Introducing Anthropology. Laura Pountney

book.

      HOW DID YOU RECORD YOUR DATA?

      The only thing I would have is my notebook. So everything I did, learnt, would go into my journal. I call my notebooks ‘journals’. Fifteen to twenty journals would be the basis of my book. I have a camera and a pair of binoculars, which is all of my equipment.

      WHO WERE YOUR MAIN INFORMANTS?

All my informants are people that I get along with. For example, there were some people in Malawi who knew what I was after straight away and there were some others who were not very informative at all. You naturally gravitate towards people that you get on with and with the people that will help you with your research. I got close to certain individuals that I worked and shared food with.

      WHAT WAS THE IMPACT ON YOUR RESEARCH PROCESS AND FINDINGS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES (AGE, GENDER, ETHNICITY, CLASS, NATIONALITY) BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR INFORMANTS?

      There are certain behaviours in Malawi that you have to observe. You have to conform to local customs. Malawians have always related to Europeans throughout history in one way or another. When you are an anthropologist you are always ambiguous. You are part of the culture but you are always an outsider.

      WHAT WERE THE PRACTICAL ISSUES THAT YOU ENCOUNTERED BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER YOUR FIELDWORK?

      In Malawi I always had a motorbike, as you can get everywhere, especially during the rainy seasons. There are lots of dirt roads and they get very muddy, so buses and lorries get stuck and nothing can get past. However, on a motorbike you can go anywhere. Unfortunately, I always had accidents on my motorbike and suffered a lot in my research – falling off the motorbike!

      WHAT WERE THE ETHICAL ISSUES THAT YOU EXPERIENCED IN YOUR FIELDWORK? Ethics are a part of everyday life for everyone. Doing fieldwork is no different than my going around here and talking to people here in my town in England. There are certain things that I should do as a human being and those that I should not. Anthropology is always ethical. I don’t see the difference between how I treat people here and how I treat people in Malawi. You can’t just barge into people’s houses and ask questions; you have to have tact. All my informants became my friends. It starts off with being an informant but then it turns into friendship, so there is no distinction between informant and friend. I always tell my informants that I am there because I am interested in understanding their way of life.

      WHAT WERE THE THEORETICAL ISSUES THAT YOU CONSIDERED IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING YOUR ETHNOGRAPHY?

      I was always aware of the theories regarding hunters and gatherers, about the movements of these people, and all my books are theoretical in a way. But I don’t have a high theory in my head when I do research. My research is more in the way of a broad interest. I am not going there to prove Mary Douglas’s thesis or Tim Ingold’s theory.

      WHAT WERE YOUR FINDINGS?

I argue that there are many ways to understand the world around us. When I studied insects, it was basically my view that there are these insects called termites and they are real, rather than being socially constructed. Malawi people look at the context of these creatures in their world in different ways. So there are many different ways of looking at the world or insects or mammals. Sometimes they are important in terms of the way they see animals in an empirical way; animals are important in terms of eating, in terms of hunting, medicines, for example. In local rituals, animals are important as well as in folklore and myths. Malawians have multiple ways of relating to animals and understanding them. We always see the world from a certain perspective, a particular way of looking at it, and some of these ways are contradictory. Termites, for instance. In Malawi, in some contexts, termites are the most blessed things on the Earth; for Malawians the termites are real food, absolutely wonderful. Then in another context termites are horrible, because they destroy your crops. Termites are also used as symbols. The termite mounds are of real symbolic significance in relation to the matrilineal society. If you look at the termite colony, it has a queen that is 100 times bigger than other small termite workers. And she continually produces. So in different contexts the termite means different things.

      empirical Verifiable through the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste), either directly or through extensions (reliance on observable and quantifiable data)

      WHAT IMPACT (IF ANY) DID THIS RESEARCH HAVE ON YOUR OWN LIFE?

      Doing research fieldwork, they say, is like a doing a vision quest, an ordeal. I have never seen research as an ordeal. I always enjoyed it. I am a perpetual student. In a way my research and my life are intertwined. I never had a problem with my identity. I have always seen myself as a working-class lad from the Black Country [English West Midlands]. And, added to that, I have always seen myself as a teacher and as a kind of anthropologist doing research, so my life in a way and my research are completely intertwined. It is not like my research is there and my life is here. They complement each other. Doing fieldwork is an experiential thing as well as being intellectual. The move from being experiential to intellectual is the process of conveying the experience into a kind of knowledge.

       Garry Marvin’s testimony (2015)

      My ethnographic research has focused on events in which humans engage with animals and in which the death of animals is the usual outcome. My first research project was a study of the bullfight in southern Spain. Here I also explored the cultural significance of cockfighting. Since then, I have conducted fieldwork in the world of English fox-hunting and with European big-game hunters.

For many people, these are disturbing events because they apparently involve people enjoying witnessing or actually bringing about the deaths of animals. But through my research I have attempted to show that, while the events do generate pleasures for the human participants, such pleasures are complex and these complexities cannot be understood by mere outside observation. Matadors spoke to me about their love of bulls, game hunters expressed great respect for their quarry, and fox-hunters spoke with me of their admiration for the hunted fox. Such attitudes might seem odd when all of these people are involved with the deaths of these animals. My task was to listen attentively, to ask carefully and to observe attentively in order to generate understanding. In all these events, animals are killed, but I slowly came to understand that what was of cultural significance, and therefore of anthropological interest, was how these deaths are brought about. My work, as an anthropologist, has been to reveal and to interpret the cultural significance of performances with, and killing of, animals in these events. Here, what is important is that, as an anthropologist, I had to enter the worlds of bullfighting and hunting in order to understand them from within rather than to impose meaning on them from outside.

      All these events generate considerable criticism from many people who are not part of them; and those people who are part of them are often suspicious of the motives of outsiders who come asking questions. In a crude sense, they are concerned that such outsiders might have a political animal rights/animal welfare agenda and are seeking access and information in order to criticize, to condemn and to discredit the event and its people in various ways. Such concerns caused some difficulties for me when I sought access to conduct ethnographic, participant observation research. The difficulties centred on people querying who I was, what I wanted to find out, what my motives were, what exactly this sort of research would involve and what I would do with the information I gained.

      Observing the corrales in Spain. (© Garry Marvin)

At the outset of my research in Spain, I had no contacts and had on one occasion to turn to a supporter or a sponsor. However, a chance meeting with someone whose father was a member of a bullfight aficionado’s social club offered me an initial step forward. I was introduced to the club, where the members were initially suspicious of someone coming from a country where it was thought that people were fiercely critical of bullfighting. However, they seemed to accept my claim that I was not there to gather evidence against a supposedly barbaric practice. Their main concerns then became about testing my seriousness,