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ditor and Coordinator- Laurie Baker BA, MA, PhD Candidate York University lbaker@yorku.ca eer Reviewers Melissa Atkinson-Graham BA, MA, PhD Candidate York University Heather Cruikshank BA, MA Candidate York University Claire Dalmyn BA, MA Candidate York University Lynette Fischer BA, MA York University

SAGA would like to acknowledge and thank the following contributors for their financial support of the Playing the Field Conference: Department of Anthropology, York University Faculty of Graduate Studies, York University York University Graduate Students Association SAGA would also like to acknowledge and thank sincerly the many students and faculty whose assistance and dedication made the conference and this publication a possibility and success. Special thanks goes to Shalanda Philips, Dr. Daphne Winland and Karen Rumley for their efforts in making the conference a success. Conference poster design: Melissa Atkinson-Graham Publication cover adaptation: Laurie Baker Printed at York University, Toronto ON Canada, available online at issuu.com/yorku_anthropology_conference and scribd.com/yorku_anth_conf 2011 Social Anthropology Graduates Association, York University This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Playing the Field - Selected Papers

Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................................................4 Playing and Fielding Theory Viratha: Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency Susan McNaughton..............................................................................................................................5 Fielding an Anti-Capitalist Anthropology Ted Baker.................................................................................................................................................10 Pervertible Practices: Playing Anthropology in BDSM Claire Dalmyn........................................................................................................................................15 ADHD, an Entity within the Crisis of the Field Jesse P. Hiltz..........................................................................................................................................20 Disability Studies Fieldwork Jen Rinaldi..............................................................................................................................................25 Locating the Ghost and the Work of Haunting in Toni Morrisons Fiction and Non-fiction Kama Maureemootoo.......................................................................................................................30 Understanding the Field of Literary Editing Alicia Fahey............................................................................................................................................35 Playing and Fielding Method Researching traffic: methodological approaches for navigating the congestion in womens health policy Michelle Wyndham-West................................................................................................................40 Prefigurative Politics & Anthropological Methodologies Niki Thorne............................................................................................................................................47 Surprises and Trends revealed during fieldwork Marta Silva.............................................................................................................................................54 Disability Fieldwork: What Disabled Fieldworkers Bring to the Field and Leave Behind Athena Goodfellow...........................................................................................................................58 Psychological Health Research: Can Disability Studies and Psychology Co-exist? Kaley Maureen Roosen....................................................................................................................63 The sound of home - Implications of living in the field Samantha Breslin...............................................................................................................................68 Activism and the Academy Jean McDonald....................................................................................................................................73 Textural Healings: Conversations about protecting privilege through subversive research Tricia Morris and Katie Macdonald............................................................................................78

Acknowledgements: I would like to open this publication with a special acknowledgement. As a community, York Graduate Students in Social Anthropology have mourned the loss of a friend, contributor, and committed colleague. We have been present for her life with cancer and are reminded, through her loss, of the preciousness of life. We would like to dedicate this publication to the memory of Dr. Susan McNaughton, and posthumously congratulate her on receiving her PhD. Her dedication and determination should be an inspiration for us all. I would like to acknowledge and thank Amy Whitefoot for taking the time to get this publication started. I would also like to thank all of the reviewers that contributed their time, despite challenging graduate student schedules, to this project. It has been a protracted and challenging process to bring this publication to fruition. For all those who stuck it out to the end it has been wonderful working with you all and I truly appreciate your commitment. All the articles in this publication offer novel and interesting ways to think, write, and research in multiple iterations of the field. I have divided the articles into two rather synthetic categories, mainly to differentiate between those more theory focussed and those with a greater emphasis on method. That is not to suggest that they address these areas exclusively as many touch on both aspects of playing the field. SincerelyLaurie Baker

Viratha: Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency Dr. Susan McNaughton

Abstract Through the context of fieldwork will be among diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Toronto, ON this paper explores the ways female involvement in Hindu religious practices affects conceptions of self, moral agency and politics that in turn underpin commitments to such practices. One of my questions is whether other traditions, namely Indian discursive religious practices, might have their own resources for imagining an ethic that respects dissent and honours the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions? (Mahmood 2003). What if the separation of modernity into a material realm, on the one hand, and an ideological realm is not so simple to perform at any given moment, let alone to stabilize and sustain?
Graudate of Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON

his paper addresses the ways that female involvement in Hindu religious practices affects conceptions of self, moral agency and politics that in turn underpin commitments to such practices. I would like to re-visit the notions of affect and emotion that inform the bhakti or devotion of female temple participants through the lens of Spinozist ethics to open up the ways in which modes of subjectivation stick to and are constitutive of a field in which religious representations acquire their identity and truthfulness. Female participation in Hindu deity worship embodies values that affirm an ethos of ethical self-sustainability and virtuous self-cultivation which poses a challenge to the valourization of secular liberal individualism (Mahmood 2006, Deeb 2006). Normative assumptions about human nature hold that faithcentred movements constrain individual self-expression in a number of ways. First, autonomy, it is claimed, is a matter of intentionality - all human beings have an innate desire for freedom and will seek to assert autonomy when allowed to do so and also that human agency may embody actions that challenge normative social conventions and not necessarily uphold them. From this perspective to evoke ideas of piety or virtue is to evoke a view of individual autonomy which adheres to these signs through past forms of association. I argue that it is important to question the history by which we have come to make such assumptions and the effect of such histories between bodies, objects and signs that emphasize secular notions of resistance, autonomy, and self-fulfillment. The context of my fieldwork will be among diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus here in Toronto many of whom have been either directly or indirectly affected by the civil war in Sri Lanka. One of the main effects of this war has been a massive displacement of the Tamil population to Canada and Toronto in particular. The war came to a military but not political end in May 2009 leaving many in the diaspora of Toronto in distress as to the fate of family and friends. Ongoing human rights violations against Sri Lankan Tamil civilians continues to reverberate throughout the Tamil population in Toronto who are dismayed and disillusioned to see Canada stand idly by on this issue which affects so many Canadian citizens. There is an increasing public perception that safe havens no longer exist and that peace-time violence may be as debilitating as that of war (Das 2008). The Tamil problem is

Keywords Agency, religion, Hindus, affect, emotion, the self

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 being cast as one of potential terrorist activity in Canada with little consideration given to the problematic social and cultural effects for the diaspora community. The important point is that is this conflict has not been only a domestic matter. While civil war in Sri Lanka technically occurred within the borders of the state, transnational ties generated by asylum seekers and other migrants are part and parcel of the current conflict (Cheran 2000, Tambiah 1986). In the face of human rights violations it is striking that the normative claims of liberal conceptions such as tolerance are taken at face value and no attention is paid to the struggles, contradictions, and problems that these ideas actually embody. Given this fraught history one of my questions is whether other traditions, namely Indian discursive religious practices, might have their own resources for imagining an ethic that respects dissent and honours the right to adhere to different religious or nonreligious convictions? (Mahmood 2003). What if the separation of modernity into a material realm, on the one hand, and an ideological realm is not so simple to perform at any given moment, let alone to stabilize and sustain? And to what extent does such an account continue to cast religious revival solely within the terms of Western modernity, now globalized and hinder a view of the emergence of new formations and ontologies? An alternative perspective would be to move away from attempts to characterize particular movements and towards a more epistemological line of inquiry that investigates the theoretical lenses through which religious movements are viewed (Bracke 2008). How might one start by acknowledging the insight that modes of knowing imply specific ways of being? Feminist critiques take aim at conceptions of autonomy and agency that value the ideas of self-governance and a deeply ingrained ideology of individualism in which individualism is to be achieved by erecting a wall of rights between the individual and those around him (Armstrong 2009:46). Post-secular theorists such as Sarah Bracke (2008), Rosi Braidotti (1991) and Lara Deeb (2006) regard the relational approaches to autonomy found in forms of religious-belonging demonstrate, on the contrary, the notion that agency can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety. Such agency is also a form of political subjectivity that interacts dynamically and continuously with dominant norms and values, multiple forms of accountability as well as bodily modes of becoming. Discursive religious practices such as Hindu worship rituals are bodily activities that are written in movement. Such practices are capable of reversing the reactive status of the body, of enhancing the bodys capacities, enlarging its powers of becoming, intensifying the bodys sensations, returning power and force to the body from which it is derived. Knowledge has its genealogy in corporeality that cannot grasp anything in its totality; the body itself is a multiplicity of competing and conflicting forces (Grosz 1994: 128). It is here that we can think through the body in terms of becoming, assemblages, and relational connections of non-ordered organisms. This is to think about the body in such a way that reconfigures the relationship between self and other, that emphasizes the productive aspect of difference and whereby bodily boundaries are blurred. While the self may have a genealogy, or a story of how it came to the present, there is no necessity that the structures of the present subject will persist or must be such a way at the present. A critical ontology of ourselves, through historical analysis can help us to examine our limits and experiment with moving beyond them. Efforts to rethink autonomy on the basis of the social conception of selves also requires a reconfiguration of the dichotomy of individuality and agency on one hand, and sociability and the collectivity on the other. Liberalisms unique contribution is to link the notion of self-realization with individual autonomy so that the process of self-realization becomes equated with the ability to realize the desires of ones true will. By this account, in order for an individual to be free her actions must be the consequence of her own desire, rather than of custom, tradition or social coercion. It is here that Spinozas definition of the individual in terms of ones condition of interaction with others, that is to say, ones power to affect and be affected holds a powerful alternative to a tradition of

6 | Susan McNaughton

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 abstract individualism conflating autonomy with atomic isolation (Armstrong, 2009:45). Heidi Ravven (2009) writes that the misconception of autonomy goes back to the ongoing and barely challenged hold of the Augustinian notion of freewill upon our standard conceptions of the human. Her critique points to the hegemony of a Christian ethics which derives its moral absolutes from a notion that following scriptural injunctions is a means of fulfilling moral law. The problem that becomes immediately apparent here is how and who is to interpret? This is a perspective she argues that shows traces of the (Latin) Christian theological tradition which still plagues not only theology but in a secularized version also anthropology and our standard and pervasive common understandings about ethics even today. The philosophy of Spinoza opens up another perspective one which provides a powerful insight into ethics and in turn how this might influence discourses of emotion and affect (Deleuze 1978). Deleuzes reading of Spinoza points to paradoxical ontologies. On one hand affect exists in the virtual and relates to bodily responses which are in excess of conscious states of perception and point to a kind of embodied visceral perception that precedes perception (Massumi 2002: 9). On the other, Rosi Braidotti speaks of affect as bodily-material causes which are themselves products of a pure flow of becoming (2006: 140). Affect enables the desire for in depth transformations of the kinds of subjects we have become. In other words, affect is either, the infinite field of virtuality as an immaterial effect of interacting bodies or the bodies themselves emerge and actualize themselves from this field of virtuality (Zizek 2008:366). But how can we acknowledge affect in a way that is not outside social meaning but provides a form of critical engagement with the nature of the social? (Hemmings 2005: 565). Lawrence Grossberg (1992) links affect and emotion closely together and views affect through what could be called energetic investments that encompass a range of ideas that link passion, volition and commitment. There is a reciprocal quality to affective engagements that involves the generation of energy and possibility. For him affect identifies the strength of the investment of emotional energy which anchors people in particular practices, meanings, and identities as well as a means of directing peoples investments in and into the world (Grossberg 1992: 82). But perhaps affect also introduces a necessary pause, a hesitancy in the way in which we habitually dwell among our concepts of culture, of everyday life or of the inner (Das 1998: 172). Pausing also allows for a closer examination of the ways that both affect and emotion relate first to an ontology that Braidotti calls nomadic subjectivity, a pragmatic philosophy of engagement as well as self-sustainability; secondly to think from the perspective of the ways in which negative emotions such as shame, guilt, pain can act as major incentives to, and not only obstacles, to change. Finally the value of these discourses might also allow for alternative ways to negotiate the everpresent and thorny issues of representation and agency, which have important methodological and epistemological implications. Spinoza had an understanding of the body which he regarded neither as a locus of a conscious subject nor as an organically determined object. His radical observation was that the state of the individuality in any particular moment is a function of its own constitution as well as external factors such as other bodies both animate and inanimate. Against essentialist notions of being Spinoza views individualities as historical, social and cultural weavings of biology. Thus affect in this sense refers to the individuals capability to maximize its potentialities and possibilities (Grosz 1994:12). He is committed to a notion of the body (and indeed the subject) as total and holistic engaged in processes of growth and transformation. The body is defined by what it could do, the transformations it could undergo, what or who it can link with and how it can proliferate its capacities - in other words flow, movement and force. By this account the affective body cannot be reduced to the mere cultivation of good habits but instead concerns the cultivation of a particular type of sociality. This view represents an important departure from

7 | Susan McNaughton

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 Descartes who believed that the single fact of diversity among states suffices to assure us that some states are imperfect (Armstrong 2009). Spinoza on the contrary offers a perspective from which to think through difference and embodiment in terms which imply a more historically and culturally viable conception. Saba Mahmoods work on an orthodox Muslim womens piety movement in Egypt concerns the way women apprentice to certain virtues such as patience and humility as forms of emotional resources that would enable them to inhabit the structure of patriarchal norms. She describes how women in the mosque movement use different modalities of agency, for example, affectivity and responsibility in realizing their desire to develop piety. Practices that involve painful emotions, self-disempowerment, and the conscious induction of shame or fear indicate the existence of agency of a different kind. Modes of subjectivity in this sense are governed by a different habitus at work in which practices of modesty and femininity do not signify abjectness of the feminine within Islamic discourse but convey a positive and immanent discourse of being in the world and specific processes of rationalization, and bodily performances related to them (Mahmood 2006, Asad 2003). This particular reading of habitus engages the discourses of affect and emotion in ways that might enable an understanding of how autonomy and sociability are related. Such practices enable a subject to transforms herself in order to achieve a particular state of being as well as increase a bodys ability to affect and be affected. Particular emotional reactions provide the opportunity for thinking about ourselves in a certain way that enables an ethics of sustainable becoming. The ways in which affect begins to provide a forms of critical engagement with the nature of the social is precisely in the idea that autonomy is constitutively relational; in other words a social process that requires the maintenance of certain sorts of ongoing relationships with others. In rethinking the body in terms of becoming, assemblages, and relational connections of non-ordered organisms, we begin the work of imagining livable worlds. A genealogy of the philosophical influences of Spinoza on affect and emotion makes it is possible to consider religious sensibility in light of his notion of relational individuality. The model of human nature to which Spinoza refers excludes any individual perfection which isolates and on the contrary regards autonomy as a process that requires the maintenance of a closer association or friendship with other individuals. The implication is that knowledge is not something we can possess but something we are or become lending support to recent feminist attempts to develop a constitutively relational account of autonomy and affect.

References Armstrong, Aurelia 2009 Autonomy and the Relational Individual. In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Moira Gatens (ed.)Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Asad, Talal 1993 Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Bracke, S. 2008 Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency. Theory, Culture and Society 25(6):51-67. Braidotti. Rosi 2006 The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible. In Deleuze and Philosophy. C. Boundas (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pp.133159. Cheran, Rudhramoorthy 2000 Changing Formations: Tamil Nationalism and National Liberation in Sri Lanka and the Diaspora. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Sociology York University. Das, Veena 1998. Wittgenstein and Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 171-96.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009

Deeb, Lara 2006 An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton UP. Deleuze, Gilles 1978 Spinoza. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Cours Vincennes: 24/01/1978. http://www.webdeleuze. com/php/sommaire.html Grossberg, Lawrence 1992 Mapping Popular Culture. In We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth 1994 Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hemmings, Claire 2005 Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn. Cultural Studies 19(5): 548-567. Mahmood, Saba 2006 Politics of Piety. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Massumi, Brian 2002 The Autonomy of Affect. In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Ravven, Heidi Morrison 2009 What Spinoza Can Teach Us About Embodying and Naturalizing Ethics. In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Moira Gatens (ed.) Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tambiah, Stanley 1986 Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Zizek, Slavoj 2008 In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

Fielding an Anti-Capitalist Anthropology Ted Baker

Abstract Donald Donham once suggested that more than any other academic discourse, anthropology has defined itself against capitalism. This paper represents an attempt to explain why anthropologists in particular have a tendency to define themselves against capitalism and where this spirit of anti-capitalism stems from. In order to do so I am going to try to weave together two concepts (culture shock and cultural critique) that have been generated through the conceptualization and practice of both fieldwork and the field.
PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON

start this paper with a very basic question: what is the relationship between anthropology and anti-capitalism? Through an exploration of the anthropological notions of culture shock and cultural critique I finish with an equally basic answer: while the relationship is not always explicit, the critical component of the anthropological project (widely conceived) suggests that anthropology is, if not implicitly, then at least potentially, anti-capitalist. But first I would like to begin with a story. During my time as a teaching assistant at York University, I had the opportunity of leading tutorials for an anthropology course that was essentially (among other things) a critique of global capitalism and the problems it generates for the worlds peoples. Throughout the course, students were repeatedly exposed to heartbreaking and maddening processes engendered by the global search for profit. One day we dealt with famine and endemic hunger as an example of the more offensive consequences of the global capitalist economy. The main case study examined Sudan during the famine of the mid-1980s and included a screening of the film The Politics of Food. Not only did this Canadian documentary do a great job connecting the dots between colonialism, capitalism and the emaciated bodies that repeatedly filled the frame, but it also provided a visual experience that had an immediate, almost visceral impact upon those watching it. Once the film was finished, I was responsible for trying to encourage discussion around this subject. This seemed daunting, given the emotional atmosphere, so I began by asking people how the film made them feel. The predictable feelings of sadness, confusion and anger were expressed, but one of the most concerning admissions that began to emerge was one of helplessness. As the conversation drifted towards our relationship and responsibility to the continuing existence of endemic hunger around the world, expressions of resignation and powerlessness emerged: Yes, this is horrible, but what can we do? After talking out the roots of the famine and drawing the links between advanced capitalism, cash cropping for external markets, land displacement, poverty, and hunger in Sudan, the conversation turned to solutions. However, after poking and prodding them to think outside the box about solutions, nobody suggested that we get rid of capitalism as a way to solve the problem.

10 | Ted Baker

Keywords Anthropology, culture shock, cultural critique, anti-capitalism

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 For me this illustrates wonderfully the scope and depth of the problem we face. The fact that students are expressing feelings of insignificance and powerlessness when faced with the overwhelming conflict and injustice that is the reality for the global majority is concerning. But even more worrisome is that the possibility of rejecting and replacing the source of these horrors (putting profit before people) isnt even raised, let alone debated. As Henry Giroux points out (paraphrasing Jameson), it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. (2007:25). Perhaps some students thought of suggesting that we abandon capitalism but didnt do so for fear of being ridiculed or singled out as a radical or dreamer, but I have a feeling that for most, capitalism seems to be the end of history, the logical and rational progression of human society to its endpoint where all other alternatives appear to be either nave and idealistic (and thus doomed) or quaint and traditional (and thus doomed). In his turn-of-the-century book History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology, Donald Donham observes that [m]ore perhaps than any other academic discourse, anthropology has defined itself against capitalism. (Donham 1999:14). While his book was an exploration of the relationship between Marxism and anthropology, I would like to attempt an explanation of why anthropologists in particular have generally defined themselves against capitalism and where this spirit of anti-capitalism stems from. In order to do so I am going to try to bring together two concepts that have been generated through the conceptualization and practice of both fieldwork and the field. The first of these concepts is the notion of culture shock, of which I will explore both the mainstream and the more reflexive and critical understandings. The second concept is that of cultural critique, a notion that has been around since the 1920s, with the historical particularism of the Boasians, and was codified in the 1980s with the publication of Marcus and Fischers Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986). Culture Shock Most descriptions of the phenomenon of culture shock tend to treat it as an illness or discomfort that accompanies immersion within a foreign culture. This mainstream understanding, representing a medicalization of a cultural process, can be dated to the 1960s, when Kalervo Oberg described it as a consequence of the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse (Oberg 1960:177). Rachel Irwin, who noted that the concept of culture shock is largely neglected within anthropology, describes it as a situation where the security resulting from ones taken-for-grantedness disappears and one feels ill at ease.... Culture shock is about being out of place in a certain place and time (Irwin 2007). However, as Peter Metcalf points out, this mainstream understanding of culture shock hides its more reflexive angle: As originally used by anthropologists, it described the disorientation that often overtakes a fieldworker when returning home from a prolonged period of immersion in another culture. All kinds of things that had once been totally familiar suddenly seem odd, as if one were seeing them for the first time. Consequently, everything becomes questionable: why have I always done this or assumed that? (2005:3). Furthermore, this questioning attitude is for Metcalf perhaps the most basic feature of anthropology (2005:3). As Marko ivkovi points out, anthropologists, for better or worse, have become defamiliarizers and demystifiers. They delight in showing how what is taken for granted and assumed to be natural is actually constructed and arbitrary (2000:61). As someone who has passed through numerous anthropology classes (as student, teaching assistant, or teacher), I can attest to the fact that this is one of the main themes drummed into the heads of students: anthropology is just as much about questioning our own cherished cultural assumptions as it is about exploring other cultures. Cultural Critique The questioning attitude that Metcalf highlights as possibly the most basic feature of 11 | Ted Baker

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 anthropology is essentially a reference to the notion of cultural critique. So, in the terms of this paper, the phenomenon of culture shock (the version that is reflexive) can lead to cultural critique. In fact, some more traditional anthropologists have argued that only via the radical disjunction of culture-shock is it at all possible to gain perspective either on oneself or on others.... Only the shock of the strangethe arrival of an anthropologist in an exotic communitybreaks the quality of routine and automatism, both for the anthropologist and the locals, and makes what is normal unfamiliar (Rapport and Overing 2000:23). In other words, the practice of anthropology can lead to a rupture in cultural assumptions. Briefly, I would like to take issue with this traditional assertion that extended contact within an exotic locale is required to induce cultural critique. Every year I have at least a couple students complain that they can no longer look at the world the way they used to. I can also remember long ago joking that I could no longer turn off the anthropologist inside. Everything had become the field. Birthdays, parties, convocations and trips to the coffee shop were now unofficial excursions in amateur fieldwork. I was seeing the world from a new perspective (one that begins with the very simple yet very powerful observation that our own culture is but one among many). In other words, I dont think the shock of the strange requires an extended stay in the Trobriand Islands. Simply knowing that others think and do things that are radically different from our own ways of thinking and doing is enough to ignite the fire of cultural critique. While direct and prolonged experience within that which Kirsten Hastrup calls the contact zone, where cultural difference collides, is most certainly a better guarantee for sparking a reflexive gaze on ones own culture, I dont think its exclusively so. Arguing this is the only way speaks more to the attempt to privilege and prioritize fieldwork abroad over fieldwork at home. 12 | Ted Baker Marcus and Fischer begin their book Anthropology as Cultural Critique with the observation that 20th century social and cultural anthropology has promised its still largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts. The first has been the salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization while the second promise (less attended to than the first) has been to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves. (1986:1). Through this process of portraying other cultures to reflect upon our own, anthropology disrupts common sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions (Marcus and Fischer 1986:1). They locate the origins of cultural critique in the nineteenth century, when it emerged from the writings of theorists and philosophers who were reacting to the impact industrial capitalism was having upon European societies. These writers, such as Marx, Freud, Weber and Nietzsche, to name a few, have inspired a continuous, if diverse, tradition of self-conscious criticism of the quality of life and thought in capitalist economies and mass liberal societies up to the present (Marcus and Fischer 1986:113). While the colonial and ethnocentric roots of anthropology have shaped and continue to shape the discipline, it would seem that anthropology is also part of a long tradition of cultural criticism. More importantly, this tradition is one originally rooted in a critique of industrial capitalism. Some even argue that cultural critique is ubiquitous in the practice of anthropology. For example, Lassiter argues that although cultural critique is not always an explicit purpose of each ethnography, as it was in Meads Coming of Age in Samoa, it remains at least implicit in the writing of each (Lassiter 2006:93). If, as Lassiter argues, cultural critique is implicit within the practice of anthropology, then what kind of culture is being critiqued? While one response could be Euro-American or Western civilization, in terms of this paper (as mentioned above) the most obvious answer, given the roots of this critique, is the culture of capitalism. If much of what we perceive to be natural and given is tied directly to the imperatives of the market and the needs and logic of capital, then a posing of these institutions and social relations as historical and particular, as culturally constructed, is almost by definition

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 anti-capitalist in nature. In other words, given that the doing of anthropology can lead practitioners, theorists, and students towards a cultural critique of their own society, and given that the society anthropologists are operating within can be conceived as a culture of capitalism, we can argue that the doing of anthropology can lead to an anti-capitalist perspective. However, this raises even more questions. If the practice of anthropology is almost inherently anti-capitalist, or at least has a tendency to go in that direction, then why has it not become explicitly so? If, as Donham points out at the beginning of this paper, anthropology, more than any of the other academic disciplines, has defined itself against capitalism, then why are there so few anthropologists explicitly pushing for radical change against and beyond capitalism? One answer can be found in Samuel Collins criticism of the notion of cultural critique. While the critical function of anthropology as a way to question our own basic assumptions about reality and the ways that we relate to each other seems to be a noble goal, what is the purpose of this questioning? In other words, cultural critique toward what end? Having disrupted the common-sense assumptions of progress, the future, power and individualism, do you then forge a better society? A more tolerant one? (Collins 2008:114-115). Once we have recognized our own cherished institutions as historically and culturally constructed, once we have blown open taken-for-granted notions of progress and modernity and shown them to be Western constructions without any basis in universality or teleological progression, what do we do? Conclusion When anthropology is put into practice by anyone fully attentive to not only local fields of power relations but also global ones, it is hard to avoid drifting towards a position against capitalism. The discipline has traditionally operated on the margins of the global economy where the worst excesses of the system take their toll. Through ethnographic explorations of marginalized populations in, for example, 1980s Sudan, it is hard not to be pushed towards an anti-capitalist stance. How is it that a country capable of feeding itself is exporting the very food that could solve its problems of famine and endemic hunger? Why are markets and profits being put before human dignity and justice? Returning to the story at the beginning of this paper regarding the frustrations and helplessness of students when faced with the daily horrors of chronic malnourishment and starvation in Sudan, we can find a lesson in Collins criticism of cultural critique as not going far enough. Perhaps if anthropology developed a more explicit anti-capitalism we might be able to better respond to the helplessness that students feel when encountering the injustice and exploitation that the culture of capitalism produces. Yes, the requirements and consequences of the global economy are repulsive, and yes, they are cultural constructions that, since they have been made by human hands can also be unmade by human hands, but where does this lead us? Cultural critique for what ends? If Ive learned anything in the past decade of post-secondary education, it is that we need to be constantly asking ourselves very basic questions in order to remain grounded and engaged. What is anthropology? What is the context within which anthropology is conceived and executed? What does it mean to conceptualize and practice anthropology within a culture of capitalism? Perhaps most importantly, why are we doing this? What is the purpose of anthropology? Is it simply to better understand the world around us and the people we share it with, or is it more? Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, famously stated that until now philosophers have only interpreted the world, while the point is really to change it. What if anthropologists took this challenge seriously, creating an anthropology whose driving force was not just analysis and understanding, but also radical change? Could this even be achieved within a university environment increasingly operating according to the dictates and logics of the market? And what would this mean for how we conceptualize fieldwork and the field?

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009
Dilemmas on the Edge of Chaos. In Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist Societies, edited by Hermine G. De Soto and Nora Dudwick. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. References Collins, Samuel Gerald 2008 All Tomorrows Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future. New York: Berghahn Books. Donham, Donald L. 1999 History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giroux, Henry A. 2007 Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy and the Project of Educated Hope in Mark Cot, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter (eds.) Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Irwin, Rachel 2007 Culture Shock: Negotiating Feelings in the Field. Anthropology Matters Journal 9(1). Lassiter, Luke E. 2002 Invitation to Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer. 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metcalf, Peter 2005 Anthropology: The Basics. London; New York: Routledge. Oberg, Kalervo 1960 Culture Shock: Adjustment to New Cultural Environments. Practical Anthropology 7:177-182. Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing 2000 Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London; New York: Routledge. ivkovi, Marko 2000 Telling Stories of Serbia: Native and Other

Ted Baker is a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at York University in Toronto, Ontario. He is currently juggling the responsibilities of being a parent, writing a dissertation, and teaching. He is also involved with a grassroots network doing solidarity work with the Six Nations of the Grand River.

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Playing Dirty: Pervertible Practices and Kinky Anthropology Claire Dalmyn

MA Condidate, Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON

Abstract This paper explores some lively infoldings of play and field at play in the multiple substantive and theoretical fields in which I am enmeshed in working with fellow practitioners of BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadomasochism), specifically in queer womens kink or leatherdyke communities in Toronto. This paper focuses in particular on questioning mainstream perceptions of kink practice and culture by unpacking taken-for-granted understandings of dirt, pollution, and sexual alterity, using the Scene concept of pervertibles (items not specifically intended for kink used in play) to bridge theory and practice. This is precisely the sort of playful tactical gesture I wish to embody in using my situated subjectivity to not only to work kink with the tools of anthropology, but to play anthropology with theoretical and methodological toys of kink culture and practice.

heres a magic store in Toronto that sells supplies and trick kits to hobbyists and performing magicians. They also sell cotton rope in a couple of different weights and a handful of bright colours. While acknowledging that just about every kind of rope has its relative advantages and its proponents among kink practitioners, Ill admit that Im a fan of magicians rope. Besides being strong enough and holding knots well enough for most ground work (that is, bondage applications that do not involve the added tensions of partially or completely suspending the bound party off the ground), it is soft and easy to care for, and it is these things because, unlike ropes used in climbing, boating or industrial contexts, this rope is actually constructed for tying up people. Its also fairly inexpensive and easy to obtain, two common advantages of pervertible materials. I learned about this store from a friend. Im not sure how she heard about it. On her first visit, my friend told me, when she asked the sales assistant to measure and cut her some standard-for-bondage lengths of bold blue rope, the assistant asked if she was a professional magician. My friend reports taking a deep breath and weighing the virtues of lying to this smiling stranger, asking herself What would Midori do?1 No, my friend told the sales assistant, Im a pervert. Oh . . . The older woman paused, blinked, then smiled again brightly. You know we have costumes, tootell your friends! Messy, Sticky and Miasmal: Fertilizing Dirty Anthropologies Woody Guthrie carves a sign into his guitar saying this machine kills fascists. Ani DiFranco says, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. 15 | Claire Dalmyn I say, heres a monkey wrench; if you bop me on the head long enough, maybe Ill wake up for a second. Bern (1998)

The Magic Store: A Prologue

Keywords BDSM, kink, play, pollution

1 A well-known and very charismatic kink educator and performance artist.

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 The rhizome is a multiplicity, an eclectic and eccentric assemblage of heterogeneous elements (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). It grows, not like a tree, always-outwards according to strict hierarchal principles, but together and apart in every direction, jumping registers in every dimension. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:6). As a mode of relating not to but in the world, the rhizome is connection incarnate, anything to everything. It is about links and leaks and lines of flight, plateaus of intensity, and we track it by mapping its breaks and flows rather than by tracing its external-internal divisions. Growing in rhizomes is a minor science, a nomad habit, like Levi-Strauss bricolage (1968) and de Certeaus poaching (Jenkins 1992), a tactical practice of using whats at hand. It is cobbling together an experiential world using whatever odds and ends you can lay claim to just long enough to recycle them and set them moving in new ways, new contexts. My hope in growing a paper around found objectsstories, tools, toys, art, which are not seeds but cuttings from other rhizomatic growths, snatched up and replantedis that they will intensify affects and sensations without foreclosing possibility on what those intensifications will produce. This is dirty work! Growing potatoes and crabgrass, you cannot help getting mud under your nails while the rhizome evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:7). The bricoleur and poacher too are sweaty, smeared with blood and engine grease and coughing up lungsful of sawdust. When I presented a version of this paper at the Playing the Field conference at York University in November 2009, I postulated that few attendees had likely thought to ask why is a paper about BDSM play practices was on the Dirty Anthropologies panel?2 One reason 2 The acronym BDSM is a composite of bondage and discipline (B&D), domination/submission (D/s, D&S) and sadomasochism (SM, S/M, S&M). this question was not asked, I suggested, was that of course this is where kinky sex belongsisnt it? Here among the dirt and the danger and the hyped-up salaciousness. How could all that spanking and pinching and leather and latex be anything but dirty? I do not suggest that BDSM is not or cannot be dirty; it can, and thats wonderful. I will argue, however, that there are problems with taking such a proposition for granted. In order to tackle these problems, we must first roll up our sleeves and question what we mean by dirty. The panel of which the first iteration of this paper was a part was titled Dirty Anthropologies: Messy, Sticky and Miasmal. This is a name worth savouring. Messy is smudged, unpolished, dishevelled, and a perhaps a little care-worn. Its a work in progress. It is cluttered confusion, the blurring of boundaries, the tears, bleeds and leaks that play merry havoc with any effort at neat categories. Sticky is tangible and inescapably material, inescapable because it clings, trails after you in streamers. It spreads, grabs hold of new bodies and tangles them up in the web. It is the stains and traces that stay with you and advertise for others to see, at least if they know what to look for. Miasma is the smear, the congealing, the aura that hates to be ignored (Taussig 2004). It crawls up your nose like swamp vapour, or smoke, like clouds of ash and flies. It is the index, extending the event in space and time (Massumi 2005). This is rich dirt, fun to play in, and a fecund materialsemiotic field for dirty anthropology. But what does this dirt entail, where does it arise, and what gives it the power to compel and control? Pollution and Power: Playing with Perversion In discussing dirt and anthropology, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the debt owed to Mary Douglas for her classic exploration of the is and does of dirt in Purity and Danger (1966). Dirt, Douglas argues, is essentially disorder. There is no absolute dirt (1966: 2). Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements (Douglas 1966:35). It is contextual (your bare

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 feet are clean on the sidewalk but dirty on the dining room table), relative, and also necessary because without disorder to order against, order would not work. Dirt and disorder entail anomaly and ambiguity, as Douglas eloquently demonstrates in connecting the power of dirt with its metamorphoses from recognizable something out of place, the unwanted leavings of its source, into a state of total disintegration, total non-differentiation: matter without form, raw creative potential (161-2). Disorder is not dangerous so long as it stays under control, in the place scripted for it by rules of pollution and purification, but slippery as a scale-less fish it keeps wriggling out of hand. Gayle Rubin, my predecessor in Leather anthropology, takes up resonant ideas around pollution and control with regard to sexualities in her fantastic essay Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, which plumbs the historical production of sexuality and sexual deviance (1984). In this work Rubin outlines a provisional hierarchy of good and bad sex. She illustrates two complementary spatial framings with graphic diagrams: the charmed circle of Good, Normal, Natural, Blessed Sexuality in the centre pushing Bad, Abnormal, Unnatural, Damned Sexuality to the marginal outer limits (Rubin 1984:281), and the struggle over where to draw the line on a slippery slope to arrest the easy slide into depravity (1984:282).According to Rubins analysis, hegemonically-sanctioned good sex takes place between monogamous married heterosexual pairs of human adults of the same generation, in private and without imbrication of manufactured objects, pornography or commercial transactions, while hegemonicallycensured bad sex deviates, in a compounding fashion, from this ideal. BDSM play isbad; vanilla fucking is good (the diagrams, interestingly, omit any explicit mention of consent). Rubin is less concerned in this article with why a particular practice, identity or subject position gets placed where it does than with how this order is maintained, and what a radical politics of sex needs to change it. As with the situations described by Douglas, it is the implosion of dirt and danger that lubricates the systems gears, even constitutes its whole machinery. We can see this implosion enacted in dense entanglements of contamination, contagion and the collapse of causality wherein trauma, disease, madness, immorality, weakness, crime, violence, incorrect politics, treachery, and the national security boogeyman of the age (communism when the essay was published, terrorism now) all at once precipitate and follow from sexual alterity (see also Puar 2007). Perversion spreads like a virus. The discovery of perverse inclinations is especially grave in people in positions of public influence, with the capacity to erode community morals. The greatest threat, in a cultural context which fears and treasures the innocence and neuroplasticity of children, is sexual deviance on the part of parents, teachers or anyone with access to minors. Perversity leaves traces in the flesh, stains too stubborn to wash out but easy enough to camouflage, so that the hope of identifying the bad guys and tagging us for rehabilitation or extermination remains always just over the horizon. Rubins call for a radical politics of sex begins with the recognition that this sexual hierarchy is not inevitable, that there is no natural or correct way of ordering: just as there is no absolute dirt, so too are there no absolute perversions. The ordering we live with is not random or arbitraryit has a huge weight of authority on its side, all the inertia of history and power, powers to produce meaning and powers to enforce orderbut neither is it immutable. Re-ordering, or even something like de-ordering the normative hierarchy to craft a theory and practice of benign sexual variation, is possible. This isnt a goal we should work towards simply because we can, nor out of benevolent compassion for those people affected by itbecause we are all affected by it. Donna Haraway says regarding queering as a radical political methodology that queering specific normalized categories is not for the easy frisson of transgression but for the hope of livable worlds (1994:60). Other configurations are possible; dirt and danger are situational, and the difference between compost and manure is whether youre downwind. Nothing is inherently dirty or kinky or sexy (not even that).

17 | Claire Dalmyn

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 The corollary is that anything can beanything that exists or has existed or will exist, I promise you that somewhere, someone has been turned on by it or will be turned on by it or is being turned on by it right now (and not necessarily in a linear temporal relation), while to someone else its the most abhorrent thing imaginable, or the most boring. It becomes redundant to say that we look for pleasures in strange places if we can recognize that all places, all pleasures, are strange to someones experience, and rejoice in how this recognition expands our capacity to engage more intensely with the world, to affect and be affectedthat is, to live. What makes self-identified kink community participants special, I think, isnt that we do anything very different from vanilla (ostensibly non-kinky, mainstream) people in terms of concrete practices, but the way we approach what we do. For me, kink is a mode of engagement with the world, and the sensuality, sexiness and sexualization of the world in particular, more than any definable field of action. The radical potential of kink, even more than the obsession with consent, is another form of negotiation: the irreverent tactical creativity dramatized in naming BDSM practice as play. Play is about the power of doing differently. Haraway talks about cats cradle games as an alternative to dominant metaphors of war and competitive warlike games, a grassroots game whose play is enhanced by playing with more than one set of hands, whose goal is not winning but making more interesting and complex configurations, collaboratively. Thinking play need not deny the violence of the world or the consequences of hanging out at the bottom of the hierarchy; even peaceful games can have high stakes. Kink gives us a particularly helpful (fun) tool (toy) with which to play this tangle of context, collaboration and consequence, in the name of pervertibles. Pervertibles are objects used in play, with greater or lesser modification, which were not manufactured with play in mind, and they are all around youamong the items from my own toybag that I brought to the Playing the Field conference, as examples, were clothespins, candles, a riding crop, a wooden spoon, the same cotton magicians rope discussed in the prologue, and a flogger I made from parachute cord. Many players praise pervertibles for their accessibility, because they are so readily available and because it is cheaper to fill a toybag with things we find or make with stuff found around the house and the hardware or dollar store than buying only from kink-oriented manufacturers. Pervertibles also often have the advantage of stealth or plausible deniability, because of their innocuousness or their association with other activities, a valuable consideration for participants who want to avoid the stigma of being called out as kinky in front of strangers or their children, parents, employers, or even, alas, their partners. Indeed, the absence of items like spoons, hairbrushes and belts from someones home sounds stranger than their presence, and none of these items would raise many eyebrows on an airport baggage scan. Many popular kink activities such as bootblacking and temporary piercing depend entirely on materials produced for non-kink purposes, and many do-it-yourself oriented kinky people are thrilled to show off our latest inspirations, bargain finds, or successful experiments. There is a pleasure in subversion, in creativity, in playing arts and crafts, and in giving new life to objects that would seem to have reached the end of their functional careers, as there is in expanding the materialsemiotic potential for experience in the world farther than the wild pleasures shelf at your local sex store. The creative and enthusiastic can find treasure in grocery stores, pet shops, army surplus retailers, thrift stores, medical supply depots, tack shops and sock drawers. These treasures need not be material, either: look for games, fantasies, roles, narratives, melodies, bits of language. Any substance or medium can be dirt for your playful assemblages. Pervertible play is about feeling around the world with all senses and finding new potential in tools and weapons by turning them into toys (because every tool is a toy if you hold it right). Pervertibles highlight the nomadic principles of poaching and bricolage, tactics of inventively using whatever is on hand, as well as the creative ingenuity of asking of an object not what is it for? but what can it do? Pervert comes from Latin roots meaning to turn away from something; if we shake off

18 | Claire Dalmyn

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 the stigma of the words history of connoting first religious and later sexual corruption, perversion is just another name for redirecting, reterritorializing, transplanting or transforming. A case could be made that many, possibly all, kink practices can be thought of as pervertible or as having perverted qualities, in the sense that even the most staple and archetypal kink images incorporate objects and icons which have different meanings in other contexts, and in most cases originated with very different purposes. Kink, as a mode of engagement with the world and as a form of serious play, routinely takes germs of ideas from one situation and uses them to grew something new and different in a fresh context. It is exemplary in this respect, as a magpie methodology, but far from unique. We take and twist in similar ways in many other contexts as well, though we often fail to recognize it. The gift of the pervertible, and a key lesson for crafting kinky anthropology, is an awakening to the radical potential of the everyday. When we cobble our worlds together using whats on hand, whatever we can reach, not indiscriminately but inventively; when we flout expectations and ignore functional fixedness; and when we respect that anything may be someones passion, we learn to cultivate a practice of attention, alertness, arousal. This skill may be of great use in the work towards a world where sexual difference is no longer so cruelly stratifiedshould we dare to pervert it so far.
Haraway, Donna 1994 A Game of Cats Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies. Configurations 2(1):59-71. Jenkins, Henry 1992 Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1968 The Savage Mind. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Massumi, Brian 2005 The Future Birth of the Affective Fact. Conference Proceedings: Genealogies of Biopolitics. http://browse.reticular.info/text/ collected/massumi.pdf [accessed February 1 2010]. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007 Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rubin, Gayle 1984 Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. In Pleaasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Carole S. Vance, ed. Pp. 267-319. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Taussig, Michael 2004 My Cocaine Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

References Bern, Dan 1998 One Dance. On Fifty Eggs [CD]. New York: Work Records. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Ark.

Claire Dalmyn

19 | Claire Dalmyn

is currently completing her MA in Social Anthropology at York University. She viewed this conference as an opportunity to question power relations in anthropological fieldwork and entanglements of these relationships with the ecstasies and agonies of working (in) the field, attending especially to where her practice does and does not enact alternatives.

ADHD, an Entity within the Crisis of the Field Jesse P. Hiltz

Abstract This paper represents a distillation of a much larger project called The Straying of Entities: On the Historical Ontology of Attention Deficit. This paper claims that historically, theories of attention are formulated according to the ways that knowledge and practices are enclosed. That is, attention is formulated in-part according to how a field or body of knowledge is self-referential. Foucault describes a striking example of enclosure in Discipline and Punish, where disciplinary enclosures are understood as strict and limited units of knowledge, time, and space. Current theories of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) suggest that this way of understanding knowledge and practice no longer works, and that our current condition may be understand as a crisis of such enclosures, as described by Gilles Deleuze. This paper claims that attention is a organizing concept, that ADHD was formulated in-between enclosures, as a symptom of crisis, and thus does not belong to a single field or disciplinary enclosure. Keywords Attention, Foucault, Deleuze, Attention-Deficit, concept, epistemology
The Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics, Trent University, Peterborough, ON

n the 18th and 19th century, Europe experienced a qualitative epistemic shift; an alteration within the organisation of knowledge; a shift in both systemic parameters and, thusly, in the ways in which these systems operate. This transition was not localized solely to the ideological, religious, scientific or political strata, but rather, we can understand it as forming along the Kantian intuitions,1 simultaneously taking shape, and shaping, the spatial and temporal axes of life, labour, language, and ultimately the humanity.2 The work of Michel Foucaults Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, surveyed and hoped to tease out the complexities of this transition from what he called societies of sovereignty to societies of discipline. It is not simply that disciplinary organisation took the world and arranged its like parts into fields, as the positivist programme had hoped, but rather, it required a work of epistemological alchemy that transforms the multiplicity of beings into elements which can be recast into the moulds of the field and arranged by the disciplines. Yet it has been suggested by Gilles Deleuze that we are witnessing another kind of systemic alteration into the post-disciplinary; we are in its midst (Deleuze 1992). In this post-disciplinary society, ordered beings are abandoned in favour of their describable informations. The individual is divided into their smallest atomic components, if the word component still makes sense here, in what seems to be a hyper-bio-politics, not of the body but of its intensities, of mass-informations. And with this, the organisational role of concepts within a field or discipline that is, the possible ways in which a concept can organize, theorize, and mobilize bodies, spaces and times has also been altered to accommodate the dawn of informative excess. I will claim here that in what could be called the postdisciplinary, the role of organizing concepts within a knowledge system can be determined by the way they channel information, rather than the way they order individual elements. I will claim that in the early 1970s, the concept of attention served as such a organizing concept, a modulator, and that Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is 1 I am here making an allusion to Kants work in both the Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegmena to Any Future Metaphysics. 2 I am referring here to the birth of the human sciences as outlined in Michel Foucaults The Order of Things.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 the resultant formation, signifying that systemic operation.3 First let me speak briefly of the transition from sovereignty to discipline, if it is not yet known to us. Beginning around the 17th century, the divine and profane space of the medieval cosmos became a disenchanted, segmented, and cellular distribution of grids, tables and vertical hierarchies. The expansive times of God - mortality, immortality and eternity became a singular time of linear sequence, efficient implementations, corrective exercises, and oriented actions. The world of Sovereignty becomes the society of discipline when the power of divine Sovereignty becomes diffused throughout local, situated, and relational authorities of enclosed spaces, and this next part is key, of distinct techniques and self-referential logics.4,5 (For further consideration of selfconcerned logics see the second chapter of Pierre Bourdieus Science of Science and Reflexivity.) For Deleuze, disciplinary societies initiated the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school [...]; then the barracks [....]; then the factory (Deleuze 1992: 3). These enclosed environments formed within the shadow of an ideal: the disciplinary project whose goal was to efficiently and beneficially concentrate, distribute, and order the forces of the human body and arrange its environment. The notion of enclosure here is key. Because 3 This paper represents a condensation of the second the specificity of these laws, techniques and individual knowledges points inward toward their own enclosures, within their own rational boundaries, we think of them as imminent to that enclosure.6 We can think of the distinctness of these knowledges of enclosures as being their various disciplinary genetics. That is, the signature of their specific paradigmatic character. Discipline then, understood as dispersion and arrangement of individual units or bodies, yields disciplines paradigmatic techniques, norms, and systemically enclosed rules that dictate their own concerns. Gaston Bachelard gives us further tools for formulating these enclosures in his notion of the epistemological break. The notion of the break, here, marks the specific points of friction in between what weve been calling disciplinary enclosures that are close together either spatially or temporally that is, in either interests or history. Breaks can also occur within a discipline, wherein divergent techniques and concerns rupture and divide an enclosure creating fields, sub-fields, subdisciplines, or what have you. If we believe that these enclosures are self-identifying and mutuality distinct, what do we make of the knitting that transpires where disciplines touch? Enclosures develop in such a way that they can distinguish themselves from each other yet also strengthen themselves by creating particular strategic entanglements, strategies of translation, and forms of authority. This is apparent within 18th and 19th century Germany, where discussions concerning the foundations of reason and morality both entangled yet distinguished disciplinary enclosures. This example will also serve to demonstrate why it is the discourses of attention deficit do not posses these same systematic dynamics. For the German Enlightenment, the concept of attention took on the efforts in many inquiries into the foundations of reason, memory, and purposeful ethical action. It was 6 The imminences of techniques then, refers to their self-

chapter of my graduate thesis, The Historical Ontology of Attention Deficit. Due to the scope of the documents used in constructing these views on disciplinary enclosures, Ive chosen to cite solely from an article by Michael Hagner Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science in the hope that it will make a complex argument slightly more transparent. 4 The above description should be considered as a swift condensation of Discipline and Punish. 5 The world of Sovereignty becomes the society of discipline when the singularity of kings rule becomes the plurality of the bureaucrat within the space of civil procedure. We witness that the concern for the shared nature of God and the soul become the introspective analysis and ordering of moods, ideas, and capacities within a humane, functional mind.

referential logics, temporal insistence on the individual, and the given intellectual and organizational arena in which they operate we can think of these crudely as areas of interest.

21 | Jesse P. Hiltz

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 through serious introspection, looking into and attending to oneself, that these terrains were explored. Attention was understood to be the medium through which reason maintained a position - as a particular stance on a given object of thought. It also functioned as the strength of the grasp by which the mind held its objects, thus allowing the mind to take up and readjust its position. Because of this role that attention was to play, it was required to play the role of both the object of analysis and the foundation for that analysis (Hagner 2003). In the late 1700s, the discourse of attention brings together German intellectuals and elites to produce scores of interdisciplinary commentaries on inner-life of the individual. The German philosopher, theologian, and critic, Johann Gottfried Herder, saw the wedding of anatomy and introspection to be imperative to understanding the attentive reasoning capacity of the soul. According to Hagner, this work on attention, this interdisciplinary cartography of the inner world, made attention a virtue of the elite (Hagner 2003: 672).7 That is, a virtue of those working within strict disciplines. The disciplines of the body, the mind, and aesthetics build thin synaptic webs between various fields wherein the anatomist of the brain read introspective autobiographies, and pedagogies of the Romantic philosophers were read along side novels and writings on the mind. This instance of interdisciplinarity should not be mistakenly read as a weakening of the cellular walls of anatomy, literature, philosophy, and theology. On the contrary, this instance provides some of the most subtle yet powerful evidence of the rigidity of the disciplinary enclosure. The keenest example is found in the experiential psychology inaugurated by Karl Moritz in the late 1700s, which, while participating in this flurry of work on attention, remained dogmatic to the separation of knowledge enclosures. 22 | Jesse P. Hiltz
mental principles that a real introspective work on the mind must begin. Keen attention insured sure footing and clear vision within the exploration of the minds mysteries. When one attends or is attentive, one makes possible and further aids the projects of Mind and Enlightenment.

Moritz stressed the importance of the break between anatomy and theology - the division between the body and the soul must remain and be always assumed (Hagner 2003: 676). This attention to the immeasurable divide between these disciplines was sacred. Also, the break between the individual elite professions of the urban setting was also assumed and maintained. Judges, lawyers, philosophers, artists, poets, and government officials were solicited for their individual and specialized introspective positions; each representing an elite discipline for which attention played the role of foundation and object of reason (Ibid). We see here that while attention was a shared conceptual object, the rules of conduct for that sharing were strict. A century later, there is a disappearance of introspective psychology and, with the mechanization practices of modern life, the discussion of attention would all but disappear, to be replaced by the behaviourist notion of vigilance, marking a shift in emphasis from the art of thought to the effective completion of tasks. Thus, in the early and mid 20th century, we see a different situation then we did in the late 1700s. With the removal of the focus on consciousness, it no longer remained possible to speak of attending to reason but rather one must now speak of the success and failure in the completion of tasks, reflex testing, and vigilance within the duration of a given activity. Where in the late 1700s attention was an elite disciplinary virtue of the professional thinker, in the mid 1900s, vigilance means the ability of an individual to maintain a normalized position in respect to disciplinary techniques. In other words, attention-as-vigilance meant a virtue in attending to the basic structures of the discipline fabric at its most basic level. Vigilance is a virtue, not of the elite, but of any individual capable of being disciplined: i.e. being placed within specific disciplinary enclosures.8 Thus, vigilance 8 This is probably most apparent when Georg Simmel writes of the compromises made in the metropolis between the minds capacity to make distinctions between stimuli (attention) and the blaz and docile attitude that occurs when the brain can not longer process the barrage of phenomena (discipline). See Simmel, Georg. 1971 The Metropolis and Mental Life. In Georg Simmel: On Individu-

7 It was from this clarity of reason and observance to

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 is a concept of concern within each enclosure, and its concern is defined specifically due the disciplinary techniques that require vigilance. It should be no surprise that all techniques require the virtue of vigilance to be ultimately mobilized. However, the virtuosity of vigilance is paralleled by another development. Because of the pan-disciplinary nature of the virtue of vigilance, (that is, it concerns each discipline) the distinct disciplines of become fused at their margins, suturing themselves at level where the virtue of vigilance became a shared conceptual object. Disciplinary enclosures thus begin look outside of themselves to arrogate and maximize their capacity for vigilance. At this time, we see several new and distinct kinds of people coming came into play in relation to their capacity for vigilance: a person could be hyperkinetic, have minimal brain dysfunction, or could have what was called a specific learning disability; all of which remain fairly secured between the borders of education, government, psychology and neurology. Unlike the German interdisciplinary boom around attention and introspection, these interactions breached the disciplinary enclosures at specific points. They represented disruptions of the kinetic, the neurological, and the pedagological dimensions of ones disciplinary vigilance. Interdisciplinary alliances were made, yet the disciplinary logics of each enclosure remained at odds with each other. We see at this time, a flux of definitions, irresolvable interpretations, and constant vocabulary reform along with heated debates about establishing clear diagnoses for complex groups of behaviour deviances in respect to vigilance. These interdisciplinary hybrids (of hyperkinesias, minimal brain dysfunction, learning disability) could find no home within any given enclosure because of the negotiated networks that were mobilized between disciplines to form them, 9 and therefore, they could not be totalized nor lay claim to a single disciplinary logic. Speaking systematically, they were created fragmentarily at the borders of, and contested
ality and Social Forms. Pg. 324-339. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 9 Im referring here to the work of Bruno Latour.

within, those different disciplinary enclosures. This complexity reveals what Deleuze called the crisis of interiors a thinning and rupturing of the enclosure (Deleuze 1992: 3-4). The diffusion and ordering of the disciplinary project had turned on itself, creating such minute differences between such small units, and establishing such complex relations between them, that it was flooded by the avalanche of numbers, facts and classifications. In short, the walls of the enclosure become over burdened with, and shot through by, a fluidity we call information. In 1972, in The Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, a rhetorical move is made which characterizes a definitive shift to a postdisciplinary conceptual object. This article is noted by Thomas Armstrong to be birthplace of concept of an attention deficit (Armstrong 2006:40).10 Virginia I. Douglas, of McGill University, in an article called Stop, Look, and Listen, draws together the disperse elements from hyperkinesias, brain damage, and learning disability (Douglas 1972). This article serves as the site where complications in vigilance, i.e. behaviour deviance, learning deficiency, educational underachievement, and pharmacological intervention come into violent intimate contact, giving rise to a conceptual object that operates within these spaces but is not owned by any single one, and which effectively resides elsewhere than within an enclosure. The conditions of this possibility rest on Douglas ability to mobilize information, without the need of strict, enclosed disciplinary logics and techniques. The informatics of the kinetic, the neurological, and the clinical are deferred from their enclosures, like various channels, through a linguistic caveat into a transdisciplinary assemblage. What does this mean? It is here the word attention reappears. Through a series of speculative asides, Douglas (1972) suggests that attention, which remains undefined and aloof in the work, is the primary 10 Although I have shown that this has actually occurred
two years earlier in a debate in Letters to the Editor The New York Review of Books between John Holt, Carlos Carrillo and Douglas, in 1970.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 thread that draws these dispersed informations together. The re-emergence of attention displaces the primacy of the vigilance of tasks, making vigilance only one of the connotations of attentions now multifaceted operation. Douglas use of attention mobilizes not only the characteristic of maintained efficiency, nor only the particular function of mind, nor the foundation of experience and reason. It also now names the condition for ethics, for social structure, for happiness, and for law. The word attention serves as the filter that gives access to specific information: it gives access to the inattentiveness of the hyperactive child but denies access to the importance of their lack of motor skills; it gives access to the popularity of the minimal brain damage diagnosis but denies its loose physiologizing (Douglas 1972: 272); it give access to the prevalence of poor test scores of the learning disabled but denies its complex socio-environmental function (Douglas 1972: 261). The disciplines here become shades of informations and conceptual objects work by organizing that information under a single name by the congruency of their shades, that is, by the resemblance of informations, regardless of there disciplinary localization. In the crisis of enclosure, the word attention marks the conditions of human life in all its capacities. To close, Id like to quote sociologist Adam Rafalovich writes at the very start of his 2004 book, Framing ADHD Children: Indeed, medical science is no longer the sole proprietor of ADHD discourse, nor is any one perspective, for that matter. Our contemporary discussion of ADHD is represented by a plurality of views: academic, clinical, pop cultural, journalistic, and so on. The various and pluralized interpretations of what does or does not constitute ADHD [...] comprise the motley tapestry of todays ADHD discourse are largely a product of the vagaries of this disorder. (2004:1-2). There is key element here that Rafalovich has overlooked, I claim. It is not that medical science is no longer the sole proprietor of the ADHD discourse; it is that there never was a sole proprietor, a primary enclosure, or a singular logic for ADHD. With Douglas, both the cluster of symptoms and the concept of attention bear a multitude of genetically different disciplinary elements. After this crisis of the enclosure, like a hydra with Janus faces, such a concept springs up, reaching out in many directions, yet doing so under a single name.

References Armstrong, Thomas 2006 Canaries in the Coal Mine. Critical New Perspectives on ADHD. Gwynedd Lloyd, Joan Stead, David Cohen, eds. 34-44. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre 2004 Science of Science and Reflexivity. Richard Nice, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles 1992 Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3-7. Douglas, Virginia I 1972 Stop, Look and Listen. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science. 4(4): 259-282. Foucault, Michel 2002 The Order of Things. New York: Routledge. ________, ______ 1995 Discipline and Punish. Alan Sheridan, trans. New York: Vintage Books. Hagner, Michael 2003 Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science. MLN 118(3): 670-687. Rafalovich, Adam 2004 Framing ADHD Children. New York: Lexington Books. Simmel, Georg 1971 The Metropolis and Mental Life. In Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Pg. 324339. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Jesse P. Hiltz is a graudate of the Centre for the

Study of Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University, Peterborough, ON.

Disability Studies Fieldwork: Does the Nondisabled Researcher Belong? Jen Rinaldi
PhD Candidate in Critical Disabilities Studies, York University, Toronto, ON

Abstract This article investigates the complications that arise when a researcher who does not identify as having a disability engages in fieldwork pertaining to disability. Disability studies is a discipline that has emerged in part in response to mainstream fieldwork that involves the study of disabled people but has not called for their active participation (e.g. education and psychology). The author presents the epistemological and political implications to their historical exclusion from fieldwork. The author also brings to light the inequalities and power dynamics that a nondisabled researcher might encounter when studying disabled people. Where then, does that leave a supposedly nondisabled researcher? What responsibilities does a researcher have to self-disclose, and at which point does the pressure to self-disclose constitute a violation, inasmuch as disclosure in a context that still stigmatizes disability could lead to loss of control over ones identity and privacy? Keywords Disability, disability studies, fieldwork, self-disclosure, knowledge-production

n this article I investigate the complications that arise when a researcher who does not identify as having a disability engages in fieldwork pertaining to disability. Disability studies is a discipline that has emerged in part in response to mainstream fieldwork that involves the study of disabled people but has not called for their active participation (e.g. education and psychology). I present the epistemological and political implications to their historical exclusion from fieldwork. I also bring to light the inequalities and power dynamics that a nondisabled researcher might encounter when studying disabled people. Where then, I ask, does that leave me as a supposedly nondisabled researcher? What responsibilities does a researcher have to self-disclose, and at which point does the pressure to self-disclose constitute a violation, inasmuch as disclosure in a context that still stigmatizes disability could lead to loss of control over ones identity and privacy? The category of disability itself encompasses people with physical disabilities, including wheelchair users and blind persons; invisible disabilities such as learning disabilities and chemical sensitivities; linguistic minorities like Deaf persons; and disabilities affecting mental state and intelligence. While the category is broad and the disability community has its own problematic internal hierarchies, all these sorts of people are subsumed under the title disabilitya political category defined by the exclusion and disadvantage they all experience. They are united in their experience of oppression, and in their difference, to the extent that they all deviate from the physical and mental states that are socially accepted as species-typical. Disability studies encourages the active participation of disabled people in scholastic research, in large part as a response to current and historical research about disability. According to James I. Charlton, the power of a popular slogan for disability activism nothing about us without us, derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice (1998:3). Disabled people have been systemically excluded from full participation in their communities due to physical barriers and social stigmas, and academia is no exception. Studies have been conducted about disability, and have focused on subjects and populations who have disabilities. However, only recently, with the rise of disability studies, have we

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 seen disabled people conducting, designing, or taking part in the research, and serving in any other capacity besides as objects of study. There are epistemological implications to the exclusion of disabled persons from studies pertaining to disability. This minority group may have something new to offer that would further research and produce different kinds of knowledge. To develop this argument, I will analyze the implications to the exclusion of women from scientific inquiry, for women and disabled people share (or have shared) common experiences of marginalization from academic pursuits. Margaret Alic presents the history of female scientists in Hypatias Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century, arguing that their storiesthat is, their collective contributionshave largely been overlooked: Throughout history women scientists have been ignored, robbed of credit and forgotten (1986:10). For feminist philosopher of science Helen E. Longino (2002), knowledge-productive processes are more social than we may realize, and we produce new and different knowledge claims only by including the voices of all members of our community. In The Fate of Knowledge, she writes, not only must potentially dissenting voices not be discounted; they must be cultivated (132). She argues that scientific inquiry has been stymied insofar as the voices of women have been silenced: their findings have been ignored and they have faced systemic barriers to full participation in scientific inquiry. As a result, science, from this perspective, could only reflect the findings and interests of a part of the community. If scientific practice had incorporated people with different experiences and perspectives in knowledge production, it would have grown in new directions. For example, Barbara McClintocks findings concerning the genetic structure of maize were revealed through an unorthodox method of investigation. She visualized chromosomal exchange via reproduction and discovered transpositiona discovery which would earn her the title of the only woman to have received an unshared Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Says Evelyn Fox Keller on McClintocks research: The word understanding and the particular meaning she attributed to it, is the cornerstone of Barbara McClintocks entire approach to science. For her, the smallest details provided the keys to the larger whole. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to individual detail, to the unique characteristics of a single plant, a single kernel, of a single chromosome, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the maize plant as a whole was organized, the better her feeling for the organism (1983:101). Keller describes McClintocks relationship with maize in a romantic way, which calls into question the ideal in science of the detached observer. Traditional methods of scientific inquiry might not have led to McClintocks results. Longino (2002) and Keller (1983) hold that being a woman helped McClintock find this new method, since women have been historically socialized to be more empathetic and relationship-oriented. The two scholars also argue that both being female, and adopting an approach that incorporates strengths that are more traditionally associated with women, marginalized McClintock from the scientific community until her discovery of transposition earned her recognition and prestige. Just as the female perspective McClintock developed might yield different kinds of scientific methods and discoveries, disabled people can draw from their own experiences in order to shape the direction of fieldwork. The exclusion of disabled people from research may have thus obstructed the production of relevant, valuable knowledge about disability. When nondisabled researchers fail to take into account input from disabled persons when studying disability, they risk basing and building their research on ignorance and prejudice. Any assumption on the part of the nondisabled researcher that she/he knows better than the participant would be presumptuous and patronizing, but more than this, would be irresponsible insofar as the research produced might be limited, inadequate, and even wrong. Furthermore, there are political implications to silencing the voices of disabled people from research in that academic research can be used

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 to legitimize unjust practices and reinforce stereotypes. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould (1996) recounts the history of scientific inquiry, arguing like Longino (2002) that science is a social enterprise. That is, science is rooted in context and often involves the justification of biases and the promotion of these justifications as capital T Truth. Gould (1996) discusses the tests conducted in the 1800s to measure sculls in an effort to rank intelligence racially, based on brain mass. This kind of research supported and promoted racism, and served as justification for public policy and social practices predicated on the notion that racial inferiority existed (e.g. as cited in Gould (1996), the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act in the United States). As long as marginalized groups are excluded from academic research, they lack intellectual authority, and researchers who seek to establish and legitimize their own biases have the intellectual authority to inform public policy, social institutions, and even just common attitudes and perceptions. When disabled people are not given the opportunity to contribute to research about disability, key issues that concern them might be overlooked, and biases that should be redressed might instead be given academic backing. John W. Cresswell (2003) discusses the value of emancipatory or participatory research, whereby members of marginalized groups take part in the process and address research questions that are of interest to these groups: namely, questions about social justice and equality. His characterization of the research method is relevant to the nondisabled researcher studying disability: This research...assumes that the inquirer will proceed collaboratively so as to not further marginalize the participants as a result of the inquiry. In this sense, the participants may help design questions, collect data, analyze information, or receive rewards for participating in the research. The voice for the participants becomes a united voice for reform and change (10). The fieldwork itself might be disabling if the nondisabled researcher, even unintentionally, objectifies and alienates the disabled people being studied. Research can further marginalize members of minority groups by scrutinizing these individuals as objects of study. The process of objectification can be demeaning and dehumanizing. When people being studied are not given the opportunity to participate in the shaping of fieldwork conditions, such as interview questions or data analysis, relevant questions or themes might be disregarded, which can produce frustration, for no space for talking about the real issues for the studied opens up. In this way, research can be silencing, for it might not reflect the experiences or opinions of those being studied. Moreover, research participants might be affected when dealing with a nondisabled researcher who is not sensitive to the needs and experiences that disabled people encounter. Even when a nondisabled researcher is sensitive, her/his very presence as a nondisabled body can be alienating. For instance, fieldwork in critical fatness studies or on topics related to eating disorders might be conducted by a researcher who is thin and fit, which might make it difficult for research participants to share their experiences and feelings. Disabled people have in various ways been subject to systemic historical discrimination and disempowerment; it is therefore important that the nondisabled researcher be mindful of the power imbalance that might occur when conducting fieldwork. The nondisabled researcher already has more privilege in contrast with disabled persons and while carrying out research serves as a cognitive authority, thus having power in the field. Sensitivity to or awareness of this imbalance might result in the nondisabled researcher being more aware of accommodation issues (physically accessible spaces for physically disabled people, plain language for intellectually disabled people, oral tests for learning disabled people, as examples) and less likely to be charitable or demeaning, silencing or inappropriate. Also, such an imbalance might be redressed by involving participants in the fieldwork, giving them the opportunity to help shape and direct the research by, for instance, participating in the development of the study questions and taking part in the interpretation of the data. I have outlined how nondisabled researchers should conduct themselves in the disability

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 studies field. Perhaps I should be asking, though, whether the nondisabled researcher even belongs in this field. Given the intensity of the power imbalance between nondisabled researchers and disabled research participants, perhaps it would be ideal if research pertaining to disability only be conducted by disabled people. Furthermore, disabled people have actual stakes in the research results, vested interests in seeing the research carried to its conclusions. What might the nondisabled researchers interest in disability-related issues even be? Is it enough to be interested in social justice and equality? Is there space in the field for a nondisabled researcher, just as there might be space in feminism for men? Or, is speaking on behalf of a marginalized group always in some way patronizing, despite the best intentions of being empowering? It is perhaps the case that instead of treading lightly, the nondisabled researcher should find another field of study altogether because by default, her/his experiences and interest are not enough to justify being part of the field. Questions like this are not new in the field of anthropology, which has become increasingly self-reflective with respect to studies of those who are culturally different from the researcher. As a woman, I relate to disability studies, for I too am a member of an historically disadvantaged and marginalized group whose bodies have been subject to surveillance and control. However, by identifying with disability studies insofar as I am a woman, I risk co-opting the stories of disabled persons, then understanding those stories according to my own paradigm rather than being open and reflexive to them. There might be a point at which I cannot relate because I have not shared in the same kind of experience, not completely, only by analogy. Perhaps it is not enough that feminized bodies and disabled bodies share commonalities, for assuming the two sets of experiences are identical might be silencing. Jennifer Robertson (2002) cautions against taking positionality as a condition of researcher reflexivity too far. In reaction to a reviewer asking her why she does not position herself in her writing as academic, white, Westerner, woman (789), Robertson argues the following: These generic, fixed categories effectively efface the complexity of my personal and professional lives. By that same token, the reviewer also assumed that the people I was working and socializing with and I were mirror images (that is, opposites) of each other, and that our relationship could only have been defined by unequal power plays. (789). When researchers choose not to position themselves in their research, they may be positioned without their consent. Her reviewer made assumptions about her identity without actually knowing Robertson, and Robertson would hold that identity slippages transpired as she engaged the participants of her ethnographic research. Identities are not ready to wear (788) packages; that is, they are not essentialist, static categories, nor are they always readily apparent. Reading the body without someones consent involves stereotyping. Beyond this, when falsely read as being privileged, a person may be pressed into admitting to identity characteristics that have been grounds for stigma and disadvantageidentity characteristics which may better serve a person hidden in exclusionary environments. When a researcher chooses not to self-identify, it may be that the assumption that the researcher is privileged misrepresents the researcher and pushes the boundaries of the researchers right to privacy. In the case of disability, a person may be disabled in a way that cannot be read on the body. Examples of invisible disabilities include learning disabilities, chronic pain, chemical sensitivities, and madness. It is possible a researcher might not publicly self-identify as having a disability, but nevertheless has one. I, for instance, have never been formally diagnosed, but I can claim to have a number of identity characteristics that have been or can be pathologized as indicators of mental health problems. I do not typically identify my reasons for relating to the disability community for fear of peoples perceptions of meof who I am, of even my strengths becoming disrupted, coloured, and simplified according to ableist stereotypes. Veganism ceases to be an impressive feat of self-discipline and will power when my history with eating disorders is

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 exposed. Dedication to my studies becomes less meaningful when people discover that I have obsessive tendencies that drive me to finish my work early and in a meticulous fashion, or anxiety about being around people that keeps me locked in my home and strapped to my computer for days. What have I managed to accomplish here, though, besides exposing myself and making readers uncomfortable? Is there value to this kind of self-disclosure? Do I not belong to the disability community until and unless I am outed? Am I not fully entitled to be a researcher in the field of disability studies until I situate myself, publicly make sense of my commitments and my interests relative to my identity, my experiences, my impairments? There is pressure in disability studies to self-identify; might this constitute an injustice, this push to expose and diagnose? Is there a place in the field of disability studies for a researcher who chooses not to situate her- or himself, chooses not to self-identify as having a disability? Or, does one only earn a place at that table now, and avoid the problems outlined above that the researcher faces in the field, by self-identifying?
Princeton University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox 1983 A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Robertson, Jennifer 2002 Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on Positionality. Anthropological Quarterly,75(4): 785-792.

her fourth year in the Critical Disability Studies Program at York University.

Jen Rinaldi is a doctoral candidate entering

References Alic, Margaret 1986 Hypatias Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century. Boston: Beacon Press Charlton, James I. 1998 Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cresswell, John W. 2003 Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, Second Edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc. Gould, Stephan Jay 1996 The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Longino, Helen E. 2002 The Fate of Knowledge. New Jersey:

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Locating the Ghost and the Work of Haunting in Toni Morrisons Fiction and Non-fiction Kama Maureemootoo
The Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics, Trent University, Peterborough, ON

Abstract By juxtaposing fact, fiction, theory, sociology and history, this paper develops a literary, social and political engagement with what is repressed, oppressed, and silenced. By putting in conversation theories from wide-ranging and often disparate fields, I attempt to cultivate a language with which to articulate spectrality and liminality. I study the work of haunting by reading Toni Morrisons fiction and nonfiction in order to examine Slavery and socially instituted racism as ways through which hegemonies repress and express ghostly presences.

traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality writes French thinker Jacques Derrida in The Specters of Marx. (Derrida 1994: 12) Derrida explains that it is often the position and the role of the litterateur to summon the repressed voices of ghosts, as exemplified in the revenant of the dead King of Denmark in Shakespeares Hamlet for instance. Traditional scholars do not interact with ghosts because of the demands of their discipline-specific training and their scientific grounding in ideals of the Enlightenment and modernity.1 The latter, argues Derrida, require that scholars believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (to be or not to be, in conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example, in the form of objectivity. (Derrida 1994: 12) By juxtaposing fact, fiction, theory, sociology and history, this paper develops a literary, social and political engagement with what is repressed, oppressed, and silenced. By putting in conversation theories from wide-ranging and often disparate fields, I attempt to cultivate a language with which to articulate spectrality and liminality. I study the work of haunting by reading Toni Morrisons fiction and non-fiction in order to examine Slavery and socially instituted racism as ways through which hegemonies repress and express ghostly presences.

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Keywords Gordon, Morrison, ghosts, haunting, hauntology, Derrida, spectrality, liminality

relation to physical and social sciences, see Bruno Latours We Have Never Been Modern (1993), where amongst others, he discusses distinctions between objects and subjects as entities of study, the Enlightenment rationale that requires that intellectuals restrict themselves to a particular disciplinary label, and questions pertaining to purification and translation as distinct ontological zones that separate the human and the non-human.

Derrida argues that facing specters arises out of an ethical commitment to learning how to live: if one is to learn how to live, it entails that one learns about life and death (ones own and that of others), and one also needs to learn about what happens in between life and death because between life and death is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak like the just. (Derrida 1994: xvii) One needs to speak to ghosts and one needs to do so in the name of justice, and out of respect and responsibility for others who may not be here, who may have disappeared or who may not 1 For further consideration of the characteristics of modernity and their

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 be born yet. Encountering and living with specters is thus a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations (Derrida 1994: xviii) It is by acting upon this politics of memory and through her commitment to justice that sociologist Avery Gordon looks at the relationship between spectrality, social sciences, and the everyday life in Ghostly Matters. Gordon argues that though scholars and intellectuals abound in knowledge of world capitalist systems and repressive states, they insist on distinctions between subject and object of knowledge, fact and fiction, presence and absence, past and present, present and future, knowing and not-knowing... According to her, the liminal spaces between these distinctions are in need of examination and comprehension for they are [the] modalities of the exercise of unwanted power. (Gordon 2008: xvii) For Gordon, there is a complex relationship between what counts as reality and the modes of knowledge production and consequently there is a complex relationship between reality and the investigation of what remains invisible and excluded; hence does not form part of established forms knowledge. The ghost is a non-object that is constantly sliding and leaking between the dead and the living, the subject and the object, social reality and imagination, and the study of the ghost entails looking at a non-present presence that one does not know and that one cannot name. One does not know: not out of ignorance, claims Derrida, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge [The ghost] comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy. (Derrida 1994: 5) Therefore Derrida maintains that the study of haunting belongs to a realm of its own: to what he calls hauntology. (Derrida 1994: 10) Organized forces that appear removed from society, and systemic structures that seem long dead from everyday living still make their impact felt in peoples lives in ways that confuse established analytic and social separations. Identifying the spaces between these seemingly inexistent social structures and examining their articulation in everyday life and thinking is what consists a study of the work of haunting. Just like one does not know whether the ghost is living or dead, whether it is here or there, it is not always obvious to determine the uncanny ways in which this non-present presence slides between persons, between subjecthood. It can be difficult to ascertain how haunting permeates the intricacies of social relationships and affects complex personhood.2 For Freud, who was one of the first thinkers to attempt to systematically explain ghostly feelings, the uncanny is a property of something secretly familiar that has undergone repression and has then returned from it. (Freud 1971: 217-256) For Gordon, the social is ultimately what the uncanny is about: being haunted in the world of common reality. (Gordon 2008: 54-55) Gordon further posits that it is precisely the experience of being haunted in the world of common reality and the unexpected arrival of ghosts that troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized and self and other. Haunting is one of the ways through which abusive systems of power can make themselves known. Their impacts can be felt, expressed and read in everyday life, and especially when they are supposed to be over with (Slavery for instance), or when their oppressive nature is ignored and denied (national security for example). For Derrida, hegemony is what purports to silence history and since hegemony is what organizes repression, it also confirms haunting. Derrida 2 Complex personhood is a strong axiom attached to Gordons belief that life is complicated. Complex personhood means that all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others. (Gordon 2008: 4) Complex personhood also means that people suffer in different ways, they often remain wedged in the symptoms of their troubles, and they also often change and transform themselves. Besides, complex personhood also means that people tell themselves stories about themselves, about their troubles, their lives, their worlds, the societies they are living in; they understand these worlds through stories that negotiate the reality that is immediately available to them and the yearnings towards which their imagination strives.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 asserts that haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony and that a set of powers cannot be understood, studied and analyzed without taking into account its spectral effects. (Derrida 1994: 46) As a result, he argues that in any given situation where socio-political antagonisms are at play, a hegemonic force is always represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, which entails that something else remains hidden and unrepresented. Haunting itself is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed though it may usually involve such experiences. For Gordon, haunting is an animated state that is physical, affective, visceral as well as psychological, and it is through this animated state that repressed or unresolved social violence makes itself known, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. Gordon uses the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when whats been your blind spot comes into view. (Gordon 2008: xvi) Thus, the appearance of ghosts notifies us that what has been concealed is in fact very much alive and present. Spectral figures leak from various forms of containment and repression and beckon us into looking at the trouble that is being blocked from our view. In this sense, Gordon argues that haunting differs from trauma in that even if both of them are frightening experiences and both register a certain harm inflicted through social violence, haunting is distinct because it produces a feeling of something-to-be-done. Haunting is part of the social world. To understand haunting is essential to grasp the nature of contemporary society and to change it. Studying haunting involves looking at the manifestation or incarnation of the spirit as it expresses itself in the specter. Derrida argues that the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. (Derrida 1994: 5) He maintains that the specter is a thing that remains difficult to name because it is neither soul nor body while it is at the same time both one and the other. He however claims that it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition. (Derrida 1994: 5) For Gordon, if haunting describes how that which appears to be not-there is a seething presence, the ghost is a sign, almost an empirical evidence that tells one that haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, whose investigation can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. In other words, the ghost or the apparition is one form, by which something which is lost, barely visible, or seemingly not here makes itself known or apparent to us. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening, argues Gordon and being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (Gordon 2008: 8) This structure of feeling can express itself in the most inarticulate experiences and symptoms, but they beckon to us and demand their due attention. Gordon posits that power is polymorphous and that it can come in various shapes, sizes and it can express itself in radically different ways: psychologically, bodily, it can be invisible, it can be visible, it can cause dreams of life and it can cause dreams of death. (Gordon 2008: 3) We now turn to study the work of Afro-American author Toni Morrison in order to look at the ways in which her novel, Beloved, structures haunting as a rememory.3 The narrative evokes an in-between, a liminal process that links an institution to an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography. (Gordon 2008: 19) Morrisons narrative is based on the story of Margaret Garner, the slave woman who in 1856 decided to kill her children and then herself instead of being sent back to slavery. The novel narrates two significant moments of violence that rejoin and mediate between the personal and the social: the killing of a baby by 3 Throughout the narrative, Sethe, who is haunted by the ghost of her daughter whom she killed, uses the term rememory to refer to what she remembers and/or what she refuses to remember.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 her own mother, and that of Slavery. The narrative interweaves itself between the individual and the private on the one hand, and the systemic and the public on the other. In this sense, the novel is about haunting. Toni Morrison further explores the space between life and death, between the past and the present, between Africa and America in the Atlantic: in the Middle Passage where many died unremembered. In an interview with Marsha Darling for the Womens Review of Books, Morrison states that, the gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. Its bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no ones ever assumed responsibility for. They are those that died en route. Nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that, they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 247). She further adds that there is a necessity for remembering the horror, but of course theres a necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing a book, in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to remember. (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 248) Toni Morrison is thus concerned with a politics of memory and inheritance and it is this concern that frames the structure and the content of Beloved as a beckoning of the ghost that demands America as a nation to remember. Beloved is not about Slavery with a capital S, it is not the story of Slavery, but it is, Morrison argues, about these peoplethese people who dont know they are in an era of historical interest. (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 257) Beloved does not simply chronicle another slave narrative as seen in the story of Margaret Garner. Instead, the novel retells one story while summoning another, it narrates what is known while remembering what was erased but whose traces are still detectablethat of the transatlantic passage. The ghost in Beloved gesticulates, signals and sometimes mimics the unspeakable and what is not remembered i.e. those who died while crossing the Atlantic and never made it to America. What haunts 124, Bluestone Road and comes back to life is not only the ghost of the dead baby but is also the ghost of the sixty million and more to whom Morrison dedicates her novel. In this sense the novel presents a double-voice and a double-narrative: that of a slave child killed by her mother and that of a girl lost at sea. Morrisons fiction and her understanding of the world do not fall within the empirical, epistemological and ontological forms of dominant western theoretical traditions. Instead her writing mingles realism and magic, the world of humans and that of spirits, and her narratives also take into account the role of belief in shaping everyday life. In her own words, Morrison suggests, as a black and a woman, I have access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who have neither. (TaylorGutherie 1994: 243) Morrison also speaks of the existence of the spectral and the way the latter shapes not only her personal beliefs but also her novels as exemplified in Beloved. She points out to the existence of the spirit world as a complement to the human one. As an African-American woman Morrison believes in the restless existence of ancestor spirits: These are spirits which have been largely unacknowledged and unaccounted for, as the dislocation of African peoples and individualsthe diasporahas swallowed the memory of their existence. (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 246) I see in the work of Toni Morrison an access into understanding the everyday life of communities in North-America. While she faces the ghosts of the past and takes into account various forms of social violence, she also gives us a glimpse into the complex personhood of Black communities and the way they learnt to get-by and make-do with what was readily available to them in terms of beliefs, knowledge, material living, and imagination. I believe that the study of haunting can allow to us to understand race dynamics as they articulate themselves in the most oblique ways within a

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 society. While race dynamics are fraught with the binary opposition between White and Black, looking at what haunts whiteness and blackness each separately, is as crucial a task as looking at them in relation to each other. For Gordon, [t] he Middle Passage is the decisive episode that establishes the amnesiac conditions of American freedom: emancipation as enslavement. (Gordon 2008: 169) The concluding lines of Beloved remind us that [r]emembering seemed unwise and that [i]t was not a story to pass on. (Morrison 2004: 324) Yet, Beloved as a literary narrative leaves its readers with an affective sense of something to be done. For Toni Morrison, the reclamation of the history of black people in [America] is paramount in its importance because while you cant really blame the conqueror for writing history his own way, you can certainly debate it. Theres a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, so that the presence and the heartbeat of black people has been systematically annihilated in many, many ways and the job of recovery is () a serious responsibility and one single human being can only do a very tiny part of that, but it seems to me to be both secular and non-secular work for a writer. (Morrison in Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 225) This responsibility, I conclude, is not only that of the writer, but also that of the scholar, as posited by Derrida and Gordon, whose aim is to identify and re-summon a past that might have been silenced, but whose systemic violence still haunts contemporary society and needs to be re-membered. To accomplish this, I argue, the scholar needs to put into conversation wide-ranging and disparate fields to cultivate a language of spectrality.
Ltd. 217-256. Gordon, Avery 2008 Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno 1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter, trans. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Morrison, Toni 2004 Beloved. New York: Vintage International. Morrison, Toni 1993 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage International. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille. 1994 Conversations with Toni Morrison. Mississippi: Mississippi University Press.

Kama Maureemootoos research interests

lie at the intersection of (post)colonial thought, queer theory, nationhood, masculinity and the cosmopolitan and migrant history of the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kama Maureemootoo completed his M.A. thesis, (Re)imagining the Past, (Re)mapping the Nation: Masculinity and the Nationalist Imaginary in the Indian Subcontinent, in 2011. He hopes to begin his doctoral research in a not-too-far future.

References

34 | Kama Maureemootoo

Derrida, Jacques 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund 1971 The Uncanny. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. James Strachey, trans. Toronto: Clarke Irwin Co.

Understanding the Field of Literary Editing Alicia Fahey

Abstract Literary editing can be understood as anthropological fieldwork. Due to the fact that texts are fluid, multiple objects, as opposed to static, unchanging entities, the editor is required to undertake an editing project as a process of fieldwork excavation, thereby qualifying the editor as an editorial anthropologist. The process of assembling a text requires biological, cultural, archaeological and linguistic research and the end result will be yet another version of a text that contains a narrative imposed by the editorial anthropologists particular motivations, interests and worldview. It is imperative that scholars recognize that the field is not objective; they are working within a field that has been cultivated and contrived. An awareness of these parameters of literary editing changes our fundamental understanding of the meaning of texts, both in their current state, and in the emergent state of the digital field.
MA Candidate , English Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, ON

would like to begin my paper with a quotation from George Bornsteins text Material Modernism: the Politics of the Page. In the introduction to this text, Bornstein poses the question: if the Mona Lisa is in Paris, where is King Lear? (2001:5). This question draws attention to the primary focus of my presentation today: my desire to challenge the conception of a text as a static, unified, object. In contrast, I will argue that texts are, in fact, multiple entities that possess a multitude of possibilities and narratives. To examine this challenge in further detail, I will discuss the role of a literary editor and the influence that he or she imposes on a text. Using the concepts of editor as fieldworker, the archives as field, and the text as the excavated, archaeological material, I will pursue this notion of what I will call, the editorial anthropologist. In essence, I am arguing that the multiplicity of texts necessitates a reassessment of our conceptions of the literary field in order to accommodate our manifold understanding of texts and to dispel the myth of a text as a static, unified entity. To return to Bornsteins quotation, a work of art, in this case, the Mona Lisa, is a tangible, singular object that can be accessed in a single location. Upon viewing the object, one can ascertain specific facts regarding its materiality: its physical dimensions, the medium used to create the object, and particular colours and techniques employed to create the finished product. Furthermore, there is no disagreement regarding the image being represented: the Mona Lisa is easily identifiable as a portrait of a woman. We can also recognize that there is only one Mona Lisa and that although multiple imitations exist, both as literal and satirical representations; we understand that these are artificial simulations and not, in fact, the original object. Similarly, we need not question the creator of the object; it is an accepted fact that Leonardo DaVinci is the author of this work of art. In contrast, when examining the materiality of a text, these definitions and facts become much less clear. One cannot definitively locate the original King Lear. This is because it is not a singular object; it is a collation of manuscripts, prompters versions, performance scripts, published scripts, and printers versions (Warren 1978:96). Ones understanding of King Lear would also depend on the published version that they were to acquire.

Keywords Literary editing, text, meaning, narrative, materiality

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 For example, it is common editorial practice to take the Folio and Quarto versions of King Lear and combine them to make one text and one story; this was the practice followed in the Riverside Edition of Shakespeares Complete Works. But if one were to purchase the Oxford edition of Shakespeares Complete Works, they would be confronted with two versions of King Lear. The reason behind this is that the editors of the Oxford edition believed the variations among the surviving documents were too different to constitute a single play and should therefore be viewed as separate plays (Jowett 2006:11). This raises another point: that it is a necessity and material reality to acknowledge that texts are collaborative objects. Shakespeare alone did not make King Lear a public text; he required the collaboration of editors, publishers, printers, and archivists for the text to come to become public. Unlike a painting, texts are collaborative by nature. They are not static objects that can be easily defined, acquired and accessed, rather, they are multiple entities that exist in various formats and are subject to emendations and transformations under a variety of sources external to the author. One common practice for acknowledging this inherent multiplicity of texts is to produce a text as a critical edition. The purpose of a critical edition is to illuminate the text by annotating textual variants and elucidating obscure language or allusions. A critical edition will also include an introduction and appendices that will situate the text in its social and historical circumstance. Either the introduction or the appendix will likely explain the transmission history and provide various interpretations of the text. In this format, an editor is able to acknowledge the multiplicity of the text in terms of its material, social, historical and cultural circumstances. Thus, the editor as fieldworker is responsible for acquiring this information and making it available to his or her reading public. In order to do this the editorial anthropologist must perform fieldwork. For the literary editor, the field of literary study, especially in the case of texts whereby the author is deceased, is the archive. The archive, however, is not an arbitrary site where random artifacts can be excavated, discovered and examined. It is a construction that reflects the archivists personal decisions about what material is relevant and should be included and what material is superfluous and should be omitted. Recently, there has been an increased awareness among scholars regarding the tenuousness of archival material and the archive itself. Ann Stoler encourages us to read the archive as process as opposed to reading the archive as thing (Stoler 2010:20). In other words, it is imperative that the archive be recognized as a site that has been cultivated and that particular motivations of the archivist(s) will inevitably impose a narrative on the archival material. The archivist is also charged with imposing some semblance of order on the documents. In this way, the archivist operates as a mediator of an archival fonds, by appraising the material contents to determine their function, purpose and relevance. Furthermore, the archivist can only work with the material that has been donated to the archive. Authors who are aware that their documents may end up in an archive are able to censor and remove documents they want to remain private. In some cases, this material may be included but the literary executor may place restrictions on it and require special permission to view these documents. Preservation is also an ongoing concern since the documents can become damaged as a result of time and overuse. What I am trying to explain here, is that even the documents available to the editor are constructed and contrived. The materials available through the fieldwork experience are already limited and contain their own narrative. We are not working in an objective field. The editor must also make selective decisions due to the fact that codex technology has many limitations. A book must be portable, affordable, and functional. Thus, the process of constructing a text requires that the fieldworker be able to excavate material, examine its meaning and functionality, and to then construct a narrative through a critical introduction and textual appendices that will situate this material in its various contexts.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 I have thus far been describing the archaeological element of editorial anthropology. The archives provide access to artifacts that allow the fieldworker to assess and draw conclusions about a culture or person based on material culture, that is, the physical documents they are examining. There are, however, several other methods involved in editorial anthropology. One of the most apparent and yet overlooked areas is the bibliographical materiality of the text. This includes elements such as cover page, page layout, font size and style, line spacing, type of paper, and binding (McKenzie 2006:35). These elements can allow the editor to draw conclusions about the cultural and historical contexts of the text being examined. The study of evolution is also central to editorial anthropology. In literary theory, this is called genetic editing, whereby the editor attempts to demonstrate the evolution of the text and the developments and transformations it underwent both prior to and after publication. The evolutionary process requires a study of manuscripts, published variants and other material such as journals and letters of correspondence that will show the development of the text. These documents can be used to dispel the myth that a text is a single, unified object. In this way, the material artifacts can offer insight to the behaviour, ancestry, evolution, social organization and culture of these objects and the people who produced them. Moreover, the literary field operates within specific parameters of genre, canonical framework, regional discourse and global issues. The idiosyncrasies of a particular author, the content of the work and the temporal period during which it was written, will establish him or her as a certain kind of writer: a poet, theorist, philosopher, novelist or a combination of these types. The value of a work will be based on its relation to other objects of its kind; particularly whether or not it is consecrated within the canonical framework of literature. These bibliographical materialities and the different facets of the field will influence and shape the narrative that the editorial anthropologist will construct. I would also like to discuss the linguistic element of editorial anthropology. Words themselves possess a linguistic code that is dependent upon the community that understands and uses them. This section of editorial theory branches into many areas of linguistics. There is the study of pragmatics, a branch of semiotics, which examines the way in which context contributes to meaning. This involves analysis of elements such as paragraph structure, punctuation and thematics. It also looks at individual words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse as indicators of meaning. There is also etymology, the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning changes over time. Similar to this is philology, the study of the form and meaning of texts and their history. Most important to this idea of linguistic editorial anthropology is that the editors interpretation of a given text will inevitably influence his or her editorial decisions. Whether or not to focus on the historical context, to modernize language, to use the earliest or latest version of a work, to base ones copy-text on a single version or to collate various versions, will all be dependent on the editors interpretation of the text and the meaning he or she wishes to convey through his or her edition. I hope that the various considerations involved in editorial anthropology are becoming more apparent. Biological, cultural, archaeological and linguistic elements of editorial anthropology are inextricably linked and will affect the editors understanding of and relationship to the text that he or she must assemble. Furthermore, the limitations of the codex that I described earlier place even more restrictions on the selection process, since all material cannot possibly be included in a single edition. This is why we must reconsider and reassess the existing literary field. Recent studies in literary editing have addressed these concerns by attempting to produce digital hypertext editions of classical texts. One of the benefits of a digital environment would be the spatial considerations; since pages would not be limited in the digital format, all of the existing material could essentially be included in an

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 edition. Furthermore, this material could be viewed simultaneously; the reader would not have to look to the bottom of the page for explanatory footnotes or the back of the book for the appendix; material could be readily available through hyperlinks, parallel text or superimposed text. Although the editor would still play a significant role in the construction and organization of the digital edition, the role of the reader is much more active in the digital environment because he or she can select what material to pursue and what material to ignore. In this way, the relationship between the reader and text is altered; the digital field will change the way that readers engage with texts by allowing them to assert more control over the selection process. This has both positive and negative implications. In addition to the changes in material and biological interaction, the digital field also changes the linguistic element of texts. Computer linguistics is an entirely different set of codes and symbols. Academics in the humanities would therefore have to learn these new modes of communication. Another obstacle with a digital edition is its material condition; not everyone has Internet access, the portability of a computer is still not the same as a book, and reading online is still not a universally accepted method of reading. Although the digital environment is still in an emergent phase as the new field of literary editorial practice, the potential benefits of this field make it a relevant and exciting possibility for reworking our conceptions of the material, social, cultural, and historical elements of texts. There is still more work to be done, but the new generation of readers will likely experience a new relationship with texts both in their material and contextual existence. I am not suggesting that we should abandon the codex, but to conceptualize the digital field as an extension of the codex that will allow readers to explore texts in a new light and make the multiplicity of texts a universally acknowledged condition.
References Bornstein, George 2001 Material Modernity: The Politics of the Page. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jowett, John 2006 Editing Shakespeares Plays in the Twentieth Century. Shakespeare Survey 59: 1-19. McKenzie, D.F. 2006 The Book as an Expressive Form. In Book History Reader. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds. Pp 35-46. New York: Routledge. Stoler, Ann Laura 2010 Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U P. Warren, Michael 1978 Quarto and Folio in King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar. In Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, eds. Pp 95-107. Delaware: University of Delaware Press. Works Consulted Bornstein, George 1993 Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press. Greetham, D.C. 1992 Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Greg, W.W. 1950-1951 The Rationale of Copy-Text. Studies in Bibliography 3:9-36. Halpenny, Frances G., ed. 1975 Editing Canadian Texts. Toronto: A.M. Hakkert. Hill, Speed 1996 Where We are and How We Got There: Editing after Poststructuralism. Shakespeare Studies 24: 38-46.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009
Irvine, Dean 2006. Editing Archives, Archiving Editions. Journal of Canadian Studies 40(2): 183-211. Kastan, David Scott 1996 The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today. Shakespeare Studies 24: 3037. McGann, Jerome 1991 The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McKenzie, D.F. 1999 Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shillingsburg, Peter 1996 Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Vickers, Brian 2006 Are all of them by Shakespeare?. Times Online, accessed August 9, 2009.

Alicia Fahey is a graduate student in the

English Literature (Public Texts) M.A. program at Trent University. Her research interests include: Canadian literature and poetry, modernism and post-modernism, post-colonialism, museum and archival theory, literary theory, gender theory, and eco-criticism. For her thesis project, Alicia is preparing a critical edition of Canadian author Sheila Watsons novel The Double Hook. Alicia is an affiliate of the Editing Modernism in Canada project (EMiC) whose mandate is to produce critically edited texts by modernist Canadian authors.

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Researching traffic: methodological approaches for navigating the congestion in womens health policy Michelle Wyndham-West
PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON

Abstract In this conference paper, I discuss methodological approaches to researching the networks of public health policy through the case study of the introduction of HPV vaccine programming in Ontario. Networks function as a tool to follow health policy narratives as they are developed across institutions; received, refuted or amalgamated by women in their everyday lives; and contested in everyday resistance and public advocacy. I examine the central notions of biological citizenship, risk, and gender across three thematic fields: (1) constructing risk, (2) negotiating risk and (3) resisting risk. These three fields by no means reflect an evolutionary trajectory. Instead, they bump up against one another and create creative frictions. My research is an endeavor to analyze how the networks of public health policy organize individual realities, and the way they are narrated, contested, and lived as social trajectories (Petryna, 2002).

n my research, which is in media res, I am conducting an ethnographic study across multiple fields1 of Ontarios tripartite health prevention policy for cervical cancer. In this research, I am investigating the networks (Riles 2001, Strathern 1996) of public health policy. By networks, I am referring to an apt image for describing the way one can link or enumerate disparate entities without making assumptions about level or hierarchy. Points in a narrative can be of any matter or form, and network seems a neutral phrase for interconnectedness (Strathern 1996:522). 2 In the case of this research, networks function as a methodological tool to follow health policy narratives as they are developed across institutions; received, refuted or amalgamated by women in their everyday lives; and contested in everyday resistance and public advocacy. In doing so, I am examining the central notions of biological citizenship (Rose & Novas 2002, Petryna 2002), risk (Foucault 1995[1977], 1980, 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1990[1978], 1991 & 1999, Douglas 1992, Lupton 1994 & 1999, Turner 1997, Nettleton 1997, Castel 1991), and gender (Butler 2007[1990], Moore 1994, Sanders 2000, Hanson 2000) across three thematic fields: (1) constructing risk, (2) negotiating risk and (3) resisting risk. These three fields by no means reflect an evolutionary trajectory. Instead, they bump up against one another and create creative frictions (Tsing 2005). Throughout this paper I will discuss how each thematic field was developed, primarily from a methodological perspective, and how each field provides the framework for the three research questions I am exploring. And, speaking of frameworks, I will concurrently recount how I have drawn upon the anthropology of policy as a mechanism to track, navigate, and analyze the unpredictable and ever changing flow of traffic. By traffic I am referring to negotiation. Such negotiation involves tacking between the dialectics of domination and resistance (Lock & Kaufert 1998:5) in even what may appear to be the most mundane and routine medical encounters. Negotiation, as per Rapp (2000), can
1 For the purposes of this research project field is defined in multiple ways, highlighting fields of enquiry, methodological fields and fieldwork locations. 2 Strathern points out that her rcit can be construed as following Latours call for a symmetrical anthropology that gathers together modern and nonmodern forms of knowledge (1996:517).

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Keywords Anthropology of policy, methodology, gender, risk, biological citizenship

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 also be looked upon as the traffic between the risk discourses of the medical establishment and individual lived experience. Without the guide of anthropology of policy a framework through which to follow the traffic of policy narratives, from above and below, as they unfold, unravel and tighten up - I am certain my research would not only be incoherent, but unmanageable. I would like to make it clear, however, that this research project is a not intended to evaluate scientific research and practices regarding cancer. Nor, is this research project an attempt to judge women who engage with or do not engage with Pap screens, HPV tests and the HPV vaccine. Instead, this is an endeavor to take a step back, from a social science of medicine perspective, and analyze how the networks of public health policy organize individual realities, and the way they are narrated, contested, and lived as social trajectories (Petryna 2002). Setting the critical context: HPV, cancer & Ontarios cervical cancer prevention policy In order to contextualize my research project, it is crucial to outline Ontarios current cervical cancer prevention policy. I will, however, only provide a cursory recounting due to time constraints and, as this is pretty technical, I do not wish to put everyone to sleep. The three-part prevention strategy incorporates regularized Pap tests, HPV DNA testing in cases of heightened risk and universal HPV vaccination of grade eight girls. It is recommended that Pap screens be taken every year until they are without abnormal results for a three-year period. As a result, Pap smears have become a regularized aspect of a womens health care and synonymous with annual physicals (Kaufert 2000). In fact, Pap smears have become a ubiquitous sign of femininity (Bush 2000) and are rarely questioned in western society. Second, in addition to conducting regularized Pap smears, it is recommended that high-risk women women who present with abnormal Pap tests --, undergo accompanying HPV DNA tests (Vanslyke et al. 2008:585, CCO 2005). Third, in the fall of 2007, the Ontario government announced that it would implement a provincewide, no-cost HPV vaccination program for grade eight girls in public schools. Similar programs have been implemented in the other Canadian provinces, all of which have adopted the Gardasil vaccine (Graveland 2009:1). This vaccine works to immunize individuals against four particular strains of the HPV virus. The vaccine immunizes against HPV strains six and 11 (which are linked to genital warts) and strains 16 and 18 (which are linked to cervical cancer). Ontarios uptake rate of the vaccine has been sluggish compared to other provinces. Just under a half of eligible girls in Ontario were vaccinated in 2008. By comparison, nearly 70% of girls in British Columbia and about 80% of eligible girls are receiving Gardasil in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia (Graveland 2009:1). If a woman/girl is vaccinated against HPV, screening protocols still suggest undergoing regularized Pap smears once sexual activity has started. Sketching out methodological approaches & research questions: Following biological citizenship, risk & gender through the anthropology of policy So, how does one research a three-part cancer prevention strategy? How do you ground something as elusive and, concurrently, material as a policy? How do you navigate the congestion surrounding the traffic a policy creates? In my view, this research project requires a methodological approach that takes into account that health policy is created, articulated, performed and resisted across many metaphorical and physical sites. For the purposes of this research, policy is defined as not only a piece of government legislation [but] a general program or desired state of affairs or, alternatively, as a label to describe outcomes for what governments generally achieve (Wedel et al. 2005:35). Anthropology of policy is often framed as studying the offices and languages of power in other words, the complex ways in which policies construct their subjects as objects of power (Shore & Wright 1997a:xiii). However, anthropology of policy should not only examine the processes through which

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 policy is formulated, but also investigate how policy works to influence peoples indigenous norms of conduct so that they themselves contribute, not necessarily consciously, to a governments model of social order (Shore & Wright 1997a: xiii &1997b:6). Pragmatically, this requires a reconceptualization of the field; not as a discrete local community or bounded geographical area, but as a social and political space articulated through relations of power and systems of governance (Shore & Wright 1997a: 14). Wedel, et al., (2005) describe the field as often consist[ing] of loosely connected actors with varying degrees of institutional leverage located in multiple sites that are not always even geographically fixed (39). Policy is not developed, implemented or experienced in a governmental vacuum - various stakeholders, such as the scientific community, the mass media and, in this case, big pharma, help shape its form, content and delivery. And, of course, policy is then taken up, mediated and/or refuted by the individuals whose behaviors it aims to affect/effect. Hoeyer notes policy emerges in the networks that give it social life, and so this is where the analyst must be placed to understand such framings and their implications (2005:S72). Thus, for the purposes of my research, the concept of the field is widely framed and steers clear from anchoring premises. As Shore and Wright note engaging within the realm of anthropology of policy involves studying through and not up or down (1997b: 14). This does not, however, consist of framing policy making as a teleological process that moves in one discrete direction of crisis naming, proposed remedy, executing the remedy and post-mortem analysis as the prevailing rational systems model might suggest (Shore & Wright 1997b: 15). Instead, anthropology of policy provides a fluid framework through which to probe and unravel prevailing common sense as current day governance strategies (Shore & Wright 1997b: 17). As a result of the diffused and discursive nature of power, there is no central node through which Pap smears, HPV testing and HPV vaccines are administered throughout Ontario these technologies are deployed in individual physician offices, labs, and a pastiche of school gymnasiums and sexual health clinics across the province. This necessitates conducting research in a dispersed manner that follows disparate networks (Riles 2001:3) that metaphorically stretch out across many fields. These networks can signify a bricolage of human and non-human elements converging and diverging depending upon the context (Strathern 1996:520). Networks hybridize womens bodies; governmental policy; medical technologies, such as vaccines, DNA tests, speculums, cytology reports; the daily news and communications technology and so on. Therefore, my research is taking place across three thematic fields: (1) constructing risk, (2) negotiating risk and (3) resisting risk. I will now, very briefly, describe each thematic field through which I am operating and how each field inspired a related research question. As Martin states, while drawing on Baudrillard, my fieldwork is fetch[ing] [me] up in what has been called implosions, places where different elements of the system come into energetic contact and collapse in on themselves (1992:11, emphasis in the original). Field Constructing Risk: Research question: Since the linkage between HPV and cancer, how has HPV risk been formulated in scientific literature and the mass media and how has a gendered public health policy emerged from these knowledge nodes? I began the research project with a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of institutionally based narratives those of medicine/science, official government health policy and the mass media as they come to bear upon Ontarios cervical cancer prevention policy. This is a critical endeavor in contextualizing the narratives of women who negotiate biological citizenship and this risk landscape for themselves and their daughters and on-line activists who advocate against the vaccine. This phase of the research project focuses upon the tracking and

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 tracing of HPV knowledges. The CDA provides the groundwork to produce situated accounts of the microphysics of power as they play out in the everyday realm of womens health discourse (Lock & Kaufert 1998:1). Situated accounts are akin to Haraways situated knowledges (1988:583-584). However, in explaining the concept of situated knowledges, Haraway stresses the importance of unpacking knowledge from above, below and laterally subjugated knowledges should not be privileged over institutional knowledge. All facets of an issue, illness or policy must be scrutinized (Haraway 1988:583-584). In essence, the CDA is a form of mini-genealogy, which in itself is an articulation of resistance (Sawicki 1991:26). Field Negotiating Risk: Research question: How are Ontariobased women enacting and mediating biological citizenship through cervical cancer risk negotiation in their everyday lives? As the CDA is underway, I am concurrently implementing the second part of the research project. This stage of the research focuses upon collecting and interpreting womens experiences (Lock & Kaufert 1998:1) as they come to bear upon Pap tests, HPV DNA testing and HPV inoculation. While there is a tendency to examine how cultural milieus/factors affect the development of science/medicine, there is less established scholarship looking at how medical technology works to assist in developing ones sense of identity/self (Cussins 1996:575). Posner (1993) found that women engaged in Pap smears for divergent reasons than medical rationale. While physicians advocate for and perform these medical procedures as a means to weed out potential disease or, in other words to look for trouble, women look to Pap smears to avoid trouble, or, to avert disease (Posner 1993:60). However, Posners study tends to reinforce the fissure between medical and lay responses to medical technologies and homogenizes womens renderings of these technologies. Therefore, careful attention has been paid in the creation of interview schedules to allow space for the emergence of the complexity of womens responses to medicalization, which may range from selective resistance to selective compliance, although women may also be indifferent (Lock & Kaufert 1998:2). In allowing for this space of complexity, I have followed Cussins lead. Cussins (1996), in a study of womens narratives regarding assisted reproduction, emphasizes that objectification can, concomitantly, be tapped as a source of agency and a continually unfolding sense of self, particularly when a woman desires to take on the social role of a mother and is having biological difficulty in doing so. Thus, a politics of just say no is unconvincing with regard to assisted reproductive technologies (Cussins 1996:576577) and this may be applicable to Ontarios cervical cancer prevention policy and, particularly the vaccine.3 Objectification can bring about new forms of agency hitherto unrecognized or developed. As women are not necessarily subsumed by medical/political technologies, the mediation of biological citizenship, risk and cervical cancer falls within the realm of negotiation. I am analyzing this negotiation, or traffic, through womens narratives for text, textuality, derived from texto (Latin, to weave), constitutes the locus where bodies discursive and material weave fabrics of the self. The body of each text contains two other bodies which shape the text as it shapes them: the physical body and the body politic whose materiality the physical body symbolically represents (SmithRosenburg 1989:102, emphasis in the original). Field Resisting Risk: Research Question: How are grassroots, anti-Gardasil activists re-appropriating risk in their informational and digital bio-citizenship? 43 | Michelle Wyndham-West As Ontario has the lowest up-take rate of HPV inoculation of any province in Canada, grassroots resistance is easy to find. However, this resistance is not generally organized along group lines. Much of this resistance is taking place on the Internet in public, on-line 3 It is worth noting that there has been a push for the vaccine to be open for use by gay men (Gilbert 2007 & Roehr 2007).

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 discussion forums, through Facebook pages and in videos submitted to You Tube. At this formative stage, on-line resistance to the HPV vaccine is discursive and primarily atomistic, although there are a few activist groups working through this medium, such as parent groups lobbying school boards and university student run groups. Political scientists would term this type of activism as non-traditional as it appears in spurts and does not take the form of firmly organized and collective action. Furthermore, this type of activism is often not taken seriously by policymakers and deemed cheap talk, both for the fact that inexpensive channels are used for communication and that these discussions will not affect policy (Chadwick 2006:121). In this phase of the research, I will be conducting CDA of various incarnations of this resistance. The DIY culture in electronic communication is particularly suitable for following resistance to a health policy for these mediums are not necessarily just personal vehicles, but operate as spaces for expression and dialogue about political and social issues (Harris 2008:482). Harris positions these on-line spaces as counter-publics or parallel discursive arenas, which is borrowed from Frasers work (1992) on feminist activism, for they allow a unique opportunity to produce and showcase alternate viewpoints, which are not given airtime in established media venues (2008:482). Conclusion In this research I aim to produce an ethnography of health policy in action across multiple, thematic fields. In essence, this involves tracing, collecting and analyzing renditions of the traffic health policy creates. Policy does not sit in a static state it morphs, hybridizes and is subject to reassembling depending upon the context. Thus, this research project requires a methodological approach that takes into account that health policy is created, articulated, performed and resisted across many metaphorical and physical sites. This involves studying through and not up or down (Shore & Wright 1997b: 14). Pragmatically, studying through necessitates conducting research in a dispersed manner following disparate networks (Riles 2001:3). The three thematic fields I have discussed -- constructing, negotiating and resisting risk -- by no means reflect an evolutionary trajectory. Instead, they bump up against one another and create creative frictions (Tsing 2005). And, these frictions provide the basis for an ethnographic account of health policy as it is worked out on the ground and in the daily lives of Ontario-based women.

References Bush, Judith 2000 Its just part of being a woman: cervical screening, the body and femininity. Social Science & Medicine, 50:429-444. Butler, Judith 2007[1990] Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cancer Care Ontario 2005 Evidence-based series: section 1 cervical screening: a clinical practice guide (May 20, 2005). Author: Toronto. Castel, Robert 1991 From Dangerousness to Risk. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. G. Burchell C. Gordon and P. Miller, eds. Pp. 281298. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chadwick, Andrew 2006 Internet politics: states, citizens, and new communication technologies. New York: Oxford University Press Cussins, Charis 1996 Ontological choreography: agency through objectification in infertility clinics. Social Studies of Science, 26:575-610. Douglas, Mary 1992 Risk and blame: essays in cultural theory. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel 1977[1995] Discipline & punish. New York: Vintage books.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009
question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, (3): 575-599. Harris, Anita 2008 Young women, late modern politics, and the participatory possibilities of online cultures. Journal of Youth Studies, 11, (5): 481-495. Hoeyer, Klaus 2005 Studying Ethics as Policy: The Naming and Framing of Moral Problems in Genetic Research. Current Anthropology, 46:S71-S90. Kaufert, Patricia 2000 Screening the body: the Pap smear and the mammogram. In Living and working with the new medical technologies: intersections of inquiry. M. Lock, A. Young and A. Cambrosio, eds. Pp. 165-183. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1998 Women, resistance, and the breast cancer movement. In Pragmatic women and body politics. M. Lock and P. Kaufert, eds. Pp. 287-309. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lock, Margaret and Kaufert, Patricia 1998 Introduction. In Pragmatic women and body politics. M. Lock and P. Kaufert, eds. Pp. 127. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lupton, Deborah 1994 Medicine as culture: illness, disease and the body in western societies. London: Sage Publications. 1999 Introduction: risk and socio-cultural theory. In Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions and Perspectives. D. Lupton, ed. Pp. 1-11. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Emily 1992 Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the days of AIDS. Beacon Press: Boston. Moore, Henrietta 1994 A passion for difference: essays in anthropology and gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nettleton, Sarah 1997 Governing the risky self: how to become

1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books. 1988a The Care of the Self. New York: First Vintage Books Edition. 1988 Technologies of the self. In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton, eds. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Publications Ltd. 1989 The birth of a clinic. London: Routledge. 1990[1978] The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. 1991 Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, eds. Pp.87-104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999 Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975. New York: Picador. Fraser, Nancy 1992 The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics. In Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency & Culture. N. Fraser and S. Bartky, eds. Pp.177-194. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilbert, Sky 2007 The promise of Gardasil. Xtra (Toronto), 606:10-11. Graveland, Bill 2009, March 2 HPV vaccine still a tough sell in some parts of Canada. Toronto Star: A1. http:// www.parentcentral.ca/parent/article/595295, accessed March 2, 2009. Hanson, Barbara 2000 The social construction of sex categories as problematic to biomedical research: cancer as a case in point. Health, Illness, and Use of Care: The Impact of Social Factors, 18:53-68. Haraway, Donna 1988 Situated Knowledges: the science

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healthy, wealthy and wise. In Foucault: Health and Medicine. A. Petersen and R. Bunton, eds. Pp. 207222. New York: Routledge. Novas, Carlos and Rose, Nikolas 2000 Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual. Economy and Society, 29, (4):485-513. Posner, Tina 1993 Ethical issues and the individual woman in cancer screening programs. Journal of advances in health and nursing care, 2, (3):55-70. Petryna, Adriana 2002 Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton University Press: Princeton. Rapp, Rayna 2000 Extra chromosomes and blue tulips: medico-familial interpretations. In Living and working with the new medical technologies: intersections of inquiry. M. Lock, A. Young and A. Cambrosio, eds. Pp. 184-207. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. C. Shore & S. Wright, eds. Pp.xiii-xiv. New York: Routledge. 1997b Policy: a new field of anthropology. In Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. C. Shore and S. Wright, eds. Pp.3-39. New York: Routledge. Smith-Rosenburg, Carol 1989 The Body Politic. In Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. E. Weed, ed. Pp. 101121. New York: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn 1996 Cutting the network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.), 2:517-35. Tsing, Anna 2005 Frictions: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Bryan 1997 From governmentality to risk: some reflections on Foucaults contribution to medical sociology. In Foucault, Health and Medicine. A. Petersen and R. Bunton, eds. Pp.ixxxi. New York: Routledge.

Riles, Annelise 2001 The network inside out. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Roehr, Bob 2006 HPV vaccine for women nears approval, gay mens study lags. Gay & Lesbian Times, no. 963:16-16 Rose, Nikolas and Novas, Carlos 2002 Biological Citizenship. London: London School of Economics web site. www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/pdf/ roseandnovasbiologicalcitizenship.pdf, accessed January 30, 2009. Sanders, Todd 2008 Beyond bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sawicki, Jana 1991 Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, power and the body. New York: Routledge. Shore, Chris and Wright, Susan 1997a Preface and acknowledgments. In

Vanslyke, J.; Baum, J.; Plaza, V.; Otero, M.; Wheeler, C. and Helitzer, D. 2008 HPV and cervical cancer testing and prevention: knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes among Hispanic women. Qualitative Health Research, 18, (5):584-596. Wedel, Janine, Shore, Chris, Feldman, Gregory and Lathrop, Stacy 2005 Toward an Anthropology of Public Policy. ANNALS, AAPSS, 600:30-51.

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Michelle Wyndham-West is a

PhD candidate in the Social Anthropology department at York University. She is currently writing her dissertation. Her interdisciplinary research on the gendering of HPV, the vaccine and related policies in Ontario draws inspiration from post-structuralist social theory, social science approaches to risk and feminist praxis.

Prefigurative Politics & Anthropological Methodologies Niki Thorne

PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON

Abstract In this paper, I draw from my involvement and research with a small, grassroots project in liberatory education, Hamilton FreeSkool, in order to discuss anthropological practice and anarchist values. Building on indigenous and feminist critiques of research, as well as the works of anarchist scholars with regards to militant research, I touch on themes of anti-oppression, cultural critique, anti-capitalism as they relate to anthropological research. I suggest that anarchism and sociocultural anthropology have an already existing resonance and that combining facets of each has much to offer activists and scholars alike in terms of envisioning possibilities for social movements as well as for decolonizing research.

narchism, Power, Hierarchy, Oppression

In this paper, I explore possibilities for anthropological research by incorporating the values of my field site and research community (Hamilton anarchist community/Hamilton Freeskool) into methodological considerations, in response to concerns raised by feminist and indigenous critiques of research. Before describing how the anarchist ethics of my field site can contribute to anthropology, I draw from anarchist scholars and the words of friends (collected through fieldwork interviews) to demystify anarchism. Part of the beauty of anarchism is the multiplicity of possibilities for definition and actionsthere is no one way to define anarchist theory or practice. As George Woodcock has written: Anarchism, indeed, is both various and mutable, and in the historical perspective it presents the appearance, not of a swelling stream flowing on to its sea of destiny...but rather of water percolating through porous groundshere forming for a time a strong underground current, there gathering into a swirling pool, trickling through crevices, disappearing from sight, and then re-emerging where the cracks in the social structure may offer it a course to run. As a doctrine it changes constantly; as a movement it grows and disintegrates, in constant fluctuation, but it never vanishes (Woodcock 2004:18). Thatbeingsaid,thereareseveralthemesthatunite allanarchisms. As Greg noted during an interview a couple of summers ago on the patio of the Bread and Roses cafe of the Skydragon Centre, There are two basic ideas that unite all anarchisms: struggle against authority and struggle against hierarchy. The basis of united struggle against hierarchy, which translates most often to struggle against any kind of inequality, injustice, prejudice, violence, and struggle against authority...makes anarchism a hard thing to define but allows for so much creativity and alliance building. Every resistance against hierarchy that does not aim to establish a new hierarchy can be viewed as anarchistAnarchism doesnt belong to

Keywords Militant research, anarchism, decolonizing methodologies, anti-oppression, cultural critique, power, hierarchy

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 any elitist group of intellectuals it belongs to anyone refusing authority, anyone who is reclaiming land, fighting against racism, ableism, or sexism. (Thorne 2011). Another theme that unites many anarchisms, and of particular importance to anthropological methods, is the belief that the ends do not justify the meansthat we should be living our daily lives and acting in ways that are consistent with the way we want the world to be. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber writes about the importance of prefigurative politics, ...making ones form of organization in the present at least a rough approximation of how a free society would actually operate....above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means (Graeber 2004a:1). As an anonymous interviewee stated, To me, anarchism is a process, not an end goal one of dismantling hierarchy and asserting selfautonomy in organizing in constructive ways. This includes elements of how we lead our lives, our lifestyles, as well as the broader pictures of struggles we identify with and choose to engage in (Thorne 2011). How we live our lives, how we interact with other humans in the present, and how we engage in research should be done in a way that is consistent with our aims for a more egalitarian future premised on less oppressive and exploitative systems and relationships. Hamilton Freeskool, a project involving much of the Hamilton radical community, and founded with explicitly anarchist principles, cites anti-oppression and radical inclusivity within its main values: More than being merely tolerant, Freeskool aims to actively make our spaces diverse and safe for the expression of all identities. We believe this is essential to the learning process. Exposing and challenging unjust race, class, gender, age, ability, sexual orientation, experience, and other dynamics helps us to work towards a culture that values a wider range of truths. Radical inclusivity is a major challenge. There are social and structural barriers to many peoples involvement in education that must be overcome for the liberation and learning of us all. An anti-oppression analysis is a powerful tool that helps to include diverse populations and educate around issues of exclusion and privilege. It is a work always in progress. We must embrace discomfort and challenge our assumptions. It is the responsibility of each participant to self-facilitate our power, privileges, and oppressions (Hamilton Freeskool Manifesto1). By incorporating the values of my field site into anthropological considerations, I aim to contribute towards possibilities for anti-oppressive anthropology. Power and Hierarchy in Research How might these values and concerns relate to academic research, methods, and writing? Contemporary anarchisms draw much of their theory today from feminism, indigenous studies, peace studies, environmentalism, and other antioppressive theory and actions. In this section, I draw from feminist and indigenous critiques to think about power and hierarchy in research. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), indigenous writer and scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith situates and critically examines research in a historical, political and cultural context. She identifies research as a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other (1999:2). Smith criticizes research for treating methodologies and indigenous peoples together, in the same breath, without understanding the complex ways in which the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices (1999:2). She describes researchers as inquisitive and acquistive strangers (1999:3). Smith writes, At a common sense level research was talked about both in terms of its absolute
1Retrieved from www.hamiltonfreeskool.org on May 5

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument (1999:3). Undermining objective claims to truth, she writes, Research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions (1999:5). Smiths critique of research as objectifying finds echoes in all sorts of research with all sorts of human beings. Diane Wolf , in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, describes these dilemmas as revolving around power, often displaying contradictory, difficult and irreconcilable positions for the researcher (1996:2). She writes: The most central dilemma for contemporary feminists in fieldwork, from which other contradictions are derived, is power and the unequal hierarchies or levels of control that are often maintained, perpetuated, created, and re-created during and after field research. Power is discernible in three interrelated dimensions: (1) power differences stemming from different positionalities of the researcher and the researched (race, class, nationality, life chances, urban-rural backgrounds); (2) power exerted during the research process, such as defining the research relationship, unequal exchange, and exploitation; and (3) power exerted during the post fieldwork period writing and representing (1996:2). Anthropologists, in particular, have inherited linkages between early field work and colonialism (Asad 1973). Fieldwork in anthropology is often seen as a right of passage, though with recent critiques, and with the politicization of fieldwork, it is perhaps becoming more acceptable for anthropologists to engage in different models of fieldwork, including fieldwork at home. Though as Wolf notes, it is important to understand that the politicization of fieldworks history in anthropology has forced contemporary critical anthropologists to engage in it with more deliberate political considerations; anthropologists, particularly feminist anthropologists, have been at the forefront of experimenting with more ethical and less exploitative methods (1996:8). It is important to consider the observations of indigenous and feminist scholars regarding power and hierarchy in research for research of all kinds. Smith writes: ...the methodologies and methods of research, the theories that inform them, the questions which they generate and the writing styles they employ, all become significant acts which need to be considered carefully and critically before being applied. In other words, they need to be decolonized (1999:39). Additionally, as activist Peter Gelderloos notes about oppression, ...we have a responsibility to challenge oppression, because oppressive systems enlist us, willingly or unwillingly, as accomplices in their perpetuation, and we can not absolve ourselves of our participation simply by improving our attitude, or becoming colorblind, or blind in any other way. Oppression is a way that society is organized, and you cannot avoid it while remaining a member of society (Gelderloos 2005). Following this, and arguments like those made by Smith and Wolf, researchers have a responsibility to recognize and challenge privilege and oppression in research and writing. This should be considered not just in terms of research that works to adhere to anarchist principles of egalitarianism and challenging and dismantling hierarchy, but in the design, implementation and writing of all research. Possibilities for Anti-Oppressive, Radically Inclusive Research How have less oppressive research methodologies been envisioned to date? In Practising Anarchist Theory: Towards a Participatory Political Philosophy, anarchist theorist Uri Gordon calls for an activist grounded approach to theory and outlines possible roles for an anarchist philosopher. Gordon emphasizes the necessity of active participation in the movement being theorized,

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 which he terms embeddedness. He writes, ... both the people whose ideas and practices are examined and the people who are formulating theory on their basis must be involved in the process of theorizing (Gordon 2007:280). Rather than from above, the voice of the intellectual should come from within (Gordon 2007; Gullestad 1999). The production of knowledge should be intimately tied to social movement activity, and ideally results in knowledge that is useful to the social movement. In Gordons conception, an anarchist philosopher either begins from within the anarchist movement, or undergoes a process of absorption and integration, ...in any case, the result is that s/he is situated seamlessly within its networks (2007:281). Gordon writes, The role of the activist/philosopher is not simply that of an expert observer but primarily one of an enabler or facilitator, and the role of the participants is that of co-philosophers and co-activists (2007:282). Complementary to Gordons notion of the anarchist philosopher is the notion of militant research. There have been calls for a more militant or engaged anthropology that strives for social transformation. For example, in The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes critiques the role of anthropologist as observer distant from political engagement and in justifying moral and cultural relativism (1995). She calls rather for a more politically committed and morally engaged anthropology. Scheper-Hughes states with regards to her research in South Africa, ...a radical self-critique is a necessary precondition for recasting anthropology as a tool for human liberation... (1995:415). Militant research has somewhat differing and more specific connotations within anarchist theory. Militant Research is described in Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations// Collective Theorization as follows: Militant Research is not a specialized task, a process that only involves those who are traditionally thought of as researchers. It is an intensification and deepening of the political. Militant research starts from the understandings, experiences, and relations generated through organizing, as both a method of political action and as a form of knowledge. (Shukaitis & Graeber 2007:9). Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber write that revolutionary knowledge must be ...a pragmatic form of knowledge that lays bare all such pretensions; a form of knowledge deeply embedded in the logic of transformational practice (2007:12). As Tammy, a FreeSkool participant, facilitator, and organizer describes militant research in our Freeskool Zine, The Liberation of Knowledge: An Activist Approach to University, Research and Beyond, At the very least militant research implies a desire to witness change in the world, if not explicit involvement in actions aimed at bringing about said change. It involves the production of knowledge that is both relevant for militant ends, and done in a manner consistent with the aims of political militants. Practically speaking it is research for the revolution...the research militant is engaging with questions around concrete forms of social intervention (Kovich 2009:16). The purpose of militant research is to develop tools, frameworks, concepts, techniques and strategies that resonate with campaigns, initiatives and organizations (Van Meter 2008:2). Tammy also notes that militant research ... is explicitly political, and conducted with the intent of critically engaging with issues, ideas and concerns that are of relevance to ongoing social justice projects (Kovich 2009:20). Militant research has the following characteristics: To whatever extent is possible, militant research is done without objectification. Rather than a dichotomy between an active researcher and a passive subject, militant research aims for ... productive cooperation that transforms both into active participants in producing knowledge and in transforming themselves (Van Meter 2008:1). Militant research is motivated towards progressive social change, and is practical, applicable, and valuable to those engaged in struggles for social transformation (Colectivo Situationes 2007a:190). Additionally, militant research, like postmodern

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 and grounded theory trends in social science, is based on a rejection of certainties and goes beyond established boundaries, rather than framing issues within pre-existing categories and understandings, and in this way responds to other critiques of knowledge production. Colectivo Situationes writes, ...it is not so much a question of reacting when faced with already codified options as it is about producing the terms of the situation ourselves (2007a:195). Militant research produces knowledge beyond the logic of confrontation, seeking to construct alternative sociabilities and new values: If struggle does not alter the structure of meaning and values; we are only in the presence of a change of roles, which is a guarantee of survival for the structure itself (Colectivo Situationes 2007a:195). Also, mirroring current trends in anthropology towards reflexivity and engagement, militant research is grounded in radical criticism of existing values of both the self and the world. Lastly, militant research is prefigurative: it is carried out in a manner that is consistent with the values of the social movement. The manner in which knowledge is produced is as important as the content of the research. In terms of the possibilities for integrating anarchist ethic into anthropology more explicitly, we can begin by thinking about what anthropology already has in common with anarchism. Anarchism is concerned with questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about our cultures and envisioning and bringing into being alternatives. As Marcus and Fischer write with regards to cultural critique, The other promise of anthropology... has been to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves. In using portraits of other cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology disrupts common sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions (Marcus and Fischer 1986:1). Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber writes that there is ...something about anthropological thought in particularits keen awareness of the very range of human possibilitiesthat gave it an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning (2004b:13). As Graeber notes, anthropology is deeply embedded in the project of trying to understand the full range of what has been, and what is possible politically, economically, and socially. He states, In a way there has always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possiblethere have been many of them, and they work fine (Graeber 2006). In terms of possibilities and utopian imaginings he states, When you see anarchism in action and it works, it just changes your perception of whats possible in society and in life (Graeber 2006). In terms of the more concrete questionwhat is an anarchist anthropologist to doGraeber calls for low theory, versus a single high theory, which would be inimical to the spirit of anarchism. Low theory, rather, is a way to grapple with the immediate questions that emerge from transformative projects. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropologist, he describes ethnography as a rough, incipient model of how non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice might work (2004b:11). Graeber describes two aspects or moments to this project: one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in constant dialogue (2004b:12). In terms of the importance of utopianism and imagination: There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively)that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated productionand the ability to imagine social alternatives, particularly if that alternative is the possibility of a society which is itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity (2005:199). In terms of utopian possibilities, Hamilton FreeSkool is an example of alternate forms of social relations and organizing, showing by example that something else is possible, and that we can create it. As Holly, a FreeSkool participant stated: I hope that the people who didnt think something like this [Hamilton FreeSkool] could exist will also hear about it and that theres people out there that are doing this, andits really utopian and kind of wonderfulI hope thats the way the world will be

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 someday. And Im not saying that its perfect by any means but that theres something thats happening within all this other craziness thats sustainable and enriching and nourishing and that thats possible. And thats really beautiful and encouraging (Thorne 2011). Mirroring Uri Gordons emphasis on embeddedness, Graeber describes the activists ethnography that might be as examining movements to which one has, in fact, made some kind of commitment, in which one feels oneself a part. It would also have to be combined with a certain degree of utopian extrapolation: a matter of teasing out the tacit logic or principles underlying certain forms of radical practice and then not only offering the analysis back to those communities, but using them to formulate new visions (Graeber 2005:200). I drew from ideas about activist ethnography, militant research, and decolonizing methodologies in formulating my research with Hamilton Freeskool. My research centred around a project and which I am already actively engaged as a participant, facilitator, and organizer. My interviewees are friends and allies, and my methods have involved multiple steps for seeking ongoing consent. These checks provides opportunitie to mediate unequal power, hierarchy, as well as misrepresentations throughout all stages of research, including the process of interviews, analysis, and the final writing stages. After each interview, I passed my notes back to the interviewee as the first step in having ownership and control over his/her words. This gave each participant an opportunity to delete any words s/he had second thoughts about, or to clarify anything that was not expressed as clearly as s/he would have liked. It also provided an opportunity to double check about the framing of sensitive information, in terms of security culture. With regards to collaboration and consent during analysis, I checked in with each interviewee before using their words. I asked questions like, Is it okay if I quote you in this way? Does this fit with what you meant to say? Do you think this is a fair representation or analysis of this topic? Lastly, during the writing stages, I posted each section and chapter to a blog, and made changes throughout writing based on feedback and desires of those involved in Hamilton FreeSkool and the Hamilton anarchist community. Participants had final say in what was written and how, with regards to their words and our project. In contemplating feminist and indigenous critiques of research and the academy, anthropology, fieldwork and writing, and then delving deeper into anarchist possibilities for research, Ive fallen into thinking about how anarchism can challenge and transform activist anthropology. Using anthropological imaginings to make sense of and expand the possibilities of anarchism, and using anarchist imaginings to make sense of and expand the possibilities of anthropology has become this continuous interplay, a dual project that loops back on itselfanarchism and anthropology dovetail and continuously enrich each other in more ways than previously imagined. David Graeber writes, It means nothing to say you are an anarchist unless you are doing somethingones means must be consonant with ones endsas much as possible one must embody the society one wishes to create (Graeber 2005:194). I continue to explore possibilities in terms of resonances between anarchism and anthropology throughout my Masters research, inspired by a number of questions. What about embodying anarchist ideals in anthropological actions? Anthropologists have a start on reflexivity and positionality, but what about really integrating a decolonizing and anti-oppressive framework into reflexivity? What if in addition to questioning the deeply embedded assumptions, power, and hierarchy, and fighting for a better world, we did this in a way that was consistent with the desired ends? What if we embodied anti-oppressive values within our research methodologies, incorporating prefigurative politics into every conceivable aspect of research and writing? What if we could imagine and create an anti-oppressive, decolonizing anthropology dedicated to social transformation?

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009
September 5, 2009. References Asad, Talal, ed. 1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithica Press. Colectivo Situationes 2007a On the Researcher-Militant. In Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization. Mark Cote, Richard J.F. Day & Greig De Peuter. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Colectivo Situationes 2007b Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes on Procedures and (In)Decisions. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, eds. Oakland: AK Press. Gelderloos, Peter 2005 What We Mean by Oppression. http://tribes. tribe.net/b78b2346-5726-4f65-9854c99dfbc4c099/thread/a2b0a862-b87f-4eb2-b26194b861668a6c, accessed October 5, 2009. Gordon, Uri 2007 Practicing Anarchist Theory: Towards a Participatory Political Philosophy. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, eds. Oakland: AK Press. Graeber, David 2004a Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-first Century. http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticlePrint/9258, accessed May 20, 2009. Graeber, David 2004b Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2005 The Auto-Ethnography that Can Never Be and the Activists Ethnography that Might Be. In Auto-Ethnographies: The Anthropology of Academic Practice. Anne Meleley and Donna J. Young, eds. Peterborough: Broadview Press. 2006 A Conversation with Anarchist David Graeber about Anthropology. http://www. charlierose.com/view/interview/473, accessed Hamilton Freeskool 2009 FreeSkool Hamilton Manifesto. http://www. hamiltonfreeskool.org/manifesto, accessed April 11, 2009. Kovich, Tammy 2009 The Liberation of Knowledge: An Activist Approach to University, Research and Beyond. Hamilton: Hamilton Freeskool DIY Zine Press. Routledge, Paul 2009 Toward a Relational Ethics of Struggle: Embodiment, Affinity and Affect. In Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Reader of Anthropology and the Academy. Randall Amster, Abraham DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II & Deric Shannon, eds. Pp. 82-92. London: Routledge. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1995 The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. In Current Anthropology 36(3):409-420 Shukaitis, Stevphen, and David Graeber, eds. 2007 Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization. Oakland: AK Press. Thorne, Catherine 2011 An Experiment in Liberation Fuelled by Love Hamilton FreeSkool, Prefigurative Politics & Anthropological Practice Tuhiwai Smith, Linda 1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Zed Books. Van Meter, Keven 2008 What is Militant & Co-Research? Portland: Grassroots Media Camp. Wolf, Diane 1996 Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork. Boulder: Westview Press.

the Department of Social Anthropology at York University, Toronto, ON.

53 | Niki Thorne

Niki Thorne is a 1st year PhD Candidate in

Surprises and trends revealed during the fieldwork Marta Silva

Abstract This paper is based on my Master`s fieldwork. In particular, it focuses on the challenges that I faced at my field site: what if everything you planned goes wrong? What if the strategy you conceived to gather information cannot be put into practice? What if your main informant has other interests and his own perspective on how you can fit into his/ her projects? My experience reminded me of Evans-Pritchards fieldwork wisdom. In his classic book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, he argues that an anthropologist needs to be opened to be guided by what he finds in the society he chooses to study. In his particular case, for instance, he was not interested in studying witchcraft, but the Azande were, so he had to let himself be guided by them. Therefore, inspired by EvansPritchard, this paper seeks to contribute to discussions about the challenges and the changes that can occur during the fieldwork.
PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at York University, Toronto, ON

he purpose of this paper is to provide a reflection about the difficulties, the challenges and the changes that can occur during the fieldwork. What if everything you planned goes wrong after you arrive at your field site? This paper is based on my own experience: the issues I will present emerged during the fieldwork I did for my Master`s research. The purpose of my Masters thesis was to investigate the emergence of a new form of Indigenous activism in Brazil. This Indigenous activism is fostered by empowerment projects related to audiovisual production and performed by young Indigenous moviemakers. In my first fieldwork trip, I followed The Brazilian Indian Video Festival. The program included seminars, film exhibitions, debates, a photographic exhibition and a basic audiovisual production workshop directed towards young members of Brazilian Indigenous peoples. Twenty young people participated in this workshop to obtain basic knowledge about cinema, documentaries and photography, and to learn how to register and edit their own images. I was the only nonIndigenous person in attendance. During the workshop, everybody received me extremely well. I was also extremely fortunate: in the second day of the workshop, one of the organizers said to me that because all the Indigenous students were staying in the same hotel and occupied many rooms, the owner had offered an extra room for free. Since everything was set up and they didnt have an extra person to occupy that room, she asked if I would be interested and offered the room to me... In addition to not having to pay for my room, I had the privilege of staying in the same hotel as the Indigenous students, of sharing meals with them, and of going to the workshop in the same bus with them. Therefore, I had many opportunities to talk to them and to establish connections. After the workshop finished, two of the 20 students that attended the workshop continued to develop a project related to audiovisual production. They worked together, with one directing and the other producing and performing in the movie. They produced a short movie about Indigenous students in public universities and they conceived of two other projects: one related to land issues and another focusing on the elder people of their community. Exchanging emails with

Keywords 54 | Marta Silva Fieldwork, anthropological research, indigenous audiovisual production

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 them, I found out that they would exhibit their movie about Indigenous students for the first time during a conference they were organizing. I asked if I could follow their work related to the new projects and if I could go to the conference. They agreed and the one who directed the movies agreed to meet me before the conference. When I asked for information about where to stay, such as suggested hotels, he suggested that I send an email to someone from their university who knew more about these details. I wrote the email, but the person never replied. So, I planned my second fieldwork trip without this help and flew to my field site, thinking that I would go to the conference and follow the work of my informants. In fact, I didnt manage to do any of these things... I arrived in the city where the conference would take place. First surprise: where was my informant? He didnt arrive, but I went to the conference anyway. The movie produced by the Indigenous students was exhibited in the beginning of the opening ceremony of the conference. After the opening ceremony, I managed to find the other Indigenous student who produced and performed in the movie. Since the other days of the conference would take place in another location, I asked for some directions. He asked a person from his university for this information and to my surprise, she said I could not go. It would not be an open event: only Indigenous people and a few researchers were allowed to go. I said that I had got permission from two of the organizers, so she sent me to talk to another person from the university, who sent me to talk to another person and so on, until I finally met the person to whom I had sent the email before travelling. Her answer was very direct: Yes, I got your email. Yes, I didn`t reply. No, you cannot go. But I came from far away just to attend this event! I have permission from two of the organizers. Sorry. It`s only for Indigenous people... Ok then... I thought to myself: ok, I didnt manage to get to the event, or to follow the debates, but at least I saw the movie... I traveled to the city where my main informant lives. At 11 p.m. on the day I arrived, I was in my pyjamas, working on my field work notes, when the phone rang. It was from the hotel hall: There is a person here who wants to talk to you. It was my informant. Ok, Im going down, I said. I got ready quickly and met him in the hotel hall. To my surprise, he said: Im not doing any movie now because I have a problem and you are the only person that can help me... Im finishing my Undergraduate Studies and I need to write my thesis. I have only two weeks to write it, the deadline is coming... Can you help me? I was surprised, but I was also glad to be asked to help in this way, because it was something that I felt I could do. I had written two theses for my Communication Undergraduate Studies, and I had a major in Journalism which developed my writing skills. Therefore, the next day, I went with my informant to the Indigenous Research Centre at his university, because he had a computer there to work. By coincidence, when I arrived there, I saw the woman who did not allow me to enter the event... She worked in the Indigenous Research Centre. My informant presented me to the coordinator of the Centre. He was extremely friendly: From which university are you? (I said the name of the university) Oh! Who is your advisor? Oh! He`s a very good friend of mine! What are you researching here? (I explained) 55 | Marta Silva (I said his name)

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 You know, we just came from an event that would be really interesting for you... (He said the name of my informant), he presented a film there! How come you didnt know about that? I actually knew and I tried to go to this event, but unfortunately, I didnt get the permission to. How come? Who didnt allow you to go? If you had talk to me, you would go! I felt a little bit frustrated to find out that I could have attended the event if I had met him before, but also amused by the irony of the situation. However, I understood later that I was actually fortunate: even though my experiences during this second fieldwork trip were totally different from what I planned, they revealed important issues that I would not have noticed if everything worked as planned. Being disallowed to attend the event, despite having the permission of two Indigenous organizers, showed me that Indigenous students were established as organizers and decision-makers in official discourse, while in reality the decisions were made by the professors and researchers of the Indigenous Research Centre at the university that the Indigenous students attended. This observation led to important reflections for my research. Struggling to understand why the researchers of the Indigenous Research Centre wanted to depict Indigenous students as the leaders of the event (in the conference announcement, only the name of the Indigenous students appeared as the organizers), I understood that it was related to the current representation of empowerment projects in Brazil: they are supposed to work in partnership with Indigenous groups in a way that makes them autonomous. This is opposed to the previous paternalistic approach. The shift happened in the 70s and 80s when representations of Indigenous populations shifted from primitive and incapable to icons of ecological knowledge and sustainability. Nevertheless, as I observed in this case, even though many projects were discursively rooted in a partnership and autonomy model, they continued to demonstrate a paternalistic attitude to Indigenous populations. The fact that my informant could not produce his movie and instead requested my help for his thesis could, at a first glance, be seen as a deviation from my research, but it was actually extremely helpful for me. It gave me access to the Indigenous Research Centre at the university he attended. Because I was helping my informant, I had to go there every day and had the opportunity to do participant observation, as well as many interviews with other Indigenous students, professors and researchers. Besides that, it also gave me plenty of time with my informant. Conclusion My goal in this paper was to contribute to discussions about the surprises and new trends revealed during the fieldwork. My experience led me to understand the fieldwork wisdom of Evans-Pritchard, elaborated in his classic book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. In the 4th appendix of the book (Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork), he points out that an anthropologist must be opened to be guided by what he finds in the society he chooses to study. He illustrates his assumption explaining that in his particular case, he was not interested in studying witchcraft, but the Azande were, so he had to let himself be guided by them. In my case, I realized that while I had plans for my fieldwork research trip, and placed my main informant into these plans, he also had his own interests and perspective on how I could fit into his projects. This experience showed me that the fieldwork is a constant negotiation, an exchange, in which each part is in a position in which it can bring improvements for the other part. I am glad that in my experience this exchange was beneficial for both parts. In my case, this exchange resulted not only in changes in the direction of my research, but also affected the way I see fieldwork, anthropology and myself as an anthropologist.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009

References Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marta Silva is a 2nd year PhD student in Social

Anthropology at York University, Toronto, ON.

57 | Marta Silva

Disability Fieldwork: What Disabled Fieldworkers Bring to the Field and Leave Behind Athena Goodfellow
PhD Candidate, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON

Abstract This paper takes interest in the complexities involved when the researcher undertakes fieldwork with subjects that share the same disability. First, this paper considers how the researchers dissatisfaction with the dominant literatures approach to disability has informs their methodological stance. Then, this paper puts forth ethnical questions with regards to the researcher-researched relationship that surfaced will conducting fieldwork, which explored experiences of inclusion/exclusion for students with learning disabilities.

his paper is set with the purpose to explore the paradox involved in fieldwork when both the researcher and the researched share the same social afflictions when the topic hits close to the fieldworkers home. Here, my interest is on the disability field. I do not intend to speak, however, as the united voice of those conducting research in this field, nor do I intend to present, more specifically, the voices of numerous researchers within this field that hold a disability label. Rather, I speak exclusively from my experience of conducting fieldwork entitled Looking through the LD Lens: Inclusive Education and the Learning Disability Embodiment. This fieldwork set out to explore the perceptions of inclusion at school for 4 participants (3 males and 1 female) that were indentified with the same disability label as me: learning disabled (LD). This papers purpose is twofold. In the first section, I discuss the value that researchers with disabilities bring to the field. In order to do so, I explore how my own experience with disability led to: (a) critical analysis the existing literature on inclusive education, and (b) an innovative methodological approach. Furthermore, I will briefly share some interesting data that I collected from my study. The second portion of this presentation examines what I left behind in the field. I look at some of the murky ethical issues that I encountered as result of sharing the same disability as my participants. Thus I suggest that despite the value that fieldworkers with disabilities bring to the field, all researchers (both with and without disability labels) must be conscious of what we bring and leave behind in the fields. Critique of the Existing Literature In the past year, I set out to examine the current literature available on inclusive education for students with learning disabilities. My analysis yielded two major criticisms with regards to the ontological and epistemological trends of the literature.

58 | Athena Goodfellow

Keywords Disability, methodology, fieldwork

Oliver (1992) notes that disability scholar disenchantment with traditional research approach: stems from the gradual rejection of the positivist view of social research as the pursuit of absolute

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 knowledge through scientific methods and the gradual disillusionment with the interpretive view of such research as the generation of socially useful knowledge within a particular historical and social contexts (quoted in Barnes & Mercer 1997:16). In this way, I was disappointed that the education literature measured the effectiveness of inclusive education by simply comparing, for instance, the academic performance between pupils with and without learning disabilities. Furthermore, I was frustrated that the literature failed to account for the complexities involved in negotiating a SPED kid1 label or other pejorative disability labels and how this might influence academic performance. My second major criticism of the educational literature called into question the epistemological objectivity that transforms students with LDs into passive research subjects (Abberly 1987). The participants passivity is evident in the prominence of survey and interviewing methods in the literature. Like many disability scholars, I was critical of how these approaches omitted the researchers positionality and largely accepted rather than challenged the disempowerment of disabled research subjects (Priestley 1997: 89). For example, Seymour (1995) conducted interviews to explore students with learning disabilitysglobal perception of self rather than empower students to explore and examine the social and political barriers at their school. In this instance, I was particularly critical of survey design. Aware of how my impairment influences my ability to accurately read and write, I question the reliability of survey data in representing the true opinions of participants. This is especially
1 An explanation of this label would be helpful for the reader: SPED refers to Special Education.

the case when participants interpretation and response to survey question might be swayed by their learning difficulties. These criticisms are largely rooted in my own experience of learning with an LD and appreciating the complexities of creating inclusivity within the local school system. These experiences informed my research design insofar as I strived towards meaningfully including students with LDs into the research process through visual methodology to allow their voice to be heard.

Figure 1. Marks photograph of the Student of the Month board posted in front of the school office.

Methodology selection My dissatisfaction with the literature led me to abandon a scientific methodological approach one where an objective party enters with benevolence to a new research territory and adopt an artistic approach where I move about the field with a level of systematic creativeness. In doing so, I decided to couple focus-group discussion with an artistic-infused methodology for my fieldwork. This approach provided the forum for participants to photograph, digitally manipulate and analyze inclusionary/exclusionary spaces at their secondary school. My own experience living with a learning disability taught me that what I want to convey is often limited by in what I write or say. For me, an artistic methodology offered an opportunity for the participants to deconstruct and communicate complex ideas and emotions with greater fluidly using visual media. I would like to share with you, briefly, some of the findings this approach yielded. Figure 1 is

59 | Athena Goodfellow

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 a common sight in many Canadian secondary schools: the Student of the Month board. Every month, Westend Secondary will select four students to be showcased, who are displayed in front of the schools main office for all students, staff and visitors to observe. Despite the intended purpose of Student of the Month board, this educational artifact is, from the participants perspective, a constant reminder that their academic achievements and personal efforts have fallen under the administrative radar. Rather than viewing this learning space as an acknowledgement of the student bodys success, it personifies, as Amy suggests,...like all the people that didnt quite make it at something ( Cite your research: Goodfellow 2009). According to Dale, another participant, this photograph symbolizes the schools lack of recognition for students whom hold membership to the DD group (Goodfellow 2009). It is noteworthy to mention that, based upon the Ontario Ministry of Educations definition, the DD acronym makes reference to students that are diagnosed as Developmentally Disabled. None of the participants, however, are diagnosed as such by the school. Nevertheless, Dale uses such terminology freely: Dale: We never, like the DD kids, no offense to anyone here we never get recognized. Researcher: Yeah? Dale: So I could take our four pictures and put them right under that and say yeah, were the students of the month now, what do you think about that Mr. Principal I already, I already told my principal that I am a goof2 and I have only met him twice (Goodfellow 2009). It is evident that Dale perceives school authorities as unawareeven oppositionalto his success. In fact, he chose to self-label as a goof when speaking to his principal. As shown in this narrative, he uses this term directly after he delegitimized the DD kids from being acknowledged
2 The dictionary definition of goof refers to a mistake; a foolish or stupid person (Webster, 2009).

by the Student of the Month award. This delegitimization gives the impression that his identification as a goof indefinitely precludes him for any prospective recognition. This can be interpreted as Dale reproducing negative stereotypes of his embodiment as learning disabled. He has internalized the devaluation of his learning disability to the extent that he affirms a pejorative label even with unfamiliar authority figures. Dale seeks to reproduce, what he believes to be, his embodied LD identityor, more appropriately, goof and DD identity in new and existing educational spaces. I felt privileged that the participants were generous with their experiences. In fact, the participants warmly welcomed discussion and requested numerous times to extend our session in order to continue the focus group discussions. Needless to say, I felt as though this valuable data was entangled in ethical and practical dilemmas. Ethical and practical conundrums for the disabled fieldworker For the last two decades, disability scholars have loudly and proudly advocated for the inclusion of the disability community in the research process. Linton (1998) has stressed a growing concerned of scholars with regards to the place of disabled persons in research: the most fundamental problem, though, is that disabled people voices are almost completely absent from the [research] picture, and so the understanding of disabled peoples place in these situations is filtered through the experience of people who have never been in that place (37). Entering the field, I was proud that my study would be with rather than for or on disabled people [emphasis original](Goodley 1999:27). Introspectively, however, I realize that I was nave to have assumed that researchers with disabilities experience the field would in either homogenous or straightforward ways. I would like to present here some of the ethical points of contention for the researcher with

60 | Athena Goodfellow

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 disabilities. I do not attempt to answer in absolute terms these questions nor do I feel anyone of these questions could be adequately responded given time constrains. Rather, I open these questions to the audience for your analytical interpretation. I would encourage you to reflect as whether these questions are unique for the fieldworker with disabilities or can be generally applied to all researchers in the field. Furthermore, I would ask of you pose these questions from the point of view of both the researcher and the researched. (a) Did my disclosure provide them with a (false) sense of emotional security? For instance, would the participants been willing to tell me how retarded they felt in class had they believed I was a normal student during high school years? (b) Did my disclosure induce a desire embellish their disablement in an effort to gain social credibility with me and/or among their focus group peers? (c) my critic of social barriers? Do I share personal strategies that I believe would improve the participants social circumstance? What impact will this information or the lack thereof impact their future life decisions?

(g) How should sensitive information that being revealed during the fieldwork be dealt with when it strike a painful memory for me? Should I omit to avoid bias; or deconstruct as it can be seen as valuable information?

(h) From a practical sense, how does my reading and writing impairment influence the transcription and, to some degree, analysis of the data? Similarly, how does the participants impairment influence the quality of the information they share? Conclusion Reflecting upon these ethical issues discussed above, I would like to conclude this presentation by addressing the following question: what capacity does the fieldworker with a disability bring value to the field and, also, what the fieldwork might leave behind? I argue here that the fieldworker with disability bring as much to the field as we leave behind. For better or worse, my critic of the literature is fueled in part by my own lived experience. It is my conviction, however, that this critic and my out of the box thinking, which is often attributed to my LD, led to a conceptualization and design of a novel artistic methodological approach. This approach combined with my disclosure provided the participants a forum where they could express their perspective via both art and spoken word, and with the safety from alienation or feeling othered for their shared experiences. Nevertheless, I caution that researchers with disabilities face a unique set of ethical obstacles that must be kept at the forefront of the fieldworks mind. We need to known that the infusing our passion and expertise in research with repertoire of personal experiences will, for better or worse, inform our studys aim, our methodological approach, the collection and analysis of our data. Most importantly, we also, for

(d) What are the politics involved in displaying empathy to their oppression or attempt to remain objective? How does this influence my studys credibility is diverse fields?

How does my shared personal experience influence my nonverbal cues such as laughter or facial expression? And, had this contaminated the research data or impact its validity?

(f) Should I share (at the end of my study)

61 | Athena Goodfellow

(e) Is it necessary or sufficient to disclose my disability when I entering the field? In other words, is it necessary that I disclose my disability, even when working with a population that may not have the same type of disability as me? How does the discrepancy between my and the participants personal experiences influence our collegial bond?

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 better of worse, have the potential to profoundly impact how the participants reexamine their social circumstance.

References Abberley Paul. 1987 The concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability. Disability, Handicap and Society 2 (1): 519. Goodley, Dan. 1999 Disability Research and the Researcher Template: Reflections on Grounded Subjectivity in Ethnographic Research. Qualitative Inquiry 5(24): 24-46. Linton, Simi. 1998 Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University Press. Priestley, Mark. 1997 Whos Research? A Personal Audit, In Doing Disability Research. Colin Barnes & G Mercer, eds. Pp. 89106 Leeds: Disability Press.

62 | Athena Goodfellow

Psychological Health Research: Can Disability Studies and Psychology Co-exist? Kaley Maureen Roosen, MA
Doctoral Student Clinical Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON

Abstract The aim of this paper is to study the psychological, social and political implications that can occur when a member of the disability community engages in the participation and introduction of research pertaining to the psychological health status of disabled persons. I propose that psychology can potentially offer a much needed service to the disability community in terms of research and psychological services. However, the challenge becomes shifting the established power differential within psychological research. Is it enough to have individuals with disabilities doing research on persons with disabilities? I will also discuss the complications that arise when the subjects problems closely resemble the researchers problems and the participants complaints about questionnairebased research are similar to my own woes within my own field as I struggle create changes to the structure and process of data collection.

s a clinical psychology student, the field is a complicated mix of clinical work, assessment, therapy, diagnosing, educating, listening, empathizing, and research aimed at understanding and uncovering the mysteries of human behaviour. All these duties encompass a complexly fused definition of what the field is; how do I, the individual, interact with this field? As a person with a physical disability, I can now acknowledge that my interest in psychology and disability stems from my own experiences; my personal frustrations with society, my own self and body and my hopes for an inclusive and empowering future for persons with disabilities. Although I do believe that having a passion for your research and clinical practice is essential, I have also come to realize this personal relationship comes riddled with conflict. Furthermore, the field of psychology research and clinical practice has a deeprooted history of idealizing objectivity as the goal (of research). The concept of objectivity manifests in the idea that the researcher is impartial and nonbiased. Double-blind research studies are the ideal within this conceptual format. The therapist is a blank slate and does not bring personal issues into the therapeutic allianceBut is this even possible? Can a personal passion not also be seen as an advantage? And how does one respond when the personal becomes too personal? How does one define this line? To begin, I will present a recent description of my recent fieldwork and the conflicts that arise when the personal becomes the topic of research and clinical work. Through many years of researching depression, social support, pain, eating disorders, I became increasingly disturbed by the lack of research on persons with disabilities. Every psychology text-book vehemently describes the importance of being aware of culture, and describes all the cultures to keep in mind. Always, there is a blatant disregard for the complexities of disability culture: It is not mentioned. The research that is detailed within these guides focuses on using disability as a comparison to the norm, as an example used to define whether an intervention is successful. The goal is to prevent disabilityIf you become disabled, you lose! As such, health is the absence of disability where disability correlates with everything negative. Psychology has been described as a

Keywords Psychology, rehabilitation, ethics, field-work

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 pathologising, voyeuristic, individualizing, impairment-obsessed discipline that has contributed to the exclusion of people with impairments (Goodley & Lawthan 2005:136). When I entered into psychology seven-yearsago, I did so with no knowledge of this criticism. What do you mean, I thought? Psychology and psychologists help people and I want to help people; therefore, I am becoming a psychologist. However, experience has taught me differently and now I find myself at a crossroads. I still love the following aspects of psychology: 1) the idea of understanding the humanity of a person and facilitating personal growth and existential self actualization, 2) the idea that you cant get to where you are going until you understand and experience where you have been, and 3) the romanticism that everyone has a story and even the most despicable of humans can be understood and empathized with. I still love all these psychological ideals, but I cant ignore the politics and the practical assertions that come with the territory of being a disabled researcher in psychology and trying to be competitive but also socially conscious. As an example, I will go through my recent research experience working at a rehabilitation hospital and attempt to point out examples of how the personal became a conflict in the field. As I mentioned previously, inspired through my annoyance with the lack of psychological references to disability in any state, unless as a comparison to what doesnt work, I wanted to do relevant disability related research. I wanted to combine psychological issues with physical ones and contribute to the literature and research for disabled people. My motivations to follow this trajectory emerged partly due to my own experiences with medical doctors who focused so much on my physical state that I felt my emotional needs were stifled. As a result, I began to work more within the health field, in a hospital. However, it has been my experience that some professionals question the appropriateness for researchers with disabilities to work with disabled persons. I was encouraged to could keep an emotional distance But wait a minute, is this even possible? How could I keep emotional distance? What if I could offer some suggestion to an individual struggling through a confusing system that I may have already wondered through? Wouldnt my passion for disability and personal experience guide me more than hold me back? I guess I would have to start the position to find out. The position I took was as a research assistant. My duties included calling individuals with severe mobility impairments and asking them to answer questionnaire-based surveys about their health status, how much care-giving help they need, their subjective and objective quality of life and how much their disability cost our society. It is difficult to think of ones existence as costly. The rewarding, yet often frustrating part about research is the fact that it always attempts to have an impact socially. The broader impact of this study is clear: We need to show persons with disabilities as suffering. The more they are using health care dollars, the more they are suffering, the greater the social burden they are, the more research and clinical funding the government will distribute to support them. If we did more realistic research, or perhaps changed our perspective to examine the positive aspects of disability, can you imagine how happy political bureaucrats would be? They might ask questions like: If they are doing so well, why do we need to give money for research to help them? Why do we need to fund charitable organizations like March of Dimes if in fact they are able to help themselves? Whats the point of putting money into health services for persons with disabilities if they are healthy and happy? Even while I was surveying these people, I cringed. The questions began with a long list of health problems and participants were asked to indicate how much the health problems interfered with their life. Then they were asked questions regarding how satisfied participants were with their life. The most common answer, Well, I am in a wheelchair, so what do you think? Or, I am happy with my life if I wasnt in a wheelchair and this often results with an initial refusal to provide a rating, and thus the clinician encourages a response or the data is not usable. The clinician

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 in me wants to agree with the participants. I want to respond, These questions are difficult. I understand, It sounds like you are having a hard time in some aspects of your life and not others which makes these extremely black and white questions difficult to reconcile But the researcher in me pushes on: Ok, if you had to pick a number from 1 to 7 based on how satisfied with your life, what would it be? This can often result in a lower number. They dont feel privileged enough to pick a high number for they feel that they live their life in a wheelchair is reason enough for them to be dissatisfied. In a way, who am I to judge their happiness? I myself find my life worthwhile and productive as a member of a disadvantaged population. However, these individuals put my own limitations at the forefront of my awareness and I find myself questioning my own positive view on life and subsequently, experience difficulties relaying these negative outcomes. In another way, perhaps a more significant way, I get frustrated with what I perceive to be societal internalization that a disabling embodiment is, by definition, not as fulfilling or satisfying as a non-disabling embodiment. And the research questions continue to baffle the constituents. For example, consider a question which asks a person with a physical disability how mobile they are, are not -or rather may never be. It reads, During the past four weeks, have you been able to run, jump, walk and bend without difficulty? Yes or No. This scale examines the level an individual matches the ideal perception of how a functioning member of society should behave (i.e., going to work and participating in the community). It was used primarily for assessing quality of life based on very straightforward questions of mobility, sensory acuity, psychological functioning and presence or absence of pain through very ablest assumptions. Who says quality of life is based on how much newsprint you can read? How much you are able to run, walk, jump or bend? Or, how often you are feeling fretful, angry, irritable, anxious or upset? This is clearly an example of a powerful cultural and social system normalizing views of what it means to be healthy and hence Happy, successful and a proud level of quality of life. And, no matter how you frame the questions, it inherently will portray persons without the ability to walk, bend, jump or jump without difficulty as suffering, as having a very low quality of life and as being unhealthy. And what were the initial results of the questionnaires I administered? Well, a quality-oflife-score of zero represents no quality of life. Our results that represented the responses of persons with disabilities were close to zero. In other words, our participants have such an incredibly low quality of life that, according to this survey, they are doing worse than a deceased person or in other more evocative language, our participants specifically, people with disabilities, feel as though they are better off being dead. Talk about results having a large societal impact! I guess if you want people to think you are suffering and the government health-care spending agencies to believe that you are a costly group of people who are living but feel as though they would be better off dead then this is a great result. Part of me thinks its necessary for this type of result to be made public because perhaps if we treated their health conditions with more compassion, they would have a better quality of life. On the other hand, how frustrating! Is this our only way of getting the support we need to live from bureaucrats? By showing us as pathetic helpless people suffering from our medical conditions? Evidently, in order to secure additional and continued health care funding from government agencies, disabled people must negotiate how they are perceived by others, thereby, often reinforcing stereotypes of vulnerability and helplessness. You will notice my language changed just now from participants to us because I am not an objective observer. I get emotional when I am interviewing these people. I do empathize with them that these questions are difficult and do not apply to real life people, but I still insist they pick a number on the scale. This project challenges my own passion for research as I view research as a potential avenue to promote systemic change. I want to be a successful researcher so that when I have my own lab, getting there by publishing and following the politics of being a grad student, I can change this research practice

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 to be more systemic. Can we not show these participants as not being victims of their medical conditions, but victims of a disabling society? One that does not hire them for jobs, so they are stuck at home answering questionnaires from researchers like me; one that does not give them enough attendant support services so that they have to live in homes or rely on their family to help them and again cant work? And, can we not show how we do not have enough adequate transportation to allow them to become fully functioning members of a community? And so on. How would government funding services respond to this type of research? These are the multiple questions that I hope more experience will answer. Besides the research aspect of my work, I am also training to be a clinical psychologist. I want to be a therapist. I want to co-construct new meaning of embodiment in disabled persons lives, and also in nondisabled persons lives. I am early in my career, but have already starting thinking about the therapeutic implications of myself, a disabled person, wanting to work with disabled clients. In many respects, I dont see any issues and mostly notice the benefits of being able to really connect with another individual who is also disabled. We are both members of the same crip culture; we are both victims of societal discrimination and degradation; and we are both victims of disabling barriers. Additionally, we are both members of a community pushed through the medical system and both struggle with medical identities and realities, such as pain. It is fairy similar to a client preference to seeing a therapist from a similar cultural or ethnic or religious background. This cultural pairing is overwhelmingly supported in psychology circles, it even has a label: Multicultural Counselling. However, the idea of a disabled counselor with a disabled client is not widely supported. Counter-transference is a psychoanalytic term used to describe when a therapist reacts to the personal attributes of a client because he or she has not yet dealt with the psychological turmoil of their own life. Disability has a long history in psychology as being psychologically pathological. Freud once described persons with physical disabilities as being unable to be psychoanalyzed because they cannot ever fully overcome their ego defenses because it would be too much of a psychic crisis to admit the overwhelming tragic nature of their existence (Freud 1920). Following Freud, there has been many examples of psychologists describing disabled persons as difficult to treat and inherently pathological (e.g. Fow 1998). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a disabled therapist is seen as unable to fully help another with a disability as he or she is not a fully functioning psychological person. How can he or she help another person with a disability without stimulating a psychic crisis within themselves? I personally dont believe this. Sure, I acknowledge that I probably will have a more personal reaction to disabled persons who resemble my own situation, but I anticipate a unique experience from every client, disabled or not and my role is to immerse myself into their personal experience to facilitate emotional growth. One area where I do anticipate conflict to emerge is the attempt to hold back my own personal beliefs that society has such an intense negative message about disability; it is difficult for disabled persons not to internalize this message. As I myself become aware of how much I have internalized this message and allowed it to influence my own being, how can I help clients see how they have internalized it? I often found myself wanting to yell at my research participants when I asked them about their satisfaction with life. They would answer, Well I am in a wheelchair, what do you think my life is like? I was tempted to respond, Well so am I and I dont feel that being in a wheelchair means a person has a hopeless life. But who am I to push my own beliefs onto others? I do not want to assume power over another individual by promoting a view that perhaps I, the therapist, have insiders knowledge on what is the better way to view the world. However, part of me feels like perhaps I can help them to realize that they are internalizing this negative societal message. The problem becomes that I am then demonstrating a paternalistic-like moral position that sets the standards for how others should think, feel and exist.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 My clinical and research fieldwork within clinical psychology has been riddled with issues, conflicts and moral conundrums that have challenged my own identity as a future clinical psychologist, future researcher and a socially conscious disabled person. And although I am left with more questions than answers at this point in my career and life experience, I am grateful for these practical experiences. Without the complicated fieldwork, I would still be going into this life choice thinking in ideal terms that I was going to save other disabled people through research and counseling, when really I am the one who needed savingSocially conscientious and awareness type saving! Now I can see fieldwork and the emotional, social, psychological, and political journey as opportunities for personal growth as a person and a researcher and clinician. Can I combine my ideal world of psychological self-actualization and humanistic emotional growth with critical disability examination and objections? I would like to believe so, and I know that my research and my practice will ultimately have to have a critical disability slant. I can no longer accept that my perspective can be represented without knowledge of the societal impact that every action I undertake has and thus every sense of embodiment I have had, has been influenced by it. And in the end, I think that is the real resolution: the knowledge that there is no answer except to continue to be aware and grow with experience in a way that you can be true to your own passion and self.

Goodley, D., & Lawthom, R. 2005 Epistemological journeys in participatory action research: alliances between community psychology and disability studies. Disability & Society 20: 135-151.

Kaley Roosen is a 2nd Year PhD student in

Clinical Psychology at York University, Toronto, ON.

References Fow, N. R. 1998 Supportive psychotherapy and psychological adjustment to physical disability. Journal of Applied Rehabilitation Counseling 29: 20-24.. Freud, S. 1920 The libido theory and narcism. In A general introduction to psychoanalysis. Pp. 356371. New York, NY: Horace Liveright.

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The sound of home: Implications of living in the field Samantha Breslin, MA

Department of Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, NL

Abstract This paper explores how conducting ethnographic research at home brings into question the notion of the field as a distinct place where fieldworkers go to undertake fieldwork. It is based on my fieldwork with musicians who play traditional Irish and Newfoundland music at sessions in St. Johns, Newfoundland. I show how my participation as a player of this music in a private session known as Fiddle Group, before, during, and after my official fieldwork project, complicated this conception. I consider some ethical and practical dilemmas for fieldworkers and participants in understanding one another that are foregrounded by these complexities. I argue, however, that these problems are common to much ethnographic fieldwork. As such, they need to be discussed, rather than hidden behind ideas of the field as an other place.

It was a warm and clear night, really quite gorgeous. I felt happy and somewhat excited on the way over to the session at the Georgetown pub to play some tunes and also do fieldwork. I entered the pub, found a seat around the table and set up my flute, joining in with what was being played. As I was in the middle of playing a tune I noticed David, one of my anthropology professors, come in. I didnt quite do a double take, but I certainly had to think about it to make sure it was him. I waved and smiled and went back to playing. After looking at him a few times, when a tune came up that I didnt know I got up to say hi. I was trying to figure out why he was at the session, knowing that I was there doing fieldwork. He asked me how my research was going and what kind of tunes we play. I said he should bring his fiddle, even though I knew this would make him a potential research participant. He said it was in the car but he was just going sit and listen for a little while. Greg, a masters student in our department who often comes out to the sessions, came in not long after. I went back to my seat when I heard a familiar tune, Greg taking a seat to the right of me. Someone else started a tune called Me Ol Ragadoo and I saw David quickly leave, but come back in with his fiddle. He pulled up a chair behind Greg and I and we opened the circle a little so that he could join in. In what followed, it seemed in many ways that David contributed to setting the direction for the session by starting a lot of tunes. It was a great session, going until 11:30 or later. But, in my head I was trying to figure out how I was going to deal with now having an anthropology professor in my field notes in addition to a fellow student, and how to describe and understand the interactions of that night when someone who could potentially be evaluating my thesis was central to the sessions dynamics. Introduction My fieldwork in St. Johns, Newfoundland from May to August 2009, pursuing a masters degree in anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, complicated the distinction between the field and home in many ways. My research focuses on musicians who play traditional instrumental Newfoundland and Irish music. In my research I sought to understand how these musicians define this music and what

pening Vignette

Keywords 68 | Samantha Breslin The field, ethnographic fieldwork, boundaries, subjectivities, research ethics, traditional music sessions, St. Johns, Newfoundland

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 it means to them to play it. The research was done in part through participant observation at local sessions of music. Sessions, very briefly, are informal but often scheduled gatherings of musicians. The musicians sit around a table instead of on stage and play tunes. I also attended weekly scheduled gatherings at peoples homes to play this music, known by the members as Fiddle Group. Initially these sessions and Fiddle Group represented to me my field (or fields), though only at certain times, when a session was taking place. However, as illustrated by the opening story, modified from my field notes, I experienced a significant overlap betweenhome and the field. As a result of these experiences, I came to understand how these two spaces are intertwined and mutually constituted, and that I as a fieldworker/researcher play a significant role in demarcating them. Many anthropologists have critiqued the construction of the field within anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Rosaldo 1993). Nevertheless, it remains common to speak of the field as a distinct place separate from home, a neatly confined object to be studied, and the Anthropologist doing fieldwork as having an objective identity separate from their personal selves. These notions are further reinforced by stories of entering and leaving the field and of persevering through struggles and dangers during fieldwork forming a rite of passage to become an Anthropologist (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:12-18). I argue that such conceptions hide the many practical and ethical dilemmas that fieldworkers and participants must negotiate. These problems should be explored, rather than hidden behind conceptions of the field as this other place. For the rest of the paper, I will use an extended example from my fieldwork with this group of musicians known as Fiddle Group, drawing on a few other aspects of my fieldwork such as the opening vignette, to illustrate how my concept of the field and my life in it became complicated. I will also discuss how these complications foreground common dilemmas for fieldworkers and participants alike. Fiddle Group, the field and my life Fiddle Group began with a group of five people who decided to take a course in Newfoundland fiddling offered at Memorial University through the music department. One of the founding members, Dana, is also a PhD student in anthropology at Memorial. Once the course ended, these people continued to meet once a week at someones home to practice and socialize and have done so for the past eight years. New people joined the group throughout the years, myself included, and now the number of people who attend in any given week generally varies from five to fifteen. The group includes musicians of all levels, most of whom are not originally from Newfoundland; we play mostly Irish and Newfoundland tunes; and the group includes all sorts of instruments that are considered appropriate to this type of music, such as fiddle, guitar, accordion, flute, whistle and bodhrn. Along with Dana, Greg who was mentioned in the opening story is also a member of the group, and many other members have some association with the university. I first attended the group in early October 2008, only a month after I moved to St. Johns. I was invited to join by Greg, who learned of my research interests (originally oral traditions and music in Ireland) and that I play the flute. I continued to attend almost every week. I also participated in other social and musical events with Fiddle Group including the groups performance at the local Folk Night held by the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Society, a Christmas party held by one of the members, and a pub session for our accordion players birthday. My participation in Fiddle Group became an important part of my life during my studies; I often looked forward to Wednesday nights as my one opportunity for a guilt-free break from school-work. In inviting me, Greg may have had insight into what my project was to become before I did. I changed my research location to Newfoundland and as I read previous research on music and oral tradition within the province, my participation in Fiddle Group and my plans for fieldwork began to converge. There had been limited research done 69 | Samantha Breslin

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 on instrumental music in Newfoundland, almost none in St. Johns, and the popularity of the Irish session was a fairly recent phenomenon. Fiddle Group then came to fall squarely within my research scope. Once fieldwork officially started, in May 2009, I of course informed all the members of Fiddle Group of my research and what role I hoped they might play, but this changed little in our relationships. I would get a few questions about how my research was going and what I was finding as the summer went on. I also became a better player, taking more time to practice, and as a result became a more active participant musically in the group. But as far as I could tell, little else about my interaction with other members changed beyond what I experienced in my first seven months or so playing with them. We bantered, joked, gossiped, talked about current affairs, drank, ate and of course played music the same as before. I see the anthropologists who are part of this group at both Fiddle Group and around our department. We will talk about Fiddle Group at school and school at Fiddle Group. My active involvement in the group certainly continues beyond my formal fieldwork period, and I intend for it to continue in the future. As I have said, Fiddle Group is an important part of my life. In addition, the opening vignette shows how the distinctions between other field sites and home are also blurred, leaving me with anthropology masters and PhD students, as well as professors, as potential participants. I certainly have fieldnotes involving all of them. Some of my friends from the department would also come to the pub where I was doing fieldwork on a Friday evening for a drink and to watch and listen to the session. Conversely, I would sometimes walk into Bitters, the restaurant operated by Memorials graduate student union, and see a member of Fiddle Group there. I even saw a Fiddle Group member at the campus gym one day. Also, while my fieldwork has technically ended, not only do I continue to participate in Fiddle Group as I did before, I also continue to attend the public pub sessions downtown St. Johns. I enjoy playing the music and it is not something that I wanted to stop, especially after I started noticing a significant improvement in my playing throughout my fieldwork. I even considered myself to be doing fieldwork while practicing playing music by myself in my home. While considering practicing to be fieldwork was at first a justification to allow myself the time to do so, it was also appropriate behaviour in my role as a beginner musician and necessary to be able to participate in Fiddle Group and other sessions. My fieldwork then also provided me with a social network of people with shared interests and activities, helping me create a greater sense of home in St. Johns, where I had just moved in September 2008. However, these experiences left me wondering where the distinctions are between the field and home, and between myself as a researcher and as a person just living my life. The people, space, and times overlapped between the field and home, so the primary way the field was defined was by my arbitrary delimitation of when, where and with whom I would take field notes. The field then was not this other place that I went in the sole capacity of an Anthropologist, it was my home and intimately entwined with myself as a person. Shared Experiences Perhaps my fieldwork is exceptional in the degree of overlap between the field and home. Yet, the demarcation of the field throughout anthropological history, which is explored extensively by Gupta and Ferguson (1997), is not nearly as neat as it has been portrayed. For example, continued involvement with ones field post-fieldwork is a common practice. Many anthropologists describe how they still keep in touch with friends and participants through letters, e-mail and visits following their period of fieldwork. Similarly, other anthropologists have argued that the periods both before fieldwork and after shape our research (Shore 1999:45; Gardner 1999:49). The complex interactions between the field and home that I experienced simply foreground common problems for both fieldworkers and participants in understanding one another and understanding fieldwork that I will now briefly mention. These issues continue

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 to be hidden and tucked away behind common parlance that the field is an other place, neatly cordoned off from home and the rest of our lives. This is done despite the fact that these problems are shared by many anthropologists and not just those of us with glaringly ill-defined fields. Old Problems The interactions between home and the field are first problematic for participants (and anthropologists) in understanding a researchers identity as a researcher. To the non-anthropologists I worked with, particularly in Fiddle Group, I was first this flute-player studying anthropology and playing Irish and Newfoundland music. This dilemma does seem less problematic when one thinks of fieldwork in foreign places when the anthropologist stands out as someone new, allowing them to demarcate their identity and purpose as conducting anthropological research. However, Katy Gardner writes how she disguised the extent of her research saying I told them I was writing a book, I did not tell my informants what I was planning to put in it (Gardner 1999: 66). Gardner did her research in Bangladesh and was adopted into a local family, self-identifying as a family member as much as possible as opposed to a researcher, a common role that anthropologists take on. What Gardners example illustrates is that there is nothing new about anthropologists having ill-defined or multiple identities (Narayan 1993). Fieldwork at home only highlights these issues of conflicting identities that participants and fieldworkers alike must try to understand. Inscribing my identity as a fieldworker on top of that of a beginner musician created strange dynamics for me as well, in terms of what constitutes fieldwork data. While my fieldwork officially began on May 7, 2009, which is the day I began taking field notes, I cannot forget all that I knew of people before I started field work. This information from before fieldwork certainly helped me in developing my research proposal, interview questions for members of Fiddle Group, and ideas of topics and issues to consider. In addition, while I am no longer taking fieldnotes, this does not mean that I am ignoring what happens at Fiddle Group or other sessions to this day. I cannot wipe these periods clean from my memory nor do I want to. Again, as I mentioned, pre and post-fieldwork have been previously discussed as influencing fieldwork and written products of fieldwork. Yet, how are participants to understand what I, as a researcher, am doing, and when, if the the field and my home overlap and I am the one demarcating these spaces and times, even if I did inform participants of their conceptual delimitation? The final complexity I will mention relates to the written products of fieldwork. Gupta and Ferguson describe how different types of writing are understood as appropriate when one is in the field and one is at home, again constructing a distinction between home and the field (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:12). This constructed distinction also extends to the intended audiences for our written works, where participants are separated from readers and readers from participants. I, however, was sitting on the same couch in my apartment writing this paper and writing my thesis as I was typing field-notes every morning. In addition, while Gardners participants in Bangladesh were unlikely to read her research, it being written in a different language and a different country, such distinctions are quickly shrinking in fieldwork abroad and particularly at home (Gardner 1999; Brettell 1993). All of my participants speak English, most live in St. Johns, and many if not all have expressed interest in reading the final product. One musician (who also happens to be a student at Memorial) told me I should bring the thesis down to the session when it is done, and if I did not then they would go find it at the library anyway. This overlap also adds to issues of anonymity and confidentiality, in a place where most musicians know other musicians. Yet, these complications and problems, among others, are also not new to anthropology. They are only highlighted by the complexities I experienced in defining the field and home as separate spaces, which they were not. Conclusion Many anthropologists have already called into

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 question traditional views of the field and argued for alternative conceptualizations and methods of researching and writing (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Rosaldo 1993). Yet, what should also be explored and discussed are these complications that researchers face living in the field. Fieldwork at home may seem particularly laden with ethical and practical problems, but insisting instead on creating neatly defined fields, as has historically been done in anthropology, only hides these issues it does not eliminate them.
University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Narayan, Kirin 1993 How Native is a Native Anthropologist? American Anthropologist. 95(3): 672 686. Rosaldo, Renato 1993 Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Beacon Press: Boston, MA. Shore, Cris 1999 Fictions of Fieldwork: Depicting the Self in Ethnographic writing (Italy). In Being there: Fieldwork in Anthropology. C.W. Watson ed. Pluto Press: Sterling, Virginia. Pp. 25 48.

References Brettell, Caroline (ed.) 1993 When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. Bergin and Garvey: Westport, Connecticut. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds.) 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press: Berkley. Gardner, Katy 1999 Location and Relocation: Home, the Field and Anthropological Ethics (Sylhet, Bangladesh). In: Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. CW Watson ed. Pluto Press: Sterling, Virginia. Pp 49 73. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson 1992 Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6 23. 1997 Discipline and Practice: The Field as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a field science. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson eds. University of California Press: Berkley. Pp 1 46. Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.

Samantha Breslin completed a masters degree in anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. For her undergraduate studies she earned a Bachelor of Mathematics (Honours) in computer science and anthropology from the University of Waterloo. Her masters research is an ethnographic study of the lives of musicians who play traditional Irish and Newfoundland music in St. Johns, Newfoundland.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Robin Whitaker for her advice on this paper. Also to Laura Nelson-Hamilton for the many discussions that contributed to the idea for the paper. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Institute of Social and Economic Research and the A.G. Hatcher Memorial Scholarship.

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Ethical Negotiations of an Activist Anthropologist Jean McDonald, PhD

Abstract People living with precarious status face significant risks of detention and deportation in their daily lives, and this has important implications for how research is conducted. In this chapter, I examine the ways I negotiate my multiple roles as anthropologist and migrant justice activist. What is the role and responsibility of an anthropologist working with extremely marginalized and exploitable groups of people? How is this role impacted through prior political commitments? These two questions have become central to my ongoing thinking on issues of ethics, activism and anthropology.

Post-doctoral fellow, Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON

hrough the development of my research plan and during my year of fieldwork, I encountered a number of ethical issues related to my roles as both an anthropologist as well as an activist within the spaces of migrant justice activism and service provision that I was both studying and participating in. In this paper, I address the conceptual and theoretical framework of my topic of study and outline the political campaigns and central issues that I intend to address and build upon through my research. Finally, I examine my social location in relation to my topic of research and my involvement in migrant justice activism. What is the role and responsibility of an anthropologist working with extremely marginalized and exploitable groups of people? How is this role impacted through prior political commitments? These two questions have become central to my ongoing thinking on issues of ethics, activism and anthropology. In my concluding remarks, I include a number of questions for further consideration. These questions may be useful for graduate or undergraduate students in thinking about the design of their research project, their positionality and responsibility as researchers, and the ethical issues that they may encounter within their fieldwork experiences. Migrant Illegality and Access to Services My research question examines the making and unmaking of migrant illegality and conversely, citizenship, in the everyday lives of people with precarious immigration status (often referred to as non-status, undocumented, irregular or illegal migrants) in Toronto. I approach this question through an analysis of power using a synthesis of theoretical perspectives on hegemony and governmentality and by taking up the themes of sovereignty, nationalism and racism. I address this question through an examination of processes of illegalization that arise as people with precarious forms of immigration status access or avoid community services such as shelters and housing, health care, education, police and emergency services, and food banks. These processes of illegalization are manifested in policies, codes, regulations and practices in which immigration status can impact access to public services. The Dont Ask, Dont Tell campaign, affiliated with No One Is Illegal, a local migrant justice organization, works to challenge the production of illegality in the realm of service provision

Activism, Anthropology, Migrant Justice, Ethics

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Keywords

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 by working with organizations and service providers to make services more accessible to marginalized groups by removing barriers facing people with precarious immigration status. By migrant illegalization, I am referring to processes that make people illegal, processes that illegalize certain bodies in particular spaces within the globalizing nation state system. Taking migrant illegality as a process rather than as a fixed status, I ask: How is illegality, and conversely citizenship, made and unmade, through access and/or barriers to community services within the city of Toronto? Access to services is not a homogenous process, and as such I aim to examine ambivalences and contradictions through the ways in which service provision works to both include and exclude, to both make and unmake citizenship and illegality. Furthermore, because precarious immigration status is not experienced homogenously, it is necessary to develop nuanced understandings of the various ways in which multiple forms of precarious status are experienced differentially. More specifically, in my research, I examined the impact of immigration status on womens vulnerabilities to violence and abuse. Because I was working with an extremely marginalized and vulnerable population, ethical considerations were of key concern. During my year of ethnographic fieldwork, I worked as a volunteer at two local shelters for women fleeing or experiencing violence or abuse. Engagement with service provision in this way allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by front-line workers in their efforts to assist women in gaining access to health care, counseling services, housing, employment, English language classes, skillsbuilding workshops, legal representation and meeting any other needs women in the shelter may have. Although I assisted with the day-to-day operation of the shelters, I tended to assist clients who had needs specific to having precarious immigration status in Canada. Over the second half of the year I assisted with community support and outreach, focusing on advocacy for women with precarious status at an office separate from the shelter location. Over the course of this research and through subsequent analysis, a number of key issues emerged: Precarious status is produced through immigration policy the fluidity of precarious status (from refugee claimant to failed refugee claimant, from visa holder to visa overstayer, etc) results in an increased risk of abuse and violence. The threat of deportation and detention is a form of violence that impacts womens lives on a daily basis. Deportability and detainability are social determinants of health, most notably mental health. The inability to plan for the future often results in depression, hopelessness, etc for women with precarious status. Precarious immigration status increases womens vulnerability to multiple forms of abuse through a variety of relationships family, partner/domestic, landlord, employer, etc. Precarious status is a pathway to homelessness. Homelessness and abuse is often triggered/intensified by pregnancy for women with precarious status. The social isolation and marginalization imposed through forms of precarious status increases womens vulnerability to abuse and violence in multiple forms. Activism and Research My interest in issues of citizenship and processes of migrant illegalization primarily arose out of political engagement with an activist organization based in Toronto called No One Is Illegal (NOII). Interest in issues facing people in local communities began to gain political ground in Toronto, as people formerly or simultaneously involved in anti-capitalist globalization struggles

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 and anti-war and occupation movements started to turn their critical gaze back towards their own communities. This shift in interest emerged largely from internal critiques that saw connections between capitalist globalization, war and occupation (more specifically in the Middle East) and the displacements of people around the globe. Political technologies, such as secret trials, detention and deportation, that relied upon discourses of security and fear began to be questioned. In Toronto, people first began to mobilize under the banner of No One Is Illegal in opposition to a border security summit held in March 2002. The ad hoc grouping then developed into a more formal organization over the next few months and years. I provide this background because my political engagement with No One Is Illegal in Toronto has direct implications for the development of my doctoral research. My own long-standing assumptions around national citizenship and belonging were challenged as I participated in this group, helping to organize conferences, speaking events, demonstrations, information pickets and press conferences. Participation in NOII forced me to confront my own positionality as a white Canadian-born citizen and my own reasons for engaging in this work. I have done a lot of thinking over the years about my role in this particular struggle, and these thoughts continue to evolve and grow. Many of my activist colleagues would likely ask why I am politically committed to a struggle that is not my own, and that I am not directly affected by. These kinds of questions are important and raise important issues around the politics of representation and identity. Yet, I would argue that there is something fundamentally wrong with the dynamic that is set up in this political question, which assumes that I am not directly affected by processes of migrant illegalization mobilized through the regimes of citizenship in Canada and globally. Indeed, I would argue that I am directly affected by this regime of citizenship, but that the effects tend to be positive rather than negative. If the privilege of formal citizenship and national belonging as white and Canadian-born are mine based upon the exclusion, marginalization and exploitation of non-citizen others and indigenous peoples then I would like to challenge and hopefully change those regimes of citizenship. As well, these issues are not divorced from my own daily reality as they do impact people living in my neighbourhood the downtown West end of Toronto where there is a significant population of people living with precarious status, as indicated by service providers working in this area. When I refer to my whiteness, it is not to uncritically reproduce taken-for-granted racial categories, but instead to recognize the privilege of this socially constructed categorization and to acknowledge how people of colour and aboriginal people are often negatively racialized and marked as other within Canadian society. Rather than understanding whiteness as a biologically determined racial category, Frankenberg demonstrates that to be classified and accepted as white is to be conferred with a set of socio-structural and cultural advantages within society. Whiteness, like all racial categories, shifts and evolves over time and from place to place. Furthermore, whiteness tends to hegemonically function as the norm within North American society. As Mackey (2002) has argued, liberal discourses and policies of multiculturalism function to reproduce the hegemony of whiteness in the Canadian context. In her study, white Canadians understood dominant rules, laws and policies as universal norms rather than historically and politically specific to the Canadian context, which emerged through colonization of Native peoples and explicitly (until 1962) racist immigration policy. According to Dyer, whiteness has colonized the definition of normal, having come to stand for the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human (1997: 45). My body has been coded and classified as white and through the place of my birth (Newmarket, Ontario) I have been conferred with Canadian citizenship. These aspects of my life have provided me with certain structural advantages. On the other hand, these aspects also set me apart in significant ways from the processes of illegalization that I aim to study and from many of the people that have insight into these processes based upon their own lived experiences. In some ways, the activist work

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 that I have been involved in has allowed me to circumvent some of these boundaries marking me as a trustworthy person, and someone who will not morally (or otherwise) place judgment on someone living with precarious status. Conclusions In this chapter, I have examined some of the ethical considerations that emerged during my fieldwork with people living with precarious immigration status, and as an activist working with migrant justice organizations. Several questions emerged for me when examining the roles and responsibilities I had as an anthropologist and activist. What considerations should an anthropologist bear in mind when conducting ethnographic research with marginalized populations vulnerable to state violence? In my case, the threats of detention and deportation were the modes of state violence experienced daily by research participants. I found that extra vigilance was necessary to ensure confidentiality of participants, and to ensure they were comfortable in the setting in which we met. I also found that the confidentiality of the organizations and community spaces that I worked within was also important, in that I did not want to inadvertently supply information with immigration enforcement through research surveillance. Do anthropologists working with marginalized and highly exploited populations have a responsibility to work towards political and social change? From my perspective, I cannot imagine doing this work any other way. After getting to know the people that I worked with, becoming familiar with their life stories and everyday struggles, I felt I needed to continue to be actively involved in movements for social and migrant justice. I also found that I became an informal advocate for some of the participants in my study, and did my best to assist any of them if they called me post-interview with particular kinds of needs, whether assistance dealing with a landlord or help to find community health care. Because I came to this topic of research through my work with a migrant justice organization, I felt that I had a responsibility to develop and address questions meaningful to movements for political and social change. My social location in relation to many of the people who participated in my study is one of relative privilege and power, and in order to address this imbalance of power, I have actively taken a political position and vocal stance on issues of migrant justice in Canada, by participating in struggles for migrant justice through No One Is Illegal, and by presenting my research findings and sharing the stories of study participants through speaking engagements, journal articles, book chapters and popular media.
References Bacon, D. 1999 For an Immigration Policy Based on Human Rights. In Immigration. S. Jonas and S. D. Thomas (eds.). Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc. Pp. 157-73. Balibar, Etienne. 2004 We, the People of Europe? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bannerji, H. 2000 The Dark Side of the Nation. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Burchell, G. 1996 Liberal government and techniques of the self. In Foucault and Political Reason. A. Barry, T. Osbourne and N. Rose (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 19-36. Crehan, K. 2002 Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dean, M. 1999 Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage Publications. De Genova, Nicholas. 2002 Migrant Illegality and Deportability in Everyday Life. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419-47. Dyer, R. 1997 White. London: Routledge.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009
Foucault, M. 1991a Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 87-104. 1991b Questions of Method. In The Foucault Effect. G. Burchell, C. Gordon,and P. Miller (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 73-86. 1988a Technologies of the Self. In Technologies of the Self. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (eds.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Pp. 16-49. 1988b Politics and Reason. In Politics, Philosophy, Culture. L. Kritzman (ed.). New York: Routledge. Pp. 57-85. 1978 The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Goldberg, D. T. 2002 The Racial State. Oxford: Blackwell Books. Gordon, C. 1996 Governmental Rationality: An Introduction. In The Foucault Effect. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 87-104. Gramsci, A. 1997 [1971] Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Kurtz, D. V. 1996 Hegemony and Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 16 (2): 103-35. Lowry, Michelle and Peter Nyers. 2003 No One Is Illegal Refuge 21(3): 66-74. Mackey, E. 2002 The House of Difference. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mishra, Mohan and Faria Kamal. 2007 Regularization from the Ground Up: The Dont Ask, Dont Tell Campaign. New Socialist 61, Summer 2007. Nyers, Peter. 2003 Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement Third World Quarterly 24 (5): 1069-93. Omi, M. and H. Winant. 2002 Racial Formation. In Race Critical Theories. P. Essed and D. T. Goldberg (eds.). London: Blackwell. Pp. 123-45. Sharma, Nandita. 2002 Immigrant and Migrant Workers in Canada: Labour Movements, Racism and the Expansion of Globalization. Canadian Woman Studies 21(4): 18-26. Sharma, Nandita. 2001 On being not Canadian: The social organization of Migrant Workers in Canada. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 38(4): 415-440. Tactaquin, Cathi. 1994 Illegal Immigrants are Treated Unfairly. In Illegal Immigration. W. Barbour (ed.). San Diego: Greenhaven Press. Pp. 138-144. Walters, William. 2002 Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens. Citizenship Studies 6(3): 265-292. Welch, Michael. 1999 The Immigration Crisis. In Immigration. S. Jonas and S. D. Thomas (eds.). Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc. Pp. 191-206. Wright, Cynthia. 2003 Moments of Emergence. Refuge 21(3): 5-16.

Jean McDonald is a SSHRC post-doctoral

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fellow at the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University. Her research examines migrant illegalization within the realm of service provision in Toronto, focusing on gender violence, racism, nationalism and global capitalism. Recent publications include, Migrant Illegality, Nation-Building, and the Politics of Regularization in Canada, (2009) Refuge 26(2): 65-77, and Citizenship, Illegality and Sanctuary, (2007) in Interrogating Race and Racism, ed. by Vijay Agnew. Jean is a long-time member of No One Is Illegal.

Textual Healings: Conversations about protecting privilege through subversive research

Tricia Morris, M.A. Candidate Katie Macdonald, M.A. M.Ed. Abstract Excitement, anticipation and pride were emotions that ushered us into our research projects, but we concluded with a sense of loss, discomfort and anger. We encountered moments of disjuncture where it became painfully obvious to us that our projects were tied to the oppressive systems and discourses we had set out to subvert. These painful realizations manifested in the field, and we reacted in anger and fear in attempts to resecure our roles as feminist researchers. It was through our conversations that we began to imagine how to employ those moments where our abilities, intentions and methods were called into question as learning moments about privilege and the ways in which we protect(ed) our authority and positions in the field. This paper focusses on the ways these conversations prompted, necessitated and facilitated our ability to not only reflect on those painful disjunctures but to encourage their inclusion and usefulness in researching and writing. Keywords Friendship, dialogue, love, blogging, crisis, competition, healing, feminism, disjuncture, transformation
Centre for the study of Theory, Culture, and Politics, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Although our research had different focuses we constructed common links through conversations with one another. We began our research projects in separate provinces, at separate institutions, and found ourselves missing one another as colleagues and learning partners, and also as friends. We felt, too, as though we were learning in environments which did not encourage our engagement in an academic community, but instead encouraged competition. In it, we were competitive. We began to envision ourselves as above, as better than the students and colleagues we were engaging with, because we wanted to form community in ways that we believed others did not. Its clearer now that these thoughts were detrimental to our attempts to form the community we hoped for, and we would like to think that this paper is an attempt to reach out to other students, to show how integral the community we formed with each other was to thoughtful research, to be challenged to make it better, and to expand it to include people who arent just us. We begin this paper with excerpts1 from letters we wrote to each other while each did our research. These letters are published (in a less abridged form) on a blog called Textual Healings which we created as a substitute for the academic communities we both felt we lacked in our programs and as a way to form the community we needed. April 13, 2009 Tuesday Nights2 Tricia, On Tuesdays, I volunteer at a Rape Crisis Centre in Toronto. I can never know how a day there will
1 These excerpts have been edited for coherency and length. They appear in their full form on our blog, accessible at: http://textualhealings. wordpress.com 2 http://textualhealings.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/hello-world/

oth of our theses are completed and printed, and they sit on different shelves at different universities. In them, though, we find each other in the acknowledgements and in the bibliographies. Our ideas were not developed independently.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 affect me some days I am floored by the compassion, humour and support that permeates the centre. Women who, on a day-to-day basis, are faced with violent crimes done to women are able to laugh, and hug, and feel hope. Other days, though, I cant shake thinking of the stories I hear, the amount of calls I get and have to direct to the crisis line, or that a place like the centre has to put so much effort into being recognized as an essential service and into getting funding. Shifting back to my intellectual work on Tuesday night is difficult for me. And its where I am right now. I spent the day at the centre and a thesis chapter is nagging at me from the computer. But, Im finding the transition from being present at the centre into talking about volunteer experiences of development and their language so difficult. I feel disheartened at critiquing the work that volunteers do when they genuinely feel as though theyre able to make a difference and am struggling to articulate why I think this work is important. I often have to come back to this beautiful passage by J.K. Gibson-Graham, where they say that our seldom inspected common sense posits a separation or even an opposition between thought, understood as cerebral reflection, and action, understood as embodied engagement with the world. This makes it hard to see thinking itself as a kind of action that we are doing thinking, in other words, touching the world and being touched by it and in the process things (and we) are changing (2006: xxix)3.
3 We did not include the complete reference for this piece on our blog, in part because we understood that our readership was limited (primarily) to one another and

I have to push myself all the time to imagine thinking this way. I guess I just need to be able to feel like its happening. To feel momentum. To be pushed by things that allow me to imagine the world differently. And, I think most importantly, I need to imagine the shift between volunteering at the centre and writing about the ways development volunteers understand their experiences, as actually not so far apart. -Katie (MacDonald 2009b) April 23, 2009 Words and action4 Dear Katie, Im sorry its taken me so long to blog you back. This is a conversation that gets to me. Theory versus activism is a conversation (and a binary) that occupies much of my thoughts lately. Im about to write to you about how I can consider thinking and writing as forms of action, and yet Im constantly plagued by the fear that Im only writing this as a sort of validation for not doing anything beyond thinking (and writing about that thinking). Im not in the streets protesting with signs. You already know this. Im so grateful that I live in a world where people do that work in the streets, and yet I consistently dont have the time or Im not sure I agree with an organizations politics or any number of excuses not to get out there. I worry that this is just another way of legitimizing not doing action.
we were both reading this text at the time. That we were reading the same texts, even though our projects were so different, is also indicative of the sort of connections we sought to make across differences. The reference is to the following text: Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 4 http://textualhealings.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/ words-and-action/

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 I hope its not. Or at least that its not just that. Im writing a thesis about what folks have written in response to Thomas Beatie, The Pregnant Man. Some of it is really difficult to read: blog posts, forum comments, television transcripts. Its violent stuff, at times. Not all of it. But some of it hurts to read because I can hear it working to deny Thomas Beaties representations of himself as a pregnant man. I can hear it denying Thomas Beatie a space to exist as he would like to exist. They might be statements in response to his pregnancy like: [s]he is NOT a male and certainly NOT a man. It is a shemale who decided to keep the female plumbing but lopped off her breasts(Former Fetus 2008, emphasis added)5. I read blog posts like this, and all I can think about is how words are working to deny Thomas Beatie a space to speak and to live as a man. And I get so sad. If I can see this bloggers post as action that works against Thomas Beatie, why do I have such a hard time imagining that my thinking and academic writing is an active act of activism? If I must understand bloggers words as active, and ultimately I must for they hurt me and Thomas Beatie (to hurt being an active verb), I must understand my own words as equally able to act on the world in other, (hopefully) more powerful ways. 80 | Tricia Morris & Katie MacDonald I must understand my own thinking and writing as action, as activism, and our discussions as conversations which can and must change the world
5 Likewise, we had discussed this comment as Tricia gathered it from a forum called Stormfront, a white supremacist electronic meeting place. The full reference is as follows: Fetus, Former 2008 Re: Pregnant Man Thomas Beatie and Wife Nancy Expecting Second Child [msg 2]. Electronic document, http://freerepublic.com/focus/fnews/ 2131660/posts, accessed January 31, 2009

and the way I live in it. Does this make sense? Tricia (Morris 2009b) We came to our separate academic work with the idea that we were doing something different than other scholars and students in our programs. These differences that we imagined as integral to our work were rooted, in part, in our belief that our (and the plural here is important, because we always do it together) writing could be action and that we could be active in the world through the written word. Guided by the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham we envisioned our academic work as capable of touching the world and being touched by it. Often we both feel as though were writing within an academy which does not promote engagement with those working and living outside of its confines, except to study or write about those Others on the Outside. We were determined to make the research we undertook different from those projects which are researchoriented and dont encourage engagement, and so worked hard to construct what we imagined to be feminist, inclusive, community oriented and different paradigms. We also believed that our writing could be different because we were doing it together. In the portion of this paper that follows we discuss our separate research projects; nevertheless, this paper is written not only to consider how community was a part of our learning, and informed our learning, but to acknowledge the role our community with one another played in our learning and writing. When we discuss our individual research projects we slip back and forth from third to first person singular and plural, in part because grammar and conventions of academic publication constrain how we are able to speak about these projects. The pronoun trouble we get into is meant to reflect this. Academic discourse often does not leave room for blurred authorship, and we recognize that conventions which blur the lines between authors are not easy to write, and nor are they easy for a lot of us to read. Tracing learning back to communities, to friends, to discussions, talks over coffee, or revelations in dreams is

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 often understood as illegitimate. Often these conversations arent even citable in traditional formats like AAA. Because we are not co-authors on each others theses we seems inappropriate, and yet I cannot represent the dialogue between our two voices that is present in those theses. We are left, then, in a difficult place. For this reason, in your reading of what follows in this paper you may feel uncomfortable or as though it is hard to follow who is talking -- this is intentional. With this style of writing we also hope to demonstrate how entwined our learning was, how we are unable to trace fully the routes and roots of ideas and learning and that common tropes of writing and citing make this learning invisible. Here it goes: Tricias research concerned representations of Thomas Beatie, heralded in newspaper articles as The Pregnant Man. I began my research because I had grown weary of descriptions of him offered by commenters on newspaper discussion forums and blog posts. Their comments were violent they called him out as an IT, a freakshow, another butch lesbian with no tits, really just a woman, and not a real man (cf. Morris 2009a). What I wished to interrogate, rather than who Thomas Beatie really is, was why commenters articulated descriptions of him in the ways they did and why these descriptions seemed more powerful than the self-descriptions he offered. I set out with the intention, not of correcting their descriptions, but of proving that the reason they were describing him this way was because they subscribed to the understanding that biological sex is an immutable and fixed truth. My research was different, I thought, because I was postmodern and didnt believe there was a biological truth about bodies. I wasnt asserting a truth about him, and was using bloggers expressions of truth against their originary purposes to problematize the idea that there is Truth at all. My writing would be insurrectionary, and theirs would be oppressive. Initially Katie had the intention of working with women in a small community in Ecuador where she had volunteered as an undergraduate. I was interested in exploring the ways development discourse was present in the lives of the women in the community and how they saw it functioning both in their community and to alter the ways they understood the world. To make my project different I undertook an intensive Spanish course in Ecuador where I hoped to be able to become fluent enough to interview women without the use of a translator. I was disdainful of translation errors, the presence of someone else in the interview and what would feel like an inability to connect with women whom I wanted to ask intimate details of their lives. By interviewing indigenous women in Ecuador about development, I hoped to be able to participate in a feminist project where I would include them in discovering what was important to interrogate about development and to connect with them through the use of Spanish. We thought we were different. It was through embodied engagement with our work that we came to understand that our paradigms werent infallible and that our research projects were tied to the very oppressive systems and discourses we had set out to subvert. Through disjunctures we experienced in the field and the ways we had imagined and constructed our research, we began to wonder if we were truly doing something different at all. The disjuncture in Katies field happened as she slowly began to realize that the women in the community were not Spanish speakers, but rather Quechua speakers who had learned some Spanish. Those in the community who spoke Spanish were middle-aged men. I began to wonder, then, about how my research would shift if I had to translate not only from Quechua to Spanish to English but also to ask questions specifically concerned with the experiences of women and to have them translated through a man. This led me to be concerned with what had happened when I classified the community and the people in it as a Spanish community. This was my third time visiting and only now was I truly realizing the language barriers. In the elision of the communitys indigenous language I also erased their history prior to colonization of Ecuador by Spain, and any sort of nuanced understanding about the indigenous rights struggle in Ecuador

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 for bilingual education and complex ideas of resistance to colonial and oppressive forces through language. I had constructed my research so that I had learned Spanish to work with women who did not speak it. Disillusionment worked similarly with Tricia, though it was in a different context. I began to work, for fun and in a space not ostensibly connected with my research, on a campus radio show with a group of friends. This radio show eventually fell apart over a conflict about whether or not, as non-transgender-identified women, we were capable of airing a radio show about transphobia. I had wanted to broadcast some of the things I was writing about in my research. While I was adamant that I am, indeed, more than capable of discussing this, a co-host disagreed vehemently, accusing me of perpetuating the oppression we would be seeking to end through the show. As folks who are not transgendered, she suggested, we did not have and should not appropriate the authority to speak on the topic of systems of oppression without those who are oppressed by them. We should not speak about people without speaking to those people, she told me. I wanted to dismiss my co-hosts anger as emotion that ought to have been directed at someone else-folks like the bloggers and commenters whose projects were actually oppressing Thomas Beatie. I forget, in these moments, that anger ought to be directed at me for the privilege I enjoy. I began to worry that, in privileging my destabilizations of truth over Thomas Beaties expressions of truth, I was perpetuating his oppression and my privilege through writing. The disjunctures we experienced were ruptures; we felt them as wounds and expressed them bodily through tears. We came to each other, hurt by the interactions which forced us to confront the deficiencies in our research. Our conversations were, in part, about healing ourselves and finding space to suture our wounds. We began to do so, for instance, in our Gmail instant messaging conversation dated February 4, 2009. We wrote: Tricia: [] I mostly mean-- it sucks to have someone assume youre someone youre not. [...] Katie: im so sorry [this disagreement with the ladies on your radio show] made you feel so badly. but youre lovely and make the world a better place. and im currently thanking you for it. Tricia: Its ok. Im just feeling intense. And I just want the world not to hurt people. Katie: Of course. You are intense. But, the world needs it. Tricia: Ha. True. Well. I hope so Katie: It does. I love you. Fear not. Hah. Our conversations allowed us to heal and reinforce to each other that we arent terrible people. As our conversations allowed us to begin healing, they also enabled us to do so in ways which left a mark. That mark is visible in our texts. Our conversations elucidated the ways in which these moments of disjuncture could help us re-imagine our work to express these ruptures textually. It allowed us to include moments of disjuncture, discomfort and destabilization in our research and our writing so that we became subjects of our own research. As subjects of our research we used our experiences as ways to analyze our work in the field. Tricia began writing a thesis chapter in which she discussed the falling out over the radio show, in order to validate the arguments she had made against my co-hosts protests. In the course of that writing, it became clear to me that my cohosts arguments were not as dismissible as I had intended them to be. She had a point, and I was devastated about that. In talking through my co-hosts arguments with Katie, I slowly began to treat them as arguments that were integral to the sorts of discussions my research engaged. For instance, I included a blog post from the blog Questioning Transphobia which expressed many of the difficulties my radio show co-host pointed to in my research as a non-transgender identified person. The post, entitled Tranny: A Guide for the Perplexed, told me quite simply: [TRANNY]. DONT FUCKING USE IT UNLESS YOURE TRANS.*

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 * And even then (Queen Emily, as cited in Morris 2009a: 52) I began to treat these responses not as critiques, but as considerations I had not entertained in the development of my research. In this chapter where I intended to knock my opponent down, I ended up analyzing my own responses to her arguments and emphasizing the ways in which my responses were concerned with protecting my privilege. In the final chapter of her thesis Katie examined the ways in which volunteers can represent communities with language and images that can be harmful. These assumptions rely on egotistical belief that we can become experts on people with whom we visit for short amounts of time, and with whom we dont often share a language. In this chapter I included excerpts from my journal from the first year I traveled to Ecuador. These quotes from my journal were embarrassing, to say the least, but allowed me to examine language volunteers employ that can be destructive (but also often sound quite nice) such as: The people here reflect something so sacred and amazing. Their respect for us and complete modesty made me humble. Standing in the kitchen with two people who worked off of the land, took pride in everything they do I felt like an asshole. An ignorant 20year old whod never really worked a day in her life or taken pride in any of her work (MacDonald 2009a: 129) This inclusion allowed me not only to critique language, but to also implicate myself in these processes. We both understand, as Rosi Braidotti (2002) suggests, that [s]elf-reflexivity is... not an individual activity, but an interactive process which relies upon a social network of exchanges (herising 2005: 133). The inclusion of these embarrassing moments could not have happened without encouragement from our academic community. As Ani Difranco sings, I have this whole new family and Im in love with each of them. And Im on this list called lucky, whenever Im in reach of them (2004). We came to realize through our work that the communities we had formed, both with one another and with others, was the safe home-base that we needed to be able to take these risks in our work. Including ourselves as subjects of our own research also requires a reimagining of the field of research to include ourselves. Being in the field then, is not distinguishable from being in our lives. The field that Katies research eventually became volunteer experiences of development is one that she has been unable to extract herself from. During the final editing process of my thesis last year, I found myself marking an essay of one of my students about their trip to a country in Central America and their experiences there. Reading and commenting on this essay was a continuation of the field for me. I was engaged with volunteer experiences in a very real and tangible and also textual way but was also simply working as a TA in sociology. Our imagined communities of research became larger, more fluid communities of learning which are not defined by distinct borders. We both understand, as Kathleen Staudt suggests, that [s] truggles do not end, but reemerge in new guises and languages; masters must be positioned to engage, then and now. Experience is a great teacher and that kind of learning means we must do more than write (2002: 67) We would like to conclude with the About Us section we include with our blog, Textual Healings: We love feminism and reggae and coffee. Were striving for true dialogue and true love with all folks. Our conversations with one another give us momentum and make us want to change the world. Sometimes theyre funny. Other times theyre sad. Most times theyre challenging. We hope you have friends like this in the world. If you dont (or even if you do) you can be ours (MacDonald & Morris 2009).

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009
Saunders (ed.). London: Zed Books. Pp. 57-68.

References Difranco, Ani 2004 Educated Guess. From Educated Guess. New York: Righteous Babe Records. herising, fairn 2005 Interrupting positions: Critical thresholds and queer pro/positions. In Research as resistance: Critical, indigenous, and antio-ppressive approaches. Leslie Brown & Susan Strega (eds.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars Press. Pp. 127152.. MacDonald, Katherine/Katie 2009a Unarticulated Spaces of Difference in Development: Finding Room for Radical Change in Spaces of Invisibility. Masters thesis, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, York University. 2009b Tuesday Nights. Electronic document, http://textualhealings.wordpress.com/2009/ 04/13/hello-world, accessed January 31, 2010 MacDonald, Katie and Morris, Tricia 2009 About Us. Electronic document, http:// textualhealings.wordpress.com/about, accessed January 31, 2010 Morris, Patricia/Tricia 2009a Men are from Mars/ Women are from Venus. Wait a Minute, Does that Pregnant Lad/y Have a Penis?: Talking about the Talk about The Pregnant Man. Honours thesis, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, St. Thomas University.

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2009b Words and Action. Electronic document, http://textualhealings.wordpress.com/2009/ 04/23/words-and-action, accessed January 31, 2010 Staudt, Kathleen 2002 Dismantling the Masters House with the Masters Tools? Gender World in and with Powerful Bureaucracies. In Feminist PostDevelopment Thought: Rethinking modernity, post-colonialism and representation. Kriemild