introduction draft/methods
This study explores
people’s ideas and theories about place through an ethnographic and historic
place study of the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The broader lens
of this work explores place narratives in the wider region from the turn of the
19th century through historic and archival research methods. The
methods employed in this study seek to uncover dimensions of place,
specifically and more generally, through a range of ethnographic and historic
methods. What people make of places is a question of meaning. How do people
form meaningful relationships in the places they occupy? How do they attach and
inscribe meaning into their places? Ideas and theories, the mental structures
used to make sense of external experiences and give them meaning, are powerfully
evident in ways people make places recognizable and meaningful. We narrate,
name, identify, remember, commemorate and mark places. What people make of
places is also a meaningful question. Fixing place into a particular narrative
is a worthy endeavor. It is worthy because we are, as philosopher Casey Stevens
reminds us, nothing without place.
On
a practical level, our knowledge of places is often a matter of survival. This
trait, which apparently receded in the last century, has revived in light of
environmental crises. In many ways place is culture. A reflection of our
material and bounded habitats, whether tangible or imagined, place reflections
are evident in clothing, dance, food, kinship structures, built environments,
spiritual practice, geolocational arrangements, ritual, ornamentation and even
skin pigmentation of and arrangement of facial features and bodies. These
characteristics persist and adapt in the contemporary world of movement,
dislocation, contest and collusion. People also narrate place traditions into
being. Far away and longing to create what they have imagined in places unseen
is a mainstay in the southwest region and across the world. Cultural
appropriation and blatant displays of cultural creation and spectacle are
mainstays of the global and local landscape of place. These place narratives
and cultural creations performances are as telling as any historical account of
place that strives to portray objective reality.
Place
ethnography is similar to traditional ethnography, which seeks to discern
cultural characteristics through field-based observation and documentation.
Keith Basso was formative in the development of place ethnography, first
articulated in his book Wisdom Sits in
Places (1996). Basso implores ethnographers interested in place to explore
them with deliberate speed. Beyond expanding knowledge of particular social
groups, the hallmark of ethnographic research, he contends place ethnography is
a critical endeavor in the contemporary moment. In this “unsettled age,” and in
these “distorted times” with so much at stake, he writes it is “unfortunate
that anthropologists seldom study what people make of places.”[i]
Basso follows this sweeping list of trials with a more lighthearted exploration
of how adept people are at creating richly lived and sensed places, and how
deeply attached people can be to their places. Relationships represented,
enacted and embodied in the physical landscape, these attachments can be
profound. “For surely as place is an elemental existential fact, sense of place
is a universal genre of experience,” writes Basso, musing that transcultural
qualities might be uncovered through place ethnographic research.[ii]
The
term transcultural is perhaps a more useful concept than universal.
Increasingly, claims of universal experiences or qualities are suspect. Yet the
desire to find qualities that transcend the particular is heady. “Everything,
or almost everything, hinges on the particulars,” says Basso, “and because it
does, ethnography is essential.” (145). Striving to find patterns in the
particulars, to move to the universal, is the work of scholars however. Some
excellent place scholarship in recent years erodes Basso’s claim that
“ethnographic inquiry into cultural constructions of geographical realities is
at best weakly developed” (105). Basso’s work with Steven Feld is one example.
Together they edited Senses of Place
(1996), a collection of research first presented of a conference at the Santa
Fe School for Advanced Research convened to explore the complex relationships
between people and places. Place ethnographies, they write, seek to
"locate the intricate strengths and fragilities that connect places to
social imagination and practice, to memory and desire, to dwelling and
movement” (8). The call to ethnographic place study is powerful in Wisdom Sits in Places. Basso’s text is
deceptively slim given its philosophical force. Insightfully cogent, deeply
philosophical, delightful, honest and surprising, the text offers encouragement
to scholars without supplying a methodological framework. Twenty years of prior
fieldwork, a directive to create a map with Apache place names, coupled with
what emerged as profoundly insightful conclusions about language, place and
wisdom resulted in text that remains unequaled in its philosophical appeal.
Michael
Trujillo’s book Land of Disenchantment:
Latina/o Identities and Transformations in Northern New Mexico (2009) is an
equally complex work of ethnography. Trujillo’s work in the Northern New Mexico
town of Española is the other intellectual pillar of this project.
Uncomfortably opposed at many junctures, these texts taken together nonetheless
form a framework for my own research. Basso work, hailed as “a classic creative
ethnographic representation” on the book’s back cover strikes a much different
tone. Trujillo, on the other hand, claims his goal is “to challenge
ethnography.”[iii]
Trujillo employs what he describes as the once-radical and now reasonably
common style of the modernist ethnography. Representations of supposedly
cohesive cultural groups have long been a mainstay of ethnography in New
Mexico. Not merely portrayed as cohesive, but outside of the modern, First
Nation and Nuevomexicana/o communities have long endured the ethnographic gaze.
Basso does not spend much time grappling with this history. According to Basso
the task of ethnographers is to fashion a written account that adequately
conveys his or her understandings of other people’s understandings. It is a
discomforting business abounding with loose ends claims Basso. Yet with
patience, good humor and perseverance, it is possible to achieve the
ethnographer’s task of determining what expressive acts might mean, and
relating them to larger ideas world. Fashioning accounts they convey
ethnographer’s understanding of other’s understandings is daunting but worthy
says Basso. “To argue otherwise (and there is a bit of that around these days)
is to dismiss ethnography as a valid source of cultural knowledge and turn it
into a solipsistic sideshow, an ominous prospect only slightly less appealing
than the self-engrossed meanderings of those who seek to promote it.”[iv]
Trujillo
seeks to engage the modernist ethnography through a series of essays, “a form
designed to address such complex and often-indefinable subjects.”[v] This
form captures the dynamic intertexuality between the ethnographic gaze and the
ethnographic archive. Prior representations of cultural groups loom in any
present ethnographic account, yet through this method the ethnographer admits,
much as Basso does, to the challenge of bewilderment and incomprehension that
accompanies observation.
Unlike
Basso, Trujillo eschews the “desire to unmask or defrock some larger or deeper
truth,” an approach to ethnographic representation he claims Michael Taussig
exemplifies in his work. Yet Trujillo concedes that even as he strives to
recognize the complex, partial and subjective representations his ethnographic
accounts by their very nature portray, he still seeks “to paint a picture that
is somehow more whole than previous ethnographies.”[vi]
Basso contends that ethnography, although often painful and wrenching, is also
a great deal of fun. Occasionally, he remarks, ethnographers “stumble onto
culturally given ideas,” that are worthy of wider attention, attention that places
and their sensing deserve. Trujillo, equally candid, speaks to finding
something “sublime and fulfilling,” in exploring the juxtaposition between the
positive and negative, the framework he uses to interrogate his own
ethnographic accounts.
Historic
methods and research are engaged both comparatively and in order to look
specifically at how place narratives operate in creating place identity. What
ideas and theories do people have about places? How are these ideas present in
the narratives people create and recount about places? I suspect in the process
of writing about these accounts I will grapple with these questions
extensively, struggling to make sense of my ethnographic data. The quality of
the scholars who work I propose to model assures nothing but a very high bar. I
approach my attempts to order these observations thematically. I often concede
to chronological accounts given the ease of chronological history. Place is a
ranging concept, and these impositions of order are equally wide and shifting.
Even places that persist over centuries of records are in constant flux as
people, power structures, cultural systems, landscapes, geographical features
and other characteristics change. Place a temporary apparition despite the
seemingly tangible physical reality that so often accompanies it. Like a series
of snapshots capturing glimpses of place at particular moments, the historical
record in story, print, photo or other documentation is one way to know a
place. Historic and archival records are a key method in place studies. The
records examined in this study certainly include newsprint, historic
photographs, surveys, archival and government documents.
Place
narratives are also abundant in other historic sources. Promotional material,
maps, as well as travel guides and similar material provide place histories of
their own. Considering why places are narrated in particular ways illuminates
why claims to definitive place histories are so powerful. Communities can agree
on particular facts and still hold vastly different ideas about what these
shared observations mean. Place histories, like any other, are tenuous and
partial. Good history is carefully crafted and with painstaking to detail and
documentation. Traditional sources have similar flaws in truth telling but
carry higher expectations. Of equal
interest, however, are the histories that are not so reliable or rigorous.
Veracity is not necessarily the point of this interrogation, especially in
regards to non-traditional sources. It is, rather, to seek patterns in place
narratives.
Place
ethnography uses a multitude of traditional methods, such as interviews and
observations, coupled with approaches such as empirical observations on public
space use and policy analysis, phenomenological methods from architecture that
seek to capture the experience of a place, and elements of that
consciousness-based experience, as well as photography, site sketching, and
other common documentation techniques. I draw these specific methods from a
rich body of critical and historical approaches employed for qualitative data
collection. Fieldwork is the primary means of data collection. As the
foundation for qualitative ethnographic research, careful observation reveals a
great deal of rich information. This is what ethnographer Clifford Geertz calls
"thick description." Engaging in community and cultural place
processes requires both observation and participant observation. Interviews are
the foundation for this study, coupled with a range of other methods. Physical
landscape and cultural use patterns, site sketching, and photo documentation of
the physical and built environment, visual analysis and interpretation of
artifacts in the landscape, the setting and relationship of buildings, the
movement of people and other things, such as animals and cars, through the
landscape, and archival research on these elements round out my methods.
Cultural landscape documentation seeks to capture the patterns of human shaping
of the physical environment, and the ways in which the physical environment
shapes cultural norms and patterns. A final component of my data collection
will be social mapping, the documentation of relationships between groups,
institutions, organizations, social structures as well as the relationships
between people, things and places.
