DAVID D. LAITIN
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATIONS: SOMALIA, NIGERIA, CATALONIA, ESTONIA
My fieldwork exposure began as a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia in 1969. Training involved four months of intense instruction in the Somali language, which facilitated subsequent research for my doctoral dissertation on the consequences of the official retention of colonial languages in independent Africa. That training, I am sure, sensitized me to the challenges field researchers face in interpreting data from their field sites, and it led me, in my second field endeavor in Nigeria, to articulate the “onion principle.”
My family and I settled in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in 1979 for a research project on the implications of religious change for political behavior. In that region of Nigeria—Yorubaland—about half the population had been converted to Christianity, the other half to Islam. The historical record revealed that these religious “treatments” in the nineteenth century were as-if random. My research strategy was to participate in religious life by going weekly to church and mosque (only a few hundred meters separated them) to observe the religious cultures in the two subcommunities. I was interested in seeing whether religious exposure could be linked to different political orientations. Another line of cleavage, which I have called “ancestral city” attachments dividing the Yoruba, was an alternative source that might condition political behavior. I chose a field site where religious groups were evenly divided and members of different ancestral cities were resident, and my wife and I set up a household in Ile Ife, which entailed becoming embedded in the local economy. A neighbor of ours, Roland Abiodun, a professor of humanities at the University of Ile-Ife (today’s Obafemi Awolowo University) offered to guide me through the oja oba (the king’s market) to help me purchase provisions. We first went to the stall of the onion merchant, a vibrant and commanding presence typical of Yoruba market women. I watched and listened as the bilingual dialogue progressed between local gossip and bargaining for his kilo of onions. The bargaining style was new to me. Several times Roland offered a price and our merchant quickly said fun mi ni owo naa (give me the money); but Roland didn’t take that as his final offer, and then he went lower. After several iterations, Roland realized he had reached the bottom price and handed over four naira for his kilo. I followed suit. I gave her four naira and got my kilo of onions.
The next week on market day Roland could not join me, and I went alone. As I entered the market, our onion saleswoman spotted me in seconds and yelled “customer, customer, come here, to get your onions.” Of course, I accepted her instructions. Upon arriving at the stall, the merchant revealed that for me there was no reason to bargain, and she would give me the four naira price right away. I was pleased that I was already accepted as a regular. Proudly, I visited Roland that afternoon and reported on my success. He smiled, a bit condescendingly, and told me that the market price for onions that week was one naira fifty kobo for a kilo. I was deflated. This anecdote became the source of a fieldwork guidepost for me and my students. I called it “the onion principle,” summarized as a simple admonition: Do not write about a country unless you can buy onions at the market price.
The market was the locus of many tests of my local competence. At the oja oba, the bowls used to measure precisely a kilo of rice were typically raised at the bottom by a translucent wax, essentially a 20 percent tax for the unwary. When I quietly revealed to my rice merchant that I had been briefed about this fraudulent practice, a new bowl quickly appeared, and I never saw the waxed bowl again.
If I couldn’t circumvent tricksters in the market, how could I do so at the church and the mosque, my two sites of ethnographic evidence? It was a challenge. In my interviews with church and mosque participants, as well as the circle around the ooni (traditional leader) of Ife, they would inflate their credentials, perhaps to secure a business relationship with an American or to have their exalted status proclaimed in a future book about their town. “Where was the wax at the bottom of their bowls?” I continually asked myself as I became more culturally adept. Tests of my skills in garnering local knowledge of Yoruba politics continued after I left Nigeria. Upon my return to Chicago, I was lucky to get into a cab with a driver from Abeokuta, a town close to where I conducted my field research. I had thirty free minutes to learn about religious and ancestral city divisions in a town that I had only briefly visited. Halfway through the Kennedy Expressway, the meter read nearly twice the price of a typical full fare. As I listened to his analysis of Ijebu/Egba relations in his home town, a rare chance for a complementary perspective, I said, “Femi, I must congratulate you on how you fixed your meter; this is not something many cab drivers can do.” He looked back and smiled. “David,” he said, “this meter is not for you; you can pay me anything that pleases you.” His analysis of ancestral city politics in Abeokuta subsequently became much better grounded. Here I was able to pay for my cab ride at market price and get a less varnished account of local politics.
This corollary of the onion principle—consider all politicians in the same genre as market women—served me well in later research projects. One example comes from my study of the Catalan movement for “linguistic normalization,” the program of ethnic entrepreneurs who demanded that Catalan rather than Spanish serve as the official language of the autonomous region of Catalonia. I went into this project believing that a deep-seated love of the language and the culture shared generally by the denizens of els països catalans (the Catalan countries) drove them to rally behind an expensive linguistic project that would enhance their ability to communicate with others by zero!
Should I buy this story? (Indeed, it was the story in my fellowship application to support the research, despite a warning from Juan Linz, who could see behind the smoke and mirrors of all Spanish politics.) In this case, I developed a degree of local knowledge by participating as a student in the reciclatge (recycling) program designed by the Catalan regional government to teach the Catalan language to the administración periferica (i.e., bureaucrats assigned from the political center to serve in Catalonia, and the support base for Barcelona’s Espanyol football team). Relying on the primitive language skills I had then achieved, one day on the metro I noticed a well-dressed man reading Avui, the Catalan language newspaper that was a symbol of the normalization program but absent any serious journalism. Then I noticed that hidden inside the pages of Avui were the pages of El País, the Spanish-language paper for serious readers. This man was evoking nationalist fervor at the same time he was ingesting world-class journalism. I proposed to myself the notion of the “private subversion of a public good” and began to notice that many Catalans relied on this strategy. For example, they voted to require Catalan as the medium of instruction for public education, and then they enrolled their children in a private English-language school. Buying the story of the ethnic entrepreneurs was only a partial truth, one hiding a more political one.
Each new fieldwork venture reminded me of the importance of navigating markets as a sign of basic competence. In the face of language movements roiling the former Soviet Union, I moved my research focus from Catalonia to the Soviet periphery to learn whether the national projects of the then Union Republics would prevail. In my first trip to the USSR, before I spoke competent Russian, I rented a tiny room in downtown Narva (in today’s Estonia) on the eleventh floor of a decaying Khrushchevka apartment. I chose Narva as my research site because it bordered on Russia, and nearly the entire population had cultural roots in Russia. My research question was how these populations—living in what the Russian state authorities called the “near abroad”—would react politically to their situation as an ethnic minority in a nationalizing state. On my first foray into an open-air market, there were queues behind every truck carrying goodies. I stood in the back of a line where I could see vegetables for sale. All of a sudden a new truck pulled up, and masses of consumers rushed to gain early access, and I followed them. It turned out that no one knew what would be offered, and the line suddenly contracted. Answering my question (in English) about what was for sale, someone informed me that it was dog bones. Meanwhile the vegetable truck was depleted, as were my culinary aspirations. After the Soviet collapse, national currencies became a new market. In a visit to Ukraine, I quickly became a multimillionaire, alas in kuponis. The new Estonian government issued the kroon. When I was investigating a more permanent place to reside in Narva, I was invited for a sauna in the coastal village of a leading Russian politician, a former member of the Estonian Soviet before it was disbanded. He had family on both sides of the border with Russia. How he would position himself in the new Estonia was in microcosm the big question motivating my research. I looked down at the tray behind the shift lever and noticed that he had exchanged his rubles for Estonian bills. For him, the market price of kroons was a bargain. He was betting on Estonian stability. You can’t sauté currency as you can onions, but understanding local markets remains a key to understanding wider political currents. More usefully, I developed skill in distinguishing produce sold in Estonian open-air markets that was imported from the Chernobyl zone of Ukraine, and despite its glorious colors, I knew to keep away.
Colleagues often ask me to spell out the implications of developing local competence in a world of big data (coming from text analysis, night light readings from satellites, and MTurk samples) and experiments relying on randomized controlled treatments. These new data sources permit us to focus on mechanisms driving consequential outcomes at the micro level. These data-intensive approaches should not harden the boundaries between qualitative fieldwork and quantitative analysis. Quite the reverse, and I have long sought to undermine what John Dewey would have exposed as this untenable dualism.1 Once we are working at the micro level, we need all the more to provide interpretations of our statistical models by asking ourselves why our subjects responded to treatment as they did. Living among the folk who are our subjects enables us to provide plausible and credible reasons for their behavior. These reasons cannot be considered explanations; rather, they are conjectures that should be put to systematic test. In other words, adhering to the onion principle enables us to induce higher-quality conjectures from those whose behavior we seek to understand.
Yoruba market women and cab drivers are probably more strategic than everyday politicians and bureaucrats, the folk we political scientists rely on for local context. Nonetheless, nationalist politicians are notorious for selling researchers a line of popular solidarity. Of course, we know that we are subject to all sorts of manipulation by those we interview; but if we abide by the onion principle, we will know better in which way, and for what reason, we are being made the fool. When you demonstrate to local informants that you are sensitive to their incentives—and aware of their manipulations—you are likely to get more reliable interpretations from them.
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David D. Laitin is the T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Laitin, David D. Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
• ——. Hegemony and Culture: The Politics of Religious Change Among the Yoruba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• ——. Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.
NOTE
1. James D. Fearon and I have shown how qualitative and quantitative work is at best mutually dependent and not dichotomous; see James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods: Putting It Together Again,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Henry Brady, and David Collier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 756–76.