the permit and the kitten

So, again, you've probably noticed that I'm horrible about keeping this thing updated.

It's been a busy, busy week. I've just come home from the last session of the class I've been auditing at UB. Professor X (as I've called him) took me and the two other students to dinner at a hallal Chinese restaurant, which was quite lovely.

The big news this week is that my application for research has been approved. I knew that the committee charged with reviewing my application was meant to meet last Thursday. Friday morning, I got up and emailed my contact at the relevant ministry to confirm that the meeting had happened. She emailed back immediately, asking if I could drop by before 10:30am as there was "one small issue" she wanted to discuss.

It was about 8:30am, and I was still in my pyjamas, drinking tea. I replied that I would be there around 10am, and hurridly put myself together and headed out the door.

When I arrived, my contact was in the middle of typing a letter for me. So I sat there, staring around her office and wondering what on earth this "one small issue" could be, and how exactly "small" it was.

She finally finished, turned to me, and explained that the committee wanted me to switch advisors. This, frankly, was nothing that hadn't been suggested to me at least once before. Other than that, she told me, the committee had been satsified with my revisions.

Quite cheered, I walked outside and phoned the one anthropologist at UB. (How I happened to meet her is another story.) I asked her for her advice, and after concluding that there really was no one suitable in the Sociology Department (UB doesn't have an anthro department), I suggested a historian who has written on the medical history of Botswana. The anthropologist, whose work isn't very closely related to mine, nevertheless volunteered herself as a local authority on socio-cultural anthropology. It wasn't even lunchtime, and I already had two new advisors.

The ministry has three weeks to actually get the permit to me, but at least I know it's in the pipeline. This has been an enormous load off my mind. In addition to being the key to getting access to some people and institutions, it's also the key to unlocking my grant money.

The other big news of the week has been the arrival of Methodius. While I have been writing this, he has been attacking my bedskirt, though the bedskirt is apparently scary enough to send him scurrying for the bathroom. He has now taken on the big, bad plastic bag on the end of my bed. Whatever monsters are under the bed, though, have someone new with whom to contend. He is a sweet, purring, sleepy thing one moment, and a vicious little tiger attacking my toes the next. I've never really had a kitten this young of my own, and I'm still learning what to expect. That said, I'm delighted to have the company.

one-way glass

In the pictures I took of Otse, you may notice that the side of one of the buildings looks like glass.

It's actually one-way glass. While I was down there, a bird flew into it. T., the man whose house this is, went outside, picked it up, and brought it into the house. It was a small bird, somewhere between a parakeet and a cockatiel, maybe.

The bird wasn't dead, but it was certainly dazed. How would you feel if you'd flown into a house, even if you only glanced off it, as this bird had? It had probably looked in front of it, and seen sky and trees and open space.

T. said that this happens from time to time. He said that if he picks the bird up, it often lives, but that if he leaves it, it will die. He said he had once found a hornbill that sat on his shoulder for half an hour before it finally gave itself a little shake and flew off.

So, he just sat on the couch with me, stroking this little bird, and talking softly to it. I stroked it along its head with my finger, and it didn't flinch at all. It alternately closed one eye, and then the other. It was bleeding a bit around the mouth, and we weren't sure it was going to make it. Then it shat on T.'s hand, and we took that as a good sign.

T. kept stroking it for a while, and then eventually put it on the window sill. He said it took birds a while to recover their equilibrium well enough to fly. It sat there for a bit, fluffing up its feathers, and eventually flew off into a nearby tree.

A note: you may have noticed I avoid the use of proper names. This is partly a sensitivity to the privacy of the people with whom I interact, and another part of it is not wanting this blog to come up in the search results should a prospective employer google my name. I'm sure you'll understand (especially those of you on the job market), and respect this in any comments you might leave.

putting the 'social' back in 'social anthropology'

This will strike the graduate students among you as particularly funny, I think.

I was just reflecting -- with a certain amoung of unreflective guilt -- on the amount of socializing I've been doing lately. My life seems peppered with lunches, braais, and coffee dates. Friday night I was out at a pub. Saturday night I was braaing. Wednesday night I hope to be back at that pub for trivia night. What kind of research is this?

Of course, the untold story is the degree to which these 'social' engagements are also fodder for my ethnographic sensibilities, if not my ethnography per se.

The irony of my pre-field social anthropology education is how accustomed I became to an anti-social existence. But really! -- oughtn't I be slaving away in the library?

kittens, expats, and that tricky thing we call 'race'

It's spring, and the jacarandas are in full bloom.

Imagine Gaborone, which is otherwise pretty dry and dusty in these waiting-for-the-rains days, decorated with these. The beautiful purple blossoms fall off the trees by the hundreds, and make the ground rather pretty.

It was actually raining pretty steadily as I began to write this entry on Thursday evening. It began to thunder and lightning, but only a bit of rain fell, and I had figured that was it. Then it turned into the first real rain of the 'rainy' season -- at least, it felt real to me. I don't remember it raining on Friday, but we did have another little storm in the middle of the day on Saturday.

I took the day off today on Thursday. In other words, no meetings, no time spent trying to arrange meetings (at least, not intentionally), and no typing of notes from prior meetings. No reading of academic books or AIDS-related anything. Just a ham & egg sandwich before jumping in the car and heading to Otse.

Otse is south of Gaborone, about halfway down the road to Lobatse. This map will give you a sense of area. Otse is home to Otse Peak, the highest point in Botswana. You can see the hill from a long way off. A certain point of the hill -- or perhaps a separate hill? -- is known as Baratani, 'the lovers'. The story is something along these lines: boy and girl fall in love; marriages are arranged otherwise; boy and girl run away and throw themselves off cliff. One isn't, I'm told, supposed to climb Baratani, but I don't know if the extends to the entire hill.

I wasn't there to climb the hill, however. A friend of mine is staying in Otse with a friend of hers, and I went down to see them both. The first friend has a cat, and the cat had kittens about two months ago. The kittens are now ready to leave their mother, and one has been reserved for me. I hadn't actually seen the kittens since they were a few weeks old, and I wanted to see what they were like.

Here are some pictures I took in Otse. There are also a couple of pictures of Gabs in the set, by way of contrast. I'm afraid I didn't actually get any shots of the kittens, but believe me when I say they are adorable. I really do want to take the kitten reserved for me, but there are a few problems I have to work out: 1) I need to run this by my landlords; 2) I need to figure out what I would do with the kitten while I'm away over the holidays; 3) I need to think about where I'm going to live...

Which brings me to this: I'm considering moving out to Gabane. (Look at the map again, and look directly west of Gabs.) You can see that it's not very far from the city, but it really feels like a village. The benefits of moving out there include: 1) my everyday setswana would probably improve because I'd have more cause to use it; 2) it would give me a sense of what centralized public health programmes feel like for people who live outside the capital; 3) it's on the road to Kanye, which is another of my formal field sites; 4) rent is likely to be cheaper.

I am chafing a bit in my one-room cottage, though the internet access is a mighty perk. Giving up the cottage in mid-December would also mean I wasn't wasting a month's worth of rent. The other strange thing is that I somehow feel more relaxed -- markedly more relaxed -- when I'm down in Otse. I can't make sense of that, really -- I've never really considered myself a 'city girl', but I've also never considered myself a 'backwoods girl', either.

Why not move to Otse? For one, one friend is currently trying to do just that, and is having a devil of a time finding a suitable place. Second, there's already a small number of established makhoa in Otse, and I don't want to move into that. Gabane apparently has a few expats, so I wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. (Been there, done that au petit Togo.) At the same time, they're not expats I already know, so there's not that temptation of some kind of immediate makhoa consociation.

I was observing this phenomenon last night at a braai last night. The host is British, but he’s friendly with a number of Batswana, particularly (but not exclusively) through a Motswana woman he met through the British Council. There were probably an even number of Batswana and expats at the braai, with more women than men in both groups. That said, the expats (mostly American) tended to be talking to other expats in the kitchen or on the balcony, while the (mostly female) Batswana tended to stay in the living room, doing most of the dancing when there was something amenable to them playing on the stereo.

This got under my skin. It also reminded me of something the guy I met in a bar a few weeks ago said to me: that, unlike what he observed in the U.S., black and white people can hang out together in Botswana. What kept nagging at my mind last night was: To what degree is this seeming segregation a product of American racial attitudes? In other words, to what degree does your average American abroad expect or anticipate racial segregation in social settings?

I wound up doing a lot of dancing – not only because I love to dance, but because it was a way of hanging out with the Batswana women, some of whom I had met before and some of whom I had not. They tended to speak to each other in Setswana most of the time, but they weren’t unfriendly. That said, the very frank sort of “So, tell me all about yourself!” didn’t really seem, intuitively, like a generally workable approach. Instead, I tried to follow their dancing, and asked about the setswana lyrics to the songs, and looked at pictures of her relatives one woman had stored on her phone. I think the highlight of the night was that I remembered (and could reasonably perform) a dance that the woman who works at the British Council had taught me at the last braai.

It’s a tricky thing: Expats are (to varying degrees and with some qualifications) socioculturally and linguistically accessible to me, and they are often connected to the institutions that most interest me. Some of them are fellow researchers. Some of them –- some more than others -- I find, for lack of a better term, sympa. That said, I don’t want to fall into the expat socialization trap (or, as I refer to it above, immediate makhoa consociation).

The most interesting conversation I had last night was with two young men – I’m old enough to call them young men, damn it – who are both students at UB. One had overheard an expat woman in the kitchen expressing the opinion that she couldn’t make friends with any Batswana guys her age because “they all want [her].” The two guys were, I thought, understandably indignant about "being put into this box." (I felt pretty embarrassed by it, myself.) I suggested that this could possibly have something to do with this woman’s experience of race in the U.S., and... what? Uncritical and uncriticized conceptualizations of African sexuality and masculinity? Some combination of unadulterated racism and youthful arrogance? These are the attitudes that make me mutter that colonialism isn't dead. Gayatri Spivak, where are you when I need you

Both of these guys have spent some time in France, and we had a really, really interesting conversation about cross-cultural interaction, assumptions and experiences of ‘difference’, and how anthropology fits into this. I gave my little spiel about funding for American scholarship abroad as a product of postwar politics. I also found myself struggling to explain (for not the first time) racial and economic stratification in the U.S., and it's relationship to the demographic characteristics of Americans likely to study abroad. The two men made some very good points about anthropology's historical contribution to the codification and maintenance of cultural and political 'difference'. I can't say I didn't find this discomfiting, but I also found it amusing, and I'm learning to regard discomfiture as a good sign.

So, all that to suggest that moving myself and my kitten to Gabane might ease my tense feelings about makhoa consociation. It might also, in part by being a smaller pool of people, help me figure out how to get to know Batswana.

paperwork, part 3: paranoia pays off

Just another quick note about stupid paperwork: You might remember me grousing (in what I hope came across as at least a slightly amused tone) about the ton of paper I turned in as my revised IRB application. The last page -- page 17 -- of the application includes a line for the applicant's signature.

For the past few weeks, I've been haunted by dreams that, in my desperation to correctly collate 14 copies of a 90-page document, I forgot to sign the damn thing.

Now, the last thing I want to do is give the IRB even the faintest reason to grumble. I had heard from one of my wanna-be-informants (meaning I want him to be an informant; I don't know what he wants) that the woman who had been handling my application back in January of last year (and from whom I haven't heard since) was back in the office. This morning, I sent her an email explaining my concern.

She emailed back, saying that yes, I had indeed neglected to sign the form, but that I was welcome to turn in fourteen more copies of that particular page bearing my signature. These signed pages would be distributed among the committee members when they meet at the end of the month.

So, off I toddled again to my local business centre, where I printed the form, made 13 photocopies of it, and signed them all. I stuck these in an envelope, and delivered them to the government office to which they belong.

This all goes to show that a little health paranoia can come in awfully handy sometimes. I know, I know... Just because I relish my paranoia, it doesn't meant they're not out to get me.

glutton for punishment

So, because I am a glutton for punishment, and because I can only do so much until my research permit comes through, I am sitting in on a class at the University of Botswana.

I heard about the class from another American student, who mentioned she was taking a class from Professor X. I had the sort of reaction you might have if I mentioned Julia Child was in my kitchen throwing something together for dinner. You can't go anywhere in the history of Botswana without bumping into Professor X's work.

I figure Professor X knows my advisors. The world of southern African scholarship is only so big. But since they haven't mentioned him much, I also surmise that they are not necessarily close. This is also fine. We can all be professional, right?

Well, last night, I took another student shopping. She just got here and doesn't have a car yet, and I'm a nice person. It also gave me a break from writing a little paper for this class I'm taking. The student asked which readings I was writing about. The readings included a piece by my advisors.

A note: This student knows which institution I hail from, but my guess is she's doesn't know her way around my part of the academy enough to put two and two together and realize that institution A + region/set of interests B probably = advisor C.

"Oh, them!" she exclaimed, "I tried to read an article of theirs once, and I got so frustrated with it I couldn't get through it."

Well, I could hardly blame her there. It's not like I've never found their writing difficult to follow. I never had cause to read their work as an undergraduate, and I imagine I would have struggled with it if I had.

She then told me some snarky things one of her professors at her college had to say about my advisors. This is fine, too. Academics disagree, and the bigger your name is, the more reason people have to say snarky things about you.

"... and Professor X thinks they're idiots!" she concluded enthusiastically.

. . .


. . .


. . .

Well. What do you say to that?

At this point, I looked over at her and told her who my advisor was. That sort of shut her up. But, as I explained to her (and myself), Professor X's disagreements with my advisors don't necessarily mean I can't have a good relationship with Professor X. (Maybe that's a bit idealistic, but I like to err on the side of believing people can behave like adults about this kind of thing.)

That said, this did not exactly make it easy to go home and write a paper about my advisors' work for Professor X. Admittedly, I did not hear Professor X say he thought they were idiots. I would bet good money that he did not use those words. I'm pretty sure in which context this student heard Professor X say something that gave the impression that he thought my advisors were idiots, but I do expect Professor X to actually have a little respect even for those with whom he disagrees.

It still didn't make writing the paper any easier.

. . .


. . .


. . .

I presented part of the paper this evening. (I didn't finish it, and with the mounting stress I was not about to stay up all night over it, but between text and outline I had enough to get the ideas across.) Professor X was snarky, but not necessarily any cattier than he is any other reading. He did make a remark about me explaining my advisors' work "because no one understands it," but he listened more or less respectfully to what I had to say. I feel better about it, but I am starting to understand how post-graduate-school life can be a bit hard. One becomes socialized into the hierarchical forms of one's own institution, and then one forgets about their particularity. There was a time when I didn't really feel an overwhelming amount of respect for my advisors, and there was also a time when I understood what kind of respect afforded them but didn't wholly understand why. It's easy to forget that I had to learn this, and it's easy to forget not everyone agrees. This is not the kind of lesson I expected from fieldwork, but my guess it will be awfully useful in the long run.

the velveteen rabbit

Last week was a goofy sort week. It was a short week, too, since Monday was part of the independence holiday weekend. Despite losing Monday (or, rather, spending Monday driving down to Lobatse to see what I could see), I had lunch and a post-lunch chat with a potential informant who did a lot of work trying to help me understand how the U.S. Global AIDS Program works. He's a nice guy, though rather suspicious of me, I think, but he took an awful lot of time to help me understand how the whole CDC/Global AIDS etc. structure is laid out. I still don't understand it, but I know more than I did.

Contrast this, then, with my meeting with another potential informant. This one was a scientist-type (while the other guy had been a public health administration type). I'd heard good things about this scientist from a lot of people, and he certainly is very friendly, has got a good handle on Setswana, and has offered a lot of help to a recently-arrived fresh-out-of-undergrad Fulbrighter with whom I've become acquainted. That said, he was more in "how can I help you understand the Botswana IRB" mode than in "informant" mode. In other words, I was having a hard time getting him to: a) understand what I was doing; b) tell me anything useful about how his organization operates. I just found him ... a little patronizing. Helpful, but patronizing nonetheless... about my research, about my Setswana skills, about my research permit process, you name it.

Maybe if I were 22, I wouldn't mind. And the 22-year-olds are nice, but I'm feeling sort of caught in between. I'm not 22, and I don't want to be treated like I'm fresh out of college. That said, I don't have the sort of 'real' job or 'real' institutional affiliations or -- to be frank -- the 'real' cash flow that the other professional or semi-professional adults (expat and Batswana) who are closer to my age seem to have. Nor do people really understand, I think, why a 30 year old would still be in the middle of a program, rather than already finished with it.

This sort of falls in line with what people say about grad school being infantilizing: you wind up professionalizing like hell while still living like a 22 year old. So you expect a certain amount of respect when you're, say, a candidate, because you've worked your butt off, but people outside the academy still treat you like you're some kind of bumbling ingénue. That's annoying. I feel like the velveteen rabbit. People who already have their degrees seem like they've got more claim to being 'real'.

That said, I am adjusting to the fact that field work -- at least, early field work -- involves a lot of people treating you like you're a Grade A idiot, and a lot of suspicion. The longer I'm here, happier I am that I'm not trying to do this project in a year.