such great Hoyts

A note from the field:

“Sure, I came here with an interest and a method, but I had a lot of real problems. Fieldwork for me does not draw on ‘natural’ personality trains… I am not basically gregarious by nature. Fundamentally, I do not like the bulk of fieldwork. I do not like making contacts. I do not like the small talk that I have to go through to set up interviews. Until I painfully established rapport here, until at last I found a few reflective, philosophical informants who for me were intrinsically satisfying, I was not enjoying myself—I was working, collecting data and not knowing where I would end...

"[T]here was a time toward the beginning of our stay that I went absolutely berserk. I mean crazy!... There were times that I felt totally inadequate—times when I feared I lacked the ability to see this through… I lived between two worlds. I did nothing, I left this lolwapa [family compound], walked out of sight, and sat under a tree. I experienced for the first time in my life the sensation that I could not communicate my feelings. I can’t even tell you now what they were. Looking back, I can’t understand myself. I was nowhere, I suppose, and I just withdrew."

—Hoyt Alverson, commenting on fieldwork in Botswana in the mid-1970s, as voiced by his wife, Marianne Alverson, in her memoir, Under African Sun (1987), 187-88.

I love this passage for the image of Alverson nonchalantly walking away from the lolwapa to do his fieldwork as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth and then hiding under a tree. I think we fieldworkers have all, at one point or another, hidden under a tree in some sense. But it's a strange thing to try to write about, not least of all the moments when one is most concerned with asserting one's authority (i.e., the dissertation). So it's also interesting to me that the experience is recounted by Marianne in a memoir. There's a lot to be said here about genre, voicing, authority, and narrative--not to mention the gendered division of expressive labor--but I'll let you, gentle reader, mull that over on your own time.