El Cruce de la Muerte: Fieldwork and Carework at the Crossroad of Death

by Amarilys Estrella

In July of 2017, one year after having moved with my family to the Dominican Republic for my dissertation research, I survived a car accident. Our car crashed directly into a coach bus that had lost control on the opposite side of that Duarte highway in an area commonly referred to as “el cruce de la muerte,” the crossroad of death. I had two broken bones, stitches, and a concussion that would require almost a year of physical therapy and ongoing psychotherapy. As irony would have it, I had spent my year of fieldwork exploring the theme of death with Black Dominicans of Haitian descent experiencing their civic deaths as stateless individuals, as well as the biological effects of racism, leading to the “slow death” of Black bodies. While I highlight in this post my personal experience navigating the Dominican health system and my quest to cope with psychological and emotional trauma in the aftermath of a car accident, I want to also explore carework in spaces of precarity. In particular I highlight the importance of family and community when psychotherapy is not an option, as was the case for many of my interlocutors. I note the importance of family and supportive academic institutions in my own recovery, while also pointing to the detrimental effects of racist government policies that limit an individual’s access to mental health resources.

Broken Bones in a Broken Health System

According to the World Health Organization’s 2013 Global Status Report on Road Safety the Dominican Republic is considered the most dangerous country for traffic fatalities with 41.7 deaths per 100,000. At the time of my accident, the people who had gathered and helped pry my passenger door open assured me that my children and husband were fine. One woman who was helping me apply pressure to stop the bleeding from the wound on my arm told me that I was lucky I had survived because, as she explained, “a esto aqui le dicen el cruce de la muerte”– they call this here the crossroad of death. Many had met their fates at that same crossroad and I was to count my blessings for having survived.

I had two broken bones (right tibia, right collarbone), bruising, and stitches on my right hand. I also suffered a concussion, at the time undiagnosed, which caused ongoing tremors during the first week and would require almost a year of physical, visual, and group therapy. At the time of the accident I was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. A plastic bottle placed under my neck for support doubled as a neck brace, while we crossed a series of bumpy roads to get to the clinic, which I was assured was private and therefore better than going to a public hospital. Once I arrived in the emergency room I was quickly taken into a room where a doctor began stitching up the wound on my hand. I stayed by myself, while my husband remained in the waiting area with our children until another family member could show up and help out. At one point I was left all alone, while the doctor and nurses confirmed the death of an elderly man next door. One nurse came in to see me during the ordeal and said as she was leaving again, that I was fine because I was tranquilita, calm.

Once the doctor returned, she asked my husband to go to the pharmacy and purchase two hospital gowns in order to be switched out of my bloody clothes. I was then wheeled away into the x-ray room, where two men in charge of maintenance helped transfer me over to the x-ray bed. Once the x-rays were done and it was confirmed that my right collarbone and tibia were broken my husband was asked to go to the pharmacy and buy the necessary materials to make the cast for my leg, as well as a sling for my arm. Having experienced emergency rooms in the United States where the billing happens afterwards, I was initially taken aback by the idea of having to purchase the hospital gowns. I was floored upon realizing that the next process would have to wait until my husband came back with the cast materials. Once the materials arrived, the orthopedist asked my husband to hold my leg up by lifting my big toe so that the doctor could start placing the cast on my leg. I had never broken my leg before, but I had also never had such a hands-on experience from a family member during an emergency room visit. What followed was a series of visits to the doctor where I would sit in my wheelchair for hours on end waiting to be seen by the orthopedist. In some ways, the torture of sitting in a waiting room for up to 5 hours at a time was ameliorated by the air conditioner that kept me cool during those blistering hot 95-degree summer days.

Seeking Mental Health Support for the First Time Ever

After spending five weeks recovering in the Dominican Republic, I returned to New York where I was finally diagnosed with a concussion. While being back home was quite the relief, it wasn’t until I found myself alone in a wheelchair that I realized the psychological toll the accident had taken on me. I woke up every day fearing that if I had not died during the accident, I was surely in some kind of process of dying then. I became hyperaware of my breathing, my vision, my fatigue and my general inability to focus on anything other than my body. Months without moving and anxiety had also caused dysphasia, making it hard for me to swallow. I felt fear taking over at all times of day. Although I was constantly checking in with my advisor, mentors, family and friends, I continued to feel lonely, anxious and overwhelmed.

Through my university’s health center, I was connected to a psychotherapist who to this day I continue to see. I had never seen a psychotherapist. The different communities I identified with dealt with our problems by showing our unwavering strength through it all, by showing how much we could resist. I had internalized this messaging and found it really hard to publicly discuss the need for a psychotherapist. Over time, this has changed, and I have found value in meeting with my psychotherapist once a week, while also holding on to my family and community’s collective healing processes.

During a recent psychotherapy session, I shared with my therapist the heightened anxiety that I experience as the anniversary of the accident approaches. I have learned to cope with the trauma the continues to live on in my body through mindfulness techniques, mantras and, yes, jumping jacks. But the fear will continue to be there. It creeps up when least expected. It recently happened as I finished watching the Teddy Pendergrass documentary. As I learned that he spent the second half of his life as a quadriplegic, I felt my chest tightening. I thought back on my own experience. I was reminded of the time I spent in a wheelchair, what it was like to not be able to bathe on my own, use the bathroom on my own and for some time eat on my own. I felt this wave of panic wash over me as I tried to understand why this had happened. Perhaps I also felt guilt in thinking that pure luck had meant that I had recovered all mobility, that I am once again walking, finishing up my dissertation, and traveling to conferences without assistance.

All of these emotions came rushing back as I thought about Pendergrass’s family and my family. They stepped in when a failed healthcare system was not available. It wasn’t until I experienced my own possible death that I understood the precariousness of a health system in which carework was almost entirely the domain of family and friends. They had become my support system. They were an integral part of my ongoing physical and emotional healing process. They bathed me, washed and combed my hair, held my hand and constantly reminded me that I was loved.

My very own traumatic experience allowed me to better understand how the necropolitics of the Dominican state had led so many Black Dominicans of Haitian descent, and Dominicans more generally, to add as many family members as possible to their funeral insurance. As a friend once told me in the Dominican Republic “funeral insurance is probably as important or more important than health insurance.” During my time in the Dominican Republic many of my interlocutors experienced the death of close family and friends. Oftentimes they talked about the hospital or clinic’s refusal to treat them because they didn’t have insurance. As impoverished, Black individuals perceived as Haitian migrants, thus outsiders, they experienced hours of waiting before anyone would come to see why they were there. They talked about the many inevitable deaths. These stories were in my thoughts throughout my recovery. I had been at the crossroad of death, yet privileged and lucky enough to survive. My hope is that in surviving I can continue to denounce statelessness and anti-Blackness as a global phenomenon and continue to highlight the many stories I came to learn about throughout this process of research, survival and recovery. I also hope that sharing my story will allow us to continue to destigmatize mental health support.

There are some key takeaways from my personal experience. The first, is the importance of providing mental health support and resources for mentors and fieldwork researchers that will allow them to be prepared to address circumstances that may arise during fieldwork. I was immensely grateful for the flexibility and easy access provided by my university’s health center. Providing a mental health resource guide for students before engaging in fieldwork research would be of great value as well. Second, the flexibility extended to me by my Inter-American Foundation fellowship allowed me to prioritize my health before the need to present the deliverables of my research. Not only did they allow me to take as much time as needed for healing, but they also allowed flexibility in determining the terms of my return to the field a year later. Finally, I would say to fieldwork researchers to ensure that you have identified a network of supporters who will be readily available when things do not go as planned. I am thankful for the support I received from everyone who was there with me during this journey. When life gives you lemons make sure you have friends, family, advisors and a therapist to help you make lemonade.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Writing, Silence, and Sensemaking After Fieldwork Trauma

by Kimberly J. Lewis

Crashing

During my first summer of graduate fieldwork, I was on an overnight bus that skidded and tumbled off the side of a highway in coastal Ecuador. I remember the heavy, alien sounds during the crash. First, the tires screaming. Then, the passengers. As our bodies crunched together against the humid window, I told my companion what I imagined to be true: vamos a morir. We are going to die. The bus came to rest, wheels up, along a line of emerald-green fruit trees. We lived, by the grace of guanábana.

On holiday weekends, urbanites in Ecuador’s highland Andes long to escape the dry mountain air. Buses fill with vacationers and descend some 10,000 feet to coastal beach towns. Overnight bus trips offer the promise of fresh ceviche at sunrise. Everyone knows that these buses occasionally sail off highways, killing or scarring dozens of people at a time. This knowledge produced two experiences of the crash. One part of me witnessed and thought: yes, this happens. This all makes perfect sense. She was the observer. Another part of me could not make sense of what was happening at all. Why were the blue lights inside the bus making the blood glow like radioactive waste? Why was none of the blood mine? She was the participant.

Fieldwork, like life, is punctuated by random catastrophe. The summer of the bus accident, I was doing research on higher education. The bulk of my participant-observation occurred in places like department offices and univresity hallways. I thought I had designed a project free from blood and death. What do we do when fieldwork flips violently on itself, like an ill-fated bus? How should we proceed when pain or trauma reshapes our ethnographic work?

Writing

Whatever happens, ethnographers are generally encouraged to keep writing. Produce meticulous field notes. Start a field diary. Take photos, press record, draw a map. Faculty encourage novice fieldworkers to treat everything as potential sources of data, especially moments that register as jarring or confusing at the time. In this framework, it becomes reasonable to reduce even the most upsetting fieldwork experiences to ethnographic insights waiting to happen. Anthropologists warn their students to be diligent about producing a record in order to make sense of these experiences later. Fieldnotes, or it didn’t happen.

However, trauma complicates the process of remembering and the act of writing. Many ethnographers hate writing fieldnotes. They are tedious and so very slow to produce. But, how often do we acknowledge that remembering and writing fieldnotes can be actively painful? Traumatic experiences and the emotions that commonly follow – fear, rage, shame – shape what we are capable of logging about our fieldwork. They affect what we can document for others, as well as what we wish to document for our future selves.

Vehicles crash. My bus could have tumbled off a highway near my home in Rhode Island, rather than in Ecuador. Yet, at home, anthropologists often have more resources to cope with traumatic events. Crucially, we are also released from pressures to collect data. We are not obligated to document or make sense of tragedy. During fieldwork, ethnographers become uniquely attentive to the world. We shake the observer in us awake, believing that she is the better anthropologist. Sometimes I wonder if I have experienced more pain during fieldwork, or whether I have simply experienced pain with my eyes and notebook fully open.

Reorienting

When I finished my summer fieldwork and returned to campus, I briefly sought help from the university counseling center. I mentioned the accident to advisors and mentors. But, I did not want to say too much. I feared someone would advise me to abandon work in Ecuador altogether. I quietly reoriented subsequent fieldwork around new priorities and limitations, mostly related to mobility, frequent breaks, and access to communication. When I drafted grant proposals, I held my breath that the intellectual justifications for these decisions were persuasive enough.

As I reflect on these experiences now that my graduate work is over, I have a few humble suggestions for dealing with fieldwork trauma. First, we must be exceedingly gentle with ourselves, our colleagues, and our students. Trauma complicates the process of returning to one’s field site. I was shocked by how the bus accident stretched well past its logical boundaries, altering relationships and practices that seemed unrelated. Years later, during the final phases of my dissertation fieldwork in Ecuador, I struggled to write about situations that recalled fear, violence, or shame. I often avoided writing at all. Ethnographers famously cling to their memories, running to bathroom stalls to jot notes. I instead spent long stretches of research longing to forget. My dreams became loops of crunching metal – a terrible kind of data to work with.

Within this context, anthropologists can honor boundaries and silences, particularly in our own data collection practices. Writing can feel tantamount to re-experiencing. Self-care might mean putting down the pen to embrace silence. But, we can do so with intention and compassion. We should also question systems and people that produce shame around adjusting our research to personal realities. Anthropologists have limitations. Few of us are truly free to pursue any line of inquiry during fieldwork, despite the heroic narratives that still shape the discipline. Researchers have emotional needs: safety, love, connectedness. We must prioritize those needs, even during fieldwork.

Anticipating

Anthropologists can also do more to develop coping tools and identify resources for emergencies. This is especially critical for new ethnographers, who may struggle to know how to care for themselves in the field or even know their own limitations in advance. Graduate methods seminars should directly address topics like violence, depression, sexual assault, social isolation, and accidents. These issues are extraordinarily common during fieldwork. Faculty should draw on other campus resources for these conversations. Seek additional forms of expertise and advice. University counseling centers, for instance, can be helpful allies in preparing to send students to the field.

There is no way to anticipate or avoid every fieldwork challenge. But we should probably all ask each other more questions. What problems might arise during fieldwork? Is there a plan for abandoning the work if necessary? What are effective ways to navigate accidents or assault or mental health problems? What possibilities exist for flexible fieldwork arrangements or changes in project design? Even as we disperse into our field sites, ethnographers should work to support one another and address complex field situations as they arise.

Connecting

Community and connection are critical resources for healing after fieldwork trauma. I returned to therapy during my last year of dissertation writing. By that time, the research was winding down. Connecting with a therapist allowed me to see the accident and other experiences in Ecuador alongside a compassionate observer. A question from my therapist encouraged me to start annotating a draft of my dissertation. I called it the shadow dissertation. In it, I noted painful memories lurking in the background of vignettes. Placing these memories somewhere reassured me they were real, too, even if they did not make the final piece. Grappling with fieldwork trauma ultimately encouraged me to form better connections with colleagues, students, and research participants, as I am more attentive to the stories behind their research.

Finally, the work of writing offers more opportunities for connection than most people acknowledge. Writing alongside colleagues can engender solidarity. It can be a radical act. For those who experienced trauma during fieldwork, writing communities can reverse isolation and allow writing to flourish. While drafting my dissertation, I participated in dissertation writing retreats and interdisciplinary writing groups with a cast of other graduate students. The Graduate School and university Writing Center supported the groups, but they required a fairly simple set of resources to sustain. Group meetings usually consisted of coffee and quiche, check-ins about goals, writing in a common space, and check-outs about progress. Tears sometimes entered the space, but self-shaming and comparison did not.

We need writing communities for more reasons than productivity. Not a single person in these groups read my work. However, they offered a sense of belonging during the writing process. I had opportunities to look up from a difficult memory, see others who cared about me, and then continue to press into the work. In some respects, communities like these were just as important as critical feedback for finishing the project. Given the painful stories lurking behind many of our field experiences, connecting with one another can allow us to understand and integrate those stories so that we can move forward.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Writing for Them, Writing for Us: Resilience in Practice

In part two of our series, Humanizing Fieldwork, we considered the everyday challenges of conducting fieldwork abroad and at home. As all anthropologists know, the ethnographic fieldwork experience is not immune to the unexpected, and emergencies affecting the physical and emotional well-being of the field worker can and do occur. What do we do when fieldwork flips violently on itself, like an ill-fated bus? How should we proceed when pain or trauma reshapes our ethnographic work? In this final installment, we turn to a more direct engagement with the experience of trauma in the field. For both our contributors, fieldwork is abruptly interrupted, and each shares her story of resilience and recovery in the aftermath, as well as how these traumatic events are processed in the work of turning fieldwork into anthropological writing.

In this third and final series, Kim Lewis and Amarilys Estrella reflect upon strategies of resilience and processes of repair in the wake of traumatic field experiences.  Central to both accounts is the importance of narrative—whose story gets told, how, by whom, and to whom—and how those narratives are engaged as legible and meaningful (or not) by others.  In engaging in the task of transforming ethnographic data into ethnography, anthropologists face the pressure of sensemaking.  Because of this, anthropological writing can become a burden but also a potential avenue for recovery, as writing through the trauma can help us process traumatic events and their aftermaths.

Narrative has, of course, been a central theoretical concern in anthropology for decades. Anthropologists are trained to write with “thick description” at the same time they must discipline their writing within particular conceptual frameworks, often in ways that reduce the affective dimensions of ethnography to a series of highly theoretical ethnographic vignettes. But, as these posts highlight, narrative practices become entangled with the work of writing anthropology in ways that can sometimes be healing but can also, at times, be re-traumatizing.  How, then, do we do the work of anthropology, when doing that work involves revisiting and reliving events and contexts that have harmed us? Are there ways these practices can become part of strategies of repair, both for the fieldworker her- or himself and, perhaps, for the field of anthropology more generally?

Both of these entries recount harrowing incidents of physical trauma.  But they also speak to how trauma can exceed its boundaries, becoming linked to spaces, places, people, relationships that had no direct relationship to the originating event.  The conventional anthropological response to such a situation is: use the trauma as part of your data.  Be an anthropologist first, a human being second.  For some people, this intellectualization can be constructive, both personally and analytically.  For others, it can feel incredibly alienating, and “anthropologizing” the events becomes a form of re-traumatization.  The everyday tasks of academic work—reading, writing, thinking—can become infused with the residue of these experiences, making it difficult to function, let alone succeed.

Estrella and Lewis illustrate this experience in the literal and metaphorical crashes of their ethnographic projects. Through connection with others, they find ways to acknowledge and make sense of traumatic experiences that go beyond data analysis. This simultaneous creation of ethnographic writing –of anthropology—alongside the process of healing and recovery reminds us that what sets the ethnographic method apart is the fact that it is an embodied experience; that just as we are “collecting data” through our ethnographic field notes and interviews, we are also living the experience of fieldwork: establishing connections with others, with the field, and with ourselves.

Much remains to be said and written about trauma and resilience in ethnographic fieldwork. When we originally put out the Call for Papers, we received many more submissions than we could possibly publish. As we moved forward with acceptances and the submission deadline drew near, some of our contributors found they were not ready to write their stories. We end this series by holding space for those whose stories were not published, the stories many of us carry out of the field and into our lives. Our hope was to open a conversation about the role of trauma, power, and academic anthropology. As this collection of essays has been shared and distributed, we have heard that these conversations are happening in classrooms and departments.   We invite you all to continue in this process with us, as together we remake what it means to be fieldworkers and professionals, as we humanize the research process, and as we open room for more conversations and transformations to come.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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The Challenges of Conducting Fieldwork in a Place You Call Home

Saira A. Mehmood

I conducted my dissertation fieldwork in my hometown of New Orleans. As a woman of color, I have noticed many other anthropologists of color also conducting fieldwork in places they call home. This is not surprising to me, given many of us want to find solutions to the problems we see in our hometowns and seek to use anthropology to do so. This type of fieldwork also brings its own set of challenges, and I did not realize how some of the trauma I experienced actually impacted me during the time. In this post, I will highlight some of the challenges I faced while conducting fieldwork and writing. I will also discuss the strategies I used to overcome some challenges. Lastly, I offer some advice to mentors who have students of color, first-generation, or non-traditional students.

Challenges

The challenges I faced while conducting fieldwork were numerous: trials related to my research, experiences related to everyday violence from living in New Orleans, and encounters related to being a visible Muslim woman of color.

My research focused on how individuals diagnosed with chronic mental illnesses navigated the mental healthcare system in New Orleans. Most of my fieldwork was at a psychosocial rehabilitation day program for individuals with a chronic mental illness. Because most of my interlocutors had limited income from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Supplemental Security Disability Income (SSDI), they were poor and had a multitude of physical health problems in addition to their mental illness. They knew the mortality gap for people with chronic mental illness is lower than the general population; my interlocutors often brought this up themselves. We were reminded of it when a member of the day program where I conducted fieldwork suddenly passed away. Working with a population that is so disenfranchised was challenging; they shared stories of trauma during life history interviews that sometimes triggered my own previous trauma.

Some of my challenges to conducting fieldwork were not necessarily related to my research but related to the everyday violence that exists in New Orleans. Many of my Black interlocutors were victims of gun violence, but as a local, this violence extended to my life as well. For instance, for savings’ sake I rented desk space in New Orleans to write my dissertation while living at home instead of returning to my university after fieldwork. Not long after I moved into the space, I heard gunshots. I had just entered the elevator when I heard the gunshots and was naively hoping they were fireworks. With the pattern of the sounds, though, deep down I knew they weren’t. By the time I got to my desk and saw my colleagues staring out the window with several on the phone calling 911, I knew something terrible had occurred. As the minutes passed by, I watched New Orleans EMS try to revive the gunshot victim in what was a drive-by shooting. By the time I went home and checked the local news, I learned he had died. “Why?” was all I could wonder. Someone who knew the victim thought the same thing, as the word was spray-painted on the corners of where the shooting occurred not long after.

This incident recalled for me something that had happened the previous summer, during Ramadan, when a friend of mine, Razan, asked me if I could pick her and her son up on the way to the mosque for iftar. When I arrived at the parking lot for her apartment complex, Razan’s neighbors, a husband and wife couple, were screaming at both her and her son. I could hear what the neighbors were yelling without even opening my car door or windows. They were blaming Razan’s 10-year-old son for scratching their new car and had already called Jefferson Parish police. I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of more: the white couple screaming at my friends for a scratch on a car I could barely see, or the police, since I wasn’t sure if whomever would show up would actually deescalate the situation. Luckily, the officer who arrived took her time to figure out and assess the situation.

The officer talked to the neighbors who were yelling at Razan. The officer then talked to Razan and her son. Razan, a Palestinian immigrant, doesn’t speak English as her first language, so she wanted me to speak to the officer. The police officer talked to me, and I could only explain what I saw from the moment I had arrived. The officer asked if Razan would like her to patrol the area just to keep an eye on things. Razan said yes, so I reiterated this to the police officer. As we finally left to go to the mosque for iftar, which we were considerably late for by then, I couldn’t help but wonder if the police officer patrolling the area would actually help or not. I also asked Razan if she had any similar previous encounters with her neighbors. She wasn’t fazed by the encounter, but I couldn’t help but worry about her safety. In New Orleans, I don’t worry about anti-Muslim bigotry as much given the open-mindedness of residents living there, but next-door Jefferson Parish, where I grew up, is a completely different environment. You can think of Orleans Parish, which has the same boundaries as the city of New Orleans, politically as a blue dot in a sea of red. Jefferson Parish, on the other hand, had the highest number of Trump voters in the state of Louisiana. I was left with a sense of extreme apprehension about my friend’s safety and my own, since the incident triggered memories of other events.

Strategies

For my fieldwork, losing people I had come to know well wasn’t easy. One way I addressed this was by attending the funeral services of those who had passed away. This provided some closure and is what my interlocutors did as well. For medical anthropologists, I strongly suggest that students budget for therapy in the grant proposal writing process. This can be justified in grant proposals, especially for medical anthropologists dealing with stressful research topics. I never found a therapist in New Orleans who accepted the health insurance I had; in hindsight, I should have paid for this out of my own pocket. I would have realized that the gunshots I heard and witnessing my friend Razan and her son being harassed had affected me more than I realized at the time, and I may have figured this out sooner.

For the stresses related to where I was living, having a good support system and network was essential. At one point during my time in New Orleans, my mom was in the ICU. My mom eventually got better, but I did not realize how much being a caregiver had taken a toll on my own health. I was lucky to be in a program where other students help each other out. One of my former classmates realized I needed time to decompress and invited me to stay with her in El Paso. Anthropologists who do fieldwork in other countries usually leave their field site when they complete fieldwork. For those of us who do research at home, this is not always an option. I was lucky to have a network of family members, classmates, and friends to confide in and a place where I could decompress.

I wish I could have done the same with my professors. That would have made a world of difference.

Advice for Mentors

I have noticed in academia that many professors come from a place of privilege. Some have parents who are professors themselves. Other professors have been out of graduate school for a while and have forgotten the tribulations we go through as graduate students. My advice for mentors here is not just based on my own experiences but also on the experiences other students of color have shared with me when I served as the student seat on the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Executive Board.

First, realize that when you tell your students to “guard your time,” this may have a different meaning for students of color, first generation college students, or those from a working-class background. Professors may say this phrase in a well-meaning way: don’t take up extra work you don’t need to do or volunteer for things if you don’t have to, especially when you’re trying to finish your dissertation. But for those of us who need income to do our research and to write, what exactly are we supposed to guard our time from? I have become quite good at saying no to people for things I know I don’t have the time for, but I also wonder how much unnecessary labor white professors realize they put on people of color themselves. For instance, I was asked to serve on a hiring committee. Since the search process would take several months and required a substantial amount of time, another graduate student of color and I served on the committee together and shared the workload. University guidelines required a faculty member of color to serve on the committee, but when a department does not have a faculty member of color, this task falls to a graduate student. The other graduate student and I served on the hiring committee, and we asked for some reimbursement to attend the AAA annual meeting in return. We thought this was a fair exchange given the time commitment and work required for our service, since were interviewing candidates at the AAA meeting, but the department initially only wanted to reimburse one of us. Eventually, after some negotiating, we both received some form of reimbursement to attend the AAA meeting, but the process shouldn’t have taken as long as it did. While our input counted in the final decision of who was hired, I also felt like the “token minority” at times while serving on this committee. Was my input actually valued? Would there be fallout if I disagreed with another member on the committee? As a graduate student, I was in a different position than the professors on the committee. In this instance and during other times at anthropology conferences, I have felt “diversity” is overused and not thought out carefully. Without actual inclusion or a goal towards social justice, diversity can easily become a code word for universities to say they are addressing the lack of professors of color and other diversity issues when they really are not. Without actual inclusion and a mission towards social justice, the systemic issues of racism do not get addressed. As a discipline, we discuss race and racism, but I actually wonder if anthropologists can see how they perpetuate systemic racism themselves.

Second, recognize that you, as mentors, need to create the conditions of communication.   As an undergraduate student, I initially had no idea what office hours were for and figured it out along the way. As a graduate student, I found similar challenges of not knowing things about the PhD process that other students seemed to take for granted. I did not confide in my professors most of the challenges I went through that I discuss in this post. Communication with them was already difficult to do given the distance from my program; I went through my program with several professors leaving the department during my time as a student, and two of my professors passed away. Thus, talking about such issues was not the norm for me because I did not know who to reach out to and never really established a consistent mode of communication with my professors. I should have communicated more with my professors, but as a visible Muslim woman of color, trying to explain things to your professors, all of whom are white, is easier said than done. They may be less likely to fully understand the impact of witnessing the neighbors calling the police on my friend’s son. To some, it may seem like it was an isolated incident. But for a person of color, that scenario indexes much broader and more complex issues about race and privilege in our country that implicated me personally, even though I was not directly involved in the dispute. I’m reminded of the privileges others have each time I go to the airport and other public places where I face additional scrutiny. We’re often taught during our methods classes that we need to learn to be adaptable during fieldwork. It’s part of anthropology. But there’s a huge difference between having trouble with our research plan vs. witnessing someone die. Thus, my suggestion for mentors is, when you’re occasionally asking us about updates about our research and writing (which you should be doing), it wouldn’t hurt to also ask us how we’re doing ourselves. A little compassion can go a long way.

Lastly, mentors just suggesting “self-care” is not enough. One professor once recommended I take a vacation. I could have probably used one, but a vacation wouldn’t have solved all my problems. I completed fieldwork and got through graduate school through “community care.” I was lucky to be in a department where my classmates checked in on me continuously and provided various forms of support. However, universities can create the obstacles that make it harder for graduate students to thrive. A colleague of mine at another university is a non-traditional student. She lives almost an hour away from her university and recently disclosed to me that one of her white professors chastised her for not attending all of the department’s colloquiums and other events with guest speakers. While she attended every class, she couldn’t attend every event sponsored by her department given the distance from her home, expenses for gas, her obligations as a mother, and other obstacles. However, her department could easily address this by making the talks accessible virtually, which is easier to do now given various platforms for streaming videos. We shouldn’t be penalized for being non-traditional or first-generation students, and professors should try to understand our situations. Self-care doesn’t mean much when departments don’t provide health insurance or a stipend we can survive on without taking on student loans. Those with power at universities can help us by addressing the systemic conditions that make it difficult to finish our graduate programs. Anthropologists can do much better by learning the difference between self-care and community care and incorporating more community care in our practices.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Methods of Motherhood: The Borderlands of Scholarship, Motherhood, and Trauma

Melinda González

“Una herida abierta”

 In her canonical text Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa describes the border as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (1999:25). Here, she is talking about the physical border between Mexico and the U.S., but also the conceptual borders of living in multiple worlds simultaneously and being unable to rectify the two. W.E.B. Dubois called this phenomenon double-consciousness–the constant inner war of how one perceives themselves and how the world perceives you.  For me, this open wound is the border between my experiences as a first-generation college student and the very real systemic gate-keeping that occurs in the academy which limits access to adequate funding and resources. This wound is the border where my role as a PhD candidate and mother intersect and, at times, clash. I struggle daily to navigate the ways in which my research on post-Hurricane Maria community organizing across the Puerto Rican diaspora and the requirements of financially sustaining myself as a PhD student and single mother have contributed to the worsening of my PTSD diagnosis and anxiety as well as the impact of my research on my child. I experience this border between my “personal” and “academic” selves as an active, festering wound worsened by experiences of poverty, disciplinary norms of ethnographic research, and experiences of racism within the academy. In this piece, I use the processes of testimonio to shed light to the herida and contend with disciplinary norms while addressing the possibilities for creating Methods of Motherhood that address trauma and bridge the intersections of my identities and lived experiences.

Why Testimonio?

Testimonio is a political act of bearing witness to one’s experiences of an event. It is a first person narrative account with its origins in Latin America. When employed ethnographically, through testimonio we validate the experiences of the individual as an anthropological method as well as a viable mode of research. For me, testimonio comes from the works of Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, but is also rooted in long traditions of Black Feminist thought, such as the works of Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston. Through testimonio, I aim in my work to develop a methodology of research that brings together my lived experiences and the specific ways in which the intersections of my competing identities create the possibilities for how I am able to conduct dissertation research that does justice to my research question without compromising responsibility to the multiple roles that I inhabit.

The Failure Betwixt the Intersections

I began contemplating how being a mother might impact my dissertation research during summer 2017 while working as a research assistant for a faculty member. This project involved collaborative ethnography across three Central American countries.  It was the first time I brought my child to the field to conduct research since they had been born.  They were five years old at the time.  I also brought a friend as a nanny, whose expenses I had to pay out of pocket. I used federal student loans to cover the costs of childcare as I was not able to work otherwise over the summer. In my personal field notes, I wrote often that I feared that my role as mother might interfere with the research. I felt an extreme pressure to perform better than I might if I were childless. I often felt like a burden in the field. I struggled to navigate having an employee with me and our different personalities as well as my child’s emotional needs and the PI’s expectations. I was conscious of the ways in which my days were starkly divided between research time and mommy time and how little time was left for me. I returned exhausted after that first summer.

When I returned for the 2017-2018 academic year, I was focused on writing my dissertation proposal and completing my qualifying examinations to make PhD candidacy. During the drafting of my proposal, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, shifting the focus of my research to addressing community organizing after Hurricane Maria in the Puerto Rican diaspora. I had envisioned a multi-sited project in New York and Puerto Rico. I would spend six months in New York, I thought, and another six months in Puerto Rico. I defended my proposal on May 2018, but before focusing on my dissertation research, I had to conclude my research assistantship duties and return to Central America. The challenges of the first summer of research in Central America and the exorbitant cost of bringing childcare with me resulted in leaving my child, who was six years old at the time, with my older sister for a month.  My child and I had not been apart for more than a few days before this, and when I consulted numerous people on the matter, including child therapists, they assured me that “children are resilient.”  We would Skype and talk via WhatsApp. I believed that my child was, in fact, resilient, having traveled to multiple countries and was sure they would be fine.

That’s not what happened. Instead, half way through my trip, my sister called me concerned, because my child said that they wanted to die. They missed me and felt abandoned by me. I recall how being far away from them felt like a sort of dying for me, too. I would text my therapist often, feeling incapable of managing my anxiety and desperately wanting nothing more than to return to my child. I had daily panic attacks. I felt deeply like a bad mother. Like I had failed. This feeling was compounded by the fact that I am a single mother and my child had also experienced paternal abandonment from their father.  I counted down the days until my return, thinking things would go back to “normal” when we were reunited. I was assured by professionals that upon my return to New York, my child would be okay and that I could continue to do my research as planned.

The Clash of Dissertation Proposal Design, Poverty, and Motherhood

I moved to New York, or attempted to, in late Summer 2018. I intended on renting a room in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn from September to January and then I would go to Puerto Rico from February to August. My friend had a change of plans, however, and was unable to sublet the room to me. During my proposal design, I depended on this room rental to allow me to do the research that I needed to in order to be fully immersed in twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic inquiry. My university monthly stipend was $1583.00 at the time, and the rental unit was $1000.00. I would have $583.00 left to cover the costs of groceries and a Metrocard. This is the budget I was working with.  I searched for months for an alternative sublet at my price point all over New York City, but no one would sublet a room to me once I revealed that I had a child.  On numerous occasions, people would tell me that they had an available room. I would go visit the apartment only to be turned down once they discovered I had a child. While technically illegal, single mothers often face rental discrimination when searching for housing.  After months of searching and couch surfing, I moved my search to New Jersey.

In New Jersey, I experienced similar housing discrimination, and finally found an apartment in Bloomfield, a 45 minute train commute into mid-town Manhattan.  The landlord, however, would not sublet to me.  I was forced to sign a one-year lease.  Using a student loan, I paid for the move-in fees: first month’s rent, 1.5 months security deposit, and a broker’s fee totaling $5,600. The monthly rent for the unfurnished one-bedroom apartment was $1400, leaving me with $183 of my stipend to somehow pay for food, internet, utilities and transportation to my field site. In order to cover the costs of living, I had to find other sources of income and even attempted crowd-funding. I was confronted with an intense feeling that graduate school and dissertation research itself would be truly impossible for me as I have no financial support from family and no co-parent. I had to rethink the design of my project.  Signing a one-year lease meant that I could not leave to Puerto Rico for six months as I had planned.

How could I do a project about life after Hurricane Maria and community organizing and not spend ample time in Puerto Rico?

And, then, my child started struggling with behavioral issues in school and at home.

What did this mean for my dissertation research and my child’s well-being?

Developing Methods of Motherhood

When it became clear that I could not do my dissertation research the way I had hoped, I began to question standard conventions of anthropological research. I interrogated the myth of twelve months of uninterrupted focused research time. Financial circumstances forced me to take on other work beyond just the dissertation research. I had to adjunct four classes and work side gigs. I asked myself: for whom is 12 months of uninterrupted fieldwork really feasible for?  It unlikely was feasible for other economically disadvantaged folx and first-generation college students with family to support. I was also faced with the reality that I could not afford to pay my monthly rent and go to Puerto Rico at the same time. I had to reconsider my role within the politics and processes of diasporic community organizing in the Puerto Rican diaspora.

I started  questioning the ways in which knowledge is produced and the direct challenges that I faced in receiving adequate funding to cover my cost of living as a student researcher as well as the lack of institutional support and scholarship on how to conduct anthropological research as parents, let alone as single mothers. I had applied for over eight scholarships, and the fact that I was doing U.S.-based research meant that my only real hope at ample funding was the Wenner Gren Foundation, which rejected me twice.  I had to ask myself if my pursuing this project was harming my child. I had to acknowledge that it was also harming me. I struggled daily with panic attacks. I had even developed an eating disorder during my comprehensive exams.  Another issue I faced, not covered in this piece, was numerous barriers to accessing adequate mental health care as well as disability accommodations to assist in navigating these numerous challenges.

Something had to change, had to give. I had to ask, why do I feel so pressured to do multi-sited ethnographic research? What about the canon is causing this rise in anxiety? I searched for texts on parenting and ethnographic research, but almost none centered the experiences of mothers of color like me, who also navigate poverty and racism in the field.  I learned, then, that I had to document these experiences for future scholars and also to consider that my dissertation was just as much about creating methods for scholars like me as it was about the experiences of Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

In their works on indigenous research, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Shawn Wilson ask us to reconsider the ontological approaches that we use to conduct anthropological research. I began to look at my research as a ceremonial practice; to understand that it was not feasible for me to go to the “field” every single day. In fact, the field, itself, was operating through me. It was informing how I could conduct research. Rising cost of living and gentrification led to me being homeless for a short-while during my fieldwork. This, too, my interlocutors face. Puerto Rican Hurricane Maria evacuees, by and large, are still living in homeless shelters or insecure housing in New York. Their children, too, coping with adjustment and moving from one climate to another. Struggling with school, with mental health, with financial precarity.

I began to develop a method of motherhood that took my everyday, material experiences as a single mother that centered the needs of my child and my personal well-being over the project design. Through this method, I encourage caretakers to write about their experiences, how their children influence their research, how being caretakers limits and expands their connections with communities and interlocutors and the way we carry out ethnographic research. I had to dig deep into the anthropological canon to find any shred of information about how to do anthropological research as a parent. I went into online support groups to vent and solve the “problem.”  Even after the reflexive turn in anthropology, we still dichotomize ourselves as researcher/scholar and human being — hiding our disabilities, our socioeconomic challenges, and the struggles of navigating parenting and scholarship.  I resist this and, as a field, we all need to. So, in my dissertation, I will write extensively about how motherhood reshaped the design of my project and how it moved me to different types of conclusions. Further, I bring into question the notion that anthropological research ought to be rooted in the study of “others” in ways that limit funding for individuals that conduct research within their own communities.

We need to find ways as a field to support graduate students from impoverished families and meet them at the intersections of their identities, or we will continue to have a discipline dominated by those with financial privilege.  I offer these suggestions to support PhD students:

1. The field of Anthropology needs to garner greater financial resources to support U.S.-based research by anthropologists of color, particularly those with financial need.
2. Anthropology students (and all graduate students) need to receive livable wages as stipends. Yearly salaries for Anthropology graduate students average between $15,000 to $20,000 a year (according to phdstipends.com). There is no U.S. city where $20,000 a year or less is a livable wage. Over my graduate career, I have had to take out over $100,000 in student loans to be able to cover the true cost of living while pursuing my PhD.
3. Professional organizations dedicated to anthropological research should allocate resources for mental health services for students/scholars and their families.
4. Caretakers should be encouraged to write about how they managed care-work in ethnographies. The reality that care-work impacts ethnographic research should be acknowledged and embraced by the academic community.
5. Annual meetings of all anthropological associations (AAA, SANA, SfAA, etc) should have free childcare on-site.
6. All anthropological associations (AAA, SANA, SfAA, etc)  should provide scholarship funding for single parents to attend annual meetings, particularly for students on the job market.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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The Embodiment of Kintsugi

Shir Lerman Ginzburg

Kintsugi

When I was in graduate school and exploring how to frame my research on mental illness, I stumbled across the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which involves the repairing of broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer, and treats the pottery’s breakage lines as part of the history of the object, rather than a flaw needing to be disguised.  Kintsugi hovered at the edges of my memory as I conducted my research and subconsciously guided my understanding of the healing process from depression.  I came to embody the practice of Kintsugi as a personal practice, which in turn helped me acknowledge and share my personal experiences with depression.

Introduction

My relationship with depression began before I was born.

My paternal grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, suffered from depression as a result of the horrors she faced; watching her draw on the same courage to battle depression motivated me to study it in graduate school.  I inherited her vulnerability for depression, but it was only when my brother was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor in February 2011, during my first year in my doctoral program, that depression staked a personal claim in me.  Simultaneously researching and suffering from depression while trying to remain upbeat for my brother pushed me to compartmentalize my own experience, borne of my desire to not let my personal life affect my professional life.  I valued my doctoral training very highly and worried that my struggle would impact my ability to complete my degree.  I freely discussed my academic interest in depression with friends and colleagues, but forbore to disclose my own suffering, even going so far as to hide the fact that I was going to therapy, hoping that this silence would mitigate my depression (despite research and ensuing personal experience to the contrary).  This decision only exacerbated my depression, as it left me feeling isolated and prevented me from fully acknowledging the effect that my emotions and mental state had on my academic performance and my personal relationships.  My brother survived, thankfully, but I was left breathless and disoriented in the aftermath.

Puerto Rico

It was therefore in a disjointed frame of mind that I traveled to Puerto Rico in December 2011 to set up a field site for my pilot study the following summer, and it felt almost like a vacation, the warm breeze and tropical flavors a sharp contrast to dreary, wintry Connecticut.  I was there to study depression, diabetes, and obesity syndemics, and during that initial visit, I successfully created contacts with a state-run diabetes clinic on the medical sciences campus of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, receiving permission to return the following summer to conduct my pilot study there, pending IRB approval.  When I returned to Puerto Rico in May 2012, obtaining IRB approval wasn’t the only thing to happen since my last visit – my paternal grandfather had passed away unexpectedly in February from pneumonia, leaving me reeling.  I was unable to attend his funeral due to both his geographic distance from me and to the religious immediacy of the funeral after his death; the added guilt of that loss lengthened my emotional recovery process and left me reluctant to collect data.   My research on depression in Puerto Rico began with me already struggling with depression and with the isolation of doing research relatively alone.  I was renting an apartment from a friend of a friend, and while the apartment was spacious and right on the beach, I was also living there alone, which added to my depression.  Making friends proved to be challenging, living as I was in a neighborhood of transitory expats.  Nonetheless, I began my interviews with an emotion that would ripen into enthusiasm, happy as I was to actually begin collecting my own data.  After muddling through four or five interviews during which participants cried while discussing depression, I remembered the box of tissues in my therapist’s office back home and began carrying my own box of tissues with me whenever I conducted interviews in order to be better prepared for contingencies, and I conducted no more than two interviews a day in order to preserve my own mental wellbeing. My adviser later informed me that she had dubbed this plan “ethnographic learning-by-mistake.”  I started going to religious services at a nearby community center and began making friends there with locals, as well as with people in my building, some of whom invited me to a 4th of July party on the roof of our apartment building.  Slowly, I began to stagger out of the fugue state I’d been in for the past four months, and began to stumble along the path towards recovery.

And then the worst-case scenario happened: my other grandfather, my mother’s father, who had been sick with colon cancer, suddenly took a turn for the worse.  A succinct phone call from my mother told me to pack a bag and head to the airport immediately because she had already bought me a plane ticket, but to no avail.  I was en route, my parents and brother were en route, my aunts, uncles, and cousins were en route, but my grandfather passed away while all of us were on our various flights, with only my grandmother by his side.  The shock of it hit me when I arrived, as the guilt at not being able to say goodbye to my other grandfather only five months after losing my first one, made the loss more difficult.  I was able to make it just in time for the funeral and the ensuing period of mourning, but then we all had to return to our various homes.  This grief process was markedly more onerous due to the lack of nearby social support, compared to when my paternal grandfather had died in February.  My parents had each other, my brother had his friends, my cousins had each other, my grandmother had her friends.  I had a circle of acquaintances I didn’t know well enough to trust with discussing themes of personal depression and grief.  The rest of my friends were conducting their own research in Ghana, England, Guadeloupe, Ecuador, Cataluña, New York, and Connecticut, and were not close at hand to provide comfort.  I was no longer in therapy, as I thought myself well enough on the route to recovery in May to not want therapy during fieldwork.  In any case my therapist moved on to other opportunities at the same time that I left for Puerto Rico, leaving me sans therapist and without the desire to get acquainted with a new therapist while in the field.  I steeled myself to spend the remainder of the summer “just dealing with it,” further compartmentalizing my grief.  I sequestered myself within my apartment or at a nearby Starbucks whenever I wasn’t at the clinic, hindering my own research in the process by not exploring San Juan as thoroughly as I ought, which in turn limited my grasp of the social and structural factors in Puerto Rico that underpinned the very syndemic I was there to identify.  It was only when I returned to Puerto Rico in January 2014 for my longer fieldwork that I began to enjoy Puerto Rico more thoroughly and stop subconsciously associating fieldwork with despondency.

Out of the Depths

It was at the time of my maternal grandfather’s death in July 2012 that, desperate for friendly interactions and without the guidance of a therapist, I began to ask for help from others in my life.  Recalling my lack of social support, I mentioned to my friends at home that I had lost my other grandfather and that my depression had relapsed, and suddenly there were flowers arriving at my apartment and concerned phone calls at all hours, asking how I was doing.  I began to suspect that my friends had made an agreement behind my back to not leave me alone for more than an hour at a time.  Soon, I had a busy Skype schedule with friends who wanted to keep me company and make sure I was doing alright.  The help I received both hastened my voyage along the path of recovery and alleviated my own trepidation about discussing depression as a personal illness, as it permitted me a deeper understanding of the ways in which depression affected all aspects of life, including the professional side that I had tried so hard to separate from my personal life.  The experience was utterly unnerving, wholly consumed as I was with the very topic I studied.  It encompassed a complete dismantling of self, an emotional realignment to comprise a startling pendulum of feelings that swung from stark numbness to acute emotion. Depression eradicated all of my preconceived notions of my own abilities to do everything independently, when in fact part of my own journey with depression involved a profound loneliness that was mitigated by the help I initially resisted so tenaciously.

Interviewing others with depression became uniquely personal and sympathetic, providing me with extra sensitivity into the way I asked questions, the stillness with which I listened to my participants’ analyses, and the meanderings we took during interviews whenever participants needed to take a break and discuss other topics.  And sometimes, my participants and I did not complete the full interview guide, instead having in-depth conversations that permitted a deeper discussion of depression as an illness and the effects it had on interpersonal relationships.  My participants framed depression not only as a result of structural inequalities, but also as a consequence of loneliness, breakdowns in personal relationships, and the suffering of loved ones.

Ultimately, I would have done several things differently if given the opportunity.  I would have had a therapist “on call” if needed, given my own vulnerability for depression, and I would have reached out to friends and family much more quickly to ask for help.  “Toughing it out” is dangerous when dealing with mental illness, given the isolation that people with mental illnesses already face.  When I began my fieldwork, I assumed that isolation was part and parcel of the experience, but I didn’t anticipate how overwhelming the loneliness would be.  I admitted my depression to my committee after I returned home, to which they responded, “That’s common – why didn’t you reach out earlier????” The “ask for help” approach to fieldwork was not something I had considered until I was already in need of it, but which is now a guiding force for my current and future ethnographic work.  It also highlights the need for a stronger social support network for graduate students who are in the field, particularly those who organize their own field sites and/or did not have preexisting social networks in place.  While I turned out alright, it could have gone very differently.

My brother’s illness in 2011 and the loss of both grandfathers within a 5-month period in 2012 left me reeling but unwilling to recognize the profound effect that these events had in my life. When I finally began reassembling myself, I wasn’t the same person I was before the depression, but rather mirrored the Kintsugi that I had discovered earlier in graduate school.  My depression is part of my history and is traced through my academic and personal discourses, and ultimately became part of my healing process.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

Source

Humanizing Fieldwork:

Trauma and Resilience in Ethnographic Fieldwork, Part II

The first collection of posts in this series demanded that we recognize the fact that fieldwork can hurt, and that we have fostered a disciplinary culture where that hurt has been normalized and even celebrated. In this next installment, our contributors recognize the challenges of navigating mental illness before and during fieldwork as well as the multiple structural constraints faced by anthropological fieldworkers in and out of the field. Recent studies reveal a mental health crisis among US graduate students, and each of these next three posts engages in some ways with this reality. The truth is that, although fieldwork continues to pose challenges to our mental health beyond graduate school, most cultural anthropologists will only be able to carry out the “traditional” or expected 12 month (or longer) fieldwork expected of them during their dissertation research. For the lucky few of us who are able to seamlessly enter tenure-track positions, long-term absences for fieldwork of more than 6 months will occur very occasionally, if ever. Attending to the particular challenges to mental health faced by novice fieldworkers who embark on research for extended periods of time is more important than ever.

When we originally conceptualized the Trauma and Resiliency series, we expected contributions would focus on trauma related to the fieldwork experience. We soon found, however, that many of the proposals we reviewed connected their trauma to other factors – be they a familial predisposition to mental illness or other structural constraints that limited or even thwarted fieldwork. For many of our potential contributors, the journey to fieldwork itself was fraught.

The three posts in this group consider the experiences of doctoral students embarking on different kinds of field research projects. Shir Ginzburg’s account of her personal struggle with depression in the field presents a learning opportunity for students preparing to depart for fieldwork and for their advisors. It serves as a stark reminder that, as mentors, we should not wait for our students to ask for help, but to have conversations about mental health early and openly.

Revisiting Carter’s rejoinder to consider the difficulties of doing fieldwork at home (what she calls “homework”), Melinda González’s post renders, in heartbreaking clarity, the difficulties experienced by those among us who are mothers, poor, and brown. González’ story illustrates some of the ways in which the field of anthropology, despite its claim to social progressiveness and even justice, continues to support exclusionary systems that disadvantage students of color and first-generation college students. The realities of living on graduate student stipends and adjunct wages without other means – and how these daily struggles to survive deeply affect mental health – come to life in her post. They urge us as anthropologists, and anthropology itself as a field, to look inward and to recognize our complicity in the propagation of our discipline as an elitist, colonialist institution through its suppression of some voices in favor of others.

Also echoing Carter’s engagement with homework and González’ description of fieldwork at “home,” Saira Mehmood shares her experiences as a Muslim woman of color conducting field work at home in New Orleans. In addition, Mehmood offers a series of suggestions for mentors to consider when advising graduate students, particularly graduate students of color.

In titling this set of posts, “Humanizing Fieldwork,” we wish to highlight two things.  First, the posts lead us to reflect upon the humanity of fieldworkers as full, fleshy, embodied beings with complex histories and lives, whose engagements in the field are imminently, inextricably bodily as well as social.  These engagements are sometimes as messy as they are productive, and they cannot be disentangled from the structures of power and privilege that condition students’ lives both inside and outside of the field.  Second, the posts spotlight the (in)humanity of a discipline that not only ignores but is often hostile to this humanity in the service of an ascetic analytics.  Despite various moves over the past several decades to “impassion” anthropology, our disciplinary standards remain centered on forms of knowledge production that are most valued when they emerge in spite of, rather than by way of, grounded experiences of lived difference.

Taken together, these posts call attention to the ways anthropology can do better to prepare and support our PhD students as they work to complete their degrees –before, during, and after fieldwork. We must also acknowledge the structural and racial barriers faced by many of our first generation and students of color, particularly those who are Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC). In the era of #hautalk and #anthrosowhite, a disciplinary engagement with PhD student mental health and its intersections with race, socioeconomic privilege, and structural violence is more important than ever.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

Source

A Crisis Of (Feminist) Faith Through An Encounter In A Clinical Setting

by Sreeparna Chattopadhyay

Introduction

In the last ten years since I graduated with my doctoral degree, I have conducted research in both clinical and conventional anthropological settings. My doctoral work examined domestic violence in Mumbai, India. My work since then has focused on health and sexual violence, with considerable periods of observation in hospital settings. My experiences tell me that while both types of project have the potential to inflict trauma on the anthropologist, their nature is different. In clinical settings, non-clinicians when witnessing clinical ‘acts’, loosely defined as surgeries and other invasive procedures, may be shocked and even traumatized by these, never having had exposure to such interventions. However, not all clinical acts are equally traumatic. Here, I offer examples of a third-trimester abortion contrasting it with a cesarean section of live twins, both of which I witnessed, to argue that whether procedures are viewed as being traumatic are contingent on the meanings that those acts embody, for us as anthropologists and for the individual undergoing these procedures.

Not all surgical incisions are the same

One winter morning in 2015, in a remote part of northeastern India, close to the border with Bangladesh, my research assistant and I were hanging out in a government hospital. I had just begun a study, the second stint of fieldwork after my Ph.D. on maternal health in the region. We had entered the pre-labor room which was comprised of ten beds, only two of which were occupied that day. We were speaking to one of the women, who was being transfused prior to her induction, about how she managed anemia in a region where 90% of women become pregnant with moderate levels of anemia.

Within what seemed like seconds, but must have been longer, there was a flurry of activities and the doctor was instructing all visitors to clear out the room. A curtain was quickly drawn around the bed of the second woman, whose name we later discovered was Anita [1]. She was accompanied by her mother, her fifteen-month-old daughter and a health worker. As we were wondering if we should leave too, the smell of blood hit my nose. A minute later, I saw the doctor walk across the room holding a bloody sac that left bright red spots on the cement floor. Soon after, Anita was wheeled into the Operation Theatre.

In the afternoon when we returned to the recovery room, Anita laid on the bed clutching her knees to her chest, her green skirt bloodied, face twisted with pain. I asked her mother whether she had a boy or a girl. I was wrong – it was a medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) at 7 months. My shock soon gave way to sadness and anger. A medical termination of pregnancy at 7 months is illegal in India. Besides, we now have the technology that ensures that a fetus is viable outside the womb at 7 months.

I discovered that Anita was an indigenous woman who lived forty kilometers from this facility. She had not known that she was pregnant until she was in her fifth month, because she was still breastfeeding her older daughter. It took her another two months to gather the resources to make this trip using three different modes of transport. She did not have enough money to bring up two children and had decided to end this pregnancy. The doctor and the health worker had counselled her on the possible harms, but she insisted on the MTP. She returned home that same evening with antibiotics and analgesics.

About four years later, in the early summer of 2019, in Karnataka in Southern India, I had front row seats to a pair of twins being delivered through an emergency Cesarean section. In a busy state facility, a very competent Ob/Gyn allowed me to accompany her into the OT as she performed the complex procedure. I saw the scalpel draw blood. She used scissors to widen the cut just above the woman’s pubic bone, standing on a stool to reach deep into the woman’s uterus as one of the twins was stuck below her rib cage with a cord tied around his neck. He was extracted first, while his sister was taken out a few minutes later, crying lustily as she tasted her first breath of air.

This was the first C-section or any operative procedure that I had seen. This was a far bloodier encounter than the MTP I had partially borne witness to. Yet the meanings that these acts embodied could not be more different. It was not the blood and gore of the clinical procedure itself that left its long shadow on me, but what it meant for me as a feminist and a woman who cannot bear her own children.

A crisis of (feminist) faith

When I remember that day in the winter of 2015, I remember pacing anxiously in my small cold room at the missionary boarding house, my home for the duration of the fieldwork. I remember having a fitful night, in fact several unsettled nights where sleep was punctuated with nightmares of children shrieking and worms splitting my skin to emerge like alien births.

As a feminist who is committed to pro-choice, but simultaneously unable to bear children and has yearned for motherhood for years, this encounter was emotionally traumatic, intellectually disruptive, and morally unsettling for me. While my immediate response was affective – grief, guilt, anger and fear – in subsequent processing of this encounter, I experienced an intellectual crisis which itself was deeply traumatic.

I knew that Anita had all the “risk” factors, for landing in this medically dangerous situation – she was poor, indigenous, lived in a remote, hilly part in a disadvantaged Indian state. Yet I oscillated between feeling that she “chose” what was right for herself and grieving the loss of a potential life. Anita went against medical advice and the advice of two family members in choosing to have a late-term abortion

I felt embittered and puzzled.  Why hadn’t she considered giving birth and then giving up the baby for adoption? I would have willingly adopted this baby and, as a recent adoptive parent, I know that the queue for legal adoption is long in India.

The feminist in me chided myself for thinking of Anita as a mere reproductive vessel. I knew intellectually that only she had autonomy over her body. Yes, the termination was medically risky, but so are many other medical procedures. Yet patients choose them, weighing the benefits and risks of such procedures. What was different here? Perhaps when it comes to late-term abortions, I was flexible with my feminist ethics? Perhaps my inability to bear children was clouding the intellectual apparatus required for feminist praxis? Worst of all, perhaps I was not a feminist at all?

The Return of the Prodigal Feminist

These doubts continued to plague me for a while. A year later, I chose to write a case study on ethics about Anita and the attendant ethical, moral and intellectual conundrums it presented. I also discussed my experience and responses with my friends, family and colleagues. As I unburdened myself through speech and text, the shame chipped away, and the edges of my guilt felt a little less jagged. The existential angst I had experienced, unsure of my identity as a feminist, had settled a bit by then.

With time, I choose to see things differently. My feminist self and the mother in me didn’t have to be like Sophie’s Choice – I could be both, and still grieve this death. Strathern famously said that anthropology and feminism make for strange bedfellows, an “awkward relationship.” But feminism gifted me a lens and a language which was not burdened by ideas of cultural relativism or individual versus collective rights.

Porter, in moving away from a rights-based discourse on abortion in a very divisive Ireland, draws out similarities between pro-life and pro-choice activists and argues that both sides “…advocate responsible sex, good parenting, and caring communities.” Thus, abortion moves away from being a strictly medical procedure or a rights-based claims to a social and moral issue, where nurturance is the bedrock on which women take these decisions, and never lightly.

Although, for Anita, this abortion was not a choice in a real sense.  She had it to give her young daughter a better life. In a country where female fetuses are routinely aborted due to a cultural preference for sons, perhaps Anita should, in fact, be be lauded for her actions?

The affective dissonance that this incident elicited in me, though unsettling, was ultimately productive. Hemmings (2012: 151) writes, “Challenging the status of the expert, considering the shared epistemic claims from below, thinking outside one’s own initial investment in the desire for clearer and more accountable knowledge; these are all the features of an affectively attentive epistemology that allows for the transformation of all participants in the research field as well as knowledge itself.” I may never do what Anita did or had to, but Hemmings argues that empathy is not a prerequisite for building affective solidarity since it requires a departure from an identity-based politics. Ethical concerns demand that we do not judge choices based on similarities between us and the doer.

I don’t know how Anita will process her experience later. For me, while nothing is settled, this experience forced a reckoning of my feminist self. The questions continue.

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel

As the images unwind, like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind!

Windmills of your mind.

Songwriters: Marilyn Bergman, Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman

For Further Reading

1. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and Antonius CGM Robben .1995. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. Univ of California Press.
2. Leibing, Annette, and Athena McLean. 2007. “Learn to Value Your Shadow!” An Introduction to the Margins of Fieldwork. The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between Ethnography and Life: 1–28.
3. Hemmings, Clare. “Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation.” Feminist Theory13, no. 2 (2012): 147-161.
4. Porter, Elisabeth. “Culture, community and responsibilities: abortion in Ireland.” Sociology30, no. 2 (1996): 279-298.
5. Strathern, Marilyn. “An awkward relationship: The case of feminism and anthropology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society12, no. 2 (1987): 276-292.

[1] All names have been changed to protect identities and the precise location of the hospital has not been shared since what we witnessed was not only dangerous but also an illegal act.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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“Homework”: The highs and lows of anthropology at home

by Chelsey Carter

John and Janice’s Devotion

In fall of 2018, I went to visit John and Janice (1) at their home in East St. Louis. When I walked in, I was immediately greeted by Janice, a tall, Black, stately, and curvy woman with big warm brown eyes. I had no idea that this first ethnographic encounter would not only change the entire trajectory of my 16 months of homework (2) (i.e. “fieldwork” aka “research” aka data collection), but also change my life.

I first met John and Janice at an ALS clinic for veterans while conducting my dissertation research. I will never forget Janice’s first words to me about her husband’s condition: “We know it doesn’t get any better, but we just want him to live the best life he can… while he’s here.”

ALS is a devastating disease that affects different patients in very different ways. It’s a constant assault of unknowns as the disease progresses towards permanent disability, paralysis, and death, usually within 2 to 5 years. For some patients the early symptoms are a foot drop or a loss of speech, but for John it was the loss of his ability to use his legs.  As his body continues to decline, he won’t be able to say a word or move his body to communicate all that’s going on in his head. When I arrived at his home, the physical decline of his disease had advanced since I had last seen him at clinic.

Janice left John and me alone and I leaned over, and asked John quietly, “What’s been the hardest thing for you?” He explained that he was falling more frequently and proceeded to show me pictures of his black eye and busted lip after he attempted to climb the stairs prior to getting his power wheelchair.

“I’m gonna tell you the truth… I had a feeling something was gonna happen to me… And I said, I don’t want Janice to have to depend on nobody.”

He told me that once he found out there was no cure for ALS, he didn’t want Janice running from place to place after he passed. Without Janice knowing, he had researched properties and found their current home for well over his budget. After months of prayer and conversation he was able to talk the owner down to a price that he could afford. He told me the house is now half paid for and that he hopes to have it paid off before he dies. With tears running down his face he said “Chelsey, she’ll always have some place to stay… I know that Janice can live here.” I was moved. This house was a way for John to show his empathy, care, and unconditional love for Janice, even when he was facing an impossible future.

Mom’s Hospitalization

A few days after I spoke to John, I got a phone call from my mom that she wasn’t feeling well. She described feeling lightheaded, cold, and shaky. By the end of the day she called me from a local hospital where she had been admitted. She was septic and had a bacterial infection, cellulitis.

My mom was in the hospital for a week and I vividly remember one day when she was in so much pain. The doctors had already given her Naproxen and Morphine, but nothing relieved the pain.

I stepped out to call my partner Aiden and begged them to come to the hospital but all I received was coldness, distance, and blame for how much I was asking for. They wouldn’t come. I hung up. I had no idea this coldness was the beginning of Aiden’s infidelity just when I needed them most.

When I came back to my mother’s room, I found her on the verge of tears as a flustered White nurse attempted to draw blood for the 9th time. Her entire body was bruised from multiple failed attempts over the hospital stay. Because she was morbidly obese coupled with the fact that she has rolling veins, finding a good vein every 3 hours to monitor her for sepsis was a monumental endeavor.

At this point my mom had asked for the head floor nurse or IV specialist but the White nurse ignored these requests. This was just one of many times my mother or I had made a request that went unheard by the hospital staff over the four days we had been there at this point.

Words weren’t working but action was necessary… my mother was suffering more than she should. I explained to the nurse that I was a phlebotomist and asked to draw my mother’s blood. She asked where I had gone to school, and I explained I had a degree in public health and was a PhD Candidate studying people with ALS.  She stared blankly and said I couldn’t and that I had to wait for the IV specialist. “When did you call them?”  I asked. She rudely replied, “Before you got here.” “Ma’am I work with people with ALS. I draw blood on people with atrophied muscles, paralysis and who sometimes weigh less 100lbs. I go to a top 10 university and went to John Burroughs, I can draw my mom’s blood… since you can’t.” “You went to Burroughs?” she inquired with surprise.  I never responded. Her surprise at my attendance to the number one high school in St. Louis suddenly granted me legitimacy into this space and the authority to complete the draw. I quickly grabbed the blood draw supplies, tied two tourniquets to the top and middle of my mom’s forearm, felt for a vein, and one stick later filled the 4 vials required for the blood test.

White Supremacy in Action

This entire encounter at the hospital with my mom reminded me of an experience with a White participant a few months back. He was enrolling in a genetics study that the ALS lab was recruiting patients for. I walked in the room and was mesmerized by the patient’s sleeve of colorful tattoos. Aiden had recently gotten a similar sleeve and I was in a habit of fawning over the color and details of each tattoo.

The room was cold, and he and his wife were tense. So, as I felt the gentlemen’s veins, I complemented his tattoos trying to engage him in a lighthearted conversation before drawing 13 tubes of blood. The room instantly got even colder. I looked up and he said to me “I’m not proud of all them. Some were some mistakes I made when I was younger.” As he finished his sentence, I found a bouncy vein in the middle of his right arm. I stepped back to grab the alcohol wipe and then realized the reason for their coldness. The vein I was about to puncture was right at the center of a swastika. I hesitated and silently continued drawing his blood, never saying another word. I felt like I was in the episode of “Greys Anatomy” with Dr. Miranda Bailey operating on the racist with the swastika.

The Painful Nature of Homework

As a queer Black feminist anthropologist studying my home, I find my personal experiences intertwined with my ethnographic fieldwork in ways that cannot be untangled. John’s love for Janice showed me the unconditional realities of love. John, a husband, father, deacon, and veteran, has every reason to be entitled, to be selfish, to be cared for as he enters the last years of his life. Yet, his gaze wasn’t inward but on Janice. Once I saw this unconditional love, and realized I had nothing to prove to be loved, I knew I had to end my relationship with my abusive partner.

In the last year, I’ve lost myself and found myself and realized that suffering, pain, and heartache have the ability to generate a reawakening both in my personal life and as a native ethnographer. The story that I thought was a love story for John and Janice, also turned out to be a much-needed lesson for me to learn my own self-worth and self-love both in my relationships but also in my relationship to this discipline and how I deploy and engage with my homework.

As we work to decolonize our sensibilities around the discipline and fieldwork, and as funding structures, political climates, and institutional shifts occur, making “traditional” international (read: colonial) fieldwork less accessible, more anthropologists are turning their lenses inward toward fieldwork at “home.” Although I am an advocate for the validity and legitimacy  of anthropological inquiry done by “native” anthropologists in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston and other Black feminist anthropologists; it is also important to recognize that the labors of this homework in the United States can be filled with trauma and pain. Anthropologist Kwame Otu said during a keynote presentation a year ago “I find home to be an inherently violent place.” Often, I experience the very racist encounters, stereotypes, and microaggressions that I study while getting to know people with a fatal diagnosis and living in St. Louis. And the objective and subjective lenses of trauma are both critical here.

Subjectivity as a methodological approach potentially provides an opportunity for greater accuracy in the ways we make meaning of culture. My positionality and life history as a “native” or ethnic ethnographer–within and outside of St. Louis, within and outside of the hospitals where I work, within and outside the role of caregiver for an ill person–creates shifting “double-visions” that inform my ability to approach the project from a number of different lenses and conceptions that are fruitful but also violent and traumatic. I believe the  strategies below support resiliency for marginalized scholars conducting homework “at home.”

Strategies for Resiliency

1. Affirm yourself daily. Remind yourself of your potential and strength. I got this tattoo recently.

1. I recognize the privileges that exist on whether or not you can or cannot access professional counseling. However, even with the small stipend support we receive, I strongly encourage the investment during homework and even writing it into your grant proposals.
2. Build community outside of your department. You are not alone. Find like-minded people that exist outside of your physical and virtual academic spaces. There are brilliant people that do not exist solely in elite academic spaces.
3. Love yourself. I don’t mean this in the cliché self-love way that is currently the buzz word for healthy self-discovery; but really love on yourself. Eat food that makes you feel good. Do activities that make you feel good. Talk to people that make you feel good. Actively practice treating yourself the way you would treat your best friend.
4. Take care of yourself first. Remember the greater purpose. The discipline needs y(our) work. Your interlocutors need to be heard. But, it’s never worth your health and well-being. A friend and colleague once told me “The work can wait, your health and well-being can’t.”

Àṣẹ.

Notes:

1. All names used in this post are pseudonyms.
2. In addition to Kamala Visweswaran’s book Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Brackette F. William’s article “The Public I/Eye: Conducting Fieldwork to Do Homework on Homelessness and Begging in Two U.S. Cities” is useful for thinking through the concept of homework and fieldwork.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

Source

Staying with the Feeling: Trauma, Humility, and Care in Ethnographic Fieldwork

by Greg Beckett

I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point, I began to respond to questions about my research with a feeling of dread. I wanted to say that it was going badly, or that the research was good but the situation was horrible, that I was sad and angry and that many of my friends and informants in Haiti were in worse shape. Many of them were dead. I wanted to say all of that, but I didn’t. I had come to think of fieldwork as something anthropologists were supposed to love doing, and I felt that if I dreaded going back there must be something wrong with me. I had internalized what might be one of the most self-destructive aspects of our discipline—the idea that fieldwork is a baptism by fire from which only the strong survive.

Staying with the Feeling

It is only recently that I have come to think of my fieldwork experiences in the language of trauma. I had been studying crisis and disaster in Haiti for years, studying how crisis feels to those who live with it every day. That meant I was absorbing countless stories of trauma, while also living through disastrous events. Yet, I avoided any acknowledgment of this reality. Avoidance is, after all, a key symptom of trauma, and I sought refuge in the defensive posture of intellectual rigor and high theory, and when that didn’t work, in numbness or in the pseudo-safety of shutting down.

Everything changed after I began to think of my experiences in the language of trauma in the context of therapy. This reframing helped me come to terms with my own experiences. It is a long journey, and like many who live with PTSD, I still have images I cannot shake. But reframing also helped in another way: it forced me to rethink my fieldwork as a whole, not just my personal experiences, but the stories of those with whom I worked too. I began to hear and see—to feel—in my notes a much deeper, more profound record of existential struggle. My therapist would often encourage me to “stay with the feeling,” and the more I did that with my fieldnotes, the richer the material became, and the more I began to understand—to really understand—about how crisis felt. This in turn made me rethink ethnography, as method and genre.

The Virtue of Humility

I came to therapy late. I don’t know why I didn’t seek help sooner, although it is probably because avoidance is such a powerful force. I did have concerned committee members and colleagues who expressed worry about my physical safety while in the field. I don’t know what they would have said or done if I had spoken to them about my traumatic experiences. I imagine that they, too, have probably internalized the disciplinary hubris that casts the anthropologist as an intrepid hero, the same habitus that generated all those whispers and rumors about people who couldn’t cut it in the field or that led fellow graduate students to clap me on the back and talk about all the “cred” I would have for working in a place like Haiti. So many of us have fallen for this cruelty that masquerades as intellectual rigor. It was a cultivated disposition at the University of Chicago, where I trained, and where the same hubris now drives a willful rejection of the very idea of trauma, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. In anthropology, this same hubris can lead to silencing or outright stigma about trauma and the related experiences of anxiety and depression, despite evidence of the high rates of mental health issues among graduate students.

When I first began therapy, I warned my therapist, whom I will call David (not his real name), that I would probably respond with a lot of intellectual resistance. I had taught psychoanalytic theory for years as part of the college core curriculum at the University of Chicago and I knew enough to know about resistance and repression. I doubt I needed to tell him; I’m sure he could read my resistance easily. At any rate, he responded by giving me a homework challenge of sorts: he asked me to leave and to practice what he called the “virtue of humility.” I won’t lie; it was hard. I had been trained to see humility, or at least certain versions of it, as a kind of weakness and to mistake an aggressive form of argumentation and assertiveness as its own kind of virtue. Yet, learning to practice humility opened up for me a whole new way of thinking and feeling. Over the course of my therapy, I got better at naming emotions and at reframing my experiences and the actions and expressions of others. Humility also helped me as a writer, and it gave me a new point of entry into my fieldnotes and research, letting me see and feel the deep intimacies at play in the stories and conversations I had recorded and observed.

Complex Trauma and Care Work

David said I had complex PTSD, which is a bit different from the most common idea many people have of trauma. Most people think of trauma as tied to a single catastrophic event, usually a near-death-experience in times of war or disaster. Yet, this eventful kind of trauma is not the most common one. It is much more common for people to suffer from a wide range of traumatic experiences, including: developmental or childhood trauma, complex trauma, and vicarious or secondary trauma. These last two are especially important for anthropologists to understand.

Complex trauma is processual and is the result of many traumatic experiences taking place over an extended period of time. It is a much better way of thinking about the traumas suffered by people living with the legacies of colonial domination or the degradations of war, military occupation, political violence, or extreme inequality. Indeed, some psychologists now reject the frame of trauma to explain these experiences, preferring instead to focus attention on the political dimensions of social suffering. Whatever name we use, this kind of suffering may be quite prevalent in a wide range of fieldwork locations.

Vicarious trauma is “the emotional residue of exposure.” This kind of trauma also accrues over time and spreads through social networks of care and empathy. In recent decades, there has been much attention paid to secondary traumatic stress (STS), vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue, all of which are prevalent among those who work in the caring professions, including emergency responders, humanitarian aid workers, social workers, nurses, and teachers. This “high cost of caring” affects those whose work requires empathy and emotional labor. Think of it as the emotional cost of bearing witness and of hearing stories of repeated stress, trauma, suffering, and violence. Given the central place of empathy, intimacy, and thick relationships in fieldwork settings, it might be worth considering ethnography as a kind of care work and reflecting more on how vicarious trauma might take hold as part of the emotional costs of fieldwork.

The Art of Resilience

I am aware of the dangers of generalizing from an individual case. I am also aware that psychological classifications like trauma and clinical practices like social work and talk therapy are culturally and historically situated, even if they claim to be universal. Nevertheless, there is much that our discipline can learn from current discussions of trauma. Here, I want to highlight three insights that might help us build a trauma-informed anthropology:

• Solidarity and Support—Relations are key to resilience. People living with trauma need support, including but not limited to therapy and mental health services. To address issues of trauma in the field we should cultivate forms of solidarity modeled on programs of peer support and sponsorship.
• Toolkits—The most important aspect of preparedness is thinking about potential problems before they happen. As a discipline and as researchers we should cultivate an anticipatory stance toward trauma and a toolkit for recognizing and responding to trauma that can help us fostering self-awareness, self-assessment, and self-care.
• Reframing—Finally, we must reframe the discussion of trauma and fieldwork. Reframing is a crucial aspect of therapy, where it is often discussed as a technique for restoring meaning and agency.

Anthropologists should reframe how we think about trauma. While many of us have long recognized the prevalence of social suffering in our field sites, there is still too much silencing and skepticism about the effects of secondary trauma on researchers. Reframing fieldwork through the idiom of care work could help us not only name and deal with secondary trauma but also reframe ethnography as a method and politics of radical care for intimate others.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

Source