„Where is the point of tension?” the trainers asked.

This was a recurring question in the fast ethnography workshop and it soon became a soothing mantra. It asks us to look at what situations, moments or places people feel stuck, what creates arguments and where is the point of release, when do you yourself feel weird, when is discomfort palpable and…why? This prompt has two effects:

• First, it tells me how to start looking at the situation around me; it’s a short incursion in a social setting, all thedetails hit you, it’s easy to be overwhelmed and think “where do I even start?” Well, luckily your assignment isn’t to come up with a new structural theory of society, it’s to find a fix, so go find the problems.
• Second, it tells me how to look at myself. If I am the “tool” of research, there will always be tension around yourself as a newcomer, and you can take that tension, hold it close, interrogate it, and let it show you what lies underneath. For me, sitting with discomfort was like pressing on one of those blue-green bruises, and it meant answering a question that anthropology always makes us ask: Do I have a right to be here? Do I have the right to a narrative for what I observe?

Testing around with fast ethnography actually triggered more questions about my relationship with ethnography in its classical, long-term format, because it fast-tracks the same insecurities and forces you to make some peace with them. My impostor fear related to ethnography is that I don’t get to that natural feeling with people fast enough, I always need time to cut through the awkwardness, I launch questions that land stiffly and get me nowhere. I get frustrated and think… aren’t there researchers out there who just converse with flair? Who deliver questions in a way that reaches people and so in return they give you exactly what you needed to know? Writing it down right now I realise how silly it sounds, not only because knowledge isn’t this transactional, but because I’ve barely met these demi-god anthropologists who deliver perfect questions met with perfect answers.

What I thought I needed to acquire this flair was more time, in one community, around one subject. But I realised that what I actually needed was to accept, investigate and work with the awkwardness. The setup (fast ethnography) and question (where is the point of tension?) helped. Every weird moment is a direction of where you could go next, every blockage could be revealing something and pinpoint your next adaptation. Your own discomfort, instead of being a suspicious guest, it’s a partner, even a working instrument. “What makes me feel like this, what is in the air, what did people react or didn’t react to, how does this illuminate something, where is the fuzzy spot that I need to investigate further?” You are faster to work with what feels light or tense or smooth or difficult, and personally, I was faster to question myself in productive ways.

For example, after the first day we saw that employees had their phones locked away during working hours. As a group, we all felt a lot of emotions and made our first sweeping statements. “This place is like a prison”. Our own freedom with objects (especially those that we see as extensions of ourselves like our phones), our self determination to decide when and how we use our things or when we take breaks, was threatened. My interpretation is that we felt a gap between us and the employees that we needed to cover up with outrage. I took that tension in myself and put it up for investigation. When I raised the issue of the phone in interviews, it didn’t feel like a sensitive issue, people were rather relaxed about placing them in the cubbyholes voluntarily, taking them when needed, they were nearby and with the sound on. On the second day it reminded me a bit of how I put my phone in another room while I work so I don’t procrastinate. How much was this procedure a deprivation of freedom and how much was it an exercise that the employees themselves were open to, in order to try and build discipline? I might still lean for the first but it was important to open up to the idea that it’s probably a mix. There were a lot of easy explanations, black and white brushstrokes that came our way, and it was really revealing to be part of a process to unravel them. All of us at first, without noticing, fixated on the story of one person that we bonded with more and let their experiences colour everyone else’s.  Having a bit of a more intimate connection with someone’s perspective (especially in this context where bonding was so scarce) made us feel like we wouldn’t mess it up, that we can rely on what we saw there because it felt real, so this must be it. The way we spent those first days was to work with ourselves individually to get over fixations and easy answers that could relieve our angst by brandishing us as “good people” in that situation, and to actually be open to what was around us in its full messiness. I think we barely got over that hurdle and we needed more time to work with the messiness. But how much more time is enough?

I realise this view might be very personal, but for me, knowing from the beginning that I’m entering a process of understanding that will always be incomplete, that will at least partly fail, was actually freeing. Instead of trying to avoid failure at all costs or to think of how it would have worked out for a “perfect” by-the-book anthropologist, I was encouraged to dig deeper, to be more critical, to ask those uncomfortable questions faster rather than postponing them. In my image of a long-term ethnography, I see an expectation of perfection that is not only paralysing, but unrealistic.

I’ll go back to the issue of “solutions” and “expertise” and I have two blunt thoughts: 1) the academic anthropologist will always be an editor of reality 2) if people who do fieldwork don’t propose solutions, others will, and they might be worse.

For me, the “do I have a right to say something about this with just a few weeks/months of fieldwork?” dilemma is solved by an obnoxious, ‘lesser evil’-based calculus. Development work is so wide, so diverse, you get all kinds of approaches to research, but a surprising amount of publications and reports that place recommendations over people’s lives have very little direct contact with actual people. Have you heard the light flutter of questionnaires? Those built to validate or invalidate tight explanations and solutions that you already thought about in a glass-panelled office? It doesn’t have to be a glass-panelled office, it can be a public institution, a small organisation that brings together young, well-educated people that read a lot and think a lot. Be it for tight budgets, financing timeframes, or long-entrenched notions of “who knows best”, there are a lot of well-meaning projects and people who will not wait around for a year for your in-depth ethnography in order to formulate their solutions. And they are not going anywhere. They will continue to hurry to change policy landscapes, to redirect money flows, to share knowledge, to “do” development.

I once had a conversation for a project with an anthropologically-minded architect: if only we could get a week of fieldwork, it would make the whole difference. For another policy project we pleaded: give us at least a day in every field-site. One day, one week, can change your direction entirely if you learn how to troubleshoot yourself. In two weeks where you are fully present in a setting you can cut through multiple layers of opinions, reactions, emotions, narratives, histories, fears, relationships, desires. Could you get more if you had more time? Definitely. Is this short incursion also valuable (and still much more than your usual policy project will allow)? Definitely. At the end of the day, this is probably the main criteria by which I will judge this fast method: can it contribute to a richer understanding of a situation compared to what is currently used in order to make decisions about people’s lives?

The question I have is how do you deal with all this content to come up with recommendations. Classical anthropology tries to absolve itself from this responsibility, but can it really? When you accumulate so much from an environment, across years, you have to become the utmost editor. What you bring in, exclude, highlight, build, describe, is as much a process of your construction as it is a product of the place or people. And the end result is a paper in your name. But in this faster version, you don’t have time- nor the diversity and richness of material to be honest- to bring yourself in as narrator as much. The limitations of applied anthropology make you stick to the problem, the people, the place, and the action that should ultimately serve other people before it serves yourself.

The self-doubt and self-questioning that comes with it, well, I think it should never go away in the first place. I think we will always be insufficient. But this exercise was an insightful way of dealing with a researcher’s insufficiency by using it as a tool of reflection. For me, one of the most important values that anthropology preaches is that no matter how long you are there for, in the complexity and ever changing dynamic of social life, you should learn how to live comfortably with being suspended in never really knowing something completely, never for certain, never quite enough, but still finding things incredibly revealing.