4447 words
In this chapter, I will figure out how I want to write this thesis. This chapter is much longer than a regular methodology section and that's because the act of writing in itself is treated as problematic. A question became lodged in my mind before I had even started to think about what my thesis would look like: “Who am I writing this for?” This question won’t be the main question of my thesis but I won’t dare to budge it from the background. Until this question receives the attention that it demands from me, I won't be able to continue writing the rest of my thesis. What I write down in this chapter will stay as it is, I won’t do any heavy editing and instead review the journey in-between writing this chapter and whatever has happened by the end.
Contents
05/05/22 13:29 [UTR]
This question caused me concern before I started to write, and severely delayed my start. It made me feel underprepared for writing because of the risk that I would say things about the cows that they would not have liked me to say.
This worry is shared with almost the entire history of anthropological research.[^colonialgaze] Imagine an academic from the West departing from the pristine office and arriving in a faraway place just to learn about how people over there live and think. This becomes a problem when the “other” is treated like a “savage” in comparison to the “civilised” people of the West. Preconceptions like this would make their way into publications -which highlights another issue- the format of text easily makes the author seem like an expert with respect to the reader. I didn't want to be a researcher that went into an unknown world, just because it was unknown, to then return to my comfortable desk and write easily digestible stories.
To answer the question: Ultimately, I’d want to say that I am writing for the cows. But I can’t say with any certainty whether they’d like what I say, so I have to write in a way that is vulnerable and open to being wrong. That way, I won’t have to make excuses for being wrong afterwards, and I don’t have to write with a tone where I pretend to be correct- which too much academic writing has. I’m hoping that the sincerity with which I stick to this intention will manifest in the choices I make in creating this thesis, hence the extended reflection on method at the start.
How can I be explicit about this vulnerability?
[/colonialgaze]: Thanks to my friend Chiara Lacroix for teaching me about the postmodernist turn in anthropology, when practitioners started to reckon with the power they had to assist in colonial acts of territorialisation:
Ethnography’s subjects and its audience were not only separable but morally disconnected, that the first were to be described but not addressed, the second informed but not implicated.
Geertz via Elie, “Anthropology and Post-Colonial Thought: The Paradoxical Quest for Positionality.”
For a researcher that uses fieldwork as a method, the distance from the field creates uncertainties that the lab researcher can avoid through extensive note-taking. In a laboratory, you can make pictures of your equipment and make notes in your lab book about all the settings and environmental conditions you saw whilst carrying out your experiment. In the field, the number of things that you could pay attention to and make notes about is unlimited. It is hard to keep track of everything, and paying attention to a few things means you constantly make decisions about what matters, what you can ignore, what you can forget. It’s this forgetting that creates uncertainty when you try to recall what happened. Staring at a screen and keyboard whilst staying alert by sniffing coffee is a world away from being outdoors at a stinky farm. It is much more lonely, I am alone with my thoughts, recollections, data and academic papers. During my fieldwork, the notes that came out of my mouth and into my recorder felt like they were passing through me. Whenever the cows did or said something, I could report it immediately. Now that I am removed from there, what passes out of my pen into words doesn’t feel like it has the same quality. It’s like trying to draw something without looking at it. I’m thinking about the moon on a cloudy afternoon.
In-between finding a memory and being able to describe it, what happens? Except for a distance in space and time -which forces a forgetting- what else changes between then and now? What if I treat this in-between as ‘listening’ to a past self? Then I can investigate the process of receiving, from a past self, what happened then. From locating a memory, exploring the context surrounding it, to then use the words of now to re-tell what happened then. Last year, I was in a phase of embodied listening, where listening is multi-sensory and multimodal. In the same way, you speak using your mouth and also the rest of your body, you listen with more than your ears. Listening involves all the senses: smell, sight, touch, sound. This year, I am in a second, separate, phase of listening where I write about what happened then. Since I do not have those happenings on-hand, I have to use my memory and imagination and theory to re-call and re-produce what it was like then and what I think happened.
The things that mattered to me have changed, the questions that guide my work have changed, and the way I see things have changed. I have changed. Last year I was following the work of my supervisor, Leonie Cornips, and studying how cows communicate, by watching them talk to each other and doing my best to understand, and reply to, what they were saying to me. And in the course of several exasperating moments, I had success. I learnt, through first-hand experience, that dairy cows do speak, that they have lots to say, and that it is possible for humans to understand some of it. And they don’t speak using words like ours, certainly not text. Yet now I’m watching words appear on my screen, I’m watching myself work and it doesn’t feel anything like what I could feel, hear, or smell then. In order to write anything, I have to first justify to myself why I should bother to say anything at all, especially using words.
I have changed. The things I was told by the cows were told to a different me than the me that is sitting down to write now. The me that is writing, and the reasons for which they are writing becomes a site of study. The fieldwork in the first phase was at farms, the fieldwork in this second phase could be me.
Last year I was a curious, embodied, stranger to farms asking: How do cows speak? Now I am an academic that writes, I am asking: Why should I be the one who writes about how cows speak? Will anything I say about, or for, the cows even be correct? After the encounter with farms, a pure, scientific form of curiosity turned into a concern about how I can share what happened. These concerns motivate a method of auto-ethnography that I am inventing for this thesis.
‘Auto’ and ‘ethnography’ are words that put themselves together in my mind whilst I was preparing a conference presentation in which I sought to ‘perform’ how I am writing my thesis.[^autoeth] The idea was to invite criticism or comments on the hypotheses, questions, or fieldwork results that I brought to my audience. I wanted them to see, or to guess, how I was making claims, and wonder for themselves if they would have made the same steps or deductions based on the interactions I described or showed in videos. The assumption was that every researcher will see or hear different things about the same interactions or happenings. I wanted us all to reflect on why we might see things differently to each other and discuss why we think we see that way.
What if I am transparent about the steps involved in giving data a meaning that it didn’t previously have or was not discernible until it became translated into the written word?
I’m curious what I will find out by being strict about how I document myself producing this document. I will be transparent about how I weave theory, data and imagination together to produce arguments and stories in my thesis. I will strive to make my own impositions and meanderings explicit, not leave them out of the text. I will review what comes out, and try to understand the reasons for which I make selections, pass over some data, and force some data into submission with the hypothetical and theoretical intuitions I’ve gained through experience or prejudice.
In the same conference, Omar Bachour spoke a sentence that reverberates in my motivation to study multi-species interactions: “If I make myself transparent, will their opacity gain clearer edges?” By making myself transparent I hope to make them, the cows, visible. Truly honouring the participation of the cows in my research would mean that I am not writing about them, but I am writing-with them as a result of our having been together. They made interesting happenings for me and they may be driving my selection of analytic tools or narrative structures. In those moments they are writing through me I want to be able to detect it. If I am serious about writing this thesis for the cows, the best thesis I could write is one that they could have written for themselves. If I can produce strategies to identify the agencies of others as they pass through ‘me’ (whatever that might make ‘me’), that would be quite an achievement.[^whyme] Reflecting on the me that writes, as they write, seems the right way to go.
“Is it possible that my keyboard could catch those instances where the cows have made efforts to write through me? It would be nice to be written through AND to recognise when my intuitions are supplied by them.”[^pres]
25/07/23 19:29 [ROT]
[/autoeth]: At the time I conceived of this combination of ‘auto’ and ‘ethnography,’ I hadn’t read any works using this term to describe how they were writing. But I remember being inspired by the phenomenological writings of Merleau-Ponty, of Charles Darwin’s diary style and Maria Sybille Merian printing her memories of encounters with humans, plants and insects whilst painting the butterflies of Suriname.
I have recently found out about the fields of auto-theory in corporeal literature studies, for a nice example see: Spry, “Performing Autoethnography.”
[/pres]: I don’t think I was successful at involving everyone in this activity but I became sure that reflexive or self-study is important in the context of multi-species interactions. See 2.2 for further analysis of this presentation.
19/07/22 20:41 [NP]
[/whyme]: The centrality of the “I” in how I will write has already started to feel perverse. I become trapped in thoughts and feelings of myself whenever I ask why I am working in the way I am. It’s not clear why that matters for my thesis. I have to fend off a worry that lots of my thesis will be me writing about myself, and not the cows. But I have to just go forth, stay close to the data, stay close to myself, and see what comes of it.
06/05/22 15:47 [UTR]
My purpose is to investigate how theory, imagination and the data interact to produce a narrative about my time with the cows. Why does this interest me so much? It seems interesting and also feels like an imperative. An imperative because in order to be ‘polite’ to the cows I have to be explicit about how I am translating/interpreting them.[^polite]
As an author, I have demanded of myself not just to be precise about what I’m saying but also to describe what I’m doing to be an author. I realise that this is actually harder than providing some partial answer to a large question. And I have no practice with this. In my HPS training, I was never advised to declare exactly how I’m writing something. There is just a background assumption and expectation that any factual claim can be connected to a reference you have mentioned. Compare this to my physics bachelor, where I was told to write out every step in a calculation during an exam or treat my lab book as a record of every step taken. For the latent scientist in me, it seems important for my work at this vital intersection of philosophy, sociolinguistics and ethnography to go some way towards being ‘concrete’ or ‘verifiable’ in the way that science is.[^replication] So I am creating and testing the following tools with the hope that they will guide me back to myself.. It is hard to pay so much attention to yourself. Especially when you are someone that is used to deflecting away and distracting from themselves.
Practical methods writing strategies that I will stick to:
07/03/22 18:17 [NP]
Before I started my fieldwork I asked my supervisor Leonie how I can devise a system to categorise the experiences I would have. I was immediately warned not to bother- just to absorb myself in the messiness that fieldwork is. That advice was excellent because not confining my attention to particular kinds of observation kept me open to being distracted by anything interesting in the moment. Now that I've settled on this methodological program of auto-ethnography I'd like to have some kind of system that I follow to ask myself the questions that I haven't yet asked about why I'm saying certain things. What are the histories of my thoughts, how do I weave my ideas together or how might they have been woven for me? What influence does the time of day, season, location or personal context have on what I say?
The date, time and place will be recorded for each writing session in the following format:
DD/MM/YY HH:MM [PLACE]
To be explicit about how much data, imagination and theory are involved in extricating meaning from data, or composing a segment of text, I will make small triangle graphs that announce the agency of each in what is written. Who or what is involved in composing my text? As much as I’d like the data “speak for itself,” the “me” that the data is translated by, or filtered through, can be broken down further into at least three axes:
Also, the conversations that sediment in my own opinions or directly inform how my writing proceeds? It is not normal in theses for the author to mention exactly how events like a supervisory meeting will modify the course of their work. But I’d like there to be a space for it- I’ll be very liberal with what and whom enters my footnotes and citations.