What’s my update today? I was working on a section of cane toads and sapos, and then moved on to spies and anxiety of fieldwork.
I think I’m using it all to get at a discussion of the basic extractive nature of research, which I don’t contest. However, I’m not totally convinced by the normal solutions that people propose—participatory research, do people really want more workshops, solve the issue. But, in any case, I am still committed to the ethnographic endeavours. So, how does one square that circle? I don’t think you can. So, my answer is a. It comes down to the labour of ethnography—both in the field and afterwards.
The conditions of the research and the writing, as it were. It would seem silly to ask my friends from the field to participate in my half-decade-long writing process. But, to see that writing as labour, as embodied, as a practice, is to think of it, perhaps, like artisanal gold mining or subsistence production. Maybe? Is this a point worth pursuing? My writing process, at least as I imagine it to make myself feel better about being a cane toad, sapo, snitch, inquisitorial ethnographer, is artisanal, makeshift, craft work.
Maybe what I’m trying to say is the difference between an open-pit mega mine and a artisanal gold mine. Both are extractive, but the latter does little harm. I of course imagine myself on that latter side of things.
This is what I was trying to articulate today. Didn’t come together, but I’ll try tomorrow.
No finishing Friday today. But, maybe 5000 words are good.
Step by step; bird by bird.