On the morning of March 30, 2021, three articles on the culture of harassment within archaeology dropped. And it was epic. Across three articles, Barbara (Barb) Voss reviewed and analyzed current research about the prevalence and patterns of harassment within our discipline. Most useful was her list of proven interventions that have demonstrable results in reducing harassment. Most difficult and heart wrenching to read were her own personal accounts dealing with harassment and how it impacted her career decisions. 

Reading these articles was tough, as I knew it would be, and it occurred to me that there are so many of us who had nowhere to turn when this happened to someone we knew or even ourselves. When we reported an incident of harassment, we were told that we had to figure it out or get out. That is messed up. The significance of these sorts of articles has the immense potential to change how we do archaeology – it could fundamentally change how we could feel safe in our professional spaces.     

The three articles, Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); and Using Public Health Interventions to Prevent Harassment in Archaeology (2021) are all Open Access, and I cannot recommend them enough. Over the course of the last few months, Barb and I have been talking through the responses and through the articles themselves. Based on the significance of our discussions, the impact it could have, and her thoughtful responses, I thought it important to make it more formal, and so I requested an interview. The interview took place on a shared document, in comments, and with an abundance of trust. 

Also, just to say, these issues, as we all know, are not limited to archaeology, but are discipline wide concerns.

Uzma: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Your articles have already become touchstones for discussion around harassment in our discipline. And perhaps we should start there/here. In your article you mentioned you are using the broad term of  “harassment” in recognition that gender and sexuality are not the sole factors in professional abuses of power. Your examples span across decades — important decades in which much work around harassment and safety have happened. Could I ask you to speak broadly about the ways we understand “harassment” to have changed over time? 

Barb: I think it’s helpful to think of harassment is a useful umbrella term, one that describes behaviors that share four specific attributes: (1) they occur in work and educational settings; (2) they involve an abuse of power; (3) they are interpersonal; and (4) they convey hostility, exclusion, objectification, or second-class status based on the perceived identity of the target. 

When Kate Clancy – one of the leading researchers on harassment in field sciences – testified to Congress in 2018, she introduced a framing I find very helpful: “come-ons” and “put-downs.” 

“Come-ons” are unwanted sexual attention, while “put-downs” involve speech and actions that marginalize or exclude the target(s) by stigmatizing their real or perceived identity. While “come-ons” receive the most media attention, “put-downs” are the most common, and they can cause just as much emotional harm and career damage as unwanted sexual attention. So it is important to address all forms of harassment – sexual, identity-based, physical and non-physical, direct and indirect – to remove barriers to participation in archaeology and related fields.

Although harassment has been most commonly used to refer to abuses of power related to gender and sexuality, Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us that, “Anything that’s meant to address gender inequality has to include a racial lens, and anything that’s meant to address racial inequality has to include a gender lens.” The research conducted to date shows that BIPOC archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists with disabilities are disproportionately affected by harassment.

Uzma: Can I ask you to speak a bit about the ‘barriers to change’ that you were able to identify, including the normalization, the exclusionary practices, gate keeping, etc.? 

Barb: In “Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” I identify normalization as one of five key barriers to harassment prevention (the other four are exclusionary practices, fraternization, gatekeeping, and obstacles to reporting).  

In survey research on harassment, respondents commonly described harassment as part of the culture of archaeology, something that is socially expected and that is “normal.” These findings should be a wake-up call for all archaeologists. 

From a trauma-informed perspective, this normalization of harassment is understandable. Survey research indicates that 15%–46% of men archaeologists and 34%–75% of women archaeologists have experienced one or more harassment events during their careers. It’s likely that even more archaeologists have witnessed harassment directly or know of harassment occurring through second-hand accounts.

The resulting collective experience of trauma in our discipline is staggering to contemplate. My hope is that the two-article series provides archaeologists and others in allied fields with tools for dismantling this normalization of harassment. 

Uzma: Significant for such work are the discussions of quantifiable survey results related to harassment in the field. Could you talk a bit about how you selected the surveys?

Barb: My primary objective in writing the first article, “Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” was to aggregate and analyze the growing body of research about harassment in archaeology and related fields. There has been so much research done over the last ten years, but it is really hard to find it and some content is behind paywalls, which poses barriers to access, especially for early career and non-academic archaeologists.

Also, the sheer volume of new studies has made it difficult to keep up with the literature. I wanted to bring all that new information together in one place, so that if you are trying to make the case for better policies and procedures in your workplace – whether academia, museums, cultural resource management, or government and NGO – you can bring this one article to your dean or director or human resources manager and say, “Look, there is a real problem with harassment in archaeology. It has been verified through methodologically-sound, peer-reviewed research. And we need to take action now so that we protect our people and so that our department or company doesn’t become the next #metoo news story.”

Once I had gathered all the studies I could find, I used three criteria to select studies for analysis:  

1.     The study had to either focus exclusively on archaeology or present study findings in a way that allowed content related to archaeology to be disaggregated from general results;  
2.     The study followed an approved human subjects protocol or had equivalent procedures in place to protect research subjects’ well-being and anonymity; and
3.     The study had passed peer review or had been publicly presented in a juried venue such as a professional conference.  

During 2018-2020, I located twelve studies that met these criteria. Seven had robust quantitative components. Initially, I had hoped to be able to combine the results of these studies into a single set of metrics (what is often called a meta-analysis). However, it soon became clear that this would not be possible, because there was so much variation in survey methodologies and especially subject recruitment methods.

For example, many studies about harassment in archaeology recruited participants through social media, which raises questions about whether self-selection biases, technology access, and social network pathways influenced the composition of the study population. Other studies used professional society membership rosters to recruit participants, which on the surface might seem to resolve these issues. But, students, entry-level professionals, and other marginalized archaeologists tend to have low participation rates in professional societies. So it’s unlikely that membership-based surveys can fully capture the experiences of the most vulnerable archaeologists. So, both crowd-sourced and roster-based quantitative surveys have value, even if their results cannot be easily integrated.

The other problem is that very few of the studies published results for archaeologists of color, non-heterosexual archaeologists, archaeologists with disabilities, and trans, non-binary, and agender archaeologists. Several noted that this information was originally collected, but that because of the low number of participants in those categories, they could not disaggregate results by race or sexual orientation without potentially compromising the anonymity of the respondents. There’s a huge research gap as a result and we need to develop better methodologies that ethically document the experiences of archaeologists of color and other marginalized archaeologists.

While initially I planned to only focus on peer-reviewed or juried research, when these gaps became apparent, I expanded the paper in two directions. I added a very brief overview of the history of gender equity research in archaeology, which had tangentially addressed harassment as a mechanism for exclusion. Some of this equity research included a focus on class that was often missing from more recent surveys and interview studies. 

I also developed a section on grassroots activism: conference actions, ad-hoc groups, blogs, art installations, and journalism. This was one of the hardest sections to write because there is so much amazing stuff being done, and with the strict word limit in American Antiquity articles, I couldn’t include everything. I decided to focus on examples involving archaeology students, early career archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists of color, because these are exactly the segments of our community that are underrepresented in formal research studies. 

Uzma: What were some of the surprises (or not) that emerged through analysis of the quantitative research?

Barb: Even as a survivor who has been intermittently involved in sexual violence prevention and activism for much of my adult life, I was still shocked by the high frequency of harassment in archaeology. Surveys results indicate that 15% to 46% of men archaeologists, and 34% to 75% of women archaeologists, have experienced harassment during their training and career, and that 5% to 8% of men archaeologists, and 15% to 26% of women archaeologists, have experienced unwanted sexual contact, including sexual assault. This high prevalence places archaeology in the same range as the military and the entertainment industry – two economic sectors that have notoriously high frequencies of harassment.

And I think we all should be shocked by this, because it’s absolutely horrific. No one should ever have to endure harassment to get an education or pursue a career. 

Some of the research in archaeology confirms well-documented patterns in educational and workplace harassment: harassers most commonly target early career archaeologists, archaeologists are most commonly harassed by other archaeologists (often members of their own research team), and archaeologists in marginalized groups experience harassment at higher-than-average rates.

One particularly interesting finding, which was consistent across many studies, is that there are specific gendered patterns to harassment in archaeology: women archaeologists are most commonly harassed by men and by superiors, while men archaeologists are more commonly harassed by peers of all genders.

It is also important to stress that while quantitative research reveals broad patterns, many people’s experiences of harassment do not conform to these dominant trends. This is why qualitative research – both open-ended survey responses and interviews – are so important, because they capture the full breadth of the problem.

Uzma: I found the section on interviews so revelatory after reading the survey results. One of the key points of analysis that you highlight from Laura Heath-Stouts work is how harassment places a ‘cognitive burden’ on those who have experienced it. Can I ask that you speak a bit more about that, in relation to (if you feel comfortable), your own experiences that you shared in the articles? In some sense, what I am asking is how do we work through the cognitive burden? 

Barb: Laura Health-Stout’s research, along with other studies, helps us understand why harassment has such a long-term negative impact on education and careers even when the harassment itself is short-lived or does not specifically pose a barrier of access to professional opportunities.

I understand this cognitive burden as having two components: one immediate, and the other quite long-lasting. To give an example from my own experience, in “Documenting Cultures of Harassment,” I describe a field project where a male colleague exposed himself to me in the shower facility. A few days later, while drunk, he tried to barge in on me when I was in the toilet. His behavior towards me was very aggressive and I feared it would continue to escalate. When I reported his behavior to my supervisor, she made it clear that she was not going to take any action to protect me from my colleague’s behavior.

For the remainder of that project, a huge amount of my mental energy was dedicated to tracking my colleague’s movements and his schedule. I was constantly performing this intricate calculus to avoid being caught alone with him: adjusting my paths of movement, timing my rest breaks and bathroom visits for times when he was occupied elsewhere, and isolating myself socially so that I would not be inadvertently drawn into meals or gatherings where he might show up. The archaeology work that I was there to do became secondary: I was counting days until the project was over and I could return home.

Afterwards, the mental calculus continued. Archaeology is a small field. I knew that I would not be able to completely avoid contact with him, so I strategized about how to minimize those interactions and ensure that I only saw him in public contexts with others present. I also carried a lot of anger against my project supervisor for disregarding my complaints. That lack of trust at times carried into other professional relationships and other projects.

When doing the research for these articles, it was so transformative to read similar accounts in the words of other survivors. Because harassment is by definition interpersonal, it is so easy to doubt yourself, especially when supervisors or other people senior to you disregard your concerns.

For me, healing from harassment is an ongoing process, one that is never truly finished. Having been victimized multiple times in archaeological settings, by other archaeologists, I walk with that personal history every day when I go to work, do field and research, attend a conference, or visit a museum. Usually it is in the background, but it is never fully out of sight. I have benefitted immensely from talking with other survivors (both informally and in organized groups) and from professional counselling. And I feel very fortunate and privileged that I am now in a professional role – tenured professor – from which I can talk openly about my experiences without fear of loss of employment.

Uzma:  I really appreciated the consideration of a trauma informed approach that you outline in your article, and I wondered if I might ask you to speak more about the importance of such an approach and what some key aspects might be to keep in mind, etc..

Barb: Trauma-informed approaches came out of grassroots activism in the 1970s and 1980s – early rape crisis centers, movements against domestic violence, sexual assault survivor networks, and veteran activist communities. They have now been validated by public health research, and have become the widely adopted standard of care endorsed by medical and legal associations as well as government health agencies. Trauma-informed care has also been slowly percolating into educational settings, and during COVID-19, we started to see this language being used more widely in academia.

The core principles of a trauma-informed approach are straightforward. First, an individual or group is more likely than not to have a history of trauma. We don’t need to ask about individual experiences, we can just assume that many people’s present-day experiences are shaped by their history.

Second, institutions and “business-as-usual” organizational procedures have the potential to retraumatize individuals. This is especially relevant to harassment, which occurs within an institutional context: workplace, school, organization, project, etc. So by definition, survivors experience harassment both as a result of the perpetrator’s actions and in relation to institutional culture and organizational responses.

Third, empowering survivors and other vulnerable members of organizations can transform these environments to deter further abuses of power and to support healing and recovery. General guiding principles include institutional transparency and honesty, including admitting when harm is done; building cultural competency; actively affirming that all members of an institution are valued; and fostering self-determination, privacy, and agency.

For myself, I try to bring these questions to my professional practice: What structures of power are at play at this moment? Who are the most vulnerable participants in this setting – are their needs being met, their voices heard, and their dignity respected? Who is empowered to make meaningful decisions, and who is being excluded? Can that be changed? Am I listening enough? Am I being honest about my actions and intentions, as well as my limitations and constraints? Am I willing to prioritize the well-being of others over my research and professional goals? Perhaps most importantly, what would be the more caring response to this situation?

Uzma: I think understanding the significance of interventions is really important. I invite you to close out our conversation with a list of what we can do and perhaps if there are one or two things you might want to highlight. 

Barb: The most important thing to do is to listen to survivors and other vulnerable members of your organization or research team. They will know where the problems are and what can be done to stop them. In addition to “open door” policies and transparent complaint procedures, regular confidential climate surveys can be especially important to identify problems as they are emerging.

Along with that, each of us can emphasize that reporting harassment is a courageous act that supports the health of the organization and the discipline.

On an organization level, every professional society, university, museum, research institute, and publisher needs to clearly state that harassment is a form of scientific and professional misconduct – similar to plagiarism, falsification of data, human subjects violations, embezzlement, and trafficking in antiquities – and will be treated as such.

For laboratories, field research projects, and other educational and training programs, codes of conduct with clear mechanisms of enforcement have been shown to dramatically reduce harassment.

Finally, prevent potential abuses of power by gatekeepers by establishing open and transparent procedures for advising, supervision, funding, permits, hiring, and other high-stakes career processes.

The details of these and other interventions will of course vary by context. For example, Carol Colannino and her colleagues are piloting a suite of interventions for field schools that specifically address the residential learning environment and faculty-student power differentials. The important thing to know is that whatever our roles in archaeology or in allied fields, there are actions each of us can take to prevent harassment before it starts and support survivors when it does.

Uzma: Thank you so much for this interview, for the work that you have done in bringing these articles into circulation, and for all the unseen labor that you do to keep our discipline equitable and just. 

Barb: Thank you for inviting me! And before we wrap up, I’d just like to mention one more thing – I’m currently working with an amazing team of translators to produce Spanish versions of both articles, which will also be released open access, hopefully later this year (2021).

Editorial Update: The Spanish version of both articles has been released open access.

Actualización: el 17 de noviembre de 2021, la revista académica Latin American Antiquity y Cambridge University Press publicaron las traducciones al español de una serie de dos artículos. Ambos artículos son de libre acceso.

Documentación de culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Contra las culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Whether you yourself are a survivor or whether you have—or someone you know has—witnessed harassment and sexual assault, you are not alone. Support is available. If you are not sure where to start, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) provides free and confidential support to survivors and to those who care about them. Support is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week by phone (800-656-4673) and via live chat at https://www.rainn.org/. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Si tú eres un sobreviviente o si has sido testigo—o alguien que tú conoces lo ha sido—de acoso y agresión sexual, no estás sole. Existe ayuda disponible. Si no estás segure por dónde empezar, la  Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) provee atención gratuita y confidencial a les sobrevivientes y sus seres queridos. La atención está disponible 24 horas del día, 7 días de la semana. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Barbara L. Voss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the incoming Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. She is a historical archaeologist who investigates the modern world through themes of colonization, diaspora, and sexuality.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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What 9/11 Taught Me about COVID-19

by David Vine

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I heard the impact of a plane hitting a building. I was a second-year anthropology grad student living near downtown Brooklyn, not far from the World Trade Center towers. I watched one of the towers fall from a park near my home. For at least four days after the attacks, I remember being curled up on my couch and in my bed. I spoke to some family and friends on the 11th, but otherwise I didn’t leave my apartment, and I don’t remember talking to anyone.

Mostly I was paralyzed by fear and a desire, but seeming inability, to help in some way. I wanted to do something for those in need. I wanted to speak out. As an aspiring writer/activist (with certain delusions of grandeur), I felt a responsibility to write at least an op-ed to counter the nationalist, often racist warmongering narratives dominating the news media. I wanted to stop my country from launching an unnecessary war that would kill many more thousands of people in a country that bore no responsibility for the attacks. I tried to write. I stared at the screen. I typed a few halting lines. I soon gave up and lay back on the couch.

I only started to feel better and extract myself from my depression after I began reengaging with friends, family, graduate school cohort members, and others in New York. I attended organizing meetings to oppose going to war in Afghanistan, went to teach-ins with friends, volunteered at Ground Zero, went for a run with a friend. I also doubled down on my commitment to produce anthropological scholarship that would, above all, contribute to movements trying to make the world better and more just. In Brooklyn, I deepened my research on gentrification and anti-displacement activism. I threw myself into new research that would become my dissertation: by some cosmic luck, in August 2001, I had begun research related to the U.S. military base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which soon helped launch the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

Once the U.S. military began bombing Afghanistan from Diego Garcia, I felt privileged and inspired to be working on an issue related to war and U.S. foreign policy. I used my anger, sadness, and sense of culpability for the war (as a U.S. citizen) to expand my research into a project that sought to expose the secretive history of the base and the expulsion of the indigenous Chagossian people during the base’s construction; to contribute to the Chagossians’ struggle to return home; and to analyze and critique the hundreds of U.S. military bases overseas and the patterns of U.S. imperialism laid bare by the post-9/11 wars.

After suffering a different kind of trauma in the sudden, unexpected death of my stepfather in April 2002, 18 years ago this month, I further transformed my dissertation project so I could live in Washington, DC, near my family. Changes to my research that initially seemed detrimental ultimately strengthened the breadth and depth of the contributions of my dissertation (and later book).

Since the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, I’ve felt similar moments of paralysis, depression, and personal fear as those I felt after 9/11. Staying at home for more than a month, I’ve felt similar moments of wanting to help, wanting to make a difference somehow, wanting to do something—only to feel incapable of doing anything. Again, there have been moments where I’ve retreated to my couch and bed.

Thinking about those four days on my couch and in my bed in 2001 has helped in this moment. Actively, almost compulsively reaching out by phone, zoom, and email to family, friends, and other loved ones has helped. Getting involved in mutual aid efforts, online political organizing, spring holiday rituals, and connecting with others in any and every way possible has helped. Remembering to lower expectations of myself has helped. Remembering to care for myself with running and walking (masked and at safe distances), meditation, and group therapy online has helped. Writing this—the first thing I’ve ever written about my experience of 9/11—has helped.

I wish I had, in the days after 9/11, known what I know now. I wish I had picked up the phone to call a friend or started to write in a journal, however haltingly, however fragmentedly, with whatever words came out.

In recent weeks, I suspect almost everyone has figured out mechanisms to cope and care for themselves and others as best they can. Of course, they have done so in radically different socioeconomic, social, and environmental circumstances. Clearly, in 2001 and today, I was and am privileged to have an apartment, a secure paycheck, and the full health of most of my family and loved ones. Others have more immediate concerns such as having enough to eat. Others can’t “stay at home” because they have no home. Others don’t have the racial privilege I have that greatly minimizes my risk of infection and death. Others live in countries with public health systems that are far more impoverished than the embarrassingly impoverished U.S. system.

My memories of 9/11 will do little to make a difference in this global pandemic beyond the solace they’ve provided me. Still, I hope some of my words might help or resonate with a few others. Millions, probably billions of people worldwide have helped and inspired me recently through countless acts of Coronavirus solidarity at local, national, and global levels. Millions have inspired me in their efforts to build community networks, mutual aid groups, and social movements despite the need for physical distancing.

Similarly, I’ve been inspired by the millions who agree that there will be no “going back to normal.” Millions now see that “normal” was the problem (just as the pre-9/11 “normal” sowed the seeds of the 9/11 attacks). Much like after 9/11, after I left my apartment and began working with others to oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I’ve been inspired since the pandemic’s onset by millions who see a historic, urgent opportunity to change what’s normal, to change the world and its structures of inequity, violence, and impending climate disaster. Now, together, we must ensure that we never go back to the “normal” that brought us 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic and that will bring us more global crises if we don’t seize our opportunity to create a new, more just normal.

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El Cruce de la Muerte: Fieldwork and Carework at the Crossroad of Death

by Amarilys Estrella

In July of 2017, one year after having moved with my family to the Dominican Republic for my dissertation research, I survived a car accident. Our car crashed directly into a coach bus that had lost control on the opposite side of that Duarte highway in an area commonly referred to as “el cruce de la muerte,” the crossroad of death. I had two broken bones, stitches, and a concussion that would require almost a year of physical therapy and ongoing psychotherapy. As irony would have it, I had spent my year of fieldwork exploring the theme of death with Black Dominicans of Haitian descent experiencing their civic deaths as stateless individuals, as well as the biological effects of racism, leading to the “slow death” of Black bodies. While I highlight in this post my personal experience navigating the Dominican health system and my quest to cope with psychological and emotional trauma in the aftermath of a car accident, I want to also explore carework in spaces of precarity. In particular I highlight the importance of family and community when psychotherapy is not an option, as was the case for many of my interlocutors. I note the importance of family and supportive academic institutions in my own recovery, while also pointing to the detrimental effects of racist government policies that limit an individual’s access to mental health resources.

Broken Bones in a Broken Health System

According to the World Health Organization’s 2013 Global Status Report on Road Safety the Dominican Republic is considered the most dangerous country for traffic fatalities with 41.7 deaths per 100,000. At the time of my accident, the people who had gathered and helped pry my passenger door open assured me that my children and husband were fine. One woman who was helping me apply pressure to stop the bleeding from the wound on my arm told me that I was lucky I had survived because, as she explained, “a esto aqui le dicen el cruce de la muerte”– they call this here the crossroad of death. Many had met their fates at that same crossroad and I was to count my blessings for having survived.

I had two broken bones (right tibia, right collarbone), bruising, and stitches on my right hand. I also suffered a concussion, at the time undiagnosed, which caused ongoing tremors during the first week and would require almost a year of physical, visual, and group therapy. At the time of the accident I was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. A plastic bottle placed under my neck for support doubled as a neck brace, while we crossed a series of bumpy roads to get to the clinic, which I was assured was private and therefore better than going to a public hospital. Once I arrived in the emergency room I was quickly taken into a room where a doctor began stitching up the wound on my hand. I stayed by myself, while my husband remained in the waiting area with our children until another family member could show up and help out. At one point I was left all alone, while the doctor and nurses confirmed the death of an elderly man next door. One nurse came in to see me during the ordeal and said as she was leaving again, that I was fine because I was tranquilita, calm.

Once the doctor returned, she asked my husband to go to the pharmacy and purchase two hospital gowns in order to be switched out of my bloody clothes. I was then wheeled away into the x-ray room, where two men in charge of maintenance helped transfer me over to the x-ray bed. Once the x-rays were done and it was confirmed that my right collarbone and tibia were broken my husband was asked to go to the pharmacy and buy the necessary materials to make the cast for my leg, as well as a sling for my arm. Having experienced emergency rooms in the United States where the billing happens afterwards, I was initially taken aback by the idea of having to purchase the hospital gowns. I was floored upon realizing that the next process would have to wait until my husband came back with the cast materials. Once the materials arrived, the orthopedist asked my husband to hold my leg up by lifting my big toe so that the doctor could start placing the cast on my leg. I had never broken my leg before, but I had also never had such a hands-on experience from a family member during an emergency room visit. What followed was a series of visits to the doctor where I would sit in my wheelchair for hours on end waiting to be seen by the orthopedist. In some ways, the torture of sitting in a waiting room for up to 5 hours at a time was ameliorated by the air conditioner that kept me cool during those blistering hot 95-degree summer days.

Seeking Mental Health Support for the First Time Ever

After spending five weeks recovering in the Dominican Republic, I returned to New York where I was finally diagnosed with a concussion. While being back home was quite the relief, it wasn’t until I found myself alone in a wheelchair that I realized the psychological toll the accident had taken on me. I woke up every day fearing that if I had not died during the accident, I was surely in some kind of process of dying then. I became hyperaware of my breathing, my vision, my fatigue and my general inability to focus on anything other than my body. Months without moving and anxiety had also caused dysphasia, making it hard for me to swallow. I felt fear taking over at all times of day. Although I was constantly checking in with my advisor, mentors, family and friends, I continued to feel lonely, anxious and overwhelmed.

Through my university’s health center, I was connected to a psychotherapist who to this day I continue to see. I had never seen a psychotherapist. The different communities I identified with dealt with our problems by showing our unwavering strength through it all, by showing how much we could resist. I had internalized this messaging and found it really hard to publicly discuss the need for a psychotherapist. Over time, this has changed, and I have found value in meeting with my psychotherapist once a week, while also holding on to my family and community’s collective healing processes.

During a recent psychotherapy session, I shared with my therapist the heightened anxiety that I experience as the anniversary of the accident approaches. I have learned to cope with the trauma the continues to live on in my body through mindfulness techniques, mantras and, yes, jumping jacks. But the fear will continue to be there. It creeps up when least expected. It recently happened as I finished watching the Teddy Pendergrass documentary. As I learned that he spent the second half of his life as a quadriplegic, I felt my chest tightening. I thought back on my own experience. I was reminded of the time I spent in a wheelchair, what it was like to not be able to bathe on my own, use the bathroom on my own and for some time eat on my own. I felt this wave of panic wash over me as I tried to understand why this had happened. Perhaps I also felt guilt in thinking that pure luck had meant that I had recovered all mobility, that I am once again walking, finishing up my dissertation, and traveling to conferences without assistance.

All of these emotions came rushing back as I thought about Pendergrass’s family and my family. They stepped in when a failed healthcare system was not available. It wasn’t until I experienced my own possible death that I understood the precariousness of a health system in which carework was almost entirely the domain of family and friends. They had become my support system. They were an integral part of my ongoing physical and emotional healing process. They bathed me, washed and combed my hair, held my hand and constantly reminded me that I was loved.

My very own traumatic experience allowed me to better understand how the necropolitics of the Dominican state had led so many Black Dominicans of Haitian descent, and Dominicans more generally, to add as many family members as possible to their funeral insurance. As a friend once told me in the Dominican Republic “funeral insurance is probably as important or more important than health insurance.” During my time in the Dominican Republic many of my interlocutors experienced the death of close family and friends. Oftentimes they talked about the hospital or clinic’s refusal to treat them because they didn’t have insurance. As impoverished, Black individuals perceived as Haitian migrants, thus outsiders, they experienced hours of waiting before anyone would come to see why they were there. They talked about the many inevitable deaths. These stories were in my thoughts throughout my recovery. I had been at the crossroad of death, yet privileged and lucky enough to survive. My hope is that in surviving I can continue to denounce statelessness and anti-Blackness as a global phenomenon and continue to highlight the many stories I came to learn about throughout this process of research, survival and recovery. I also hope that sharing my story will allow us to continue to destigmatize mental health support.

There are some key takeaways from my personal experience. The first, is the importance of providing mental health support and resources for mentors and fieldwork researchers that will allow them to be prepared to address circumstances that may arise during fieldwork. I was immensely grateful for the flexibility and easy access provided by my university’s health center. Providing a mental health resource guide for students before engaging in fieldwork research would be of great value as well. Second, the flexibility extended to me by my Inter-American Foundation fellowship allowed me to prioritize my health before the need to present the deliverables of my research. Not only did they allow me to take as much time as needed for healing, but they also allowed flexibility in determining the terms of my return to the field a year later. Finally, I would say to fieldwork researchers to ensure that you have identified a network of supporters who will be readily available when things do not go as planned. I am thankful for the support I received from everyone who was there with me during this journey. When life gives you lemons make sure you have friends, family, advisors and a therapist to help you make lemonade.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Writing, Silence, and Sensemaking After Fieldwork Trauma

by Kimberly J. Lewis

Crashing

During my first summer of graduate fieldwork, I was on an overnight bus that skidded and tumbled off the side of a highway in coastal Ecuador. I remember the heavy, alien sounds during the crash. First, the tires screaming. Then, the passengers. As our bodies crunched together against the humid window, I told my companion what I imagined to be true: vamos a morir. We are going to die. The bus came to rest, wheels up, along a line of emerald-green fruit trees. We lived, by the grace of guanábana.

On holiday weekends, urbanites in Ecuador’s highland Andes long to escape the dry mountain air. Buses fill with vacationers and descend some 10,000 feet to coastal beach towns. Overnight bus trips offer the promise of fresh ceviche at sunrise. Everyone knows that these buses occasionally sail off highways, killing or scarring dozens of people at a time. This knowledge produced two experiences of the crash. One part of me witnessed and thought: yes, this happens. This all makes perfect sense. She was the observer. Another part of me could not make sense of what was happening at all. Why were the blue lights inside the bus making the blood glow like radioactive waste? Why was none of the blood mine? She was the participant.

Fieldwork, like life, is punctuated by random catastrophe. The summer of the bus accident, I was doing research on higher education. The bulk of my participant-observation occurred in places like department offices and univresity hallways. I thought I had designed a project free from blood and death. What do we do when fieldwork flips violently on itself, like an ill-fated bus? How should we proceed when pain or trauma reshapes our ethnographic work?

Writing

Whatever happens, ethnographers are generally encouraged to keep writing. Produce meticulous field notes. Start a field diary. Take photos, press record, draw a map. Faculty encourage novice fieldworkers to treat everything as potential sources of data, especially moments that register as jarring or confusing at the time. In this framework, it becomes reasonable to reduce even the most upsetting fieldwork experiences to ethnographic insights waiting to happen. Anthropologists warn their students to be diligent about producing a record in order to make sense of these experiences later. Fieldnotes, or it didn’t happen.

However, trauma complicates the process of remembering and the act of writing. Many ethnographers hate writing fieldnotes. They are tedious and so very slow to produce. But, how often do we acknowledge that remembering and writing fieldnotes can be actively painful? Traumatic experiences and the emotions that commonly follow – fear, rage, shame – shape what we are capable of logging about our fieldwork. They affect what we can document for others, as well as what we wish to document for our future selves.

Vehicles crash. My bus could have tumbled off a highway near my home in Rhode Island, rather than in Ecuador. Yet, at home, anthropologists often have more resources to cope with traumatic events. Crucially, we are also released from pressures to collect data. We are not obligated to document or make sense of tragedy. During fieldwork, ethnographers become uniquely attentive to the world. We shake the observer in us awake, believing that she is the better anthropologist. Sometimes I wonder if I have experienced more pain during fieldwork, or whether I have simply experienced pain with my eyes and notebook fully open.

Reorienting

When I finished my summer fieldwork and returned to campus, I briefly sought help from the university counseling center. I mentioned the accident to advisors and mentors. But, I did not want to say too much. I feared someone would advise me to abandon work in Ecuador altogether. I quietly reoriented subsequent fieldwork around new priorities and limitations, mostly related to mobility, frequent breaks, and access to communication. When I drafted grant proposals, I held my breath that the intellectual justifications for these decisions were persuasive enough.

As I reflect on these experiences now that my graduate work is over, I have a few humble suggestions for dealing with fieldwork trauma. First, we must be exceedingly gentle with ourselves, our colleagues, and our students. Trauma complicates the process of returning to one’s field site. I was shocked by how the bus accident stretched well past its logical boundaries, altering relationships and practices that seemed unrelated. Years later, during the final phases of my dissertation fieldwork in Ecuador, I struggled to write about situations that recalled fear, violence, or shame. I often avoided writing at all. Ethnographers famously cling to their memories, running to bathroom stalls to jot notes. I instead spent long stretches of research longing to forget. My dreams became loops of crunching metal – a terrible kind of data to work with.

Within this context, anthropologists can honor boundaries and silences, particularly in our own data collection practices. Writing can feel tantamount to re-experiencing. Self-care might mean putting down the pen to embrace silence. But, we can do so with intention and compassion. We should also question systems and people that produce shame around adjusting our research to personal realities. Anthropologists have limitations. Few of us are truly free to pursue any line of inquiry during fieldwork, despite the heroic narratives that still shape the discipline. Researchers have emotional needs: safety, love, connectedness. We must prioritize those needs, even during fieldwork.

Anticipating

Anthropologists can also do more to develop coping tools and identify resources for emergencies. This is especially critical for new ethnographers, who may struggle to know how to care for themselves in the field or even know their own limitations in advance. Graduate methods seminars should directly address topics like violence, depression, sexual assault, social isolation, and accidents. These issues are extraordinarily common during fieldwork. Faculty should draw on other campus resources for these conversations. Seek additional forms of expertise and advice. University counseling centers, for instance, can be helpful allies in preparing to send students to the field.

There is no way to anticipate or avoid every fieldwork challenge. But we should probably all ask each other more questions. What problems might arise during fieldwork? Is there a plan for abandoning the work if necessary? What are effective ways to navigate accidents or assault or mental health problems? What possibilities exist for flexible fieldwork arrangements or changes in project design? Even as we disperse into our field sites, ethnographers should work to support one another and address complex field situations as they arise.

Connecting

Community and connection are critical resources for healing after fieldwork trauma. I returned to therapy during my last year of dissertation writing. By that time, the research was winding down. Connecting with a therapist allowed me to see the accident and other experiences in Ecuador alongside a compassionate observer. A question from my therapist encouraged me to start annotating a draft of my dissertation. I called it the shadow dissertation. In it, I noted painful memories lurking in the background of vignettes. Placing these memories somewhere reassured me they were real, too, even if they did not make the final piece. Grappling with fieldwork trauma ultimately encouraged me to form better connections with colleagues, students, and research participants, as I am more attentive to the stories behind their research.

Finally, the work of writing offers more opportunities for connection than most people acknowledge. Writing alongside colleagues can engender solidarity. It can be a radical act. For those who experienced trauma during fieldwork, writing communities can reverse isolation and allow writing to flourish. While drafting my dissertation, I participated in dissertation writing retreats and interdisciplinary writing groups with a cast of other graduate students. The Graduate School and university Writing Center supported the groups, but they required a fairly simple set of resources to sustain. Group meetings usually consisted of coffee and quiche, check-ins about goals, writing in a common space, and check-outs about progress. Tears sometimes entered the space, but self-shaming and comparison did not.

We need writing communities for more reasons than productivity. Not a single person in these groups read my work. However, they offered a sense of belonging during the writing process. I had opportunities to look up from a difficult memory, see others who cared about me, and then continue to press into the work. In some respects, communities like these were just as important as critical feedback for finishing the project. Given the painful stories lurking behind many of our field experiences, connecting with one another can allow us to understand and integrate those stories so that we can move forward.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Writing for Them, Writing for Us: Resilience in Practice

In part two of our series, Humanizing Fieldwork, we considered the everyday challenges of conducting fieldwork abroad and at home. As all anthropologists know, the ethnographic fieldwork experience is not immune to the unexpected, and emergencies affecting the physical and emotional well-being of the field worker can and do occur. What do we do when fieldwork flips violently on itself, like an ill-fated bus? How should we proceed when pain or trauma reshapes our ethnographic work? In this final installment, we turn to a more direct engagement with the experience of trauma in the field. For both our contributors, fieldwork is abruptly interrupted, and each shares her story of resilience and recovery in the aftermath, as well as how these traumatic events are processed in the work of turning fieldwork into anthropological writing.

In this third and final series, Kim Lewis and Amarilys Estrella reflect upon strategies of resilience and processes of repair in the wake of traumatic field experiences.  Central to both accounts is the importance of narrative—whose story gets told, how, by whom, and to whom—and how those narratives are engaged as legible and meaningful (or not) by others.  In engaging in the task of transforming ethnographic data into ethnography, anthropologists face the pressure of sensemaking.  Because of this, anthropological writing can become a burden but also a potential avenue for recovery, as writing through the trauma can help us process traumatic events and their aftermaths.

Narrative has, of course, been a central theoretical concern in anthropology for decades. Anthropologists are trained to write with “thick description” at the same time they must discipline their writing within particular conceptual frameworks, often in ways that reduce the affective dimensions of ethnography to a series of highly theoretical ethnographic vignettes. But, as these posts highlight, narrative practices become entangled with the work of writing anthropology in ways that can sometimes be healing but can also, at times, be re-traumatizing.  How, then, do we do the work of anthropology, when doing that work involves revisiting and reliving events and contexts that have harmed us? Are there ways these practices can become part of strategies of repair, both for the fieldworker her- or himself and, perhaps, for the field of anthropology more generally?

Both of these entries recount harrowing incidents of physical trauma.  But they also speak to how trauma can exceed its boundaries, becoming linked to spaces, places, people, relationships that had no direct relationship to the originating event.  The conventional anthropological response to such a situation is: use the trauma as part of your data.  Be an anthropologist first, a human being second.  For some people, this intellectualization can be constructive, both personally and analytically.  For others, it can feel incredibly alienating, and “anthropologizing” the events becomes a form of re-traumatization.  The everyday tasks of academic work—reading, writing, thinking—can become infused with the residue of these experiences, making it difficult to function, let alone succeed.

Estrella and Lewis illustrate this experience in the literal and metaphorical crashes of their ethnographic projects. Through connection with others, they find ways to acknowledge and make sense of traumatic experiences that go beyond data analysis. This simultaneous creation of ethnographic writing –of anthropology—alongside the process of healing and recovery reminds us that what sets the ethnographic method apart is the fact that it is an embodied experience; that just as we are “collecting data” through our ethnographic field notes and interviews, we are also living the experience of fieldwork: establishing connections with others, with the field, and with ourselves.

Much remains to be said and written about trauma and resilience in ethnographic fieldwork. When we originally put out the Call for Papers, we received many more submissions than we could possibly publish. As we moved forward with acceptances and the submission deadline drew near, some of our contributors found they were not ready to write their stories. We end this series by holding space for those whose stories were not published, the stories many of us carry out of the field and into our lives. Our hope was to open a conversation about the role of trauma, power, and academic anthropology. As this collection of essays has been shared and distributed, we have heard that these conversations are happening in classrooms and departments.   We invite you all to continue in this process with us, as together we remake what it means to be fieldworkers and professionals, as we humanize the research process, and as we open room for more conversations and transformations to come.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Humanizing Fieldwork:

Trauma and Resilience in Ethnographic Fieldwork, Part II

The first collection of posts in this series demanded that we recognize the fact that fieldwork can hurt, and that we have fostered a disciplinary culture where that hurt has been normalized and even celebrated. In this next installment, our contributors recognize the challenges of navigating mental illness before and during fieldwork as well as the multiple structural constraints faced by anthropological fieldworkers in and out of the field. Recent studies reveal a mental health crisis among US graduate students, and each of these next three posts engages in some ways with this reality. The truth is that, although fieldwork continues to pose challenges to our mental health beyond graduate school, most cultural anthropologists will only be able to carry out the “traditional” or expected 12 month (or longer) fieldwork expected of them during their dissertation research. For the lucky few of us who are able to seamlessly enter tenure-track positions, long-term absences for fieldwork of more than 6 months will occur very occasionally, if ever. Attending to the particular challenges to mental health faced by novice fieldworkers who embark on research for extended periods of time is more important than ever.

When we originally conceptualized the Trauma and Resiliency series, we expected contributions would focus on trauma related to the fieldwork experience. We soon found, however, that many of the proposals we reviewed connected their trauma to other factors – be they a familial predisposition to mental illness or other structural constraints that limited or even thwarted fieldwork. For many of our potential contributors, the journey to fieldwork itself was fraught.

The three posts in this group consider the experiences of doctoral students embarking on different kinds of field research projects. Shir Ginzburg’s account of her personal struggle with depression in the field presents a learning opportunity for students preparing to depart for fieldwork and for their advisors. It serves as a stark reminder that, as mentors, we should not wait for our students to ask for help, but to have conversations about mental health early and openly.

Revisiting Carter’s rejoinder to consider the difficulties of doing fieldwork at home (what she calls “homework”), Melinda González’s post renders, in heartbreaking clarity, the difficulties experienced by those among us who are mothers, poor, and brown. González’ story illustrates some of the ways in which the field of anthropology, despite its claim to social progressiveness and even justice, continues to support exclusionary systems that disadvantage students of color and first-generation college students. The realities of living on graduate student stipends and adjunct wages without other means – and how these daily struggles to survive deeply affect mental health – come to life in her post. They urge us as anthropologists, and anthropology itself as a field, to look inward and to recognize our complicity in the propagation of our discipline as an elitist, colonialist institution through its suppression of some voices in favor of others.

Also echoing Carter’s engagement with homework and González’ description of fieldwork at “home,” Saira Mehmood shares her experiences as a Muslim woman of color conducting field work at home in New Orleans. In addition, Mehmood offers a series of suggestions for mentors to consider when advising graduate students, particularly graduate students of color.

In titling this set of posts, “Humanizing Fieldwork,” we wish to highlight two things.  First, the posts lead us to reflect upon the humanity of fieldworkers as full, fleshy, embodied beings with complex histories and lives, whose engagements in the field are imminently, inextricably bodily as well as social.  These engagements are sometimes as messy as they are productive, and they cannot be disentangled from the structures of power and privilege that condition students’ lives both inside and outside of the field.  Second, the posts spotlight the (in)humanity of a discipline that not only ignores but is often hostile to this humanity in the service of an ascetic analytics.  Despite various moves over the past several decades to “impassion” anthropology, our disciplinary standards remain centered on forms of knowledge production that are most valued when they emerge in spite of, rather than by way of, grounded experiences of lived difference.

Taken together, these posts call attention to the ways anthropology can do better to prepare and support our PhD students as they work to complete their degrees –before, during, and after fieldwork. We must also acknowledge the structural and racial barriers faced by many of our first generation and students of color, particularly those who are Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC). In the era of #hautalk and #anthrosowhite, a disciplinary engagement with PhD student mental health and its intersections with race, socioeconomic privilege, and structural violence is more important than ever.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Staying with the Feeling: Trauma, Humility, and Care in Ethnographic Fieldwork

by Greg Beckett

I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point, I began to respond to questions about my research with a feeling of dread. I wanted to say that it was going badly, or that the research was good but the situation was horrible, that I was sad and angry and that many of my friends and informants in Haiti were in worse shape. Many of them were dead. I wanted to say all of that, but I didn’t. I had come to think of fieldwork as something anthropologists were supposed to love doing, and I felt that if I dreaded going back there must be something wrong with me. I had internalized what might be one of the most self-destructive aspects of our discipline—the idea that fieldwork is a baptism by fire from which only the strong survive.

Staying with the Feeling

It is only recently that I have come to think of my fieldwork experiences in the language of trauma. I had been studying crisis and disaster in Haiti for years, studying how crisis feels to those who live with it every day. That meant I was absorbing countless stories of trauma, while also living through disastrous events. Yet, I avoided any acknowledgment of this reality. Avoidance is, after all, a key symptom of trauma, and I sought refuge in the defensive posture of intellectual rigor and high theory, and when that didn’t work, in numbness or in the pseudo-safety of shutting down.

Everything changed after I began to think of my experiences in the language of trauma in the context of therapy. This reframing helped me come to terms with my own experiences. It is a long journey, and like many who live with PTSD, I still have images I cannot shake. But reframing also helped in another way: it forced me to rethink my fieldwork as a whole, not just my personal experiences, but the stories of those with whom I worked too. I began to hear and see—to feel—in my notes a much deeper, more profound record of existential struggle. My therapist would often encourage me to “stay with the feeling,” and the more I did that with my fieldnotes, the richer the material became, and the more I began to understand—to really understand—about how crisis felt. This in turn made me rethink ethnography, as method and genre.

The Virtue of Humility

I came to therapy late. I don’t know why I didn’t seek help sooner, although it is probably because avoidance is such a powerful force. I did have concerned committee members and colleagues who expressed worry about my physical safety while in the field. I don’t know what they would have said or done if I had spoken to them about my traumatic experiences. I imagine that they, too, have probably internalized the disciplinary hubris that casts the anthropologist as an intrepid hero, the same habitus that generated all those whispers and rumors about people who couldn’t cut it in the field or that led fellow graduate students to clap me on the back and talk about all the “cred” I would have for working in a place like Haiti. So many of us have fallen for this cruelty that masquerades as intellectual rigor. It was a cultivated disposition at the University of Chicago, where I trained, and where the same hubris now drives a willful rejection of the very idea of trauma, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. In anthropology, this same hubris can lead to silencing or outright stigma about trauma and the related experiences of anxiety and depression, despite evidence of the high rates of mental health issues among graduate students.

When I first began therapy, I warned my therapist, whom I will call David (not his real name), that I would probably respond with a lot of intellectual resistance. I had taught psychoanalytic theory for years as part of the college core curriculum at the University of Chicago and I knew enough to know about resistance and repression. I doubt I needed to tell him; I’m sure he could read my resistance easily. At any rate, he responded by giving me a homework challenge of sorts: he asked me to leave and to practice what he called the “virtue of humility.” I won’t lie; it was hard. I had been trained to see humility, or at least certain versions of it, as a kind of weakness and to mistake an aggressive form of argumentation and assertiveness as its own kind of virtue. Yet, learning to practice humility opened up for me a whole new way of thinking and feeling. Over the course of my therapy, I got better at naming emotions and at reframing my experiences and the actions and expressions of others. Humility also helped me as a writer, and it gave me a new point of entry into my fieldnotes and research, letting me see and feel the deep intimacies at play in the stories and conversations I had recorded and observed.

Complex Trauma and Care Work

David said I had complex PTSD, which is a bit different from the most common idea many people have of trauma. Most people think of trauma as tied to a single catastrophic event, usually a near-death-experience in times of war or disaster. Yet, this eventful kind of trauma is not the most common one. It is much more common for people to suffer from a wide range of traumatic experiences, including: developmental or childhood trauma, complex trauma, and vicarious or secondary trauma. These last two are especially important for anthropologists to understand.

Complex trauma is processual and is the result of many traumatic experiences taking place over an extended period of time. It is a much better way of thinking about the traumas suffered by people living with the legacies of colonial domination or the degradations of war, military occupation, political violence, or extreme inequality. Indeed, some psychologists now reject the frame of trauma to explain these experiences, preferring instead to focus attention on the political dimensions of social suffering. Whatever name we use, this kind of suffering may be quite prevalent in a wide range of fieldwork locations.

Vicarious trauma is “the emotional residue of exposure.” This kind of trauma also accrues over time and spreads through social networks of care and empathy. In recent decades, there has been much attention paid to secondary traumatic stress (STS), vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue, all of which are prevalent among those who work in the caring professions, including emergency responders, humanitarian aid workers, social workers, nurses, and teachers. This “high cost of caring” affects those whose work requires empathy and emotional labor. Think of it as the emotional cost of bearing witness and of hearing stories of repeated stress, trauma, suffering, and violence. Given the central place of empathy, intimacy, and thick relationships in fieldwork settings, it might be worth considering ethnography as a kind of care work and reflecting more on how vicarious trauma might take hold as part of the emotional costs of fieldwork.

The Art of Resilience

I am aware of the dangers of generalizing from an individual case. I am also aware that psychological classifications like trauma and clinical practices like social work and talk therapy are culturally and historically situated, even if they claim to be universal. Nevertheless, there is much that our discipline can learn from current discussions of trauma. Here, I want to highlight three insights that might help us build a trauma-informed anthropology:

• Solidarity and Support—Relations are key to resilience. People living with trauma need support, including but not limited to therapy and mental health services. To address issues of trauma in the field we should cultivate forms of solidarity modeled on programs of peer support and sponsorship.
• Toolkits—The most important aspect of preparedness is thinking about potential problems before they happen. As a discipline and as researchers we should cultivate an anticipatory stance toward trauma and a toolkit for recognizing and responding to trauma that can help us fostering self-awareness, self-assessment, and self-care.
• Reframing—Finally, we must reframe the discussion of trauma and fieldwork. Reframing is a crucial aspect of therapy, where it is often discussed as a technique for restoring meaning and agency.

Anthropologists should reframe how we think about trauma. While many of us have long recognized the prevalence of social suffering in our field sites, there is still too much silencing and skepticism about the effects of secondary trauma on researchers. Reframing fieldwork through the idiom of care work could help us not only name and deal with secondary trauma but also reframe ethnography as a method and politics of radical care for intimate others.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Beatriz Reyes-Foster (Twitter @BeatriAnthro) is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida (USA).  Her research focuses on medical interactions, the production of health disparities, and mental health in Mexico. She currently serves as co-chair of the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group, an SMA Interest Group. She is the author of Psychiatric Encounters: Madness and Modernity in Yucatan, Mexico (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

Rebecca Lester (Twitter @psychanthro) is associate professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and a practicing psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, trauma, personality disorders, and self-harm.  Her work sits at the intersections of anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, coupled with a strong commitment to engaged practice.  She is the author of Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (University of California Press, 2005) and Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (University of California Press, 2019).

Over the next several weeks they will present a thematic series of posts composed by diverse authors. This blog series is initiative of the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group (AMHIG), a forum for anthropologists, scholars from other disciplines, and practitioners whose work focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of mental health. In particular, AMHIG offers an organizational structure for scholars and practitioners engaged in this topic area to network, share resources, and develop new ideas.

Trauma and Resilience in Ethnographic Fieldwork

Cultural anthropology has long prided itself on eschewing formal methodological training. When we were in graduate school, ethnographic methods were rarely discussed as part of our education (aside from “take notes on everything”), and fieldwork was treated as a sink-or-swim proposition. Good ethnographers would succeed, bad ones would fail. And while we were pushed to pursue an anthropology “with stakes” — that is, an anthropology that studied problems that mattered in some way, to some one — nobody talked about what it might mean to do this. What might an anthropology of genocide, or violence, or other forms of human suffering do to the ethnographer’s psyche?

It never came up.

In passing conversation, I [Beatriz] would learn from fellow graduate school colleagues that they were in therapy. After fieldwork, a good friend of mine described the gut-wrenching feeling of prying an orphan’s arms off herself when she visited an orphanage. Another talked about ending his field research when he became suicidal. And I, too, experienced moments in the field that could only be described as traumatic.

My [Rebecca’s] work in eating disorder clinics brought different kinds of challenges.  Spending time with emotionally devastated people on the verge of dying from starvation, others who were actively suicidal or who craved the sensations of self-harm, and those who recounted horrific instances of child sexual abuse or sexual assault created a daily onslaught of experiences, sensations, and emotions that at times could be overwhelming.  I often cried in the car on my way home just so I had some sort of release of the negative affect before I engaged with my children.  And as a survivor of a long-term eating disorder myself, steeping myself in the world of eating disorders for research brought up difficult and painful memories of my own history that I had to explore and attend to.

Ethnographic fieldwork can be, and frequently is, emotionally difficult for fieldworkers, who may experience either direct or vicarious/secondary trauma while in the field. Even under the best of circumstances, navigating a new field setting with little if any training on how to emotionally manage the many challenges inherent in fieldwork can be significantly destabilizing, and the effects of such experiences can be long lasting. And yet, a culture of silence about the emotional toll of fieldwork and the importance of mental health has remained prevalent throughout our field. At the same time, anthropology remains a primarily white space, and Black and Brown anthropologists face additional structural obstacles and challenges that compound with the naturally fraught nature of (white) academic culture and fieldwork in general.

These realities exist alongside a core paradigm in our discipline reflective of its colonialist origins: a fetishization of the dangers of the field as a wild and untamed space coupled with the proposition that this “wildness” can, with the proper courage and skill, be conquered, domesticated, and made legible to others back home by the intrepid lone fieldworker.  This history has led to a paradoxical push towards ever more dangerous/challenging/extreme research projects coupled with a disciplinary disavowal of the challenges and human costs of doing fieldwork.

We conceptualized the Trauma and Resilience in Ethnographic Fieldwork series as a way of opening a much-needed and long overdue conversation about the need to consider mental health as part of the anthropological experience from a variety of different perspectives. Posts in this three-part series will feature stories of both trauma and resilience (broadly conceptualized) from contributors writing across a wide variety of topical and regional specialties and representing a range of career stages, backgrounds, and life experiences. These posts are meant to provide authors with a platform from which to share their stories of emotional struggle or trauma in the field, but also to highlight the ways in which these struggles were met or overcome: how did contributors deal with their experiences of trauma? What worked and what didn’t? What sorts of social and institutional supports did they use? The series will also contain information and resources for faculty advisors preparing to send students into potentially traumatizing situations.  This goal of this series is to highlight the reality of trauma and emotional stress in ethnographic fieldwork, as well as provide faculty and students with resources on best practices for emotional care prior, during, and after fieldwork.

The First Three

In this first installment, we bring you three accounts of fieldworkers grappling with tensions between expertise and humility, pressures to silence trauma as the price of membership in certain intellectual cultures, and challenges of engaging in research that can unexpectedly come to resemble ones private life, sometimes in profoundly heartbreaking ways.  In each of these posts, we encounter scholars whose research led them to radically interrogate not only their own deeply held assumptions and commitments but to question the very foundations of our discipline.

Greg Beckett’s piece thinks with and through anthropology’s tradition of cynicism and even callousness with regards to fieldworker vulnerabilities, contributing to a disciplinary ethos of, as Beckett describes it, “cruelty that masquerades as intellectual rigor.”  By “staying with the feeling,” Beckett tells us, we can reconceptualize ethnography as a particular kind of care work, where intellectual hubris can and should be rejected in favor of an ethos of humility in the face of the very real effects of human suffering.

Chelsey Carter’s post foregrounds the challenges and opportunities entailed in doing what she calls “homework,” or fieldwork conducted in the ethnographer’s home culture.  As a queer woman of color studying ALS among black individuals living in the racially fraught atmosphere of St. Louis, Carter expected to encounter some issues related to race during her fieldwork.  What was less expected, however, were the more nuanced ways that her fieldwork experiences paralleled those in her personal life, transforming her understandings of herself, her relationships, and her work along the way.  She offers specific recommendations for how to manage the unique challenges of “homework” that are extendable to those working outside of their home cultures as well.

Sreepana Chattopadhyay’s selection is a powerful account of how intimately personal issues can shape and be shaped by our encounters in the field.  Juxtaposing her observations during a third-trimester abortion and a cesarean section birth, Chattopadhyay interrogates how what constitutes “trauma” is less the specific events observed but the meanings those different events have for the individual fieldworker.  She describes her reactions to these two events as intellectually as well as psychologically traumatic in that they provoked an “affective dissonance” for her regarding her own feminist commitments.  Ultimately, the resolution of this dissonance led Chattopadhyay to a series of insights about fieldwork that she shares with us at the end of her piece.

Taken together, these three posts speak to the enormity of the task we, as fieldworkers, undertake, a task that extends far beyond collecting data on a given topic.  Anthropology is indeed, as Beckett suggests, as form of care work.  But it is care work with a deeply existential and self-reflective bent that is predicated on purposefully dislocating ourselves—geographically, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally, even spiritually—and entering a state of suspended unknowing.

Taking trauma seriously in anthropological fieldwork does not mean we should not do this research or that we should only choose projects that will be “safe” and unthreatening to our senses of the world and ourselves.  Quite the contrary.  But it does mean that we need a concerted disciplinary and pragmatic shift in how we go about doing this work and how we care for our students, our colleagues, and ourselves in the process.  It means recognizing and validating new kinds of writing and scholarship that take seriously the human dimensions of this work without sacrificing intellectual quality or rigor.  And this is a key point: humanity and rigor are not mutually exclusive, despite our disciplinary traditions to the contrary.

As fieldworkers, we may experience various forms of trauma, including complex trauma, vicarious trauma, and even direct trauma.  But we are not only traumatized.  We also endure.  It is not the trauma itself that validates a fieldworker’s claims to knowledge, but how we experience and make sense of it in ways that guide deeper and more attuned engagements with our work, our relationships, and ourselves.  And this, as all of the posts in this series demonstrate, cannot be accomplished alone.  It happens through relationships, through building networks, and through speaking what our discipline historically silences.  These are the motivating aims of this series.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Making anthropological expertise public—that is, releasing our insights into the world of non-academic publics—is never easy. Anthropological engagements with media are frequently awkward, fraught and unsatisfying. But what happens when an anthropologist who conducts research “at home” is summoned by the media as simultaneously an expert and a witness?

On November 22, 2017, Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb military leader, was convicted of genocide and sentenced to life in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands.  That very same morning, I was contacted by several news agencies and invited to offer my comments in response to the verdict.  As a political anthropologist and a specialist on the Balkans, I have grown to expect occasional contact with journalists, particularly during eventful times in Bosnia proper.  The long-awaited Mladić verdict was one such quintessential special occasion, the kind the brings Bosnia back onto the front pages and into the 5 o’clock news.  What’s more, I was about to start teaching a week-and-a-half-long thematic cluster on public anthropology in my “Anthropology for the 21st Century” course at University of Ottawa. Amidst our heated class discussions about challenges involved in popularization of anthropological knowledge, scientific impartiality, the problem of positionality, and engaged scholarship, I felt I ought to “talk the talk and walk the walk” and speak with the journalists who had contacted me.

Complicating my sense of responsibility to respond was my own positionality—I am not only a scholar of Bosnian postwar political life, but also a so-called insider or “native anthropologist,” in so far that I conduct research in my country of origin, where I can (most of the time) successfully pass for a local resident. My background also means that in addition to being a researcher, I am also a witness, and if you will—a victim—of Mladić’s military campaigns, particularly the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo during which I grew up.  I soon learned that it was this other dimension of my background—my origin and biography—that made me an attractive interviewee and a spokesperson in the context of The Hague decision.  Details such as how old I was and under what circumstances I survived the siege became an important aspect of my correspondence with the media. One media house appears to have eventually omitted my comments in favor of those offered by a survivor of a wartime prison camp—a decision that I, as an anthropologist who favors non-expert opinions on politics, would not necessarily disagree with. But the moment did bring to mind the anthropological critique of deservedness predicated on hierarchies of suffering.

Nonetheless, it turned out that in this moment where I thought I was being given a chance to be a publicly engaged anthropologist, I was in fact being interpellated as something else entirely.  My background was imagined as a special source of expertise, experiential authority and even authenticity—something that we know happens with particular frequency to scholars who are ethnically and racially marked, and others whose subjectivities seem infused with a kind of excess of historicity. Ironically, this other, geographically and historically anchored dimension of my person could not shake the memory of the ambiguous, and sometimes even violently problematic, effects of journalistic presence and representation of the Bosnian war.  Back home, a suspicion, even aversion towards (foreign) journalists has been an important consequence of international media coverage of the 1990s. What’s more, the Sarajevan in me had painfully little to say about Mladić’s trial and The Hague justice—a sentiment I shared, in Bosnian proper, on my Facebook page, where it met with approval by dozens of other Bosnians who recognized themselves in my words.  Concretely, I expressed my ambivalence about the slow-moving cogs of international justice, as well as my resentment over the fact Mladić’s person and figure had—once again— succeeded in poisoning my affective life and holding my time hostage, even if he were now condemned by The Hague. The verdict and subsequent inquiries by journalists catapulted me into a news reading frenzy—which now seemed necessary in order to safeguard my status as an expert—that focused less on international coverage of the verdict, and more on the nationalist responses in Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, and in Serbia proper. By the end of it all, I felt shell-shocked and battered, as if the work of interpellation to which I had been subjected had actually brought into existence this new person—a victim.

My academic colleagues, experts on Bosnia who aren’t Bosnian themselves, joked that in contacting Bosnia-born academics, media houses actually get “a two for the price of one”—an expert and a witness.  Another Bosnian-American anthropologist simply refused the journalists’ inquiries, since an invitation to take part in such coverage did not seem a genuine invitation for engagement, but a wish to satisfy a convention by including a direct quote of someone with a personal connection to a place.  In this sense, the (insider) anthropologist appeared as an ideal expert, one that could, so to say, “offer a story from the people.” Paradoxically, this internalized expectation about the nature of anthropological knowledge was also what made her not want to talk to the journalists—the fact that she was not there right then made her question her capacities and her right to speak on behalf of those back home.  Another colleague lamented a journalist asked him—point blank—about his ethnic background, which he could not ascertain from his ethnically ambiguous name.  In Bosnia, this is a common form of symbolic violence, suffered with particular intensity by children of interethnic marriages—and yet, Western journalists seem somehow authorized to participate in it and be oblivious to its consequences.

As scholars, many of us are painfully aware of the difficulty involved in setting anthropological expertise on the road. Our ethnographic authority and deep familiarity with the contexts we study places us in a strong position to provide critical insight, yet our ethnographic methods remain subject to enduring accusations of being non-representative, partial and unscientific. Those of us who are deemed “native-born” or who embrace “engaged anthropology” are, of course, even more vulnerable to such forms of dismissal. Thus, the fact that journalists seek to foreground this element of our identity in our expert renders us even more vulnerable to critique.

Native-born or not, many anthropologists I know have their own battle stories about what happens when their expertise goes public. My most recent exchange with the media had some familiar dimensions—for example, the sense that a narrative had already been imposed, and that I somehow needed to position myself in response to it. But it also had another aspect. When I asked one of the journalists to see a final version of the text—citing past experience of being misquoted—the journalists made an appeal to journalistic freedom. He only shared with me a finished text.  In retrospect, I did not mind the way in which my words were included in this article.  But I could not help but feel the entire interaction ought to have been handled differently. The invitation to say something about a man responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the broken lives of many more, takes a certain kind of a toll, especially when one has a personal connection to the event—the very thing that journalists fetishize. Like many other Bosnians, I did not in fact, want to talk about Mladić—yet how could I claim that the verdict was unimportant, or leave my imagined international audience thinking this trial meant nothing? The other side of me—the specialist anthropologist—could not quite pass up the opportunity to affirm the importance of the verdict.  What’s more, as anthropologists we draw upon insights of others—it seems only fair that occasionally, we’d be interviewed too. But under said circumstances, where one walks the line between subject and object of inquiry, what exactly ought to be the terms of this kind of an engagement?

After all of this was already said and done, I needed a stiff drink and an evening with some Bosnian friends.  And then, for the first time in many years, I started to write poetry again. Perhaps it was the melancholy mood of the occasion—after all, with this last major verdict, the war in some sense, seemed to finally be over. But I suspect the poetry became a means of asserting another self, one not suspended in motion by narratives of others. It became a lifeline, an alternative genre that would permit that which ethnography allows too, which is to tell another kind of story.

Larisa Kurtović is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Ottawa. She writes on political activism, cultural politics and postsocialist transformation in contemporary Balkans. She is currently writing a book entitled Future as Predicament: Political Life after Catastrophe, based on long-term research in postwar Bosnia.

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