Anthropologizing

A old tale I heard from a Peace Corps staff member who arguably qualified as a journeyman for all his work in various U.S. government was about how people who had been to Africa wrote about their experience. It appeared to him that there was an inverse relationship between actual time on the ground and volume; people who came for a 2-6 week visit would write books; 2-6 months warranted an article; anything over a year and you might squeeze out a paragraph or two. Though it's not canon, it does reflect how hard it is to take the square peg that is life here and round the corners in such a way that someone back home can grasp it, particularly after some years of understanding why 1) the peg is square, and 2) presenting the peg as round isn't fair to the peg.

The people who do the best at it (from my current paradigm) are the anthropologists; Lisa Cliggett, Elizabeth Colson, Thayer Scudder, and Kate Crehan, who have written about ethic groups I have spent some time with ... the baKaonde and the baTonga. Hell, I'll throw Nick Sitko in their as well; he's not an anthropologist per se, but he writes well. The point is, they present the square peg in the form of sometimes exhaustively comprehensive narratives that compose the fraction of "development" writing that chokes up on the ash-handle and takes a swing at the structural basis for life here (i.e. familial, kinship, community relationships, perceptions of nature, etc.) Which is to say they don't rely on simplistic narratives for why development creeps along in most of the rural portion of The Continent.

However, I will admit it is a stretch to read any of their titles ... anthropologists utilize nomenclature and qualitative research methods that are every bit as nuanced, complicated, and yawn-inducing as any of the "hard" sciences. Usually you have to plow through a lot of sociological / anthropological background to get to where they elaborate on the social contexts that make up the muscle and sinew to adorn the skeleton of theory. And without a healthy idea of the entire context (including the physical landscapes that are arguably as important as the social landscapes) it is beyond my capacity to visualize a hint of what they are getting at; for example, I really appreciate Crehan's description of the "Fractured Communities" primarily because I spent two years in buKaonde; she spent close to six.

The point of all this meandering is that the stereotypes that are trotted out to pull at the heart[and purse]strings of donors are often a cosmetic representation of the full story. Just as their is far more to you and I than a picture, or our relative GDP, there is similarly far more to the typical rural African. It's a matter of looking hard before giving. Just cut us old salts a break when you ask; as I've said, the context takes time.