Keep Calm and Carry On?

Challenges of Doing Fieldwork under Fear and Fire in an Israeli Border Town

The bus station in Kiryat Shemona decorated with national flags and flags from various military units. Photo courtesy Cathrine Furberg Moe

This essay offers some reflections on how long-term field research in conflict settings influences the research process and the researcher. In 2008–09 I did anthropological fieldwork in the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona situated parallel to the northern border with Lebanon. The town of 25,000 residents is inhabited largely by Mizrahim, Jews descended from Arab and Muslim countries. In the 1950s, they were sent to peripheral regions to populate remote districts, prevent the return of the displaced Palestinian population and create an internal frontier against the neighbouring Arab countries considered hostile to the new state. Over the years, Kiryat Shemona has been the frequent target of Hezbollah-fired Katyusha rockets. The most notable response by Mizrahim to the Ashkenazi political dominance, economic hardship and existential insecurity has been the intensification of their bond with the political right and peripheral forms of ethno-nationalism. Before arriving at the field site I had prepared myself academically, and to my best ability, emotionally, to conduct fieldwork in a politicized setting and potentially under fire. A key challenge was how I would navigate the tension between maintaining an analytical capacity while informants sought endorsement of their angst and at times xenophobic attitudes. How would I feel listening to opinions I did not agree with or handle a situation where it was assumed that I would be sympathetic? Overt calmness and situational self-silencing emerged as combined coping strategies and research methodologies.

Keep Calm

Weeks into fieldwork, I noted how some of the residents used “strength” as a spoken and behavioral code to deal with borderland anxieties. When I first met Keren, a Mizrahi middle-aged woman, one warm July afternoon in 2008, she welcomed me mockingly to the “Katyusha town.” As we walked around the neighbourhood she painstakingly pointed towards places that had been hit by Katyusha rockets during the second Lebanon war. An apartment building, a house, roads, streams and trees, all seemed to bear damage from the war. Past wars and trauma were part of collective memory and emerged as frequent themes of conversation. “We have learned to live with fear, we have gotten strong” was a phrase I often heard.

Faced with a rocket attack during the Gaza War in 2009, I had conflicting feelings about the situation I faced. The local population supported the military operation overwhelmingly. I knew that there was a great chance that Kiryat Shemona could be the target of rockets during my stay. While I opposed the war in Gaza, I sympathized with and shared the residents’ sense of fear. Early on the morning of January 14, 2009 I was awakened by the siren alert for incoming rockets, the tzeva adom (red code). I remained in my bedroom which was the fortified room of the house. It was built from solid concrete, but gave a false promise of protection. Shortly after the siren I heard a large sound of rockets followed by distant explosions. Keren and her husband called from outside that we had to seek shelter in their basement. I waited for a period of silence then ran across the yard. We all remained indoors that day, watching the news. The rockets landing near Kiryat Shemona were described as part of a solidarity attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

A choir performing at Remembrance Day in front of a soldier in a glowing sunset. Photo courtesy Cathrine Furberg Moe

Keren exhaled with a sigh of relief. “There is a word you need to know to live in Israel,” she said. “Balagan (mess). There is always balagan. We try to run a normal life. Whenever a rocket falls you seek shelter, then life continues. You can’t be afraid all the time.” Keren had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome. “But it is not post. The post never comes. We are always in the midst of it,” she commented.

I realized that I too, had adopted their ideal of being strong and remained calm during fire. Keren remarked that my reaction meant that I was becoming though and strong, just like an Israeli. She turned my ability to endure hardship into a sign of stoicism, ascribing me with an insider status.

Strategic Self-Silencing

Several scholars of nationalism argue that the production of national sentiments can be a strategy to counter fear and become a source of moral grounding. Hastings argues that nationalist sentiments arise chiefly when and where a particular ethnic or national group feels that its character or importance is being threatened, for instance through external attack or an imagined threat or grievance (Hastings 1997:198). According to Giddens, the psychology of nationalism is that of an extraordinary emotional mood that occurs when ordinary life is disrupted (1985:218). In the context of an Israeli border town, ordinary life was affected by nationalist sentiments because conflict was not a relatively transitory condition but perceived as a permanent. The Jewish-Arab Palestinian conflict has, most of the time, been understood as “routine, immutable, an uncontrollable given, an eternal fate” (Kimmerling 2008:156).

During the build-up to the war in Gaza and in the midst of it, more emotional energy was invested in the symbols of nationhood. Blue and white Israeli flags were flown on balconies, streets and in social media profiles. Banners with slogans such as “We are all IDF” and “We love Tzahal” (Hebrew acronym for the IDF) idealised the warrior image of the soldiers and was intended to boost their morale. Members of the local yeshiva moved their prayer ceremonies from the synagogue out into public space. The residents appearedto symbolically move themselves from the periphery to the centre of the nation as key actors in the moral legitimization of war. In everyday life, I witnessed the anxieties associated with racism, inequality and marginalization that both Mizrahim and Arabs experienced. For Mizrahi residents, expressing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments had become a strategy to negotiate their position in the Israeli ethnic hierarchy.

Faced with both hot nationalism and banal xenophobia, I applied situational self-silencing as a combined coping strategy and research methodology. As an anti-occupation, non-Israeli student, my political views were different from the majority of the residents who were at times fiercely patriotic. I withheld some of my thoughts and feelings and bordered on an apolitical stance in order to establish and maintain relationships in the town. I did not share the extent of my critical view of the political right-wing developments within Israeli society. This partial self-silencing aimed at not offending or pushing away informants was a source of emotional stress. At times it generated a sense of loneliness and reinforced the feeling of being isolated.

Carry On?

Sometimes we do need to carry on observing the variable salience of social forces. However, it can be equally important knowing when to exit and draw a line. The first months of fieldwork I felt energetic and enthusiastic. The following six months, I adopted local coping strategies that allowed me to deal both with ordinary fear and dramatic events like a rocket attack. To deal with my own self-silencing I took brief trips out of town and stayed connected with friends through social media. However, toward the end of fieldwork in late spring 2009, I started to withdraw from data-gathering activity. I experienced a tension between my informants’ idealization of my strength and the actual anxiety I felt. Keren and her family had generously opened their lives to me but I could not share their (at times) strong xenophobia. While my surface appeared calm, my body was in a state of anxiety as I tried to no negotiate the ambiguous feelings I held. The unintended consequences of carrying on became a sense of leaving with loose ends.

If I had been more aware of tools for addressing anxieties, I would perhaps have been able to reduce its power and knowing when to exit. I propose that more sound guidelines for de-briefing are needed in the ethnography of violence. Post-fieldwork, the anthropologist could have a round of safe supervision, focusing on the affective dimensions of fieldwork. Sometimes one needs a distance to critical events to be able to reflect. The self is more than a research tool. We leave the field marked with new strengths and scars. The professional silence surrounding the potential emotional stress of fieldwork in conflict zones should be removed. Otherwise it can be challenging to carry on.

Cathrine Furberg Moe earned her anthropology PhD from London School of Economics. She is a senior researcher at Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies in Oslo, Norway. Her book Nationalism and the Politics of Fear in Israel: Race and Identity on the Border with Lebanon will be published this fall.

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New clues in the search to rediscover the mysterious Maya Blue formula

The recipe and process for preparing Maya Blue, a highly-resistant pigment used for centuries in Mesoamerica, were lost. We know that the ingredients are a plant dye, indigo, and a type of clay known as palygorskite, but scientists do not know how they were 'cooked' and combined together. Now, a team of chemists has come up with a new hypothesis about how it was prepared.



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Scientists provide a more accurate age for the El Sidrón cave Neanderthals

A study has been able to accurately determine the age of the Neanderthal remains found in the El Sidrón cave (Asturias, Spain) for which previous studies had provided inexact measurements. The application of a pre-treatment to reduce contamination by modern carbon has managed to lower the margin of error from 40,000 to just 3,200 years.



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EAS and Interdisciplinary Collaborations

The Culture and the Mind Project

Evolutionary anthropology is a diverse branch of the field, but many EAS members share a devotion to fieldwork and the use of rigorous, quantitative methods in their efforts to understand human behavior in context. These qualities lend themselves well to collaborative research into questions of cross-cultural variability and universality of interest to researchers outside of anthropology, and have led to the participation by EAS members in a number of large-scale inter-disciplinary projects over the years. One recent example of such fruitful collaboration is the Culture and the Mind project, led by Stephen Laurence of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield.

The Culture and the Mind project (C+M), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council is a large-scale, and cross-cultural investigation of an array of subjects of interest to psychologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and anthropologists, including development of theory of mind, folk epistemology, pedagogy, naïve mind/body dualism, prosociality, the relation between intentions and morality, norms of morality and punishment, material culture ownership, prestige goods, and functional fixedness in artifact use.

No fewer than fourteen members of EAS have been involved in the project at some level throughout its four-year history, in project design, data collection in the field, or both. The total number of participants is considerably larger. Laurence cites an earlier project he directed, the Innateness and the Structure of the Mind project, as a major influence on C+M. Participants in that earlier project impressed on him the need for collaboration with anthropologists. He notes, “for many questions regarding key aspects of human cognition, we currently have more by way of comparable quantitative data on other species in relation to humans than we have on how humans in diverse cultural groups compare. Clearly, there is a real need for such data, and seeking it out has been the cornerstone idea of the project from the start.” He also cites Joseph Henrich’s (U British Columbia) project on the Foundations of Human Sociality as a key impetus, and as an inspiration for the feasibility of such a large-scale project. A number of current and past EAS members were also key contributors to that landmark cross-cultural study of human cooperation.

Close collaboration with anthropologists with extensive field experience was key to the development of methods for the Cultural and Mind project, which by design are both comparable across sites and ethnographically grounded, involving innovative, locally-informed experimental paradigms and vignette-based questionnaires. According to Laurence, the greatest methodological challenges were in accommodating the diversity of cultures involved in the project:

“The project has run experiments at a total of nineteen field sites, working with traditional societies in rural settings all around the world. In the vast majority of cases, the field sites involved small-scale societies, but the cultures ranged from hunter-gatherer societies, to slash and burn horticultural societies, to fishing communities, to nomadic herding populations, and occupied a vast range of different ecological niches.”

H Clark Barrett (UC Los Angeles), the C+M anthropology coordinator and EAS member, recounts that additional challenges stemmed from the diversity of perspectives among the researchers involved, for example in seeking consensus on how to implement experimental protocols across cultures. For example, in designing the project on the role of intentions in judgments of moral violations, the anthropologists agreed food taboos would be important to examine since people may find eating forbidden food morally wrong independent of the knowledge or intentions of the person who had broken the taboo. However, they also agreed on the culturally contextual nature of moral norms. Barrett notes:

“…every culture has foods that are not acceptable to eat, but because of the cross-cultural variation in how this is framed, it was difficult to find foods in each culture that would allow interpretation of the results to be comparable across sites. The resulting conversations were an interesting exercise in the micro-sociology of science.”

Views of culture and expectations as to its influence on psychological variation also varied among the project’s members, leading to healthy theoretical debates within the project, according to Laurence. In regards to culture, Barrett says the only a priori hypothesis is that the participants in the research are humans who have grown up in a range of diverse cultures, including many that are typically underrepresented in psychological studies of the mind–non-Western, non-industrialized cultures. He observes: “This range of cultures gives us the opportunity to test hypotheses about human psychological universals, as well as human psychological variation, in an unprecedented way.”

Despite any challenges, C+M has already seen the publication of what will likely be a series of high-impact papers on the interaction of culture with the evolved human mind. The first, on early theory of mind development, was published in January’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B. However, much of the analysis lies ahead. While Barrett does not want to spoil preliminary results before publication, he thinks, “it’s safe to say that the project will, in some cases, provide new evidence in favor of existing theories of human psychology, and in other cases, may help to overturn some previously popular theories.”

Laurence shares high hopes that the project will contribute to our understanding of culture, cognition, and the mind across the range of domains tackled by the project. However, beyond the actual experimental results, he hopes, “the project will serve as inspiration to others to undertake similar cross-cultural studies that deliver comparable quantitative data while at the same time being ethnographically informed.”

Adam Howell Boyette is the EAS Section News contributing editor. He conducts research on childhood and human adaptation in the southwestern Central African Republic. He is interested in how social learning and child development relate to cultural transmission. He is currently a PhD candidate at Washington State University, Vancouver.

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PoLAR will have a 2012 Impact Factor

Little known by the members of APLA, every June there is a publishing flutter when Thomson Reuters publishes the prior year’s “Impact Factors.” Some of this buzz reflects jockeying among medical and hard science journal editors and publishers, flapping about who is number 1—or who fell to number 5. While not a flap of this magnitude, APLA members could pause and congratulate their current (John Conley and Justin Richland) and past editors for their journal’s debut in June 2013 on the “Anthropology” list.

In order to be indexed on a given list, publishers (like AAA and Wiley-Blackwell) have to apply. Inclusion is competitive. Thomson Reuters reports that it receives applications for more than 2,000 titles each year and only accepts 10-12% of these journals. The application process can take up to three years.

The impact factor represents a ratio of citations per scholarly units within a short timeframe, less than two years. The impact factor counts only citations from a very specific list of English-language journals, and it’s fair to say that for many disciplines the number can only provide a narrow reading of value. For instance, in some disciplines, monographs or conference proceedings are important and the impact factor is not as valid a tool as in disciplines where journals dominate the scholarly exchange. Similarly in most humanities fields, in which citations require more time than two years to publish and in which much scholarly activity is not in English, the impact factor cannot reflect the same kind of assessment as it may in more technical fields.

Any author facing the question of “where to publish my article,” views a dizzying expanse—and a geometrically growing landscape—of possible journals. Some historians of science calculate that new journals have increased at a consistent 5-7% rate each year since the late 18th century. Over three centuries, that’s spawned a vast frontier. Some authors navigate this selection process by looking for journals with impact factors, a marker that some deans and personnel committees consider extremely favorably when reviewing candidates for hiring, tenure and promotion. In addition, some libraries use the impact factor in making purchasing decisions. In other words, in any overloaded system –and scholarly journal publishing certainly qualifies—numerical shorthand can aid individuals in traversing an uneven terrain.

Ultimately, the worth of a given journal is a complex matrix of its refereeing system (or peer-review process); the promptness of its publication; the accuracy and completeness of information; and the journal’s general reputation. I’m delighted to state unambiguously that PoLAR fares extremely well across all of these criteria. However, I do not wish to undervalue the very real prestige of this honor. Whatever the shortcomings of the actual impact factor, readers should not hesitate to celebrate the editors’ substantial achievement in producing content that has been dubbed worthy of an impact factor.

Oona Schmid is director of publishing of the American Anthropological Association.

Please send ideas for future columns to the APLA contributing editors, Leo Coleman at Coleman.514@osu.edu and Allison Fish at fish.88@osu.edu.

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Imagining a Deaf Utopia

In the summer of 2005, I drove to rural South Dakota to visit the offices of the Laurent Company, whose aim was to build a town for the deaf. By the time I moved there to begin my field work in 2007, the company was bankrupt, plans for Laurent had been abandoned, and the proposed founders had moved to Indiana and placed their children in the Indiana School for the Deaf. Instead of the deaf Mecca I had been chasing, I found myself in a state that would shortly be closing down instructional programs at its own dedicated school for the deaf.

The South Dakota School for the Deaf (SDSD) had been an emotional and practical center-point for the deaf in South Dakota since its founding in 1880. Local deaf activism and fundraising always seemed to circle back around to the school: the Deaf Sertoma Club sold potatoes by the hundredweight to raise money for a scoreboard in the gymnasium; the South Dakota Association for the Deaf and a local deaf-run business raised almost $300,000 to buy a plot of SDSD’s land and historical buildings that the state had put up for sale. So its closure came as something of a surprise, even though administrators, parents, and members of the deaf community had been worrying about declining enrollment since the mid-1970s.

How could the deaf community, locally and nationally, be vibrant enough to attract interest in a town for the deaf, but in such decline that it could no longer support a dedicated school? Perhaps I had merely been suckered by the Laurent Company and there was no such interest. Or maybe the state was acting in bad faith, neglecting what could have been a viable school and forcing its closure.

The answer to this paradox lay in one of my original research questions about Laurent: who would have lived there? How could one imagine, let alone enforce, a town filled with just deaf people? But the town was not supposed to be of the deaf, but for the deaf–a place where deaf people would not feel ostracized or stigmatized, would not be excluded from civic participation because they used American Sign Language or needed an interpreter. In a comment on the Laurent Company’s blog, one of the co-founders (a hearing woman with a deaf daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren) clarified their mission of creating a town where language would not be a barrier for either deaf or hearing:

Laurent has never been planned or presented as a town for only deaf. If you think about it, few families have only deaf members. Most have deaf, hearing and maybe even hard of hearing. Signing, [sic] is the common link we share.

As many as 95% of deaf children are born to two hearing parents, and while fewer statistics are available, over 90% of deaf parents are estimated to have hearing children. In a large, sparsely populated state like South Dakota, deaf children growing up with a hearing family might have few chances to meaningfully interact with deaf peers or adults: in 2008, in 33 of the state’s 66 counties, there were between one and five deaf students in the entire county, and in 12 others, there were no deaf students at all. Dedicated schools for the deaf give children a chance to learn to sign, to get specialized education, and to interact with peers without feeling that their deafness is a stigma or their defining characteristic.

Parents deciding between sending their children to SDSD or keeping them in local schools were driven by many of the same conflicting desires that inspired other families to consider uprooting their lives and moving to Laurent. They wanted to find some bridge between deaf and hearing worlds. Many parents of deaf children, be they hearing or deaf themselves, are attracted to the aforementioned advantages of a dedicated school, but they also highly value keeping their child in the family home. This was the conundrum Laurent promised to resolve–raising a child in a world designed for the deaf but with space for the existing family unit.

Given that no space quite like Laurent exists, families handle this trade-off differently. A mother and ASL teacher in South Dakota explained her choice to send her teenage son to the Iowa School for the Deaf; she did not feel he was getting enough interaction with peers or even teachers who were fluent in ASL due to SDSD’s declining enrollment and ability to attract well qualified teachers. She lobbied for better resources, but finally sent him away: “He is living with a stranger, but he is getting a good education and he is happy.” As the actions of the intended founder of Laurent showed, other families have moved en masse to enable their children to go to dedicated schools but still live with their families. But these choices are unusual. Local public schools have become more attractive because they have received increased resources for special education (a result of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). For most of the parents of the 400 deaf children living in South Dakota, sending a deaf child to a dedicated school for the deaf was not worth the sacrifice of home residence.

Laurent was the dream of what its founders termed “the world’s first fully integrated town.” But the slowly declining enrollment at SDSD has been the reality of compromise, and one that has tilted towards more families choosing to keep their child closer to home. The resultant mainstreaming of deaf students–also in pursuit of integration, albeit on different terms–will undoubtedly be consequential for both those students and for the deaf community as a whole, although in ways that are as yet unknown.

Please send your comments, contributions, news and announcements to SLA contributing editors Aaron Ansell (aansell@vt.edu) or Bonnie Urciuoli (burciuol@hamilton.edu).

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Gardens Feed and Fuel Grassroot Organization

The Greening of Detroit

In 1989, The Greening of Detroit (TGOD) was established as a non-profit organization with the mission of “re-foresting” Detroit, following decades of damage caused by tree diseases, depopulation and disinvestment. Since then, TGOD has planted more than 60,000 trees and annually plants between 6,000-7,000 new trees from a variety of species. In addition, TGOD is at the forefront of the impressive Urban Agriculture movement in Detroit and the US. In 2012, TGOD supported nearly 1,500 urban gardens and reached 15,000 local participants through seed distribution, educational classes and market development.

Our Workforce Development department, where I am housed, collaborates with community residents, organizations and funders to train local residents to enter the “green” industry job market and provide viable opportunities for job placement. In addition, we attempt to address one of the most problematic issues in Detroit right now: vacant land. Recent estimates indicate that more than 70,000 house lots sit vacant in Detroit. These properties are a burden on the city’s already thinly-stretched resources, creating a space for various illegal activities (eg, trash dumping, drug use and sales), and devalue the surrounding properties.

My role at The Greening has primarily been in the area of community organizing. I have been tasked with bringing residents together to determine the future of local parks and greenways; working collectively to map out a desired future that will not only beautify parks, but invest power into the grassroots and give voice to an often neglected underclass. At times, the process of collective visioning leads down unexpected paths. At one of the parks where we worked in 2012, local residents proposed nominating a relic of racial segregation as a designated historical site. Built in 1940, the “Birwood Wall” was constructed by a white developer seeking Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) funding as an actual physical barrier between the black and white neighborhoods of Northwest Detroit. Still standing, the Birwood Wall runs through the back of one of the parks where TGOD works. The decision to seek historical status for the wall—which would prevent any development or other project from altering or tearing down the wall without approval from the Detroit City Council—demonstrates the potential significance of the efforts we endeavor to undertake.

More often than not, though, food figures prominently in the process. We use food to bring people together at community meetings and give thanks for their participation. At each park where we work, we host small barbeques coinciding with community meetings where we collectively discuss future work. At the first one of these I put together in 2012, I inadvertently forgot several items—like a knife and spatula—which provided an opportunity for attendees to hustle back to their house to get the items. Not only did my error give several people a chance to contribute to the event, and therefore distribute ownership over the process, it opened a small window into food practices. People returned with their own blend of spices for seasoning the hamburgers we were grilling, in addition to the spatula we needed; chopped onions and relish appeared with the person who went to get the knife I had neglected to bring; aluminum foil and lighter fluid that I forgot, arrived with a pitcher of red, sugar-sweetened beverage. Suddenly, the assembled group was bustling around the grill and picnic table, sharing tips about cooking and filling plates with food.

Community groups frequently request help with either existing urban gardening programs or starting new projects that produce food where they live. On the Eastside of Detroit, adjacent to the city airport, a group of local residents and concerned citizens have embarked on an effort to address the vast blight plaguing their neighborhood following the expansion of the airport in the 1960s. Urban agriculture figures prominently in this endeavor, as local residents have built a large hoophouse and adopted about a half block of vacant lots for food production. At Fletcher Field, a revitalized six-acre park in the neighborhood, a large airplane-shaped garden was built by a Community Development Corporation (CDC) and is used by local residents. This space has become a safe haven for youth and adults to interact, share time working in the gardens and learn about alternative food system possibilities. TGOD has been actively assisting their efforts by helping mow and maintain the park and by clearing large areas of overgrown grass and weeds.

We also provide opportunities for cross-generational transmission of knowledge. Our youth employment program—which annually provides jobs for 120 high school students in Detroit—provides participants with opportunities to work in the gardens alongside community leaders with diverse experiences and training. I recently organized a trip for six youth to a farm outside Detroit, where participants could ride horses, harvest eggs from a chicken coop, and pull carrots out of the garden, wash them off, and eat them—a first for most of them.

In a setting like Detroit, beset with complex social and economic problems, prioritizing development projects to meet needs is challenging, at best, and can dampen successful project implementation if community members have more pressing needs. Detroit’s decline as an important manufacturing center and driver of the U.S. economy continues to take it’s toll on local residents. Official unemployment figures in Detroit are double the national average, with unofficial numbers running as high as 25%; population levels continue to slide, with a 25% population loss occurring between 2000 and 2010; and the local education system is in disarray, creating a population where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate. In this context, rallying community support for improving park space can be difficult. However, combining green development with programs addressing community needs—such as building community gardens, or removing blight—has been a win-win in Detroit.

Benjamin McShane-Jewell is a PhD candidate in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and program manager of workforce development at the Greening of Detroit.

For comments or questions, please contact Meredith Gartin, SAFN contributing editor, at meredith.gartin@asu.edu.

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