed place, I can’t very effectively look for them. There’s nowhere I can leave messages or notes.
I realised months ago that what I was posting was wrong, and that stopped me from writing more — most of my discussions with people have not been blogged. But last week, combined with other factors, I was ashamed enough of this that I put this blog under lockdown. Now, I’m trying the Catholic approach.
The other geographic problem is one I’ve been thinking about for a while — San Francisco’s a small city, but it’s still, in terms of population, a little more than twelve hundred times the size of Adwafo. Geographically, it’s several hundred times as big. The estimates I trust best would put even just the homeless population of San Francisco at approximately twelve times the entire population of Adwafo. With size comes diversity, and much of that diversity is geographically linked: About half the homeless people one encounters in the Upper Haight are punk kids with pitbulls or Dobermans, asking quite directly for money for booze. In my neighbourhood (the Lower Haight/Fillmore), all but one of the homeless people I know of are middle-aged black men, able-bodied and sane. On Market Street, there’s quite a mix of races, sexes, ages, abilities, and sanities.
Partially because it’s easier, but also largely because I believe that living in a place makes a difference, I’m going to focus on my neighbourhood, for the time being. I’d really like to eventually do some work on Market Street, though, as that’s more representative of the homeless person that the average uncomfortable San Franciscan encounters.
Confession doesn’t feel as good when you get sidetracked at the end.