The Wenner-Gren Blog

Former microfinance borrowers continue to share many social connections

Caroline Schuster is a Lecturer at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. In 2009 she received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “Making Good Money: Microcredit, Commercial Financing, and Social Regulation in Paraguay’s Tri-Border Area,” supervised by Dr. John Comaroff. In 2014 Dr. Schuster received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Economies of Gender in Paraguay”.

This engagement project is based on my research about women’s microfinance loans in Latin America. As a feminist scholar interested in issues of gender justice, I set the goal of engaging with the microfinance industry by way of outreach and awareness on women’s perspectives and voices in Paraguay. In my research I found that the small-scale loans offered by Fundación Paraguaya, the country’s largest microfinance provider and institutional site of my long-term fieldwork from 2009-2010, had a complex effect for the women who borrowed.

Domestic life and shared indebtedness – cooking and caring for friends, anthropologists, and co-borrowers

As I argue in my book, Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy, even the seemingly technical financial aspects like credit scores, loan contracts, payment schedules, and debt collection, worked together to create gendered interdependency through “social collateral.” In other words, while normal bank loans usually require some sort of physical asset to underwrite the debt as collateral, microfinance is unique in supposing that women’s mutual support and group pressure will guarantee repayment. I argue that even the humdrum technical aspects of loan underwriting have powerful – and gendered – causes and consequences. At the same time, those financial processes were invisible when women were taken to be naturally hyper-obligated – bound by kinship and caring roles. The powerful appeal of the iconic “woman entrepreneur” justified these specialized development loans while gendered financial labor simultaneously went unnoticed. I hoped to showcase feminist research on the economy to open a conversation.

Credit services, including informal money lending as well as institutionalized microcredit, continue to be ubiquitous in Paraguay

Even though I had been in contact with a robust network of feminist scholars in Paraguay and Argentina, I found an unexpected hurdle. For this group of professional women, their unstable work – often in short term, flexible, and project-based contracts – made the seemingly straightforward task of organizing a symposium extraordinarily complicated. Two researchers had moved abroad with their families. One was on short-term assignment as the ‘gender specialist’ attached to a larger development project. Two more were uncontactable because their professional affiliations had lapsed.

My failed symposium exposed precisely the double-bind that went to the heart of my research. As I argue in my book, Paraguayan labor economists conclude that women work predominantly in low-paying positions in small and microenterprises because of their “flexibility” (flexibilidad). According to this line of reasoning, flexibility allows women to fulfill family obligations as well as work for income but also means that they must settle for jobs with a high degree of precariousness and limited social security and pension access. But the recourse to “flexibility” in labor theories, as feminist economists like Drucilla Barker have pointedly argued, is bundled up with a broader value judgment about women’s work, and the apparent inevitability of women’s social and kinship obligations.

In the end, the very labor dynamics that inspired my engagement project ultimately frustrated my efforts to organize a symposium thematising women’s work. Simply put, it was shaped by the gendered and gendering expectations about women’s economic lives that I am dedicated to challenging in my broader scholarship.

Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

At an impasse, I changed course and built my Wenner-Gren engagement project around the single institutional framework that had remained constant throughout the past 10 years of my ethnographic research: the microfinance non-government organization (NGO) Fundación Paraguaya. The momentum created by 18 branch offices, nearly three hundred employees, long-term capital investments, and a sustainable financial model, put the organization on firm footing since it was founded in 1985. And while many on-the-ground staff changed quite quickly, a dedicated group of core senior managers were key contacts as my research unfolded from 2006-2016. Again, this came as no surprise as I had come to see these financial practices as regulatory forms.

My ongoing collaboration and engagement with Martín Burt, the charismatic CEO and founder of the organization, put me squarely in the uncomfortable ambit of development consulting. The now-classic distinction made by Arturo Escobar between development anthropologists and anthropologists of development, where the former was considered to be complicit with neo-colonial aid interventions and the later were considered theoretically principled scholars, was in reality unsettled conceptual terrain. How to bring my anthropological study of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs who borrowed money from a Paraguayan NGO back to the organization in a way that was meaningful and also critically engaged?

Tellingly, the result of my engagement project was actually yet another reversal. Instead of unilaterally sharing my research results, in our conversations Martín and Fundación Paraguaya instead updated me on how my earlier anthropological engagement with the NGO had reshaped some of their strategic priorities and programs in the years since I had wrapped up my long term fieldwork. I spent three weeks in Asunción learning about how my early participation as an outside consultant and researcher had reframed Fundación Paraguaya’s focus on a holistic approach to poverty alleviation. While I was certainly alarmed by the way my research on social collateral had been captured and converted into new financial products, metrics, and values, I was forced to reckon with a wider meaning of engagement beyond simply sharing what I had written with professional colleagues who shared many of my social science assumptions. The indeterminate zone between development anthropologist/anthropologist of development left no straightforward answer to how my collaborators should read what I write or vice versa.

[“Fundación Paraguaya’s Poverty Stoplight – an early collaboration]

In her edited collection on When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography, Caroline B. Brettell argued that, “Ethnographic authority survived under the cloak of distance and difference because the ‘natives’ never knew what had been written about them” (Brettell 1993: 10). My initial effort to bring my writing back to the field of development in Paraguay was a failure, and for reasons that had been anticipated in my own research. Meanwhile, my interlocutors at Fundación Paraguaya had been in conversation with my research all the while without my having known.

Working towards a different concept of ‘being there’ in fieldwork, George Marcus wrote that, “We don’t need more conferences or seminars but a different style and process of training anthropologists, also a rethinking of the standard forms and functions of writing in anthropology.” Being challenged by these reversals gave me new ways of thinking about what engagement means. Writing with my counterparts and collaborators in the field forced me to confront the fact that my training in ethics and field work methodology left me unprepared to actually deal meaningfully with engagement, and not just with my feminist allies, but also with industry partners in the field of development and finance. The net effect was to compel me to reckon with my own social collateral in the fieldwork context. In fact, could social collateral – and the webs of obligation that we invest in others – offer a vocabulary to talk and think about anthropological engagement writ large?

Screen capture from The Storytelling Film.

While a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, Kathleen Rice received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2011 to aid research on “Purity, Propriety and Power: Negotiating Lobola and Virginity Testing as Sites of Gendered and Generational Power among Xhosa South Africans,” supervised by Dr. Janice Boddy. In 2015 Dr. Rice received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “In My Youth We Cared About Each Other: An Oral History Film of Xhosa Elders”.

My Engagement Project took the form of a subtitled film composed of a series of oral history interviews with elders from the rural Xhosa community where I carried out fieldwork for my doctoral project. Shortly prior to my doctoral fieldwork, local leaders decided to collect video-recorded oral history interviews with village elders. The impetus for collecting these stories stemmed from an awareness that local elders had lived under Apartheid and through the years of transition, and have watched their children and grand-children grow up in the new South Africa. As elders continued to pass away, community leaders became increasingly concerned that these valuable memory were being lost. Accordingly, video-recorded oral histories were envisioned as a way of preserving the experiences and wisdom of these elders. And according to community leaders, this wisdom is vital for guiding the younger generation, who are widely perceived by their elders as being wayward and in need of guidance.

A few months before I began my doctoral research, community leaders appointed a young local man named Thembela (a pseudonym) with the responsibility of collecting these interviews. With the assistance of a local NGO, the community had secured funding to purchase a video camera, and to bring a documentary filmmaker from Johannesburg to train the young local filmmaker. However, several months into my fieldwork I learned that the project was not moving forward.  Speaking with Thembela, I learned that he felt ill-equipped to pose questions of elders in a manner that would elicit the desired form of open-ended reflection. To overcome this obstacle, the NGO director (a non-Xhosa South African who resides in long-term in the area) spoke with community leaders and then approached me to ask if I would be willing to assist Thembela with the project. From the NGO director’s perspective, my skills as an anthropologist might be useful in successfully carrying out the interviews. Furthermore, my dissertation research broadly focused on the gendered and generational politics of social reproduction, and in particular on how local people navigate domestic and intimate relations in a time of economic precarity and rapid social change.  Therefore, from the perspective of community leaders my expressed interest in elders’ lives reflected the spirit of the envisioned project. I was pleased to be invited to help, and agreed to assist Tembela in collecting the interviews.

Over the following months Thembela and I worked together to collect ten oral history interviews with elders. The interviews range between twenty and ninety minutes in length, and are all in isiXhosa (the local language). The content of these interviews covers descriptions of daily life in youth and young adulthood, experiences and reflections on the years of transition from Apartheid to non-racial democracy, differences and similarities between their life experiences and those of their contemporary young people, as well as wisdom that that interviewees felt motivated to impart to youth. Most interviews feature rich personal anecdotes.

The project remained unfinished when I left the community in 2012, but at that time Thembela was diligently working on editing the interviews. However, Thembela ended up leaving the community for personal reasons, leaving the project unfinished. Accordingly, my Engagement Project entailed completing the film –now referred to in the village as the Storytelling Project, – and also using the film as a reference point for sharing my dissertation research with the local community.  To that end, with Wenner-Gren support I edited the videos to create a short film with English subtitles. For this, I required the assistance of a translator, as elders speak a version of isiXhosa (the Xhosa language) that is rich in metaphor, and is consequently difficult for me to interpret without assistance. Through the South African Translators Institute I was able to connect with two excellent translators: Mr. Jeff Nyoka, and Nombeko at Bohle Language and Translation services. With their assistance, I was able to complete the film.

With the film complete, I returned to the village in March 2016. As the full version of the film is over four hours long, I hosted a showing of segments of the film was in the local library. The showing was open to all interested members of the community, and everyone was informed that the full film would be left in the library. Following the showing, I used content for the film as a reference point for a discussion the findings and implications of my doctoral research.

A copy of the film, as well English and isiXhosa transcripts of the interviews, are accessible in the community library. I intend for them to remain there, and will be available to future researchers, the local community, and members of the South African public.  At the time that I am writing this, four of the ten interviewees already passed away, one within the past few weeks. Independent of my own research interests, I hope that these interviews will be of value to the friends and family that these elders have left behind.

Image courtesy DDingDong

While a doctoral student at Binghamton University Layoung Shin received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2012 to aid research on ”Performing Like a Star: Pop Culture and Sexuality among Young Women in Neoliberal South Korea,” supervised by Dr. Deborah Elliston. In 2016 Dr. Shin received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Beyond the Rhetoric of Child Protection: Challenging Age Regulations as a Strategy for Queer Youth Movement”.

LGBT Youth Shelter Ddingdong

Ddingdong is the shelter for young queers, which just opened in Winter 2014, supported by nongovernmental organizations. Since this institution is the one that is most closely related with my concern on working class queer youth, I visited Ddingdong in July and met activists, Ryu Eun-chan and two others (Eun-chan was one of my informants during my 2012-3 field research.) From the visiting and the conversations with them, I could learn about the development of the institution that had occurred during the last three years after my visit of South Korea in 2013.

Image courtesy DDingdong

With regards to sharing my research result, we shared the idea that challenging age boundaries for the rights of teenagers to be independent (at least such as opening cell phone, bank account) necessary and required, but it might not be easily achieved sometime soon. Instead, the Ddingdong has been providing alternative resources for helping them, providing counseling, medical care, and temporary places to stay.

My suggestion on queer youth movement also was to build alliances between queer youth and working class (marginalized) youths, so that they can work together for basic concerns on economy, job, and shelter/home, that is fundamental for basic survival of marginalized youth, beyond gender/sexual identity. They have been already constructing connections with one another. I thought, therefore, it is more appropriate for me to support their activities that have already been going on. Therefore, I provide $200 to the Ddingdong, for continuation of their collaboration with other youth organizations for marginalized youth, and find ways to tackle age restrictions at least some areas.

Il-cha and Fan-cos activities

For the second part of my project, I met two groups of il-cha participants who helped me the most during my fieldwork research; Inae and Inyang from the Aplus, and Changong and Heesu from the Exciter. I originally planned to support having a united event of il-cha teams, but I found that their activities have stopped since Spring 2015. As I indicated in my proposal, il-cha activities were in recession due to not only economic difficulties to open their own events, but also due to the increased stereotypes and prejudices on them even among LGBTs in Korea.

Image courtesy Layoung Shin

While il-cha disappeared from the scene, fan-cos continued. There  have been a similar number of participants and events since my fieldwork in 2012-3. But again, the issue for this fan-cos is that it is hard to make it public due to discrimination, stereotypes on their gender nonconformity and non-heterosexuality. They have been promoting and sharing their events only through SNS, like Twitter, which makes it hard for newcomers to find their existence. For instance, even I, who have been following almost all fan-cos events and individuals’ twitter accounts, did not know about some of the events they were preparing during my stay in South Korea. I could know about one of their events, only through Yoohee, my interviewee. Likewise, without personal contacts, exclusive involvement within the community, fan-cos cannot but isolate themselves from potential fan-cos participants, which is the reason the size of fan-cos has been reduced.

Image courtesy Layoung Shin

That was the reason that I proposed opening up a website. Yoohee, one of the oldest fan-cos event organizers, also agreed on that opening the website for fan-cos would be the best way for promoting fan-cos in the long term. It could be the hub of the events, accumulating information, and resources together. Luckily, Yoohee and two other members of her team are professional website developers, and they agreed to take care of the website. As one of the most popular and oldest fan-cos team and participants, they will take responsibility maintaining the website as well as fan-cos subculture in general. So I decided to hire them for the united fan-cos website development and maintenance for at least one year, as the boost of fan-cos event development.

Lecture at Fort Jesus Museum

While a doctoral student at Cornell University, Nidhi Mahajan received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “Merchants of Mombasa and the Making of a Shadow Economy,” supervised by Dr. Viranjini Munasinghe. In 2016 Dr. Mahajan received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Illegality and Maritime Trade in Coastal Kenya: A Public Dialogue on Economic Transformation”.

Fort Jesus is an imposing structure that lies atop a coral ridge with a sweeping view of Mombasa’s harbor – an ideal point from which to watch ships pass in and out of the Swahili port city. This was indeed, one of the purposes of the fort, designed to look like a person laying down, their head to the sea. Built by the Portuguese sometime between 1593 and 1596, to secure their position in this part of East Africa and their ambitions across the Indian Ocean, the building is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Upon visiting the fort, now a museum, one cannot help but be struck by a mural presumably done by unknown Portuguese mariners from the sixteenth century – hand-drawn images of ships, mythical sea creatures, sailors, and the sea – carefully preserved within the museum’s walls, natural light in the display room playing tricks on one’s imagination, the past casting shadows upon the present. The fort marked the violent entry of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. Where once no state claimed authority over the sea, the Portuguese in the fifteenth century (followed by the Dutch and British) wed cannons with trade, and altered the shape of history. Trade that was once carried on freely across the Indian Ocean, came to be regulated by colonial states who ruled with the force of the gun.

My dissertation project examined the contemporary resonances of this long history of tension between Indian Ocean trade networks and the state in East Africa, focusing on the creation of a shadow economy in the Indian Ocean. Examining the entanglements between the sailing vessel or dhow trade and multiple regulatory regimes in the western Indian Ocean, I argue that these trade networks have been pushed into a blurry realm between legal and illegal trade by states as they pose a threat to state sovereignty. When I returned to Kenya in 2016, it was fitting that the Fort Jesus Museum became a space for engagement. While the museum is usually where objects such as ivory, jewelry, and intricately carved furniture from the Swahili coast are carefully displayed in glass cases, the photo exhibition I curated for the museum emphasized a humble object – the mangrove pole.

Mangroves poles from the swamps of the Lamu archipelago in northern Kenya were once harvested and exported out to the Middle East, where they were used for structural timber in homes. Sailors from Oman, Iran, and India would arrive in Lamu with goods like carpets, food stuffs, dates, furniture, and porcelain and carry back cargoes of mangrove poles, animal hides, ivory and even enslaved peoples from these shores. While scholars have written much about these luxury goods, mangrove poles, a key export from the Swahili coast have rarely been examined by scholars. This mangrove pole trade however, structured economic life in Lamu, employing a large number of its residents as cutters, porters, merchants, and transporters. While the mangrove pole export trade came to an end in the 1980s, as the government of Kenya banned the trade citing concerns about environmental conservation, many of those involved in the trade viewed its illegalization as wrapped up in other political economic concerns. Some say that the trade was banned to prevent ivory smuggling, while others believe it was a way for the state government to purposefully impoverish this community that lies at the margins of the Kenyan state. Regardless, the mangrove pole trade is well-remembered in Lamu, even if it remains undocumented.

As part of my engagement project, I curated a photo exhibition for the Fort Jesus Museum titled “From Swamp to Sea: The Mangrove Pole trade on the Swahili Coast.” Using photos in the archives of the Museum as well as private collections, the exhibit pointed to the complexities of the trade and its regulation. It opened on 19^th July 2016, in Mombasa and will travel to other museums in Lamu and Malindi, on the Kenyan coast. On the day of the opening, I presented a lecture on the trade and its history in an effort to share my research with the community. Residents of Lamu and Mombasa present at the opening expressed their surprise on seeing an exhibit of a quotidian good in a museum, the curator of Fort Jesus even exclaiming, “We must think of history through these everyday objects!” as we discussed the political and economic ramifications of the trade and its ban.

For the rest of the project, I shared the results of my research with both, my interlocutors and the academic community in Kenya. I presented a public lecture “The Contemporary Dhow Trade in the Western Indian Ocean,” to residents of Mombasa at the Friends of Fort Jesus Seminar program. Against the backdrop of the fort, we discussed shifting regulatory regimes in the Indian Ocean, smuggling, and neoliberal economic transformations that threaten communities of seafarers and merchants across the Indian Ocean littoral.

These discussions then shaped a talk at the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, where I gave a seminar titled “A Sea of Suspicion: The Dhow Trade and Dispossession in the Western Indian Ocean.” Attended by academics based in Nairobi, the talk gave me the opportunity to communicate research findings to specialists of East Africa who don’t work on the Swahili coast, but are nonetheless engaged with broader debates about political economy in the country.

This engaged anthropology grant therefore enabled me to return to Kenya, to build on old connections and forge new ones as I communicated my work in different formats to the academic and non-academic community in Mombasa and Nairobi.

Dr. Roseann Liu

Roseann Liu is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College. In 2013 she received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to to aid research on “Educating for Justice: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and a Charter School’s Pursuit of Racial Equality,” supervised by Dr. Kathleen D. Hall. In 2015 Dr. Liu received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on ‘”Protocol and Professional Development, Reciprocity and Representation”.

Ever since the rise of multicultural education in the U.S., there have been efforts made to include minority students’ histories and cultures. More often than not, these efforts have resulted in token lessons or special celebrations that only scratch the surface.  The school in which I conducted fieldwork was noteworthy for its thoughtful approach toward including marginalized students’ histories and cultures into its curricular programs. However, it still struggled with how to teach, for example, Asian American history and African American history in a way that was not compartmentalized. This resulted in students’ categorization of certain lessons as being “for” certain racial/ethnic groups. During Asian-American week, black students asked questions like “Where were we?” and likewise, Asian-American students wanted to know more about the role that Asian Americans played in the civil rights movement. Part of the goal of this engaged anthropology grant was to provide teachers with the tools to highlight the intersection of different minority groups in American history, and the time to be able to revise their social studies curriculum so that it was clear that these groups’ histories did not exist in a vacuum. This grant allowed teachers to engage in professional development, and dedicated time to think about a social studies unit that would specifically address the student population that was mostly comprised of black and Asian students.

Another goal of the engaged anthropology grant was to create more reciprocal relationships with practitioners at the school around ethnographic representation. A series of meetings took place with board members and administrators at the school so that we could begin a dialogue about the findings from my dissertation research, and the role of ethnographers in schools more generally. The first meeting included a presentation of the major findings from my dissertation and an opportunity for school members to respond in person that provided their own perspectives on my ethnography. The next step included chapter-by-chapter written feedback that school members provided to me. Shortly before I engaged in final revision of the dissertation, my dissertation committee met with school members to discuss issues of ethnographic representation, and more broadly explaining what anthropology and ethnography offers in terms of understanding broader social problems. We also discussed school members’ perspectives on my findings and the final dissertation was revised with their feedback in mind. In the final draft of the dissertation, I wrote a more nuanced explanation of the school’s founding history, it’s mission, and its curricular programs.

The dialogue also prompted me to provide, from my perspective, a realistic understanding of the forms of financial and human resources that can or cannot be expected, the specific research activities ethnographers are likely to engage in, and the timeline of moving from fieldwork to findings. This dialogue helped them consider the level of access they want to provide, to weigh the potential benefits against the costs of participating in external research, and to manage expectations around reciprocity. From these dialogues the board has been engaged in a process for thinking through how to entertain requests from researchers to conduct research in their school.

Tsimane mothers and children from Monte Rosa study community

Melanie Martin is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. In 2012 while a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara she received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to to aid research on “Maternal Factors Influencing Variation in Infant Feeding Practices in a Natural Fertility Population,” supervised by Dr. Michael Gurven. In 2016 Dr. Martin received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Targeting Early Life Health Risks Among the Tsimane Through Mixed Educational Outreach Modes”.

I had studied infant care and feeding practices among the Tsimane from 2012-2013. The Tsimane are a hunter-forager population residing in the Bolivian Amazon, with a high burden of infectious disease. Tsimane mothers breastfeed intensively for 2 years or more, but introduce complementary foods relatively early (around 4 months on average). My research examined maternal perceptions of infant needs and other motivations influencing their feeding decisions, as well as variation in infant nutritional status associated with variation in the timing and quality of complementary feeding. Though not the primary focus of my investigation, my research documented local inequalities in prenatal care and vaccine coverage, as well as modifiable behaviors related to child nutrition and antibiotic usage that could be targeted through educational initiatives. With the  Wenner-Gren Engaged Anthropology Grant, I returned to Bolivia in July of 2016 to revisit the families that had participated in my study, and present these results to the wider Tsimane community.

Martin in meeting with EBB director Carola Vaca and rangers

I first presented formal reports of my results to three organizations that provide or at times help facilitate health care for the Tsimane: the primary health clinic servicing the Tsimane (Horeb), the Gran Consejo Tsimane (the local governing body of the Tsimane), and the Estacion Biological de Beni (EBB), the bioreserve in which several of my study communities were located. During my field research, the EBB transported physicians to these villages when they otherwise lacked the funds to do so, thus facilitating the only available preventative care for many pregnant women and children—a fact which I highlighted in my report.

Martin and Nate present research findings on Radio Horeb broadcast

Following these meetings, my assistant Bernabe Nate and I gave a 15 minute radio broadcast discussing my results on Radio Horeb—a mission-operated AM station broadcast in most Tsimane homes. In discussing results of our project, we encouraged families to eat eggs, papaya, butternut squash, and legumes– foods that are rich in vitamin A and other nutrients that support healthy growth, development, and immune function. My research showed that although many Tsimane families cultivate these foods, children infrequently consume them. I had also documented fairly extensive misuse of antibiotics, which can be purchased over-the-counter at local pharmacies and market kiosks. Antiobiotic misuse and rising bacterial resistance are global problems, but the Tsimane have received little to no education on safe antibiotic usage. We used horticulture analogies and existing public health campaigns to explain how bacterial resistance develops, to warn families against administering antibiotics for common cold and flu symptoms, and to encourage them to purchase antibiotics only in a pharmacy after consultation with a doctor or pharmacist (to ensure the antibiotics are not expired and will be administered in the proper dosage). I created two educational posters depicting these messages, which were delivered to the Gran Consejo and the health clinic at Horeb, and presented to study villages in community meetings.

Community meeting in Chacal

The community visits allowed me to answer additional questions about my research, and visit the many families who participated in my research or otherwise welcomed us into their communities. These visits were the most gratifying part of my trip (and not just because it was prime fishing season, and I was invited to enjoy many massive meals of delicious, fire-roasted fish!). The infants I had worked with were all now 3-5 years old, and many mothers had had other children since then. They were delighted when I showed them pictures of my own daughter, now 3, who I was pregnant with while in the field. Tellingly, many families also asked, somewhat perplexedly, “so you’re not going to do any interviews?”, when I first showed up in their villages, and then smiled warmly when I replied, “jam, sobaqui momo” (“no, I’m just visiting.”).

Educational poster highlighting ‘Cuidado con los antiobíoticos’ appropriate and inappropriate antibiotic usage

In truth, though the educational messages were well-received, I can’t say how effective they were. But that is really beside the point, as ultimately this research was as much a collaborative effort with participants as a product of my own design and analysis. The Tsimane I spoke with appeared to understand and appreciate the initiative to share that joint knowledge with them, irrespective of what they ultimately do with it. It is difficult for researchers working in remote locations to make trips without a specific research agenda, and circumstances often move early career anthropologists to work with new populations. This was certainly true in my case, for which reason I remain grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with study participants and interpret meaningful aspects of my research, and their participation in it, for the wider Tsimane community.

Some workshop participants; and Adolfo Rebolledo, the second on the left, and anthropologist Laura Montesi in the middle (picture by colleague Diego Martínez)

While a doctoral student at University of Kent, Laura Montesi received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2014 to aid research on “Making Sense of Diabetes Among the Indigenous Huave People of San Dionisio del Mar, Oax., Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Anna Waldstein. After successfully defending her dissertation Dr. Montesi received an Engaged Anthropology Grant in 2016 to aid engaged activities on “Structural Food Nostalgia in Times of Diabetes”.

I arrived in Mexico in the aftermath of the Nochixtlán repression. In several Mexican states teachers had taken to the streets in protest of federal education reform. The government’s subsequent repressive acts were fiercest in Nochixtlán, a municipality on the outskirts of Oaxaca City. On the 19th of June, the confrontation between striking teachers and the federal police left a death toll of twelve civilians.

The education reform includes teacher evaluations aimed at selecting “good” public school teachers. Opponents argue that such evaluations allow the government to justify mass layoffs and the gradual demolishment of public education, and that they also ignore the ethno-cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic diversity of the nation and punish teachers stronger in traditional knowledge systems than in the national, hegemonic curriculum.

It was in this atmosphere of tensions that I reached my fieldsite, San Dionisio del Mar, an Ikojts/Huave community of 3,000, located in one of the most politically unstable regions of Oaxaca, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Here, the teachers’ discontent combined with other social demands, such as the defense of the territory against aggressive industrial exploitation.

Interviewing the elderly on the epidemiological transition and social change in San Dionisio del Mar (picture by workshop participants). Anthropologist Montesi in the back observing the interview process

My Wenner-Gren workshop, which promoted reflection on the link between health, food practices and cultural identity, was designed to be participatory and collaborative, encouraging research-actions that build upon the participants’ interests and skills. In a way, this engaged workshop is consonant with the social movements in Mexico that are fostering a transformative and culturally plural kind of education.

My PhD explored the experiences of Ikojts rural men and women living with diabetes in San Dionisio. In my research, I scrutinized how Sandionisians make sense of diabetes at a personal, family and community level. I discovered that diabetes is an idiom for vulnerability, namely a manifestation of structural and ordinary violence, and a metaphor expressing compelling concerns. These concerns include changes in the local diet, the most tangible sign of a more general loss of cultural identity and cohesion.

Learning about and playing with photos (picture by workshop participants)

With my Wenner-Gren grant, I could stay in San Dionisio for a month and work with younger members of the community (high school students, aged 15-16). They documented, analyzed and produced materials on past, present, and future foodways through photographs, interviews, and videos. A holistic view of health emerged from the multiple relationships discovered between wellness, ecology and local knowledges.

The workshop was divided into four main parts:

During the first week, my colleagues — Adolfo Rebolledo (ecologist), Juan Pablo Mayorga (journalist specialized in environmental topics), and Diego Martínez (documentary maker) — and I encouraged discussion on a range of related topics: everyday diets, origin of food resources, characteristics of local and imported/processed foods, emerging diseases and the epidemiological transition, and the nature of diabetes, including its medical and social aspects.

Workshop participants present their work at the local high school

These topics were addressed through a number of activities. For example, the participants categorized their food and beverage intakes of the previous 24 hours into sets. Some chose to classify them by nutrients, others by origin, others by when eaten. All identified comida chatarra, junk food, as an independent food category, prompting us to analyze processed food labeling. As a result, the students realized how little pre-packaged food labels revealed and how privileged they were to have locally produced foods such as corn, fish, shrimp, and fruits. A territory mapping exercise followed, with workshop participants asked to draw San Dionisio del Mar and all its surroundings, and to locate its sources of food. This exercise helped us rethink the value of local food systems and the implications of food dependence on community well being. We also interviewed elders about the social, dietary and health changes they have witnessed. The students enjoyed being researchers in their community.

During the second week, they received training on the basic principles of interviewing as well as documenting through photographs and videos.

A view of San Dionisio del Mar and its salty lagoons

The third week was dedicated to research projects. One group explored the fishing techniques of poor fishermen and analyzed the unequal relationship between Ikojts fishermen and external, often Zapotec, traders. In a wonderful documentary they made, they express the hope that Ikojts fishermen will be able one day to compete more fairly.

The second group exemplified the dietary transition in a photo essay portraying an Ikojts woman, Doña Carmela, preparing supper. Diabetic, Doña Carmela told her interviewers that she is confused about processed food: “My daughter-in-law cooks Maruchan pasta often. My husband thinks it’s not good and causes cancer. I sincerely don’t know.” Her words reflect how uncertain people are about food today.

The fourth week of the workshop ended with the presentation of the students’ work at the local high school. Pupils from other classrooms and the students’ families were invited. I also shared my research results and underlined the importance of community-based initiatives that, conjugating scientific and community knowledge, craft appropriate responses to local needs. The project met with great approval, and the students’ families requested it be repeated next year. May this be the first of similar initiatives!

Attentive at the presentations

As part of my Wenner-Gren activities, and thanks to the initiative of anthropologist Citlalli  López, I also helped organize an intercultural exchange between the teachers of San Dionisio del Mar and the educational community of the Intercultural University of Veracruz (UVI). This university, which offers bachelor degrees to young minority and/or disadvantaged students, is nationally recognized for its strengthening of communities’ knowledges and practices. I traveled with my friend Obdulio Muriel, an Ikojts teacher, to the UVI in Zongolica, in the state of Veracruz. Obdulio, an advocate of linguistic rights, and I have worked together on several projects.

At the UVI, we presented our work in the interrelated fields of language/culture revitalization and traditional medicine. In exchange, the UVI students and teachers, mostly Nahuatl speakers, showed us their projects on environmental and food systems conservation. We all found that our topics display interesting overlaps and agreed to continue this intercultural exchange.

Ikojts teacher Obdulio Muriel talks about his community and our work on language/culture revitalization to UVI students and professors

At the end, Obdulio said: “This experience was very useful. I feel satisfied because I was able to make public all the work that we [the school he works in] have done and that usually remains confined to our small village. Reciprocally, the people here showed us the work they are carrying out with their communities, and this can be an example we [the Ikojts] can follow.”

Just after a lively discussion on the socio-cultural aspects of diabetes at the General Hospital in Tamaulipas

These exchanges of ideas and experiences, which were helped by the Wenner-Gren grant, should have a place in academia as well as in the public health sector. To this end, I presented the core themes of my research to diverse audiences. During one presentation, given at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social), I met with Mexican anthropologists working on diabetes among indigenous peoples. This was a valuable opportunity to make ethnological comparisons and explore future research collaboration. With medical doctors and nurses at a public hospital in the northern state of Tamaulipas, which has one of the highest prevalence rates of diabetes in Mexico, I shared a sociocultural perspective on diabetes. The medical staff talked about its successes and failures in working with diabetes patients, and was glad to learn about a more “humanistic” approach to this metabolic disorder.

Overall, all these experiences made me realize how transformative anthropological research can be when we dare to cross spatial, cultural, and disciplinary frontiers.

A preliminary meeting in progress: Discussing the Engaged Anthropology project with the APDP (JKCCS)

Ather Zia is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2011 while a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, she received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “Politics of Absence: Women Searching for the Disappeared in Kashmir,” supervised by Dr. Victoria Bernal. In 2016 Dr. Zia received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Exploring Strategies for a Stronger Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir”.

This project, building on the findings of my previous study worked on  how the women-led Association of Parents of the Disappeared Persons popularly called the APDP[1] in Kashmir could overcome three challenges that pose a threat to its goals and long-term sustainability. In Kashmir, since the armed movement broke out in 1989, India has deployed massive number of armed troops. In the lethal counter-insurgency laws measures implemented by India, human rights groups claim that over 70,000 people have been killed and more than 8000 men have been forcibly disappeared in custody by the Indian army.  The APDP member-activists  are mainly Muslim women, including mothers and wives (called half-widows) of the disappeared men who have become tireless human rights activists, an unprecedented engagement in a conservative Muslim-dominated society. The APDP activists mobilize demonstrations, pursue court cases and collect documentation.

Lawyers and activists strategizing

On one hand the APDP has become an internationally visible movement, but on the other hand it faces three challenges that threaten its effective working towards searching for the disappeared men; 1) the legal cases pertaining to the disappeared persons filed in courts against the army and the state by the APDP activists are languishing in courts without results, 2) APDP suffers lack of funding to support its day to day activities which includes documentation, legal proceedings, creating public awareness and even salaries for the member staff [who are trained human rights activists) 3) In case of half-widow-activists, there is lack of awareness about the duration they have to wait before they can remarry. While not a direct challenge to APDP as a movement, the half-widows need support because having lost husbands who were their primary breadwinners, these women have also lost financial means and social status.

Within the purview of the engaged anthropology project as proposed I conducted a series of workshops with various sections of the host community and external resource persons to understand the breadth of the aforementioned issues and interrogate strategies through which the APDP as a organization can be made more robust and create support for its members. These workshops provided a chance to generate a dialogue between the members and other participants for creating successful legal strategies, raising funds, and supporting the organization in most crucial aspects.

APDP activists discuss life, activism, financial, and legal struggles

This engagement project aimed  1) To enable a dialogue between the APDP members and legal practitioners, scholars and activists to explore strategies for making legal procedures for enforced disappearance cases yield maximum results; (2) To generate a conversation amidst APDP members about their challenges and struggles of emotional, legal and financia nature,  (3) To enable a dialogue between APDP member-activists, professional HR activists and potential donors towards exploring the possibilities  for fundraising, (4) To enable a dialogue between the APDP members and religious scholars to address the issue of re-marriage for half-widows; its religious and social consequences and creating awareness.

The participants in the workshops included those that have previously and/or are currently involved with APDP, such as, mothers, half-widows and other kin-activists; APDP administrative staffers and internees; Lawyers, judicial officials, and legal activists; Religious scholars and social activists.

Workshop 1: Legal Workshop – Rethinking, and Strategizing Human Rights Cases

Exchanging ideas and recording details

This workshop proved to be a significant milestone in rethinking and strategizing APDP’s legal struggles. The Wenner Gren Engaged anthropology project was pivotal in generating a legal network; gathering relevant participants, and creating discussion.

Workshop 2 & 3: Sustaining solidarity and the Future of APDP

The conversation between the activists was cathartic and eye opening. This meeting opened floodgates of emotion and concerns by asking the members “now what from here on?” The activists shared their concerns and challenges both concerning their private and public activism. The discussion included talking about topics: like sustaining solidarity; reinforcing the APDP efforts; funding for APDP; help for families; half-widows; engaging the next generation with APDP and future challenges. A few initiatives were discussed aiming at alleviating some financial challenges of the activists and the organization.

Workshop 4: Future of Half-widows: Remarriage or Property Rights?

Discussing Legal Challenges and Struggles

One of the most important findings of this workshop was that remarriage is not a priority for the half-widows but in the last 30 years acquiring property rights has emerged as a their primary concern. Concerning remarriage as per the Indian law, half-widows are not recognized as widows until seven years after the disappearance; in the interim, a half-widow cannot remarry or qualify for any government welfare plans. To counter the rising social problems of half-widows, Islamic scholars in Kashmir have shortened the duration of time until remarriage to four years. The time duration, either four or seven years, implies the possibility of return, and the men are technically considered not dead. Most half-widow-activists maintained a strong hope that their husbands will return and have not remarried. This is supported by a survey of half-widows, which records that about 91% of the half-widows refused to remarry. Most participants in the workshop agreed that attaining property rights was where they required support. The JKCCS/APDP in collaboration with designated lawyers and Islamic scholars plans to devise legal and religious strategies to solve the property rights issues of the hal-widows.

Property Rights not remarriage an issue for Half-widows

Fieldwork Highlights

Guest contributor for ASAP – Association for the Anthropology of Policy

The PI was invited to be a Guest Contributor from the field and post to the instagram website of Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP). The PI has tweeted all the postings to the Wenner Gren twitter account, which was duly acknowledged.   The postings with images are available on the link provided. Please see from Kashmir Post 1 through 15.