Fieldwork: Methods and Settings

Methods and Settings

I have already opened up a number of methodological considerations in the introduction, when presenting the notion of ‘fibre formations’ as my device and approach – as a way of perceiving, relating, ordering, of doing fieldwork and a method for analysis – when proposing wool as a site per se. Also chapter three where my analytical framework is developed further is tinted by methodological debates on how to include materials while

‘making the field’ during research. Furthermore, the analytical chapters in Part II, all weave in current discussions on methodological aspects of doing anthropological fieldwork. For instance, chapter six offers a trans-local comparison between laboratories and includes reflections on the possible dissonances between what people say they do, what they do and the scope of what they consider themselves to know; chapter seven discusses different methods to ‘hear’ the story of the wool, based on the observation that people who work with it, speak of it as an active part of telling a story.

I link to storytelling as method.

Since such methodological topics are partially integrated and run along the whole thesis, in this chapter I choose to focus more on the practical aspects, the settings, the procedures, and the tactics used during the research process of the study.

In spite of the numerous possible settings and the conceivably endless scope of wool, I spent my fieldwork time in a limited set of places. During slightly over a year, in 2010 and the beginning of 2011, I conducted fieldwork with sheep farmers, in laboratories, with artisans in their homes and/or workshops, and in several washing, spinning, carding and/or weaving industries. I made most of my visits inland Uruguay, and in or near the capital, Montevideo. During that year, I also spent time with the artist, Mónica Giron, in her studio, in galleries and at the art school where she also worked, as well as in some of the art collections that hold her artwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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In 2014, I resolved to go back for three months for additional fieldwork, this time mainly in Patagonia, on both the Chilean and the Argentinian side of the Andes, and in the Chilean archipelago. In December 2014, I also attended the annual International Wool Textile Conference (IWTO) in Brussels, Belgium.

Figure 4.1 Map of South America.

The yellow area indicates the region within which the fieldwork of this study has been conducted.

The area coincides with the Souther Cone and embraces three nations: Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. (Map drawn by Bruno Capelán based on Cardellino and Mueller 2014).

95 The reason for limiting the fieldwork to this place was, as explained in the introduction, that the concern of the artwork which triggered the study pointed and lead me to step deeper into the wool production of this region.

The fieldwork involved a lot of long distance travelling. When thought of as one place, the grasslands – here used in its wider sense as grazing lands – span an area of 4.944.081 square kilometres, and three countries, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina (Suttie, Reynolds, and Batello 2005; Frame and Reynolds 2005). They embrace a variety of ecozones, biozones, geozones, microclimates, farming and pastoral systems, urban and rural variety and management policies. My decision to focus on the grassland as a region entails taking an opportunity to rethink categories when placing together material that has been collected at enormous distances, and making certain kinds of comparison – certain classifications. Such a move does not deny the diversities or the differences that may, for instance, stem from national and local governance, but must inevitably overlook certain aspects, in order to lift forward others that lay intimate to the purpose of the study.

In this sense, a premise for my study has been a transregional comparison, by clearly cutting across certain differences without ignoring them. This allows for a lifting forward of details about the relational activities and skills that I have set out to pay attention too.

Making phone calls, sending emails and telling people about my interest in work with wool was part of the contact making activities. New contacts were then made in classical ethnographic chain reaction manner – one contact leading to the next and the next and the next, and sometimes included a combination of luck, stubbornness and personal motivation.

For instance, once, I was walking back from a rent-a-car agency, just having returned the vehicle that had taken me many kilometres back and forth and across inland Patagonia. I had spent about a week travelling between different sheep farms, asking the farmers about their work and life and walking the fields with them. I had slept a few of the nights on the farms, for some nights I had found a room to rent and the rest I had slept in the car. I carried a lot of recordings, photos, notes and impressions, as well as a bad cold, and as I was leaving the agency I took a tired turn onto what I hoped would be a shortcut to the room I had booked and the comfortable bed that was on my mind. I ended up standing in front of a Mapuche wool workshop. I went in, sat down and told them about my project and was invited to come back the next day. From there, several interviews and further contacts with artisans rolled in.

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Otherwise, most contact was made through already established informants.

A laboratory technician that I had interviewed would pick up the phone to call a person that he knew who worked in a Mapuche sheep farmer cooperative. Once that person had approved, I got his number and we set up a meeting.

Also the opposite was sometimes true: that some efforts to make contact did not automatically ‘roll on’. One person to whom I reached out for contacts with sheep farmers at first showed great enthusiasm and promised to call me back with information, yet although I left him several messages over an extended timespan reminding him of my interest, I never heard from him again. A similar situation happened with the Benetton Group in Patagonia. My calls were not returned. Although I was eager to get a sense of their own version of their presence and activities in the region, I ended up accepting that with this multinational company there were other kinds of conditions and gatekeepers at work, and that the version I would get from them was through what was already published in press releases and online. A more nuanced understanding of their presence was to become visible through my fieldwork with other farmers and woolworkers in the region.

In hindsight I see that I was moving this study quite carefully, without wanting to push it in any forced direction, but letting it happen and build itself up along its own trajectory. I also moved quite carefully in the places and rooms I spent time in. This does not imply that it is in any way

‘innocent’ or that I have acted like a ‘fly on the wall’. I made specific choices along the way, and here the purpose, aim, methodological disposition and conceptual focus were always actively motivating the decisions.

Having been careful may, then, sometimes have affected my conduct, but not necessarily the results of the study. During one fieldwork session on a farm I was the only woman present. This fact made my presence more special than I would have wanted. I hesitated for a few moments when wanting to sit down and talk with the shearers on their break, as the circle they formed where they sat was very closed. I did create the opportunity to squeeze in between two of the men and the conversation took speed quite easily after that. I also, however, decided to not spend the night on the farm.

I saw absolutely no danger, but neither did I see a reason to feel vulnerable at night.

97 In the laboratory I accompanied several technicians during their work: I sat and walked with them as they went about doing their job and asked questions. Most of my time was spent in a combination of watching and asking questions. This was a similar procedure as with the artisans in their workshops. I tried to take care to not interrupt their job, but I know that my interest and questions did divert their attention and swallow some of their time. I also know that it was not always clear to them what I was after. One technician asked me: if anthropologists compare cultures, why did I spend time in a laboratory? Nor was it always understood how I went about with my research. An art collector whom I was interviewing would interject that I was not adding anything with my inquiries that he didn’t already know.

An artisan would ask what my hypothesis was. I tried to explain again and in a different way what I had always already introduced: that my efforts had to do with getting to grips with their everyday work with the wool or the woollens, with their skills, and with the way they saw their own work and their worlds. I did not work with a predefined hypothesis, but with assumptions and dispositions, and that it was in conversation with people like her, and with the scholarly literature, that my project took shape.

Another challenge was to move beyond or work actively with contradictions that would sometimes occur between what people did, what they said that they were doing and what they said was the effect or significance of what they did. Once I had accepted such contradictions as not only a common aspect of doing complex fieldwork (Atkinson, Delamont, and Housley 2008) but as part of my findings (which I make more explicit, particularly in Chapter six) I could proceed with more confidence. In relation to this issue I also found Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s quote comforting when working on, as she suggests that

“Knowing and thinking are inconceivable without a multitude of relations that also make possible the worlds we think with” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012).

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Figure 4.2 Map of the region with details of my fieldwork settings

This map details the location of the sites/environments: the laboratories, the sheep farms, the manufacturing plants, the artisan workshops, the art collections, the artist studio, the Benetton stores in Scandinavia, and the IWTO meeting in Brussels.

All in all, I conducted about 40 interviews. These were recorded when possible (there were a few times when the recorder did not work). Along with the interviews I took photos, and sometimes recorded short videos (also the camera failed a couple of times). In addition, I dedicated a lot of attention to what was going on – I made observations²⁹. Tim Ingold highlights the significance of observation in anthropological research:

29 To clarify, we are talking about observation as an anthropological research method and not about authoritarian control, panoptic surveillance or any candid presence, although recent debates about this kind of observation also include questions about the effects of technology, and critique this notion for insufficiently characterizing the complexities of contemporary surveillance practices (Gad and Lauritsen 2009; Dubbeld 2005; Lyon 2006).

99 For to observe is not to objectify; it is to attend to persons and things, to learn from them, and to follow in precept and practice. Indeed, there can be no observation without participation – that is, without an intimate coupling, in perception and action, of observer and observed (Ingold 2000: 108).

Thus, participant observation is absolutely not an undercover technique for gathering intelligence on people, on the pretext of learning from them. It is rather a fulfilment, in both letter and deed, of what we owe to the world for our development and formation (Ingold 2014a:387-388).

My committed observations were all written down, at first mostly as jotted words, lists or half sentences, in a notebook (or sometimes on a piece of paper) by the end of the day or when I had just left the place. Later, I wrote whole sentences and paragraphs (called fieldnotes in the analytical chapters) sometimes by hand but mostly in a word documents on my computer. I always made sure to write up these fieldnotes as soon as possible after the visit. I invested a considerable amount of time on writing them, and also on transcribing the interviews. I saw these tasks as ways to reflect over and code the material (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011; Sanjek 1990). When writing up the thesis, I would go back both to the original recordings, and to those notes and I would sometimes remember other version, or notice other aspects, of the same event. I would also note new details by revising the photos and the videos I had taken. This may be referred to a variation of a hermeneutic spiral where the oscillation between parts puts ‘the whole’ in motion (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009).

Fieldnotes and the photos are, in this sense, not accurate descriptions of

‘reality as it really is’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Brit Ross Winthereik (Winthereik 2004) suggests replacing the notion of ‘accurate’ with

‘adequate’ description, referring to how well the researcher links the fieldnotes, the transcripts, the analytical and theoretical resources (2004:12; see also Juul Nielsen 2010). This way of viewing also allows the researcher to adjust, and re-adjust the study and its focus along the way.

The analytical chapters, in part II, also include discussion on methods. I have given my fieldnotes as well as the photos a lot of space in the analytical chapters. The fieldnotes included in the analytical are elaborated from the original notes taken, and slightly adjusted in order for them to be more coherent for a reader. I sometimes include a few words or sentences in Spanish to provide a livelier sense of the voice the speaker. That the photos are given so much space in my work, is mainly due to my personal background in photography and to the strong conviction that visual information, such as photos, does not simply illustrate what the text is

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already saying but can be used to add to the flow of the narrative. I therefore think of the photos and their accompanying picture-headings and picture-texts, which I have carefully selected for the analytical chapters, as overt parts of the body of text, of the argument and the place-making of my thesis (Collier and Collier 1986; Pink 2008; 2013). This is also why I do not include in text references to the photos.

Every so often, in conversation with the people I was talking to about their tasks and activities, they would make associations to other sources, recommend me to read texts or look at reports and documents that they thought would interest me. Most of the times I made efforts to find these sources. I have, in the chapters, cited these as references.

Practically all interviews were conducted in Spanish and I translated the parts that I found relevant along with the transcriptions. Before every interview and observation, I made sure to inform the participants about the purpose of my study, that the interviews would be used only for my project and not by anybody else, and that they could withdraw at any point without further questions. I have as much as possible preserved anonymity of persons, places and circumstances, with the exception of the artist, who has given her consent, and who is a public enterprise. I see this confidentiality as both an ethical consideration and as part of the coding process of seeing links beyond the immediate.