AMELIA HOOVER GREEN
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: EL SALVADOR
I got nothing, zero, no research whatsoever done on my first trip to El Salvador. I had hoped to achieve fluency in Spanish, settle into an apartment, and start doing interviews with ex-combatants from that country’s civil war (1980–1992). I had planned to spend six months in El Salvador, followed by six months in Sierra Leone. Instead, I found myself struggling to get out of bed. After six weeks of immersion in Spanish, public transit logistics, and self-loathing, I came home convinced that I would have to give back my grant money and drop out of graduate school. I hated fieldwork.
Almost a year later I went back to El Salvador. I completed more than forty interviews in less than a month. I got great material. I still hated fieldwork. I never made it to Sierra Leone.
In this chapter, I provide a comparative reflection on those first two trips, now both nearly a decade in the past. If this were a piece of positivist research, I’d have to report a nonfinding: my hatred of fieldwork did not vary and, therefore, can’t explain why my 2009 trip succeeded whereas my 2008 trip failed. But hating fieldwork did affect nearly everything about my research, from sampling, to methods, to ethical calculations—although I don’t mention hating fieldwork in the resulting publications. My 2008 and 2009 trips illustrate what it means to hate fieldwork, how I succeeded despite hating it (and why I felt I had to), and some ways that hating fieldwork changed my research. There are some questions and field locales where it’s possible to hate fieldwork and still succeed. Whether one (and by “one” I mean “I”) should still do fieldwork is a different question.
TWO EXPERIENCES OF HATING FIELDWORK
Ten years ago, on my twenty-seventh birthday, I lay in bed with yet another fever-and-sore-throat, trying to rouse myself to go celebrate. As usual in the evenings, I was alone in my stuffy little room, staring fixedly at my laptop, where—also as usual—ESPN.com was failing to load the Twins highlights. As I remember it, I sat up and croaked with quiet melodrama: “I hate this.” I smooshed a couple of lanes of the ant highway on my windowsill, flicked off the fluorescent ring light, lay back down, and considered skipping my own party.
I’d been in San Salvador for about a month at that point. My Spanish, already passable, was improving; my hosts were kind and interesting; I was nurturing new friendships among my classmates at the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN)-affiliated Center for Exchange and Solidarity (“el CIS”). Each week I made my way to more and more of the places I’d been trying to visualize for two years: the chapel where Archbishop Oscar Romero was martyred; the Ministry of Defense; the cathedral; El Playón, where death squads dumped their victims; and the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), site of the 1989 Jesuit massacre. I took hundreds of pictures and jotted dozens of pages of notes, playing the part of the intrepid researcher.
I was, all the same, utterly miserable and entirely unproductive. Every day I contemplated the list of people I should call about interviews and found some reason not to pick up the phone. The notes I took were mostly meaningless. I made vague noises about “working” and shut myself in my room for hours on end, knowing that I should do something different but unable to figure out what. Nothing I did felt easy or right or hopeful. None of my clothes fit because I’d lost too much weight. I obsessed over my changing body, sometimes inordinately delighted by the continued weight loss and sometimes fully convinced that my clothes didn’t fit because I was gaining weight. I hadn’t received any eating disorder treatment for a year, and suddenly my whole brain was a sea of red flags.
Later that birthday evening, having dutifully arrived at a bar, drunk exactly one Pilsener with CIS pals, and taxied home to my tiny turquoise bedroom to weep and read Stephen King, I wrote in my journal:
I am a motherfucking grown-up!
I don’t have to do things I hate!
I felt calmer after reminding myself that I could let myself out of my self-made trap. I began to consider that I could, and perhaps should, leave the field (in both senses). I should leave El Salvador if I was miserable and not really working; I should leave political science if I couldn’t hack fieldwork. In a long string of emails, I told my dissertation supervisor everything, expecting and accepting that this was the end of my fledgling career. She told me to come home and not make any rash decisions.
Ten months later I was back. At some point, I handed the now extremely grubby and tattered list of interview contacts off to Erika Murcia, a Salvadoran CIS friend who had become my research assistant, fixer, translator, and general savior. Erika made the phone calls I dreaded (that is, all the phone calls). I installed myself in a hostel that had air conditioning and hot water, within walking distance of a rich-people mall with sub-Arctic climate control, fancy coffee, and an English-language bookstore. Usually a taxi picked me up from the fancy hostel at 8 a.m.
Nearly every day, nearly all day, I listened to ex-combatants’ experiences. I did not ask about violence against civilians because I assumed I would get few honest answers, but many Salvadoran ex-combatants seemed eager to get their secrets out under the promise of confidentiality. Consequently I heard a shocking amount about the cruelty and banality of war. It rained hard most afternoons, so I got used to listening to answers shouted over the sound of a deluge on a tin roof. Interviews began to fall into organized patterns, some of which actually matched my theoretical priors. The clothes I’d brought to San Salvador became lightly but ineradicably mildewed.
In the evenings, exhausted, I’d crank up the air conditioning, plop down on my bed, and eat saltines for dinner while audio files transferred from my digital voice recorder to my computer. After chatting briefly with my partner or my mom, I’d leaf through the day’s interview notes and lock the pages away, dutifully complying with the protocols approved by my university’s institutional review board (IRB). I was usually asleep by 8:30 p.m. When I got sick, I had my very own tiny bathroom with a cool, bleach-smelling tile floor. On one sick day, I realized that I felt like I was catching a break. A rather detached-sounding internal voice noted, apparently I’d rather have uncontrollable diarrhea than do this job. I still hated fieldwork. It was confusing because I was succeeding at fieldwork.
For years after those first two trips, I knew that I hated fieldwork and frequently declared that I hated fieldwork, without fully understanding what that meant. It certainly doesn’t mean anything objective; it’s not the sum total of physical discomfort, illness, bad weather, terrifying traffic, crime, language barriers, and troubling revelations. It isn’t necessarily even related to being good or bad at fieldwork. It’s also not quite the same as experiencing poor mental health while in the field, either—although I’d be the first to admit that the two are related in my case.1
Looking back at the worst of the worst times, the most ragged and splotchy of the journal entries from each trip, I’ve decided that, for me, the defining feature of fieldwork-hatred is needing to force myself to do everything, from oozing out of bed in the morning to locking up my notebook pages at night. This brings on a sort of existential exhaustion that neither sleep nor buckets of coffee can cure. (I tried both.) Forcing it also implies faking it, constantly. I was faking when I ordered my coffee in the morning, faking when I chatted with taxi drivers—and, I think, sometimes faking my interest and empathy with interview respondents.
DOING IT ANYWAY
At this point a reasonable reader might ask why I went back to El Salvador a second time, let alone all the other times since. Other readers, particularly those in the middle of their own dissertation research, may understand immediately. The structure of (U.S.) PhD training in political science is one reason someone might need to do fieldwork despite hating it. Machismo is another. In my graduate program, it seemed impossible to be a “good comparativist” without a stock of fieldwork adventure stories, whether the adventures served the ostensible purpose of the trip or not. Sometimes, though, fieldwork is really and truly necessary. I wanted to learn about the experiences of low-level combatants in the Salvadoran Civil War, and I wanted to learn about these experiences in great detail. I could not do the project without some qualitative interviews.
But how is a newbie researcher to tell the difference between necessity, on one hand, and machismo or mere convention, on the other? Compliance with machismo and convention had been an utter disaster, but my questions demanded at least some time in the field. Finally, I realized that I was doing semistructured interviews with strict protocols to protect confidentiality, a procedure that already limits reinterviews. This was not ethnography; it didn’t need to be ethnography. My dissertation advisor’s rightly classic book on Salvadoran insurgency relied on long-term ethnographic research.2 Without realizing it, I had been working from the assumption that I should literally follow in her footsteps. But I didn’t have to do so.
Realizing I wouldn’t be an ethnographer meant I could think of my interviews as part of an empirical strategy designed to measure, carefully, a particular set of outcomes—rather than as an attempt to understand the full range of respondents’ experiences as fighters. Of course, I relied on some ethnographic principles in collecting and analyzing interview data. My sense of my own positionality, and my awareness of the stakes involved in recounting one’s memories of such a critical period to a white American woman from a fancy university, fundamentally shaped the final analysis. But I was free, at least analytically, to conduct interviews that asked directly and primarily about respondents’ experiences of the institutions I was interested in: recruitment, military training, political education, and disciplinary procedures. My interviews, and my visits to El Salvador, became shorter and more efficient.
Having abandoned the idea of long-term, immersive, ethnographic fieldwork, I scheduled several short trips, with breaks in between. Looking back at the first, failed trip, I thought concretely about specific things I hated: being too hot to sleep at night, mosquito bites, not being able to hang out on the internet, cold-calling for interviews, figuring out public transit, not having my own bathroom, my mediocre Spanish. On my return trips, I stayed in the aforementioned air-conditioned room with a private bath, ate breakfast at the bakery across the street, outsourced phone calls to Erika, hired her to translate when necessary, and drove around in taxis every day. Your mileage may vary, as they say. But on this trip and others, I found that my budget evened out: per-day expenses were much greater, but I accomplished a lot more each day. The way I have talked about these decisions in the years since is to “prioritize what gets you through the day.”
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity I experienced pushed me to consider nonfieldwork information sources about combatant experiences in the Salvadoran Civil War, two in particular. First, I worried that some potential interviewees, particularly those with less formal education, might be put off by an in-depth interview (perhaps especially with me). I commissioned Erika to administer a structured questionnaire in veterans’ service offices around the country during the fall of 2009. Erika collected 260 responses from all over the country; I never left home. Second, I realized rather belatedly that many of the Salvadorans living in the United States were ex-combatants. At the time, I was living in San Francisco, a center of the sanctuary movement—yet I hadn’t spoken with any of the thousands of Salvadorans there, owing to my previous myopic focus on having an “authentic fieldwork experience.” I began seeking interviews at home. Ultimately, I interviewed more than one hundred Salvadoran ex-combatants, as I had initially hoped, about a quarter of them in the Bay Area.
I finally decided not to travel to Sierra Leone, both because I judged that I could write a good dissertation on the basis of subnational variation in El Salvador alone and because I worried that I’d be too miserable to function in Sierra Leone. In the end, the dissertation confined my interest in the Mano River wars to a short chapter where I breezily discussed a host of extension cases. In my 2018 book, I similarly focused on El Salvador—but I fleshed out the Sierra Leonean and Liberian cases in a long chapter. Here I relied extensively on other people’s fieldwork and, as with the Salvadoran case, on existing quantitative data on violence. Would fieldwork have yielded better, or at least more detailed, results? Probably. Was it possible for me to do that fieldwork? Probably not.
THE METHODS, AND ETHICS, OF HATING FIELDWORK
Some of the methodological implications of fieldwork-hating are already clear, particularly the push toward triangulation and my deep reliance on a brilliant and tenacious research partner. Others surprised me. For example, I was a young, white, American woman who smiled a lot and didn’t speak fluent Spanish—a credulous-looking person. Rightly or wrongly, I occasionally used my identity and appearance to create an impression of harmlessness as a way of gaining access. In the new, nonethnographic era, however, I quickly realized that I needed to balance the impression of naïveté I created by signaling that I knew a lot and would be difficult to bullshit.3 This I did by listening for locations, unit designations, and other specifics in the introductory section of the interview, and then name-dropping key events or people that were likely to be relevant. This produced more specific answers and avoided the usual recitation of pablum that frequently interviewed ex-combatants tend to deploy with inexperienced researchers.
It does not feel good to hate such a big part of one’s job. It feels even worse to consider that hating a big part of one’s job may lead, or may have led, to unethical research practices. But I’m writing about hatred; hatred has inescapable ethical stakes. First, doing research that is likely to get the right answer, as opposed to research that merely accomplishes the doing of research, is an ethical imperative. In nearly any research-ethics framework, but particularly in the framework that informs human subjects research at U.S. universities, this is so because beneficence requires that we balance the potential harms of research against the putative benefits.4 If the benefits are illusory because the research is incorrect, no balance is possible. To whatever extent my accommodations to fieldwork-hatred lowered the quality of my findings, or transformed fieldwork into mere hoop-jumping, that is an ethical failing. I have thought a lot about this, and I feel mostly confident that my results are not based on errors introduced by fieldwork-hatred, or on systematic errors more generally.
A second ethical quandary looms larger for me. I believe researchers who depend on people’s expertise and do not pay for respondents’ time have an ethical obligation to provide some benefit to those people, not just to the world at large in the form of increased knowledge. The best researchers that I know form lasting relationships at their field sites, returning again and again and providing support to individuals and community organizations via their work and resources. Both by design and because my visits were so brief, I don’t remember most of my interview respondents’ names. More important, and more relevant to the discussion of hating fieldwork, it is not clear to me that my work in El Salvador provided any sort of net benefit to any of the people or communities with whom I formed temporary relationships. I was careful to provide resources short of payment; I expressed respect and consideration. And I believe I did no significant harm.5
I did, however, ask people to tell me about critical moments in their lives. And sometimes, when I was hearing about critical moments in a respondent’s life, I was thinking about how soon I could possibly take a nap. I suspect that this is sometimes true for everyone who does fieldwork; no one is superhuman. At the same time, those of us who hate fieldwork run a higher risk of “faking it” in the wrong moment. That risk is compounded, in my view, by the fact that fieldwork-haters are less likely to reinterview, and less likely to stay connected over time. It’s an uneasy thing to acknowledge.
Will I ever do fieldwork again? This is what I’ve been asking myself since my last visit to El Salvador in 2015. I have yet to come to any firm conclusions. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to work that I can do (mostly) from the comfort and safety of home: big data sets, methodological work, and so on. I also have a broader network of colleagues than I did in graduate school, many of whom love fieldwork. I can imagine collaborating with these folks on future projects to minimize field time (and to minimize people in the field having to put up with a fieldwork-hater). I believe, on balance, that my research will benefit the people and communities who helped me during my visits to El Salvador. I’m still not sure I will go back.
I’m not sure my experiences should be instructive. But for those seeking instruction, here are the key points:
• Even fieldwork-haters can do effective fieldwork. Not all excellent fieldwork is ethnography.
• Prioritize what gets you through the day. Be honest about what you need, and even about what you want. Get plenty of rest.
• Consider the methodological and ethical implications of your fieldwork-hatred. Hating fieldwork doesn’t necessarily imply ethically or analytically dubious research, but it does imply some extra responsibilities.
• Almost everyone feels pressure to like fieldwork. Not everyone actually does. You are not alone. Find colleagues and friends with whom you can be honest. You can do this.
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Amelia Hoover Green is associate professor of politics at Drexel University.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Hoover Green, Amelia. “The Commander’s Dilemma: Creating and Controlling Armed Group Violence Against Civilians,” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 5 (2016): 619–32.
• ——. “Armed Group Institutions, Combatant Socialization and Violence Against Civilians: Evidence from El Salvador,” Journal of Peace Research 54, no. 5 (2017): 687–700.
• ——. The Commander’s Dilemma: Violence and Restraint in War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
NOTES
1. I’ve written about mental health and the academy more generally; see Amelia Hoover Green, “Academia, Mental Health, and the Cult of Productivity,” Duck of Minerva (blog), April 28, 2017, http://duckofminerva.com/2017/04/30702.html.
2. Elisabeth Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
5. But, on the (in)sufficiency of “do no harm,” see Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (June 2007): 299–319, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.