WENDY PEARLMAN
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: THE MIDDLE EAST
I began my relationship with Middle East studies more than twenty years ago during a junior semester abroad in Morocco. My memories from that period are of the typically humbling mishaps of a young American abroad for the first time. I lived with a working-class local family that did not have hot water and bathed at a communal hammam once a week. When I joined, I elicited unforgettable scorn from the woman who helped me scrape off dead skin with a cloth mitt and quickly apprehended that I might not have done that before. I traveled to a peripheral city and stayed in a hostel, only later discovering that it was widely known to be a brothel. I began learning the Arabic alphabet and practiced reading street signs, my pride in sounding out F-a-n-t-a melting when I recognized the image of the tell-tale orange bottle below. And even my scarce knowledge of Arabic did me no good when I joined my classmates on a trip far into the Atlas mountains, where we were sent in pairs to spend a few days with Amazigh-speaking families. My partner and I performed an elaborate pantomime—consisting of bleating like sheep, repeatedly lifting our fingers to our mouths, and excitedly invoking the only word we knew (“No!”)—to communicate to our hosts, somehow, that we were vegetarians.
I gathered more memories during subsequent years living in and among Arab communities: I spent a year volunteering at organizations serving Moroccan immigrants in Spain; made multiple return trips to Morocco as an Arabic language student; spent a semester at Birzeit University in the West Bank; interned at Palestinian human rights organizations in Ramallah and Gaza, and then spent another year doing Arabic language study at the American University in Cairo. This time in the region amounted to about two years between my BA and MA, and then another eighteen months between my MA and the start of my PhD.
Going back and forth delayed my doctoral studies considerably. When I began, I was the old lady in a cohort of stellar newly or nearly newly minted university graduates. During the prior year I did the interviews for what would become my first book, and I also got ideas that would inform my choice of a topic for my dissertation, which would become my second book. Even so, it was difficult then to account for what I had gotten out of the hours-turned-days-or-weeks devoted to watching Ramadan soap operas, playing with neighbor kids, looking through wedding albums, traveling on circuitous routes in shared taxis and mini-vans, and joining extended families for lunches that became dinners and then invitations to spend the night.
What I was doing across those years was not fieldwork. Indeed, I do not think I even knew the word fieldwork at that time. Nor was it ethnography or participatory observation, as I was not seeking information for any sort of research project. I would not even call it “deep hanging out,” to invoke Clifford Geertz citing James Clifford.1 Rather, it was just normal hanging out, but these accumulated experiences taught me much more about the Middle East than I realized at the time. Each was an installment in a lifetime investment in building an area studies expertise, and it all helped establish the foundation for the rest of my career studying this particular region. I would not trade that for the world.
As I cannot call this time fieldwork, perhaps it is best to think of it as “field-being.” And field-being, I propose, deserves more appreciation then it currently receives as a part of the overall academic project of producing knowledge and understanding. Field-being can help us learn things in different ways than we do while conducting what is more conventionally understood as field research. In this regard, at least four salient distinctions come to mind.
First, and perhaps most basic, field-being is a crucial step in acquiring the proficiency in foreign languages needed to do credible research about societies that speak languages other than our own. In my experience, learning Arabic required both years of formal instruction and years of on-and-off living in the Arab world. I am fortunate that all of that preceded any attempts to do serious fieldwork.
Second, whereas fieldwork has us play the role of “researcher,” field-being allows us to take on a diversity of other roles, each of which can give us a different perspective on the communities we seek to investigate. In my years in the Middle East, for example, I was a student, a friend, a coworker, a volunteer, an employee, a housemate, a tenant, a neighbor, and (as happens to many who spend much of their twenties abroad) a romantic partner. Each role introduced me to a distinctive environment and its own web of social relationships, assumptions, and norms. Each contributed to the personal, multifocal well of latent understanding from which I continue to pull in ways difficult to predict.
Third, in contrast to fieldwork (at least as it is usually done in political science), field-being invites us to follow rather than guide the disclosure of information, and this holds immense potential to expose us to things for which we might not even think to search. To return to my own experience, I spent considerable time immersed in Arabic-speaking settings long before I developed the capacity to express myself in that language. During that stage, the natural thing for me to do was keep quiet and concentrate on trying to absorb (or guess) what was being discussed around me. Unlike in the interviews that have now become a mainstay of my fieldwork, my typical role in those exchanges was that of a spectator, not that of a researcher actively trying to steer a conversation according to my goals. Research demands that we steer conversations purposefully, and there is no shame in that! But a lot can sometimes be gained by putting our agendas aside. And as a matter of principle, the more time we spend simply listening and observing, the more we earn a credible claim to be able to interpret, analyze, assess, and make meaning out of other people’s worlds.
Fourth, whereas the value of fieldwork is conventionally measured in terms of data collected, the value of field-being might lay chiefly in the analytical intuitions honed. These somewhat intangible instincts about places, situations, and topics enable us to discern questions that are worth researching (because they matter to the people we research), help us identify nonobvious ways of exploring subjects, and enrich our ability to make sense of what we gather. In my experience doing interviews (as a part of fieldwork), I believe that intuition (built during field-being) has been far more useful to me than any preexisting list of questions or standardized guidelines about to how to ask them. Intuition strengthens the ability to read spoken and unspoken cues about what to probe more deeply or, alternatively, what to let go. Intuition, perhaps more than other kinds of knowledge, is gained experientially. And there is no better way to gain intuitions about a field site than by being there.
Students conducting fieldwork ought not to look at time in the field narrowly in terms of gathering data for a specific project, such as a dissertation. Rather, I encourage them to think of it broadly in terms of developing an enduring relationship with a place, language, or topic. In that regard, sometimes it is the episodes in the field that are unplanned or unsought, or perhaps not even understood or appreciated at the time, that prove most valuable as the years pass. Keep your eyes and ears open and absorb all you can. Nothing you hear or observe in the field is irrelevant in your quest to get to know a social universe different from your own.
As we move along in our lives and our professional trajectories, it can become increasingly logistically difficult to devote time to field-being, as opposed to fieldwork. Time is limited by teaching and service responsibilities, family duties, and the pressure to translate knowledge into publishable deliverables (professors’ version of actionable intelligence). In whatever ways we can, however, it is worth trying to squeeze out time for field-being, or at least to cultivating the spirit of un-instrumentalized discovery that it represents.
Beyond our own thinking about “the field” as a place to be and not simply to work, we can encourage our students to take advantage of chances for field-being whenever possible. I am continually dismayed when I hear students, and especially undergraduates pondering postgraduation plans, refer to the idea of spending time abroad as “time off.” “Time off what?” I usually respond. “Time off life?” My preprofessional undergraduates typically invoke this phrase with an apologetic tone, implying that going abroad after college is a digression from what they are supposed to do: go straight to graduate school and not delay the start of a high-powered career. If they depart from that path, they seem to feel that they need to justify it.
As educators, we should challenge that view. As long as it is safe and affordable, young people seldom go wrong by spending more time in other countries, languages, and cultures rather than less. Where they go and what they do matters less than simply getting there. We can encourage them, and remind ourselves that one need not be doing fieldwork to be in the field and learn.
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Wendy Pearlman is associate professor of political science at Northwestern University.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Pearlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria. New York: Custom House, 2017.
• ——. Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• ——. Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada. New York: Nation Books, 2003.
NOTE
1. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998.