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R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

11/20/2015

By Jamie A. Thomas

Bikes and bajajis at a taxi stand and bus stop in Dar es Salaam.

"I don't like the way they speak English in front of me."

Research is Communication.

In my last post, I wrote about what I find most powerful about research, and how I came to develop a strong project during my fieldwork in Tanzania a few years ago. Here, I want to describe what I've learned about the importance of interpersonal communication.

I was weaving in and out of the midmorning city traffic in a bajaji, a typical motorized form of three-wheeled, open-air transport, when I most intensely began to understand the importance of language and communication in urban Tanzania. This was in thanks to the bajaji driver, who I had struck up a conversation with during our ride across Dar es Salaam, from Sinza to Msasani.

An Unscripted Experience in Listening.

We had begun by speaking in Swahili that overcast morning, exchanging a set of unsurprising hellos and how-are-yous. However, once it came out that I spent a lot of my time at the local university, a place the driver did not frequent, the conversation quickly escalated. We continued in Swahili, and I strained to hear him as we picked up speed, and the wind whipped by us, carrying a cacophony of honking car horns and hazy exhaust.

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Project Runway Tanzania.

11/13/2015

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By Jamie A. Thomas

Why Research is Powerful.

One aspect of why research is so powerful, is because it brings us insight by making visible the relationship among factors we may have previously thought unrelated. And this is where anthropological research excels, by placing the human at the center of the study, with a parallel goal of contextualizing descriptions of human behavior.

Importantly, research is only as good or strong as the contextual description it relies upon. Set against a poorly researched description of contributing factors, any study becomes too weak to stand on its conclusions. For example, in the picture above, there appears to be someone in jeans standing on the left. However, when brought into its full context, we can see there is really only one person (me) in the picture (below), standing instead on the right.

Building Contextualized Research is Not Easy.

At an outdoor market in Dar es Salaam.

The richer the context we can develop because of our participation, passion, and mindful absorption of the locale of our research, the stronger we, as researchers, can come to understand the intersections of behaviors, histories, and practices in the daily lives of the people we care about. With context as a strong descriptive basis for our interpretations, we can feel reasonably certain about our conclusions and recommendations, because these are anchored by a deeply nuanced appreciation of multiple factors that combine to create the space we're focused upon.

Even so, developing richly contextualized inquiry is not easy. But here's how I did it in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (2010-2011) to support my research on social identity and language policy in the teaching of Swahili to non-Africans on study abroad in Tanzania from the Austria, China, Libya, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.

In my experience, there were there main principles at the core of my fieldwork that assisted me with building context for the study:
(1) Participation and friendship.
(2) Interpersonal communication.
(3) Openness and adaptability.

In this post, I'll address the first of these: Participation and friendship.

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Choose Your Own Adventure.

11/3/2015

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By Jamie A. Thomas

Near Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Anthropology is Adventure.

As a kid, I used to love reading Choose Your Own Adventure books because it seemed there was always an infinite number of ways to explore the unknown. In one book, I'd be a spelunker in a deep, dangerous cavern; in another, I'd suddenly find myself at the helm of a spaceship running out of fuel. Abruptly after each scene, the book would give you an ultimatum: go to page 6 if you choose to run for the escape pod, turn to page 23 if you choose to attempt lightspeed and make it to the nearest space station. It takes a certain brand of confidence to stick to your gut and turn to page 23.

Years later, I still hold onto the thrill of those books, but now I see investigating culture as a special kind of continuous adventure. Because what is a thrill, except for an emotion extending from an experience we find startling, exciting, terrifying, and changing--at all once. This is what it feels like to land somewhere unknown, and to be overwhelmed by all there is to see, hear, observe, and learn. Amid the overwhelmingness of it all, you must remember that you're a researcher, and that you have choices to make about who to spend time with, where to observe, where you live, and how you participate (or not) in local life.

These are like a series of small ultimatums in the course of a field project, because you never know if you'll ever see the same person again, or get another opportunity to have that interview, say that line again in better Spanish or Arabic, or get that ride out to the rural farm where they make pulque. As a result, the researcher in me has learned a special brand of confidence to adapt quickly, be ready with my recording equipment, revise decisions, go with my intuitions, and become a tenacious muckraker to get information and interviews when my research questions demand it. I learned to always carry around my audio recorder, camera, and mini-notebook, so that I could be ready to document my evolving thoughts, new observations, or take down someone else's contact information.

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#languagestory blog

R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Research is Communication.

An Unscripted Experience in Listening.

Project Runway Tanzania.

Why Research is Powerful.

Building Contextualized Research is Not Easy.

Choose Your Own Adventure.

Anthropology is Adventure.

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