- Email: [email protected]
Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research “behind enemy lines”
Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Critical review
Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research ‘‘behind enemy lines” Kevin A. Gould Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., H 1255-26 (Hall Building), Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 19 May 2009 Received in revised form 21 October 2009
Keywords: Neoliberal Emotion Fear Epistemology Guatemala
a b s t r a c t Based on my political opposition to neoliberal policies, I elected to conduct dissertation research on a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. This paper explores emotional aspects of this work. Specifically, I describe my fear that research subjects would accuse me of being a spy. I then describe my efforts to cope with these fears and the ways that fear and coping influenced my meaning-making work. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction During my doctoral field work I studied the practices of policymakers as they implemented a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. As an interested foreign researcher, I was welcomed within the policy-making circles, and I became a quasi-insider in a world of technocrats, economists, planners, and surveyors. However, during the research process I often felt unnerved. As a ‘‘lefty” academic, I was uncomfortable engaging on a daily basis with the authors of this neoliberal policy. This discomfort manifested in the form of anxiety. Specifically, I feared that I would be called out as a spy by the people whose research practices I was studying. To reduce my anxieties, I engaged a range of coping mechanisms and techniques. This paper describes my fears, the coping mechanisms I used, and how these efforts helped constitute the knowledge I produced through my dissertation. This paper contributes to the growing literature on how researchers’ emotions influence the process of knowledge production (Jaggar, 1989; Laurier and Parr, 2000; Widdowfield, 2000; Bondi, 2005a; Holland, 2007; Bennett, 2009). This study differs from others that focus on fear and meaning-making in that my emphasis is not on the debilitating, even paralyzing effects of fear with respect to the research process (Widdowfield, 2000; Laurier and Parr, 2000; Wilkins, 1993; England, 1994; Bondi, 2005b). While fear can have this effect, this essay emphasizes how fear— and my efforts to cope—led me in new research directions and to new possibilities. But this paper not only describes my efforts to cope with (manage) emotion (Hochschild, 1998; Hubbard et al., 2001). It also describes how new meaning-making possibilities E-mail address: [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.10.014
emerged through unexpected encounters with research subjects with their own emotional lives. Finally, my approach to the study of fear is inspired by recent scholarship that characterizes fear as a multi-layered range of inter-related feelings rather than a narrowly defined emotional response or clinically-determined symptom (Saville, 2008; Pain, 2009). This study also contributes to an interdisciplinary literature focused on the relationship between social science and spying. This literature includes surveys of scholarly participation in the gathering of military intelligence (Fluehr-Lobban, 2003; Price, 2004; Barnes and Farish, 2006), as well as studies by researchers who reflect on occasions when they were suspected of being spies (Herbert, 2001; Owens, 2003; Simmons, 2007; Sallaz, 2008). My investigation represents a modest new direction: I seek to address the meaning-making work set in motion when researchers fear they will be accused of spying by their research subjects. This is, I contend, a relevant issue given that many scholars express concerns about it.1
2. Situating fear As Tolia-Kelly points out, the possibility of experiencing a particular emotion is contingent upon specific and uneven geometries of power (2006). What were the conditions for the anxiety that I felt while conducting research with policy-makers? My first task was to make my way into the Guatemalan agrarian bureaucracy; I was welcomed in part because of my status as a white-skinned, 1 Searching Google Scholar with the terms ‘‘ethnography” and ‘‘spy” yields a long list of papers in which authors briefly describe their concerns that they are viewed as spies by research subjects (search October 11, 2009).
16
K.A. Gould / Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18
North American of heteronormative comportment. This subject position facilitated access because of imperial histories that connect the United States and Guatemala. During the 20th century in particular, white men from the United States have influenced Guatemalan politics through their roles in intermingled processes of development aid, military intervention, international business, and research (Sundberg, 2003; Grandin, 2004). Furthermore, the privileges of whites in Guatemalan society date back centuries to the colonial history of Central America when light-skinned descendents of Spaniards began exercising control over nearly all aspects of governmental administration (Casaus, 1992). This history is one factor that allowed me to position myself with relative ease in the Guatemalan agrarian bureaucracy. A second factor that enabled me to find a place in this bureaucracy—and, as well, feel the anxiety that I did—relates to my personal history. After graduating from college in the mid-1990s, I was employed for 2 years as an environmental ‘‘expert” for a Washington–DC-based non-government organization operating in northern Guatemala. This job helped me develop personal and professional networks in the areas where I would conduct dissertation research almost a decade later. When I started my field work, I found old networks and friends throughout the institutions I planned to study. While I had my reservations about the policy, my place in these networks led me to feel included in the community of policy-makers. Thus, my particular work experience also created conditions that helped me situate myself within the agrarian bureaucracy. That said, my ‘‘personal” history was helpful only within the larger context of the colonial and imperial histories described above. As the title of this essay suggests, I began my research intending to go ‘‘behind enemy lines,” and I did this in relation to my political opposition to neoliberalism. It is important to specify that I use ‘‘behind enemy lines” metaphorically, not literally since some scholars do quite literally participate in contemporary military operations.2 While designing my research proposal, I saw Guatemala’s new, World Bank-funded land policy as deeply problematic. After writing a Master’s thesis on a similar policy in Guatemala (Gould, 2006) and reading about the World Bank’s work in other parts of the world (Escobar, 1995; Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Mitchell, 2002), I became convinced the policy I would study represented a threat to marginalized populations in Guatemala. I planned research on the policy hoping that the information I would produce would support the struggle for a more equitable distribution of land and resources in Guatemala. 3. Anxious (inter)actions When I arrived in Guatemala I found that policy-makers implementing the land policy were working for an array of decentralized institutions including state land agencies, the World Bank, national and international engineering firms, and even the Catholic Church. In my first encounters with policy-makers, I presented my research interests and asked if I could conduct participant observation research within the policy process. As I explained my research, I often felt like the proverbial spy. I worried that these policy-makers would detect my politics—my opposition to neoliberal policies— and eject me from the institutions I wanted to study. This fear affected my behavior during these encounters. My anxiety was somewhat distracting: listening closely became more difficult than I anticipated as did expressing myself clearly in Spanish. Some2 Anthropologists and other social scientists are employed by the Human Terrain System and other counter-insurgency programs funded by the United States Foreign Military Studies Office. See the website of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists for more information: http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home (Accessed on May 17, 2009). See also Mychalejko and Ryan (2009).
times I would stammer a bit before regaining my composure. I also felt excitement. I fantasized that I was an undercover agent finally reaching the source of information I had long coveted. In the swirl of emotion, I could feel myself perspire, becoming somewhat redolent! I did not like these early meetings, and yearned for more comfortable encounters with research subjects. To reduce my anxiety during fieldwork, I adopted a series of coping strategies. These strategies affected the interactions I had with policy-makers and my research. First, I sought to eliminate formal meetings. Instead, I tried to integrate myself into the social life of the policy process so that I could meet policy-makers under conditions that would cause me less anxiety. Since I was invited to social events by my contacts in the agrarian organizations, I accomplished this relatively easily. Rapidly, I began to meet my former ‘‘interviewees” in informal settings such as bars, restaurants and soccer fields. A few months after arriving in Petén, I rented a house with an ex-patriot engineer who worked for the project. Our house became one of the hubs of activity for project managers and technicians. Although I did not always feel comfortable even in my own (shared) house, I was now able to learn about land policy, institutional conflicts, and the struggles and triumphs of technicians while sitting around the kitchen table or in our rather comfortable living room. My goal in integrating myself into the project was to reduce the anxieties that were emerging during formal encounters (interviews) with project leaders. These leaders were overwhelmingly male and their non-familial social lives were largely carried out among other men. As a result, my participant observation research extended along networks composed primarily of men; I learned most about aspects of land policy dominated by men. Specifically, I became familiar with the policy-making process in the countryside, at the upper levels of the agrarian organizations, and in what might be called cartographic workshops, places where land survey data were converted to maps. In time though, my connections in this masculine policy-world led me to aspects of the project carried out by women. Nevertheless, by the end of my stay in Guatemala, I was least familiar with those parts of the policy process implemented by women including legal research into the histories of state-sanctioned land claims, aspects of urban land policy, and clerical and accounting processes administered mostly by women. In sum, my efforts to reduce my anxieties about being detected as a spy led to dissertation research that focused on men’s worlds within the land policy process. Participation in the social life of the policy work, however, did not entirely relieve my anxiety about being seen as a spy. In my new social circles I felt, for obvious reasons, uncomfortable discussing my politics. I sought to cope with this anxiety by finding safe spaces where I could be myself. I found these in peasant organizations as well as state- and church institutions led by leftists. After visiting these organizations I felt recharged, able to sustain myself more comfortably in my day-to-day work. Nevertheless, as a person who had lived in Petén for a few years before this dissertation effort, I was aware that my strategy was problematic. I knew that agrarian institutions in Guatemala and elsewhere cannot be neatly divided into ‘‘enemy” and ‘‘allied” camps. I also knew that intricate personal and professional networks connect agrarian institutions resulting in substantial mobility of employees among institutions. As well, through my graduate studies, I had become convinced of the importance of avoiding static and binary visions of politics, (e.g. Nelson, 1999). Yet during my research, I could not let go entirely of this binary political/moral geography of enemies and allies. I clung to this notion in part because it provided spaces where I could rest and ‘‘be myself.” The boundaries that I established among institutions in my efforts to find safe spaces extended themselves to my research and
K.A. Gould / Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18
later to my writing. Those institutions that I saw as ‘‘enemies” became the focus of my research. By drawing boundaries around the ‘‘neoliberal” institutions and then studying them, I had difficulty recognizing the political heterogeneity and dynamism within institutions and the connections between the so-called neoliberal and leftist organizations. Creating these imagined boundaries also made it more difficult to see that organizations representing different political positions all contributed to producing hegemonic discourses about land and rights in Guatemala. Over time the effects on my research of this early boundary-forming process declined. As I got to know policy-makers and their organizations, I began to shed some of my preconceived notions and see more clearly the complexities that characterize the policy process. Nevertheless, this reflection illustrates the power of emotions brought to bear on research—in this case anxiety—in the constitution of boundaries and related meaning-making processes (Bondi et al., 2005). I further coped with my anxiety by telling stories. I spoke by phone with trusted friends and family about my research position. In these calls, I discussed my fears that I was perceived as a spy and that I was in fact behaving like a spy. By telling my field work stories to confidants, I could be reassured by people I trusted that what I was doing was ethical, that I had nothing to fear. Likewise, in my field notes I evaluated my research ethics by scrutinizing my own efforts to inform research subjects about my work. Some of my conversations with confidants led me to believe that I was not being sufficiently explicit with research subjects. I would then speak more openly with the policy-makers around me, especially with those with whom I spent the most time. My ‘‘confessions” about my politics motivated others to share their views. The World Bank consultants working on the project seemed to be committed to the neoliberal vision: prosperity through the construction of land markets. In contrast, Guatemalan planners seemed hardly aware of the market vision. They were more concerned with completing land surveys, distributing land titles (state-sanctioned private property rights), or simply earning a salary. Sharing my views about the project with ‘‘enemies” helped me recognize the complexity and contradictions inherent in the policy process. The notion of ‘‘coping with anxiety” suggests a degree of control that I did not always enjoy; my urge to talk about spying was sometimes overwhelming. On four different occasions when talking with key research subjects, I denied being a spy, even though no one had accused me. The most memorable of these incidents occurred after approximately three months in Guatemala. I was having lunch with the owner of a Guatemalan engineering firm who worked for the project. In my nervousness, I joked that I would not be a ‘‘little spy,” that I merely sought to accompany his team of surveyors to collect data for my dissertation. The engineer and his wife, who was also eating with us, thought my reference to spying humorous. They began laughing and then started humming the theme song to ‘‘Mission Impossible,” the film starring Tom Cruise as a CIA agent. On the remaining occasions, I denied being a spy, in response to a project leader asking for information about a colleague or about the work of another land institution. ‘‘I am not a spy,” I said, ‘‘I cannot compromise the people whom I have interviewed, especially with the policy still on-going.” Fear, like other emotions, is a ‘‘connective medium in which research, researchers, and research subjects are necessarily immersed” (Bondi, 2005b, p. 433). Given my preoccupation with spying and the accompanying and inevitable non-verbal cues of my discomfort (Thrift, 2009), it should be no surprise that people around me became aware of my feelings. As my field work progressed, the policy-makers and technicians with whom I worked increasingly made jokes about me being a spy. Most such jokes arose in conversations with individuals or in small groups. Such joking increased in frequency after I had been away from project
17
headquarters for a few weeks. Policy-makers would welcome me ‘‘home,” then joke that I had been in Washington to turn in my reports to the spymasters. In one case, I was accused of being a spy in a more public setting, a party in Guatemala City. Many of my friends from land agencies in Petén had taken the 6 h bus trip to Guatemala City to be present for the party, a black-tie event with hundreds of people in attendance including many of the top land experts in the country. Before dinner, the master of ceremonies, who was the communications director of the project in Petén and also a friend, introduced a few of the guests. When it was my turn, the communications director said, ‘‘This is Kevin, our very own spy from the CIA.” Initially, spy-jokes strengthened my feeling of operating behind enemy lines and led me to segregate myself from the people making the, albeit joking, accusations. For example, soon after the CIA joke introduction, I felt quite uncomfortable and left the party. As well, I distanced myself from the engineer who sang the theme song to Mission Impossible and initiated participant observation with a different firm. In spite of my heightened anxiety around this teasing, in retrospect I realize that the spy-jokes ultimately helped me develop closer and more complex relations with policy-makers. The jokes were a part and parcel of a culture of hard teasing that typified the interactions of low- and mid-level technicians and policy-makers who worked on the project. By withstanding the teasing I became accepted into the social circles of those people working on the project. As well, on various occasions these jokes provided a segue for earnest and nuanced discussions of the military-spy culture during Guatemala’s war years and the fine line between research and spying by foreign researchers, Peace Corps volunteers, consultants, etc. Although I still occasionally felt like a spy, I no longer felt as awkward or anxious about my position as I had when I began the field work. With increasing lines of connection and affection, new opportunities for my research emerged. For example, friends in the Guatemalan agrarian institutions introduced me to the World Bank consultants who arrived from Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. Assigned to conduct interviews and collect data for reports, the work of the Bank consultants had parallels to my research, though these individuals spent most of their time based in Washington and evaluated other land projects. When they learned of my research, they invited me to accompany them in their work. Over meals they explained why they saw the project as important for Guatemala, and they described their own efforts to cope with frequent travel, demanding supervisors, and long distance relationships. As I shadowed the consultants, I could also see that they frequently failed to impose (or explain) their ideas about the project to better informed Guatemalan policy-makers. The important point is not these particular observations or experiences, but rather that the spy-jokes, social networks, and my own coping mechanisms eventually led to more comfortable relations with research subjects including Bank employees. These relations were manifested in research situations where I had a chance to study the project not as a battle between enemies and allies, but as a complex, sometimes contradictory process linking a wide array of institutions, actors, and ongoing struggles over resources and meanings (Gould, 2009). 4. Conclusions When I began my dissertation research I feared that the policymakers whose practices I studied would condemn me as a spy. This paper describes these fears, traces my efforts to cope with them, and explores how fear and coping influenced my work. Throughout my dissertation research, fear and my meaning-making work were mutually constituted. As I began my field work, my feeling that I was ‘‘behind enemy lines” caused me anxiety and led me to frame
18
K.A. Gould / Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18
my research in binary terms. I coped by developing more informal, personal relations with policy-makers, finding spaces of refuge from ‘‘neoliberal” institutions, and talking with distant friends and family. Policy-makers responded to me by reaching out, sometimes by teasing me, calling me a spy. As I developed more fulfilling relations with research subjects, my fear of being accused of spying subsided, and I began to feel more comfortable. At the same time, I developed a research position which allowed me to view the policy process as more complex and contradictory. While the anxiety and the binary research frameworks were the conditions of possibility for my later more nuanced emotions and research, the latter work was most useful to me. I value this work because its complexity presents more possibilities for transforming the policy process. It also serves as a starting point for examining how the interwoven and emotional lives of geographers and their research subjects constitute knowledges about neoliberal policies. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge my friends and contacts from the World Bank-sponsored Land Administration project in Guatemala. Thank you. For their useful suggestions on this essay, I also wish to thank Leonne Gould, Chris Harker, Paul Kingsbury, Norma Rantisi, Ted Rutland, Tracy Zhang and two anonymous reviewers. All views expressed here are my own. References Barnes, T.J., Farish, M., 2006. Between regions: science, militarism, and American geography from world war to cold war. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (4), 807–826. Bennett, K., 2009. Challenging emotions. Area 41 (3), 244–251. Bondi, L., 2005a. Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 443–448. Bondi, L., 2005b. The place of emotions in research: from partitioning emotion and reason to the emotional dynamics of research relationships. In: Davidson, J., Bondi, L., Smith, M. (Eds.), Emotional geographies. Ashgate, Burlington, VT, pp. 231–246. Bondi, L., Davidson, J., Smith, M., 2005. Introduction: geography’s ‘emotional turn’. In: Emotional Geographies. Ashgate, Burlington, VT, pp. 1–18. Casaus, M. 1992. Guatemala: Linaje y racismo. FLACSO, San Jose. Gould, K.A., 2006. Land regularization on agricultural frontiers: the case of Northwestern Petén, Guatemala. Land Use Policy 23 (4), 395–407. Gould, K.A., 2009. Marking Land, Producing Markets: The Making of a Guatemalan Rural Land Market. PhD Dissertation. University of British Columbia, Department of Geography.
England, K.V.L., 1994. Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research. The Professional Geographer 46 (1), 80–89. Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of The Third World. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Fluehr-Lobban, C., 2003. ‘‘Ethics and anthropology 1890–2000: a review of issues and principles. In: Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice. Altamira Press, California, pp. 1–29. Grandin, G., 2004. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. University of Chicago Press. Herbert, S., 2001. From spy to okay guy: trust and validity in fieldwork with the police. Geographical Review 91 (1), 304–310. Hochschild, A.R., 1998. The sociology of emotion as a way of seeing. In: Bendelow, G.A., Williams, S.J. (Eds.), Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues. Routledge, London, pp. 3–15. Holland, J., 2007. Emotions and research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 10 (3), 195–209. Hubbard, G., Backett-Milburn, K., Kemmer, D., 2001. Working with emotion: issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4 (2), 119–137. Jaggar, A.M., 1989. Love and knowledge: emotion in feminist epistemology. Inquiry 32 (2), 151–176. Jansen, K., Roquas, E., 1998. Modernizing insecurity: the land titling project in honduras. Development and Change 29 (1), 81–106. Laurier, E., Parr, H., 2000. Emotions and interviewing in health and disability research. Ethics Place and Environment 3, 98–102. Mychalejko, C., Ryan, R., 2009. Military backed mapping project in Oaxaca under fire. In: Upside Down World: Covering Activism and Politics in Latin America.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Critical review
Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research ‘‘behind enemy lines” Kevin A. Gould Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., H 1255-26 (Hall Building), Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 19 May 2009 Received in revised form 21 October 2009
Keywords: Neoliberal Emotion Fear Epistemology Guatemala
a b s t r a c t Based on my political opposition to neoliberal policies, I elected to conduct dissertation research on a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. This paper explores emotional aspects of this work. Specifically, I describe my fear that research subjects would accuse me of being a spy. I then describe my efforts to cope with these fears and the ways that fear and coping influenced my meaning-making work. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction During my doctoral field work I studied the practices of policymakers as they implemented a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. As an interested foreign researcher, I was welcomed within the policy-making circles, and I became a quasi-insider in a world of technocrats, economists, planners, and surveyors. However, during the research process I often felt unnerved. As a ‘‘lefty” academic, I was uncomfortable engaging on a daily basis with the authors of this neoliberal policy. This discomfort manifested in the form of anxiety. Specifically, I feared that I would be called out as a spy by the people whose research practices I was studying. To reduce my anxieties, I engaged a range of coping mechanisms and techniques. This paper describes my fears, the coping mechanisms I used, and how these efforts helped constitute the knowledge I produced through my dissertation. This paper contributes to the growing literature on how researchers’ emotions influence the process of knowledge production (Jaggar, 1989; Laurier and Parr, 2000; Widdowfield, 2000; Bondi, 2005a; Holland, 2007; Bennett, 2009). This study differs from others that focus on fear and meaning-making in that my emphasis is not on the debilitating, even paralyzing effects of fear with respect to the research process (Widdowfield, 2000; Laurier and Parr, 2000; Wilkins, 1993; England, 1994; Bondi, 2005b). While fear can have this effect, this essay emphasizes how fear— and my efforts to cope—led me in new research directions and to new possibilities. But this paper not only describes my efforts to cope with (manage) emotion (Hochschild, 1998; Hubbard et al., 2001). It also describes how new meaning-making possibilities E-mail address: [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.10.014
emerged through unexpected encounters with research subjects with their own emotional lives. Finally, my approach to the study of fear is inspired by recent scholarship that characterizes fear as a multi-layered range of inter-related feelings rather than a narrowly defined emotional response or clinically-determined symptom (Saville, 2008; Pain, 2009). This study also contributes to an interdisciplinary literature focused on the relationship between social science and spying. This literature includes surveys of scholarly participation in the gathering of military intelligence (Fluehr-Lobban, 2003; Price, 2004; Barnes and Farish, 2006), as well as studies by researchers who reflect on occasions when they were suspected of being spies (Herbert, 2001; Owens, 2003; Simmons, 2007; Sallaz, 2008). My investigation represents a modest new direction: I seek to address the meaning-making work set in motion when researchers fear they will be accused of spying by their research subjects. This is, I contend, a relevant issue given that many scholars express concerns about it.1
2. Situating fear As Tolia-Kelly points out, the possibility of experiencing a particular emotion is contingent upon specific and uneven geometries of power (2006). What were the conditions for the anxiety that I felt while conducting research with policy-makers? My first task was to make my way into the Guatemalan agrarian bureaucracy; I was welcomed in part because of my status as a white-skinned, 1 Searching Google Scholar with the terms ‘‘ethnography” and ‘‘spy” yields a long list of papers in which authors briefly describe their concerns that they are viewed as spies by research subjects (search October 11, 2009).
16
K.A. Gould / Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18
North American of heteronormative comportment. This subject position facilitated access because of imperial histories that connect the United States and Guatemala. During the 20th century in particular, white men from the United States have influenced Guatemalan politics through their roles in intermingled processes of development aid, military intervention, international business, and research (Sundberg, 2003; Grandin, 2004). Furthermore, the privileges of whites in Guatemalan society date back centuries to the colonial history of Central America when light-skinned descendents of Spaniards began exercising control over nearly all aspects of governmental administration (Casaus, 1992). This history is one factor that allowed me to position myself with relative ease in the Guatemalan agrarian bureaucracy. A second factor that enabled me to find a place in this bureaucracy—and, as well, feel the anxiety that I did—relates to my personal history. After graduating from college in the mid-1990s, I was employed for 2 years as an environmental ‘‘expert” for a Washington–DC-based non-government organization operating in northern Guatemala. This job helped me develop personal and professional networks in the areas where I would conduct dissertation research almost a decade later. When I started my field work, I found old networks and friends throughout the institutions I planned to study. While I had my reservations about the policy, my place in these networks led me to feel included in the community of policy-makers. Thus, my particular work experience also created conditions that helped me situate myself within the agrarian bureaucracy. That said, my ‘‘personal” history was helpful only within the larger context of the colonial and imperial histories described above. As the title of this essay suggests, I began my research intending to go ‘‘behind enemy lines,” and I did this in relation to my political opposition to neoliberalism. It is important to specify that I use ‘‘behind enemy lines” metaphorically, not literally since some scholars do quite literally participate in contemporary military operations.2 While designing my research proposal, I saw Guatemala’s new, World Bank-funded land policy as deeply problematic. After writing a Master’s thesis on a similar policy in Guatemala (Gould, 2006) and reading about the World Bank’s work in other parts of the world (Escobar, 1995; Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Mitchell, 2002), I became convinced the policy I would study represented a threat to marginalized populations in Guatemala. I planned research on the policy hoping that the information I would produce would support the struggle for a more equitable distribution of land and resources in Guatemala. 3. Anxious (inter)actions When I arrived in Guatemala I found that policy-makers implementing the land policy were working for an array of decentralized institutions including state land agencies, the World Bank, national and international engineering firms, and even the Catholic Church. In my first encounters with policy-makers, I presented my research interests and asked if I could conduct participant observation research within the policy process. As I explained my research, I often felt like the proverbial spy. I worried that these policy-makers would detect my politics—my opposition to neoliberal policies— and eject me from the institutions I wanted to study. This fear affected my behavior during these encounters. My anxiety was somewhat distracting: listening closely became more difficult than I anticipated as did expressing myself clearly in Spanish. Some2 Anthropologists and other social scientists are employed by the Human Terrain System and other counter-insurgency programs funded by the United States Foreign Military Studies Office. See the website of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists for more information: http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home (Accessed on May 17, 2009). See also Mychalejko and Ryan (2009).
times I would stammer a bit before regaining my composure. I also felt excitement. I fantasized that I was an undercover agent finally reaching the source of information I had long coveted. In the swirl of emotion, I could feel myself perspire, becoming somewhat redolent! I did not like these early meetings, and yearned for more comfortable encounters with research subjects. To reduce my anxiety during fieldwork, I adopted a series of coping strategies. These strategies affected the interactions I had with policy-makers and my research. First, I sought to eliminate formal meetings. Instead, I tried to integrate myself into the social life of the policy process so that I could meet policy-makers under conditions that would cause me less anxiety. Since I was invited to social events by my contacts in the agrarian organizations, I accomplished this relatively easily. Rapidly, I began to meet my former ‘‘interviewees” in informal settings such as bars, restaurants and soccer fields. A few months after arriving in Petén, I rented a house with an ex-patriot engineer who worked for the project. Our house became one of the hubs of activity for project managers and technicians. Although I did not always feel comfortable even in my own (shared) house, I was now able to learn about land policy, institutional conflicts, and the struggles and triumphs of technicians while sitting around the kitchen table or in our rather comfortable living room. My goal in integrating myself into the project was to reduce the anxieties that were emerging during formal encounters (interviews) with project leaders. These leaders were overwhelmingly male and their non-familial social lives were largely carried out among other men. As a result, my participant observation research extended along networks composed primarily of men; I learned most about aspects of land policy dominated by men. Specifically, I became familiar with the policy-making process in the countryside, at the upper levels of the agrarian organizations, and in what might be called cartographic workshops, places where land survey data were converted to maps. In time though, my connections in this masculine policy-world led me to aspects of the project carried out by women. Nevertheless, by the end of my stay in Guatemala, I was least familiar with those parts of the policy process implemented by women including legal research into the histories of state-sanctioned land claims, aspects of urban land policy, and clerical and accounting processes administered mostly by women. In sum, my efforts to reduce my anxieties about being detected as a spy led to dissertation research that focused on men’s worlds within the land policy process. Participation in the social life of the policy work, however, did not entirely relieve my anxiety about being seen as a spy. In my new social circles I felt, for obvious reasons, uncomfortable discussing my politics. I sought to cope with this anxiety by finding safe spaces where I could be myself. I found these in peasant organizations as well as state- and church institutions led by leftists. After visiting these organizations I felt recharged, able to sustain myself more comfortably in my day-to-day work. Nevertheless, as a person who had lived in Petén for a few years before this dissertation effort, I was aware that my strategy was problematic. I knew that agrarian institutions in Guatemala and elsewhere cannot be neatly divided into ‘‘enemy” and ‘‘allied” camps. I also knew that intricate personal and professional networks connect agrarian institutions resulting in substantial mobility of employees among institutions. As well, through my graduate studies, I had become convinced of the importance of avoiding static and binary visions of politics, (e.g. Nelson, 1999). Yet during my research, I could not let go entirely of this binary political/moral geography of enemies and allies. I clung to this notion in part because it provided spaces where I could rest and ‘‘be myself.” The boundaries that I established among institutions in my efforts to find safe spaces extended themselves to my research and
K.A. Gould / Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18
later to my writing. Those institutions that I saw as ‘‘enemies” became the focus of my research. By drawing boundaries around the ‘‘neoliberal” institutions and then studying them, I had difficulty recognizing the political heterogeneity and dynamism within institutions and the connections between the so-called neoliberal and leftist organizations. Creating these imagined boundaries also made it more difficult to see that organizations representing different political positions all contributed to producing hegemonic discourses about land and rights in Guatemala. Over time the effects on my research of this early boundary-forming process declined. As I got to know policy-makers and their organizations, I began to shed some of my preconceived notions and see more clearly the complexities that characterize the policy process. Nevertheless, this reflection illustrates the power of emotions brought to bear on research—in this case anxiety—in the constitution of boundaries and related meaning-making processes (Bondi et al., 2005). I further coped with my anxiety by telling stories. I spoke by phone with trusted friends and family about my research position. In these calls, I discussed my fears that I was perceived as a spy and that I was in fact behaving like a spy. By telling my field work stories to confidants, I could be reassured by people I trusted that what I was doing was ethical, that I had nothing to fear. Likewise, in my field notes I evaluated my research ethics by scrutinizing my own efforts to inform research subjects about my work. Some of my conversations with confidants led me to believe that I was not being sufficiently explicit with research subjects. I would then speak more openly with the policy-makers around me, especially with those with whom I spent the most time. My ‘‘confessions” about my politics motivated others to share their views. The World Bank consultants working on the project seemed to be committed to the neoliberal vision: prosperity through the construction of land markets. In contrast, Guatemalan planners seemed hardly aware of the market vision. They were more concerned with completing land surveys, distributing land titles (state-sanctioned private property rights), or simply earning a salary. Sharing my views about the project with ‘‘enemies” helped me recognize the complexity and contradictions inherent in the policy process. The notion of ‘‘coping with anxiety” suggests a degree of control that I did not always enjoy; my urge to talk about spying was sometimes overwhelming. On four different occasions when talking with key research subjects, I denied being a spy, even though no one had accused me. The most memorable of these incidents occurred after approximately three months in Guatemala. I was having lunch with the owner of a Guatemalan engineering firm who worked for the project. In my nervousness, I joked that I would not be a ‘‘little spy,” that I merely sought to accompany his team of surveyors to collect data for my dissertation. The engineer and his wife, who was also eating with us, thought my reference to spying humorous. They began laughing and then started humming the theme song to ‘‘Mission Impossible,” the film starring Tom Cruise as a CIA agent. On the remaining occasions, I denied being a spy, in response to a project leader asking for information about a colleague or about the work of another land institution. ‘‘I am not a spy,” I said, ‘‘I cannot compromise the people whom I have interviewed, especially with the policy still on-going.” Fear, like other emotions, is a ‘‘connective medium in which research, researchers, and research subjects are necessarily immersed” (Bondi, 2005b, p. 433). Given my preoccupation with spying and the accompanying and inevitable non-verbal cues of my discomfort (Thrift, 2009), it should be no surprise that people around me became aware of my feelings. As my field work progressed, the policy-makers and technicians with whom I worked increasingly made jokes about me being a spy. Most such jokes arose in conversations with individuals or in small groups. Such joking increased in frequency after I had been away from project
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headquarters for a few weeks. Policy-makers would welcome me ‘‘home,” then joke that I had been in Washington to turn in my reports to the spymasters. In one case, I was accused of being a spy in a more public setting, a party in Guatemala City. Many of my friends from land agencies in Petén had taken the 6 h bus trip to Guatemala City to be present for the party, a black-tie event with hundreds of people in attendance including many of the top land experts in the country. Before dinner, the master of ceremonies, who was the communications director of the project in Petén and also a friend, introduced a few of the guests. When it was my turn, the communications director said, ‘‘This is Kevin, our very own spy from the CIA.” Initially, spy-jokes strengthened my feeling of operating behind enemy lines and led me to segregate myself from the people making the, albeit joking, accusations. For example, soon after the CIA joke introduction, I felt quite uncomfortable and left the party. As well, I distanced myself from the engineer who sang the theme song to Mission Impossible and initiated participant observation with a different firm. In spite of my heightened anxiety around this teasing, in retrospect I realize that the spy-jokes ultimately helped me develop closer and more complex relations with policy-makers. The jokes were a part and parcel of a culture of hard teasing that typified the interactions of low- and mid-level technicians and policy-makers who worked on the project. By withstanding the teasing I became accepted into the social circles of those people working on the project. As well, on various occasions these jokes provided a segue for earnest and nuanced discussions of the military-spy culture during Guatemala’s war years and the fine line between research and spying by foreign researchers, Peace Corps volunteers, consultants, etc. Although I still occasionally felt like a spy, I no longer felt as awkward or anxious about my position as I had when I began the field work. With increasing lines of connection and affection, new opportunities for my research emerged. For example, friends in the Guatemalan agrarian institutions introduced me to the World Bank consultants who arrived from Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. Assigned to conduct interviews and collect data for reports, the work of the Bank consultants had parallels to my research, though these individuals spent most of their time based in Washington and evaluated other land projects. When they learned of my research, they invited me to accompany them in their work. Over meals they explained why they saw the project as important for Guatemala, and they described their own efforts to cope with frequent travel, demanding supervisors, and long distance relationships. As I shadowed the consultants, I could also see that they frequently failed to impose (or explain) their ideas about the project to better informed Guatemalan policy-makers. The important point is not these particular observations or experiences, but rather that the spy-jokes, social networks, and my own coping mechanisms eventually led to more comfortable relations with research subjects including Bank employees. These relations were manifested in research situations where I had a chance to study the project not as a battle between enemies and allies, but as a complex, sometimes contradictory process linking a wide array of institutions, actors, and ongoing struggles over resources and meanings (Gould, 2009). 4. Conclusions When I began my dissertation research I feared that the policymakers whose practices I studied would condemn me as a spy. This paper describes these fears, traces my efforts to cope with them, and explores how fear and coping influenced my work. Throughout my dissertation research, fear and my meaning-making work were mutually constituted. As I began my field work, my feeling that I was ‘‘behind enemy lines” caused me anxiety and led me to frame
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my research in binary terms. I coped by developing more informal, personal relations with policy-makers, finding spaces of refuge from ‘‘neoliberal” institutions, and talking with distant friends and family. Policy-makers responded to me by reaching out, sometimes by teasing me, calling me a spy. As I developed more fulfilling relations with research subjects, my fear of being accused of spying subsided, and I began to feel more comfortable. At the same time, I developed a research position which allowed me to view the policy process as more complex and contradictory. While the anxiety and the binary research frameworks were the conditions of possibility for my later more nuanced emotions and research, the latter work was most useful to me. I value this work because its complexity presents more possibilities for transforming the policy process. It also serves as a starting point for examining how the interwoven and emotional lives of geographers and their research subjects constitute knowledges about neoliberal policies. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge my friends and contacts from the World Bank-sponsored Land Administration project in Guatemala. Thank you. For their useful suggestions on this essay, I also wish to thank Leonne Gould, Chris Harker, Paul Kingsbury, Norma Rantisi, Ted Rutland, Tracy Zhang and two anonymous reviewers. All views expressed here are my own. References Barnes, T.J., Farish, M., 2006. Between regions: science, militarism, and American geography from world war to cold war. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (4), 807–826. Bennett, K., 2009. Challenging emotions. Area 41 (3), 244–251. Bondi, L., 2005a. Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 443–448. Bondi, L., 2005b. The place of emotions in research: from partitioning emotion and reason to the emotional dynamics of research relationships. In: Davidson, J., Bondi, L., Smith, M. (Eds.), Emotional geographies. Ashgate, Burlington, VT, pp. 231–246. Bondi, L., Davidson, J., Smith, M., 2005. Introduction: geography’s ‘emotional turn’. In: Emotional Geographies. Ashgate, Burlington, VT, pp. 1–18. Casaus, M. 1992. Guatemala: Linaje y racismo. FLACSO, San Jose. Gould, K.A., 2006. Land regularization on agricultural frontiers: the case of Northwestern Petén, Guatemala. Land Use Policy 23 (4), 395–407. Gould, K.A., 2009. Marking Land, Producing Markets: The Making of a Guatemalan Rural Land Market. PhD Dissertation. University of British Columbia, Department of Geography.
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