My stint of work in the village has come to an end, and so I had to make arrangements to finally leave the place and head back to civilisation to try and make sense of the madness that is captured in my field notebooks. I have been deliberately vague about revealing my departure date because I wanted to avoid anyone creating a scene, and also because it was part of a strategy to have a strong negotiation hand when it came to selling my motorbike.

I succeeded on the first count, but not on the second.

No one was too bothered about me going, and no one wanted to give me very much money.

I have assured the villagers that I am not really finished here and that I will be back, so it is just a temporary departure. Researchers, once they have established the kind of relationship with a country and a region that is required for a PhD, continue to travel and work in the these places as the pressures of life and work do not afford us the luxury of time to really get to know a new area. There have been lots of sideline issues that have cropped up which merit a look, but which aren’t relevant enough to my current research to warrant inclusion. It will be far easier to explore these than to start afresh in some other place, although as I am a bit worn out from this batch of research then this won’t be for some time yet.

After the irritation and disappointment of present giving (see below), there were a few more bits of business that I had to sort before I could flee the region. My sturdy motorbike, which had become a good friend, had to be sold. There was much interest from quite a few people in buying it, mainly because it has become a bit of a running joke over the last five months. When I bought it, my friend who accompanied me in the buying decided that I should get some mirrors attached to it, which can be seen in the photo. This is a major social faux pas in the mountains, as Dominican peasants rush around without paying any regard to the traffic around them. Why anyone might want to know what was coming up behind them was a bit of a mystery for them, which partly explains why so many people have limps resulting from broken legs, and the high number of widows. This and the huge amount fo rum that people drink before they set out on these bikes.

The other major problem with these mirrors is that the road running through the village was unpaved and full of potholes. Driving across this uneven surface they became loose, and flapped up and down as I bounced up and down over bumps and potholes. This led one wag to liken these mirrors to a donkey's ears, and the way they flap up and down as the donkey walks. My motorbike became known as El Burro, or the donkey.

The large object strapped to the back is a large propane tank. I needed to get this filled up, so I had to partake in the traditional Dominican activity of driving along with a large cumbersome object strapped to the back. The straps are made from cut up innertubes, and although these have a reputation for being practical and safe, I was still uncomfortable with driving along with a heavy, cumbersome and extremely flammable object strapped to the back with strips of old rubber.

After successfully negotiating the bike for a price only significantly less that what I paid for it (rather than disastrously or staggeringly less), I had to go and deal with my chickens. My two egg laying chickens, Ginger and Sporty (I did also have Baby, but she died young, perhaps of bird flu), were not quite big enough to eat, though it goes without saying that Ginger was the larger one. And the first to have a solo career. They have now been given as presents to a friend. And so I was ready to leave the village.


I am not too sad to be leaving the village, as although I have had some unhappy moments there, there has also been many happy ones. More significantly, it is not the end of my relationship with the village, as I am most probably going to go back to the region to do more work. The crucial factor is that I have lots of other things in my life which I want to deal with, and I would rather be doing them than spending more of my life living in a small remote mountain village in the Caribbean.

I am now leaving the DR, after 6 months. On my way back to the UK I will be spending a week visiting a good friend in New York. I have always wanted to go to New York, simply because the whole place seems so bizarre and improbable that I want to see if it actually exists, rather than it being a momentous work of fiction.

One social phenomenon that I am interested in, and which I have been researching in my village, is something called moral economy. This is a complex notion, but it describes the patterns of expected behaviour by different people, what is considered right and appropriate. For example, at Christmas time shop owners might expect their workers to work overtime, because that is what a good, hardworking loyal employee does, and the workers themselves might expect their bosses to give them a nice Christmas bonus, because that is what a good, generous boss does. Of course, the boss can punish workers that they consider to be ‘lazy’ by not giving bonuses if they don’t work hard, and workers can punish ‘tight’ bosses who don’t give bonuses by not working. The interesting thing is that this is an economic relationship (exchanging labour and money), but one that is put in the language of morality (good generous boss and good hardworking employees). As people try to punish what they see as wrong behaviour, it is useful for understanding how groups are able to modify the excesses of others.

Lecture over.

The reason I am very interested in this is because this system, which many people have found to be hugely powerful in making sure that certain things did or didn’t happen, is almost non existent in my village. Whilst others have argued that the reason why few peasant revolutions occur is because this moral economy offers a more effective and less risky way to be revolting, I have found that it is unable to prevent even the most minor of abuses. Every time a communal project has been initiated, a women’s group or a cooperative, it has quickly dissolved as someone runs off with the funds. It has been a constant emotional struggle to continue my research when everybody is busy telling me who stole what from who, who siphoned off the communal funds, and so on. I must have heard a story like this about everyone in the community, and I find it a challenge to cope with maintaining friendships with so many people who I know to have murky pasts. I do have a large amount of faith in human nature, that fundamentally people are good, but the constant bitching and crimes of the last five months have thoroughly battered this.

One friend described to me that how the Dominican Republic is a shame culture, rather than a guilt culture. When people do something illegal or immoral, they feel no guilt, but they do feel shame when they are caught. Hence what might stop or limit the crimes they commit is not how bad they will feel for having done something bad, but the potential for shame should they be caught. I am not even certain that this provides much of a disincentive.

Part of the problem here is that people who are found to be stealing aren’t necessarily looked upon with shame, due to the cult of the tiguere. This is a Dominican word used to describe someone who uses their mind to avoid doing things the standard way. It is a word one hears everyday, used in different contexts to describe a variety of personalities from common thugs to Machiavellian dictators and manipulative drugs barons. In a large part of its usage, it is used not as a pejorative description but as a complement – someone who is not just getting ahead through illegal and immoral means, but more importantly because they are using their brains. People often describe the situations when someone steals money from a community group as “the most intelligent people take it all for themselves” – the most intelligent rather than the most devious. It is almost a mark of respect to have outwitted your fellows to steal everything for yourself.

There is a secondary problem in that people let other people get away with these things because they would have done the same if they had a chance. This leads to a kind of perverse moral economy – people do not act to stop people from thieving from the community because they want to be able to do the same if they too had the chance. One of the more bizarre justifications I have heard for the system of botellas, government jobs given to people on the basis of their party loyalty rather than qualifications, is that this person will be guaranteed a job for four years, but with the new elections and a change of government, it will be someone else’s turn to get a free salary. It is a system of social redistribution of state funds, if governments change regularly, lots of people have a chance of gaining a job that they don’t deserve, rather than just a few. When people in the village see their neighbours illegally hooking up to electricity they do nothing, even though they pay for it with higher bills, because “everyone has the same right to do this” – they don’t do anything because they would do the same in their situation. It is a moral economy that allows abuses rather than prevents them.

As I am studying why peasants aren’t revolting, this is of great interest to me. It is also a bit frustrating, as I can see many ways in which the community can make life better for all of its inhabitants by acting together, but this never happens as any communal group quickly dissolves through people running off with funds. There is a very strong individualistic streak to people here, based on a long experience of the collapse of communal projects.

The reason I am particularly animated about this today is that I have only a few days left here, so as a way of thanking the community for helping me with my study and being very hospitable, I went to town and bought enough Mandarin saplings to give one to each family. As soon as they were unloaded, people started to appropriate trees for themselves. I quickly let it be known that there was only enough for one for each family, and that they were to be considered as a thank you present, but this did not stop people from walking away with two or three trees “one for me, and I am taking my neighbour’s up to their house for them”. There is a great trend here to try and grab as much for oneself as possible, before someone else does exactly the same. The justification for these sorts of theft is that if they don’t do it, someone else will.

The most interesting thing about this, and perhaps also the most frustrating, is the reason why this occurs. It would be very easy to slip into simplistic arguments about the selfishness and childlike behaviour that stops a community and a country from developing (in many senses of the word). Reality is a bit more complex that this, and the reason why this occurs is because there are no social sanctions to stop this taking place. In many society there is a range of responses that prevent people from breaking the rules, from feelings of guilt and shame to actions such as boycotting shops who are known to overcharge. Here people often say that the only way of stopping someone from cheating the system is to confront them followed by a fight, and they feel forced to tolerate many things because it is not worth getting into a fight about. With a lack of sanctions, misbehaviour becomes not just the norm but in some ways it becomes what is expected.

It may not have always been like this. In the past, when people lived from subsistence agriculture, there were successful cooperatives that provided many hands to one man’s fields in times of large tasks. People could not afford to break the rules, to not cooperate, because they knew that at some point they would need extra labour too, and as there was no money they had no other means to obtain it other than to ask for a favour, which is dependant on good social relations. With the shift to a market dominated economy in the village in the last fifteen years, people have become accustomed to being able to pay for labour, so the old social ties that provided cooperative work have broken down. The conclusion, as usual, is that we academics can point to a social breakdown that has resulted from Capitalism. Some of my colleagues will take this as a good reason to mount The People’s Revolution, even though life is clearly better in so many other respects since the marketisation of the economy.

I feel much more annoyed and disappointed that my trees have been misappropriated than when hearing the stories about misappropriation of much more valuable and important things such as community funds. Firstly, it is affecting me directly, I feel hurt rather than the mere disappointment in my friends that results from hearing about their corruption. Secondly, it was something that was a present to thank each member of the community individually. Rather than being merely a tree, it was a statement of gratitude.

I don’t feel that I have lost my faith in humanity, but that it has been taken away from me.

The little shack I live in is just behind a colmadon, the mixture of shop and drinking hole that is a major piece of rural Dominican life. This particularly one is known as La Cuarenta, in honour of a particular place in Santo Domingo that is notorious for its drunken punch-ups. Originally a nickname, it is now the accepted name of the place that even the owner uses.

The person who inspired this name is not, as might be expected, one of the heavy drinking blokes who frequent this place, who come every Saturday evening after being paid their week’s wages and drinking rum till either Monday comes, they run out of money, they collapse, or the police come to break up the fights and lock people up. The fights are frequent here, perhaps because the men resemble the fighting cocks they so like to talk about; small furious balls of aggression, that once fighting will not stop until the other is dead. One could make a comment about similar intelligence too, but it is certain that all the loud troublesome individuals for miles around come to drink here.

Rather, the person who inspired this name is my landlady, the owner. She is a small matriarchal monarch with a loud and piercing squeaky voice who inspires terror wherever she treads. She has always been very kind to me, but I am still scared to cross any line with her. She has the reputation for breaking up vicious fights, which would surprise anyone upon meeting this small middle aged lady for the first time. Other villagers take great delight in telling me stories of her dragging out trouble makers by their hair, or thumping some drunk of half her age and twice her size.

This place can get rather irritating to live next to, but perhaps not for the expected reasons. I have grown used to the noise emanating from a rabble of drunks, and most Saturday nights I am to be found playing billiards and dancing badly at another, quieter establishment up the road. Rather the irritation comes in the afternoons and evenings when I choose to work on my notes in the house, as she has a nasty habit of playing music rather loudly. Although I rather like Bachata, the twangy Dominican country music, the problem comes as she likes to put one particular CD on loop, and this disk consists of only five songs. I now have these five tunes branded into the grey matter of my head, and it has been a slow painful form of Chinese water torture to put up with this for the last five months.

I would say something to her about it, but I am too scared.

I have recently been re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, only this time in the original Spanish. I find it a particularly appropriate novel here because the mix of the magical and the real in the village of Macondo that Gabriel Garcia Marquez created reflects something of the character of the village that I live in.

Certainly some of the families here have some great stories behind them, and the interactions between them are fantastic. Sometimes five generations live within a hundred yards of each other, and all the village dynasties are all connected by marriage at several points. People go to live in the cities, and sometimes never come back except for a visit, but there is a sense that these long term urbanites are all campo at heart – no matter how long they may live in Santo Domingo, they are still from this small mountain village.

Each family has its characters, its matriarchal grandmother and her husband who spends his days looking after his fighting and cocks and telling stories about how life was in the village when he was a lad. These stories are always interesting, and very frequently completely untrue. There are then the serious, quiet sons, and the heavy drinking street fighting men. The younger women are generally subservient to their husbands, and do as they are told, except the rare individuals who give hope for feminism.

The magical is not necessarily present on the surface, but once this mundane patina is scratched, a belief in the supernatural appears, if nothing that I would scientifically label as magic. I remember having a very technical chat with a friend here about how to tell when his crops were suffering from different diseases, how one could tell when they didn’t have enough phosphorus and so on, only for him and his colleagues to suddenly jump up and start throwing stones at a small bird sitting in a nearby tree. He explained that this was an evil species of bird that came down at night and sucked your brains out as you slept, and thus had to be killed on sight before it killed you.

When you ask people about their religious believes, they will always tell you that they are catholic, and indeed every Friday during Lent there was processions and singing on the road that leads through the village. Pictures of the Holy Family decorate every house, but many have their pictures of their particular saints in the back room. People take care of these little shrines, decorating them with flowers and various bits of paraphernalia bought at shops that cater for these. This is of course Santeria, part of a spectrum of syncretised African, native Caribbean and Roman Catholic beliefs that includes Dominican and Haitian vodou.

I haven’t been able to see any of the more extreme bits of magic, such as possessions and so on, but I do know that there is a witch living near by. When chatting to a friend, her sister walked past, talking to herself. I was informed that she was rather mad, and that I should make sure that I watch out for her, but that she herself was not the witch. My friend informed me that her sister’s husband had an accident whilst trying to illegally hook his house up to the mains electricity supply. As a result he was crippled, and so to stop his wife running off with another man who was better able to service her needs, he visited the witch who put a curse on her to send her mad, and therefore make sure that no man would run off with her.

If anyone has any tasks for the witch to perform, let me know by email and I’ll see what I can do.

One of the constant threads of banter that I have with the villages is regarding the future of my DNA in the area. I am constantly being encouraged to father a child with various members of the community, and every day someone shouts out to me “hey, American (they still haven’t accepted that there are places outside of this island that aren’t New York), so-and-so wants to have a baby with you!”. This does remind me of a story I was told about the only two bits of official advise allegedly given to Cambridge doctoral students as they departed off to some jungle somewhere, which was to take the biggest possible hamper from Fortnam and Mason’s, and not to marry the locals. Sound advice, and certainly more brief than the 57 page risk assessment I had to write.

These comments about babies have long become a running joke, but it has recently taken on a rather unnerving side. The rich weekenders who live in the village have long been advising me to do this, as they see it as an economic help, as it would mean that one person in the village would have an EU passport, and therefore could live and work in Spain and send money back to support their family. Certainly when they have fathered children with local women, they have brought them up as their own, and helped out the mother financially. I just see this as a bizarre form of development aid, rather than anything more sinister. However, I recently asked one of the locals why it is so important that I should father a child here, when there are plenty of nice young men locally who are perhaps more suitable candidates for the job. The reply I was given was that “your babies would have pale skin, and would be pretty. No one here wants an ugly brown baby.”

I have become rather accustomed to the strange attitudes towards race and skin colour here in the DR, but even so the casualness of this remark was mildly shocking. Many people say that the DR is not a racist society, and it certainly is not in the terms that societies in the US or Europe might be called be racist. This is probably the result of the huge amount of racial mixing that has been going on here, and so it is difficult to be a racist society when all but a handful (excluding those individuals of immediate European, US, and Haitian descent) would be classed as ‘mixed race’ by any European or US census. However, it does contain a number of trends that could be said to be based on racial prejudice, mainly around the omnipresent and unchallenged idea, even by black people, that white skin is better than black. On every piece of publicity, which of course exist to present a good image of life to be associated with a particular product, the good life that is portrayed contains a skin tone several notches paler than the national average. We are at the start of a presidential election campaign, and I have noticed that the official pictures of the candidates on the billboards are certainly a paler hue than the pictures of the candidates in the newspapers. On a more sinister note, one long standing Dominican politician, Peña Gomez, was long demonised by his opponents for his black skin, with insinuations that he was of Haitian origin and practiced witchcraft. At the same time as doing this, the then President Balaguer would highlight his own French background.

Anti-Haitian sentiment is a huge part of Dominican society but even though Haitians have much darker skin than Dominicans, this is not necessarily the same as anti-black sentiment. The way that Dominicans, many of whom should know better, talk about Haiti is embarrassing and frustrating. At the moment there is a rather unpleasant attempt by newspapers and politicians to demonise a noted campaigner for the rights of children of Haitian immigrants who were born in the DR, and who according to the Dominican constitution are entitled to citizenship. Ironically, a central part of this demonisation is the attempt to remove her Dominican citizenship. In the village, although the Haitians are blamed with some justification for a large number of problems, such as low wages, they are almost always treated with politeness, except by one notorious bully who treats everyone badly.

These trends, of a racially mixed society that has no real internal problems yet has a massive anti-Haitian streak and a view that white is automatically better than black, are confusing for people brought up with European and US ideas of what is racial prejudice and identity. One friend was telling me about the countless African-American academics and activists who come here to do research or campaigns, and bring their ideas of what is culture, race, and racism from the US. They simply do not understand how these things work here, and how it is vastly different from their own ideas, and leave with a mixture of frustration, confusion, and disillusionment.

I am probably better off sticking to my own research.

In the last few weeks, there has been a movement towards village unity. Normally the village is fractured and divided, not necessarily because there are lots of arguments and disagreements, although they do exist, but simply because no one can be bothered to do anything together. The tendency to act for oneself, without considering the effects on others, is a highly irritating and very strong trend in village life.

The cause that has united the village has been the start of the softball season. Each of the five communities in the valley has a team, and the league is intensely competitive, with games nightly over several months. Twice a week, the team from my village takes on the competition, and a very large part of the community goes to the pitch down the road to support and cheer them on. The pitch is floodlit, and so in order to prevent the violent protests that would occur if the game was suspended due to a power failure, the electricity company has ensuring a reliable supply. As a result, every family is relieved that for a few hours each evening, the electricity supply is predictably present.

The good atmosphere is provided by the variety of establishments selling fried plantains and grilled chicken that set themselves up around the perimeter, as well as the necessary supply of rum and cold beer. There is also a pair of pundits who provide a commentary on the proceedings, broadcast over a shaky and unpredictably PA system. They have certainly got a routine going, and it must be quite unnerving for the batsman to be facing a pitcher, with derogatory remarks being broadcast as your neighbours watch and listen in. One of their favourites regards is when a ball is hit high in the air, and the predictable comment comes without fail and without variation:
“oh, that has gone way way up in the air. The fielder waits, has a cup of coffee, and catches.”
Most nights they share a bottle of rum, and as the evening wears on and the bottle slowly drains itself, the comments get more slurred, inaccurate and entertaining.

Our team is called The Stallions, and the competition comes from The Bulls, The Dragons, The Rockets and The Family. I personally find the last one most amusing, not least because it invokes a somewhat less power-filled image than the other name, but because that team’s community of origin is rather inbred, so if the name isn’t as macho as the rest, it is certainly accurate.

The reason why the team is called The Stallions is because the president of the team, an extremely rich and famous businessman with a weekend home up here, is a keen horseman. Admittedly, if they play badly they get called The Mares or The Foals. As he paid for the uniforms, he can decide what team name goes on the front, and can put his company logo on the back. He likes to treat the team as a kind of hobby, with more than a little say in the selection process. If they are winning, he will buy everyone a beer and encourage them to cheer louder, and when the victory comes, he demands that they all go and get drunk with him. It is only a matter of time until he decides to sign some major league baseballer on a million dollar contract to come and play in our local league, just so we can defend our hard-won title from last season.

A bunch of lads from the village and I like to sit at the action end, as this presents some wonderful opportunities for cheering on the Stallions, and for hurling abuse at the opposition players. If our man comes up to bat, he is ordered to smack the ball out the back of the pitch and try and hit the grilled chicken shack, not just for the ensuing homerun, but also for the comedy value. At the same time, we will be denigrating the pathetic deliveries of the opposition pitcher, commenting on his beer belly and a thousand other attempts to put him off. Missed hits by opposition batsmen are met with jeers and insults, and when he is caught out, he has to pass us on his way back to sit on the team bench, which presents a fantastic opportunity to kick a man when he is down and out. Marvellous fun.

I have to go down to the pitch just now, I have some cheering and jeering to do.

In every academic publication there is a little section at the front where people put their acknowledgements, making sure they thank their funding body, their colleagues who have offered advice, and not least the people who actually took part in the research. These are always useful to read as they give interesting insights into how the work was conducted and so on, and sometimes they offer a bit of gossip. One prolific publisher is also a notorious Lothario, and it is possible to trace his affairs with various colleagues by looking at how the dedications at the beginning of each book change.

I have something that is in the slow grinding wheels of final editing for publication, and the acknowledgements for that are fairly mundane, thanking various colleagues who have made suggestions and so on. When I finally get round to writing up my current research I have a different idea in mind. There will be the standard piece of text expressing my sincere thanks to whoever and whatever made the whole thing possible - I suppose I ought to thank my funding body and my colleagues, not least because I will almost certainly need them in the future. In addition, I am toying with the idea of putting a list of “no thanks”, denouncing the people who, instead of making my research possible, actually made it more difficult and less enjoyable.

(may I take a moment to assure the reader that they are not being considered for this category).

I am aware that this might be considered as un-gentlemanly conduct, but it would none the less be very therapeutic. There are a number of people here in the DR who have acted to delay, distract, or stop altogether my research. In particular, I will have to non-thank the numerous botellas who I have come across. These are people who work in government jobs not because they are qualified, but because they are members of the right party, and so need to be rewarded for this. They are called botellas (bottles) because one government building, due to its shape, is nicknamed “the crate”, and so the purpose of the bottles is to fill the crate. My particular favourites are the librarians in the archives of one ministry who turn out to be illiterate, and so are totally useless in finding any record. Various institutions would be non-thanked for their inexplicable and intolerable tendency to write reports and publish studies, yet not make copies available. I have yet to work out the reason why an NGO or government department would spend millions of pesos and years of time writing a report, then making absolutely sure that no one read it.

I have recently been doing some lectures at one of the universities here, and I was contemplating doing a public lecture for various academics, NGOs, government people and members of the public who might be interested in my work. Instead of talking for an hour on my research, I would use it to denounce the various bits of corruption I have come across, which range from the blatant to the nefarious. This is a process that would take up a whole hour, and which would be much more enjoyable for me rather than the normal dry dross I churn out. In particular, I would particularly enjoy denouncing the exploits of people who would appear not just in the lecture material, but also in my non-thanks list, as a kind of cold revenge.

Depending on which tit-bits I throw at the audience, I may have to have a taxi waiting at the back to whisk me straight to the airport, lest the lecture offends too many of the wrong sort of people.

On fieldwork, it seems that some incidents will happen that make perfect sense at the time, yet are completely impossible to explain in a logical manner to a person who wasn’t there. In the village the other day, I sat on the veranda of one of the weekend homes of rich city dwellers, eating caviar and having a very serious conversation discussing the merits of different types of helicopter, and the traffic avoidance benefits they bring. I understand that this might not make any sense to you, but it seemed logical at the time.

However, all of my experiences pale in comparison with that of my friend J, who was working in East Africa when his car mysteriously broke down. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it, until he looked under the driver’s seat and found a dead porcupine, which he promptly threw away, and the car started working again. Recounting this story later, his audience were horrified by this. It was clear to them that the porcupine had been placed there to curse him and his car, and he should take the dead creature to a witchdoctor, who would de-curse everything. They were doubly shocked when they heard that he had thrown it away, as it means he couldn’t recover it, and he and his car would walk the earth forever cursed.

He sold the car, and apparently the new owner is mystified as to why a perfectly sound car seems to constantly be breaking down.

As you travel around the very tall and steep mountains where I live, you eventually come across the bizarre sight of a circular, perfectly flat valley about 10 miles across, apparently created millions of years ago by a meteor strike. The valley is so high up in the mountains that for millennia people have taken advantage of its deep, rich, flat soils to grow crops that can’t be grown elsewhere. Nowadays this area is famous for producing the country’s entire supply of onions, potatoes and strawberries. In order to bring this produce to market, one of only two paved roads in the entire mountain range winds its way up from the plains, although there are still large patches that are unpaved and potholes so large that when it rains the locals have baths in them. I live about halfway along this road, and I am grateful for the fact that travel is relatively easy and not too weather dependant, unlike many neighbouring villages.

The downside of this is that traffic on this road is very heavy, with comically overcrowded lorries carting vegetables driving far too fast round tight corners. Frequently one of these tips over, spilling cabbages over the road and stopping traffic for hours. The road is eternally noisy, and when it hasn’t rained for a few days such a large quantity of dust is thrown up that the vegetation is grey for several meters on either side, before reverting to a more natural green. Sharing the roads with these are two other staples of Dominican transport, the entire family (including pets) travelling squashed on to one motorbike, and the pickup truck jam packed with passengers and their baggage. In these there is often so little space that the passengers in the open bit at the back have to stand up so that everyone and their luggage can fit in.

Today I was walking along this road when I came across some policemen stopping the cars as they drove past. I enquired what the purpose of this was, and I was informed that it was part of an Easter period safety campaign, and they were making sure that all drivers were wearing their seatbelts. Being the Dominican Republic, non-obliging drivers were given a ticking off, whilst the vastly more dangerous overcrowded pickup trucks and motorbikes were waived through.

The other day a English friend and I went out for meal, which was very tasty, but possibly the most politically incorrect lunch I have ever had.

It was not politically incorrect in the way that many people talk about food ethics, such as eating Foie Gras, out of season vegetables flown halfway round the world, or microwave ready meals. It wasn’t even the distressingly common over-enthusiasm with the ice in drinks. Dominicans are obsessed with getting drinks as cold as possible, which is a good thing on a hot day, and Dominican beer is certainly pretty good when very cold, and pretty vile at any other temperature. A useful hint is to always have a good look at a very cold bottle before opening it, as having to wait for the beer to defrost is rather frustrating. I can forgive their sinful habit of putting ice in whisky, as Americans almost always do it, but I will never be able to stop myself being shocked when I see Dominicans get out the ice bucket for a bottle of red wine. The automatic action to make all drinks near freezing is very distressing for me when, as happened the other day, I see someone in a bar paying around £30 for a bottle of rather fine red Rioja, then sticking it in to chill. Of course, it is their money, and they have the right to do anything they want with the drinks they buy with it, and so I always manage to stop myself from either denouncing their sacrilege or laughing at their philistine ways.

Our meal seems innocuous enough, we went to a nice Argentinean restaurant, ordered some nice food, and had a nice bottle of red wine (at room temperature). The bottle of wine was necessary as I had to interview someone I particularly dislike in the afternoon, so needed some sort of anaesthetic and relaxant, but midday drinking aside, there were three reasons why it was politically incorrect.

Firstly, Argentinean food is notoriously based upon bits of cow, and we managed to order the only vegetarian food on the menu, for which we got slightly frosty looks from the manager. One Argentinean once commented to me that the only purpose of salad is to make the plate look nice. It is rather like going into a curry house and ordering fish and chips, an affront to all that the chef holds dear. I am always tempted to subvert food ethics of certain establishments – back home I get my organic vegetables from the hippy vegan shop, but I make sure I visit it after picking stuff up from the butcher and the fishmonger. For this, and other sins, I have been repeatedly threatened with a permanent ban, but the hairy hippies never go through with it.

Secondly, despite the grand abundance of Argentinean wines, we managed to order the only Chilean bottle in the place. There were a few French and Spanish offerings, but they didn’t offer the same political opportunities.

Finally, and most crucially, we (two Britishers) went to an Argentinean restaurant on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the Falklands conflict.

I did suggest singing God Save the Queen before we ate, but with all the steak knives around the place I had sincere doubts that we would get out alive.

I apologise for being a bit quiet recently, but I was on a little jolly to Cuba. Each year a bunch of geography students from my university get to spend a week or so in Cuba, looking at all sorts of interesting things that are going on. Of course, bringing a bunch of twenty year students anywhere would involve serious recreation, but there was a healthy balance between the consumption of local culture (drinking rum) and the study of consumption of local culture (the curious contradiction of luxury tourism in a socialist country). This was my second year on the trip, and this year was even more educative and entertaining than last year.

I was there in my capacity as an academic member of staff, so involved in the teaching and assessment, but as I was the only member of staff fluent in Spanish, I had quite a bit of translating work to do. This ranged from acting as a go-between with some students and a representative of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, who was more interested in talking about sex than in the benefits of world socialism, and translating warnings from bar staff to students about the danger of jineteros*, a concept that they didn’t believe could be possible.

There are a great number of similarities but also differences between Cuba and the DR. Both have rich cultures that are mainly a mix of African and Spanish influences, and the art, music, religion, food and many other areas of life share a great number of commonalities, although Cuban rice and beans is superior, as instead of using artificial flavourings and MSG, the economic problems have forced them to use natural spices. Forty nine years of socialism have created some great differences – whilst most visitors find the 1950s American cars a great attraction (how strange it is that no tourist brochure mentions the 1970s Ladas), I was more struck by the lack of large, expensive 4*4s, a feature as common to Dominican urban life as beggars and slums. Whilst both Santo Domingo and Havana were both great colonial cities, the old town of Havana is far superior and better preserved – whilst Dominicans have been knocking down old buildings to build boring concrete blocks of boring shops, Havana has been saved by the combination of four decades of benign neglect followed by one of frantic preservation. Apart from a handful of colonial buildings saved by the state as museums, the only people who look after Santo Domingo’s colonial heritage are private owners (almost all foreign individuals and corporations) and the Catholic Church.

We made a visit to the building at the forefront of the American attempts to stamp the imperialist jackboot on the people of Cuba, the American special interests section. This is the frontline in the war of words – at night a scrolling message board at the top of the building spreads the benefits of democracy and capitalism mixed with messages relaying baseball results, whist the surrounding billboards denounce the American sponsorship of Miami based terrorists. The war of words is more of a playground scrap, as accompanying the billboards are hundreds of fascist looking black flags, which the Cubans claim is to represent the dead from American sponsored terrorist attacks, but the Americans claim is to stop people from viewing the message board.

Not generally the sort of architecture that tourists come to see in Havana, but interesting none the less.

*Jinetero: a good looking, snake hipped Cuban who hangs around bars frequented by tourists, distracting them with their charms before stealing their wallets, or convincing them that they are really the love of their lives in order to gain access to their money or a visa. Their Dominican cousins are called Sankeys, and both are real dangerous professionals.

I don’t think I have mentioned it before, but my village is probably one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean. This is a relatively recent thing, due to the specific human and physical geography of the place, and it is part of my job here to discover the precise process by which it became so beautiful.

The stereotype of a beautiful Caribbean village might be a quaint fishing village surrounded by vast, empty expanses of white sand, bordered on one side by turquoise clear water, and by swaying palm trees on the other. If this is your idea of Caribbean beauty, let me recommend either Boca de Yuma in the southeast DR, or Rincon on the Samana peninsula. However, this vision is most certainly not applicable to my village, as it is over 4,000ft up in the mountains, and very close to a monument that marks the centre point of the DR, and therefore the furthest distance from the sea of any point of in the Caribbean archipelago. Rather, what makes this village so special is a specific change in the agrarian economy, combined with the unique microclimate of the area.

The little valley that my village occupies is the first dip after the vast rise of the outermost slope of the cordillera as it emerges almost vertically from the Cibao plain. This makes it the first rest that air masses get after they rise up the steep incline, producing a microclimate that a tourist board or real estate salesman might describe as “refreshing and well watered”, or “cold and wet” to the rest of us. This might sound miserable, and it sometimes is, but when the rest of the country is sweltering in the tropical heat, we up here remain fresh and comfortable. It is our little secret, and it is why rich city dwellers who are in on the secret have built weekend homes up here.

About twenty years or so ago, when most of the villagers were living from producing root crops such as yucca, supplemented by bean growing and keeping cattle, someone worked out that this climate was perfect for growing the flowers that had become a commercial crop in North America and Europe. Over time, other people noticed the success this person was having, and as new varieties and growing techniques emerged, eventually almost the whole village was growing flowers. Now, as I walk through the village, I am surrounded by roses, anthulia, lilies and a whole number of flowers that I don’t know the name for in English, but are nonetheless rather beautiful.

This has also represented an improvement in the lives of villagers, as these flowers sell well in the markets of the big cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago. There are certain high points, such as the Christmas party season, Mothers’ day, and of course Valentine’s day, when the price of roses can increase tenfold. Throughout the year, although the market has its ups and downs, flowers always sell. As one villager put it, “people are always falling in love and getting married, and people are always dying and having funerals”. Daily I see my friends carrying bundles of freshly cut flowers to be taken down to market that night and sold the next morning to the florists of the cities. If a single flower can be beautiful, seeing a van stacked with hundreds of lilies or thousands of roses is certainly very impressive. A field of swaying gladioli is a nice sight to see on one’s way to work.

The flowers that don’t make it to market, the lilies with too short a stem, the roses that can’t quite make up a dozen, are not thrown away, but rather decorate the tables of every household in the village. When one enters the house of a friend here, if it doesn’t smell of freshly made coffee, it is filled with the sweet scent of lilies or roses.

The downside of this, as a friend told me, is that such abundance of flowers makes it more difficult for the men folk to think of a present to charm the ladies.

I have recently been surprised by how my chicken has turned from a fluffy little bundle of feathers into a psychopathic sadistic rapist.

Chickens are generally considered as comedy animals, frequently portrayed through animations, butt of jokes, and subject to philosophical musings as to their attitude towards traversing transport infrastructure. They certainly don’t deserve this cuddly representations, as they are amongst the most evil creatures around. Some creatures, such as snakes and crocodiles, get lots of bad press, but many other animals deserve it just as much. I wonder what the conservation community would think if it were suddenly discovered that Pandas, far from being cute and cuddly, were actually cannibals and devil worshippers.

When I first got my first chicken, he was thin, gangling thing, who ate everything I threw at him. He would come to my house several times a day to eat some corn, and would spend the rest of the time wandering around under the trees by the river. Recently he seems to have grown up from this child-like existence into a fury of very adult behaviours.

He still comes to the house several times a day to get his meals, but whenever he does I make sure that my neighbours cocks are not around. Before, if they were around he would not come to eat, and he would run away if they approached him, but now he is grown up he has got cocky and has no fear at all. The result of this is that he has been fighting with the neighbours, which has been very messy.

What few people realise is that male chickens can be very aggressive and prone to fighting, but most frightening of all is that when they fight, they will carry not stop until one of them is dead. For this reason most people keep their cocks tied up, but I had let mine run free because he was a shy, weak creature. Now that he is a fully fledged psychopath, he has taken advantage of this freedom to square up to the neighbours, and get into some impressive scraps. Someone was passing recently when he squared up to the neighbour, so they were separated before it got to the point when one of them was dead, but still there was a considerable amount of blood splattered around the place. From time to time someone’s cock breaks free from its moorings, and roams around picking fights. Quite often there is no one to break them up, and so people just discover a corpse with another chicken continuing to peck and slash at it long after it has perished.

Whereas my innocent childish chicken would wander down by the river, scratching at the ground under the trees for some scraps to eat, the adult that it has grown into prefers to spend time in the field across the road, where the old lady keeps her poultry to produce the eggs that provides her income. She has a rather large collection of rather fine hens, and the little psychopath has been having his way with them. I see him chasing after them as they try to run away, when he grabs their neck with his beak, throws them to the ground, and leaps on top of them. He seems to manage to rape a good few hens a day, and crows loudly at his achievements.

I have a good mind to go across to claim half of the eggs as my property.

I am not one to anthropomorphise animals, but I wonder what sort of person my chicken would be. I think that he is the sort of small, hairy aggressive person you frequently find in Scottish pubs, squat powderkegs just waiting to go off. The sort of people you take the long way round back from the bar just to avoid, lest it result in a spilt drink or other minor infringement that would always escalate into a situation with a corpse (yours), with another person continuing to kick and slash at it long after it has perished.

I have recently bought a pair of very young hens, which are rapidly growing up into a future meal. They are stupid creatures that spend the day eating lots and scratching around in the grass outside my house. No trouble at all, which is the way I like my chickens.

Today, once again, a very famous and rich Dominican who has a weekend home in the village urged me to father a child here before I finish my fieldwork. Apparently, this village is lacking in Scottish DNA and I should do my duty to fill this hole. I smiled politely and said that I was working on it, and would continue to do so at the dance hall that night. Of course, I was lying. Just because he has doesn’t mean that I should follow his example.

Many people here ask me where I learnt to speak Spanish, and I am quite chuffed to say that this is normally accompanied by a comment on the quality of it. For those of you who don’t know, I learnt about six words in five years of study at high school, which was followed by a near-vertical learning curve when I went off to study geography at a university in Spain.

Cantabria, the province where I lived in Spain, is considered to be the cradle of the modern Spanish language. The political process that created the modern kingdom of Spain started there, a mechanism that consisted of either attacking neighbouring kingdoms or marrying their princesses (after all, all is fair in love and war). People there are very proud that theirs is a pure and noble strain of Spanish, perhaps an equivalent would be BBC English. This is the idiom and accent that I picked up in my time there, the way that s is pronounced halfway between s and sh in English, z and c pronounced like th, and the difficult to grasp soft d in the word Madrid. Refined, elegant, clear and generally rather fine.

However, coming here has had a rather disastrous effect, as this has become tainted by Caribbean Spanish, which is treated with the same incomprehension and semi-disguised disgust as Geordies are in English. Moreover, I am living with isolated mountain communities whose dictation has suffered the same fate as their genetic variation – it has become very messy, and rather limited. When I first got here things were a bit difficult, but I have become accustomed to this hillbilly/Geordie Spanish. Indeed, I don’t think I have pronounced an s or a t for several months now.

As well as loosing consonants, I have picked up some of the very specific words that are used up here, particularly the obscure ones used to describe agricultural activities. In their own way, these are rather poetic, and last week I made a concerted effort to learn the local variations on tree names, which include Man’s Face, Green Ebony, and Wood of the Cross (apparently, if planted next to your house it is guaranteed to keep witches away. I am tempted to plant one outside my office in Manchester to ensure that certain staff members leave me alone).

With Haiti as a neighbour, sometime ruler and general strong influence, Dominican Spanish contains words that have come via a convoluted journey from France and West Africa, as well as a smattering of words that originate from the various US invasions and from US hemispheric hegemony generally. There are also quite a few indigenous words that have survived the complete elimination of the previous occupants within fifty years of Columbus arriving. Some of these have even made it into English, including papaya, Jamaica, savannah, and more bizarrely, hammock and barbecue. However, with the large number of Haitian immigrants working in agriculture in the area, many of my neighbours who employ, work with or otherwise deal with them have come to learn no small amount of Kreyol, and this has become a regular feature of village conversations. Kreyol words have even managed to usurp their Spanish equivalents – nowadays no one in the village talks about eating their desayuno in the morning, but rather their manje. Crazy people are not loco but fou, and so on.

Given that these words are used mainly as a form of slang, and given the sort of thing that slang is perhaps best at dealing with, most of the Kreyol words I have picked up are part of the virtually unlimited variation referring to a very limited selection of the human anatomy. As my mother reads this, I am not going to go into details.

A central part of what it is to be a geographer, a central part of what defines our discipline, is the experience of going a doing fieldwork. Traditionally, this would involve going to far flung places, and bringing back carefully drawn maps, stories of the natives, and a veritable medley of diseases and parasites. Deep within our soul is a vision of ourselves hacking though jungle wearing a pith helmet, and it remains there despite the cultural influence of four wheel drives and Gore-Tex.

The process of research has traditionally been to formulate some theories about a particular place, then go there only to find that reality gets in the way of carefully constructed theory. The solution has traditionally been to wander around getting hot/cold/wet/ill/pregnant or any combination of these, until the right answer is deduced. Apparently it is all a character building experience, and makes us what we are.

When I was doing research at the place previous to my current employment, when I was in a geography department rather than a development institute (whatever that is), myself and my colleagues had a huge variety of places of work. Some would hang around in Antarctica for months on end, others would sweat in the Amazon (where the disease and parasite opportunities are varied and virtually limitless), with other trips to South Sea islands, Patagonian mountains, Faroese fishing villages, African deserts and so on. What they would return with was generally welcome; nice pictures, great stories, and exotic bottles of alcohol. The exception was the infamous and virulent strain of typhoid brought back from the Amazon which resulted in the whole office becoming quarantined.

Geography as a discipline has moved on from more traditional fieldwork, and now we often work in less traditional environments, such as public parks, red light districts and so on. One colleague spent the best part of a year travelling around university libraries in the US, looking for copies of a geography book from the 1930s, more specifically examples with graffiti in the margins.

The important thing is not necessarily where we go, and what we do, but the fact that we actually do leave our offices. The tradition of fieldwork is deeply ingrained, and it is too valuable an experience to loose. One of the most important implications of it was highlighted recently in the Times supplement, which advised women who are looking for a good looking, tanned, educated, well-travelled, entertaining and intelligent man, to look no further than the meetings of the Royal Geographical Society. As I have the letters FRGS after my name (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), I am proud to be continuing the tradition of good looking, tanned, educated, well-travelled, entertaining and intelligent geographers.

Why they chose to highlight the meetings of the RGS is beyond me, as they are generally populated by the bearded sub-species of geographer, but the principle remains that geographers are damn sexy.

In my current institution, I am surrounded by economists, people with business degrees and those specialising in that most condescendingly titled discipline; human resource management. Frankly, none of these will ever be sexy, particularly those who treat people as resources to be managed. What unites these people is that they can write their research, spend three years doing a PhD, without leaving their office, but instead over-analysing statistics and so on. They become pale, boring, obsessive people, with a blinkered perspective on the world. In particular, I find economists distinctly un-sexy, as these are people who think that the world can be understood through looking at statistics, rather than the world itself. I recently came across an individual who was finishing their PhD at an American university, where the process is slower, lasting around five years. Their area of interest was the growth of the Indian economy, and they had spent half a decade researching this topic, but without actually going to India. The economists in the audience at this event couldn’t see the problem with this, but the rest of the people were absolutely horrified at this arrogant attitude that the world can be experienced and understood at a distance, through numbers. It is like people who think that they can understand the wonder of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel through photographs of it, rather than going and seeing it in three dimensions, surrounded by the context of a chapel and a city.

And that, dear friends, is why you should never date an economist, but should instead aim your amorous intentions towards geographers.

I have always been a bit of a feminist, but being a male feminist is a bit problematic. For a start, sisters who are doing it for themselves aren’t always looking for encouragement from men, but quite the opposite. Out here in rural DR, my feminist political beliefs are challenged by the sheer machismo of society here. Most of my male neighbours up here think that giving votes to women is political correctness gone mad.

A general prevailing mood here is that women only serve for sex and food, and so those with big hips are highly valued, as not only does it shows good child bearing potential, but it is the physical manifestation of good domestic produce, the layers of sediment resulting from many great meals. I once overheard some sleazy gringos commenting how they find it odd that Dominicans prefer larger prostitutes, as they think they are getting more for their money. If this is the case, and this is certainly not an area which I am researching, then it explains why the village prostitute does such good business, as following this line of logic she represents an absolute bargain. Actually, she seems pleasant enough – she works out of the drinking establishment next to my house, so I speak to her on a daily basis as I leave to go out. I only wish that she would realise that she isn’t ever going to get any business from me, and that she would stop groping my posterior.

It is perfectly acceptable for a man here to have as many girlfriends as he can afford, as long as the wife doesn’t find out. Needless to say, the same freedom is not extended to women. It is normally an economic limitation on girlfriends, as one friend told me he had to stop seeing one girlfriend in a village down the road as he couldn’t afford to keep paying for things for her, but that he aimed to get back with her when his business picked up. I hear he is getting a good price for his produce nowadays, which is probably why I often see him on his motorbike, heading down the road.

What gets my goat is the idea here that the wife, in cases where she discovers the philandering nature of her fella, is expected to just put up with it. A story went round recently about one woman who discovered that her man had been playing away from home, and in retaliation she cut up all his clothes with a pair of scissors. Although this is not a particularly hellishly furious reaction from a scorned woman, up here it is something akin to the combination of burning your bra whilst jumping in front of the King’s horse. As I heard this story, I was about to make a comment about what a great Sister this woman is, and how it is good that she did something, but before I could do so the rest of the room started going on about what a right so-and-so she is, doing that to her man, destroying his nice clothes. The proper reaction was to do nothing, other than sweep the house and prepare his rice and beans (but without putting cyanide in it).

This viewing of women as objects for sexual conquest is one trend that crosses class boundaries. I was told by one of the rich people who own weekend homes up here, that before I leave the country, I should father a child with a woman from the village – he did, and he didn’t regret it in the slightest. There are eight or so weekend homes in the village, and there are at least two children who have resulted from the brief and illicit union between a rich city dweller and a local girl. Meanwhile several of the villagers have advised me that I should sleep with one of the Haitian women who work in the fields here, particularly on cold nights, as the darker a woman’s skin is, the more heat she is presumed to give off. I am sure that I do not need to inform you that I have followed neither of these pieces of advice.

Of course, there are also some places where woman are simply not expected to be. For example, no women are expected to be seen at the drinking area where the billiard table is, with the exception of teenage girls who can play during the day when men are not there. Likewise, no reputable woman would ever go to a cockfight, which is certainly a very macho environment. The exception to these is, of course, disreputable women. The cockfighting arena for the whole valley is in my village, and so on Sundays, when they put on the fights, all the prostitutes for the whole area come to ply their trade in the arena and the neighbouring billiards place. Sundays are certainly not a day of rest for them.

A friend of mine, who is certainly a proactive feminist type, once went to a cockfight in the DR. She is a particularly pale gringa, so she must have flipped out the locals with the unprecedented spectacle of a woman in attendance who is not only not a prostitute, but also an Americana. Mind you, this is the girl who plays golf in tweeds and pearls, just to wind up the old boys at the club, her particular take on subversive action.

I don’t think Dominican society is ready for my radical idea that women should be treated as the equals of men. That is currently an unimaginable situation, not least for the women of the village.

A standard activity of the middle class students that I have the joy to teach back in the UK is the taking of a “gap year”, between school and university. This might involve travelling round the world working and partying, combined with doing some of charity work in a poor country. Ostensibly this is to give them a chance to mature by seeing more of the world, in particular to gain a sense of perspective from spending time with less privileged people. However, judging by the comments that some of them put into their essays, it seems to generally have the opposite effect. This is perhaps because they apparently spend most of the time hanging around and drinking with the sort of person that they hung around with at school, and will hang around and drink with at university, except in a sunnier climate.

Now, doing the sort of work that I do gives me the right, perhaps even the obligation, to be cynical about the whole development arena, and projects like gap year students in particular. Along with membership of professional bodies, subscription to relevant journals comes a free invitation to join the “Make Geldof History” campaign. Of course, you could be cynical about my work, but that would be pointless as I am already far more cynical about it than you could ever possibly be. Despite this general rancour, there is something particular about people who go to teach English to school children as volunteers that really makes me angry at the futility and self-righteousness of it all.

In the first class with my first year students, I always ask them about their educational background, so I can adjust my teaching accordingly. Every time I hear the phrase “I spent a gap year teaching English to orphaned orang-utans” (or similar) I make a mental note to take 10% of all the marks of that student, just for being so irritating. What makes it so particularly annoying is not the will to help, which should be applauded and encouraged, but the self-righteousness that accompanies it. The whole industry that entices students into paying thousands of pounds to undertake this trip maintains the lie that the recipients of these classes receive more from this than the volunteers themselves. Their brochures are full of phrases such as “when I taught them a few phrases, their little faces lit up, and I could see how much they gained from the experience”. One could make the point that the students might be better off receiving free health care and half decent job prospects than a few phrases of a language they will never speak again, but this would expose the economic dynamic that underlies this phenomenon. Put simply, the students, mainly because of their age and experience, have nothing more to offer than language teaching, and so this multi-million pound industry of sending the young British middle class abroad is driven not by need in the recipient countries, but by demand for a character building experience in the UK. In times past, the young British middle class were sent abroad to get another type of character building experience, as military officers they would shoot natives to maintain the great British Empire, but the current system isn’t that much of an improvement. It is not just us who do it, last time I was on research in the mountains of the DR I met a middle aged woman from Atlanta who had decided to take a month of work to come and teach English at a rural Dominican school. Of course, she spoke almost no Spanish, had no teaching experience, and had made no contact with the school that she intended to teach in. She just thought it was sufficient to turn up and get going, and this would alleviate her conscience for a while. She was “giving something back” – what, and to whom, was not up for discussion.

What gives me the right to take such a position is that for the last few months I have been working as a volunteer one morning per week, giving English classes. This is because many of the parents have been asking me to do this, and it is one particular thing that I can do to directly do something for the community, without compromising my research. Mainly however, it gives me a legitimate excuse to do something other than my own work. The Dominican government, as usual demonstrating its infinite wisdom, has decided that all students should study English, but haven’t bothered to provide the qualified teachers or resources. The job in the school down the road was left to the maths teacher, who tries his best but himself only speaks a few phrases, and the books are old, tattered, and few and far between. I have been thrust into this void of knowledge, and have been trying to fill it with usefulness and enthusiasm. Mainly I have been failing.

Now, as some of you might know, and the rest would have guessed, I was not a good child at school. In fact, I recall being threatened with expulsion on more than one occasion. I feel that Karma has come to teach me a lesson in behaviour they could never teach me whilst I was at school. Rather than “their little faces lighting up”, when I attempt to teach a few phrases to the students, they ignore this as the boys are too busy throwing objects at other boys, or trying to flirt with the girls, whilst the girls are busy dodging thrown objects and flirtatious comments whilst engaging in gossip. It is not the rewarding (and easy) task that people may lead to you believe. In the long run it should provide me with some benefits, as I will get ever closer to understanding, and perhaps even empathising, with my students.

In one of today’s classes, I was teaching how to describe someone, so that next week we could play a game of Guess Who? I got the students, who were about age 16 in this class, to give me the name of a body part that we could learn to describe.

Of course, the first thing that was shouted out was “ass”, as boys will be boys. I thought about correcting him, to tell him the proper pronunciation of the posterior is “arse”, but remembered I am supposed to be teaching ‘Mercan English, so I let the ‘error’ stand.

Last Tuesday, the 27^th of February, was a national holiday here for Independence day, marking the day one hundred and sixty or so years ago, when they first attempted to establish an entity called the Dominican Republic. The land that is currently the DR had up till that point been invaded several times by Spain, France, Haiti and England. Later rulers would then try and sell the country, or parts of it, to Spain, France and the USA, whilst the USA would invade twice. Oddly, the first Spanish colony in the New World is the only one to have not declared independence from Spain, as Haiti was the incumbent ruler at the time when the attempts to establish the DR first took place. Interestingly, one thing that many Dominicans forget is that one of the first things the new rulers did was to try and sell the newly independent colony back to Spain.

The event was marked here in the mountains by all the school children drawing flags at school and parading up and down the road waving them. The radio and television was full of messages of sincere looking pundits telling us how we should be patriotic and love our country. This is part of a wider system of enforcing nationalism, present in all forms of life here from the unsubtle messages about loving your country in the text books to the government funded quangos who exist solely to promote patriotism. I have written before on my discomfort with Dominican nationalism and the veneration of “the hero of the independence” – Juan Pablo Duarte, in particular the uncritical worship of “patriotic heroes”, and the lack of critical thinking about the country’s history and sense of identity. For example, Duarte was a minor player in the independence movement, was quickly sidelined by the rest of the revolutionaries, and is only venerated because of the rest of the revolutionaries turned out to be a rather nasty lot and it would be too embarrassing to worship them. History has thrust greatness upon him, yet he doesn’t deserve it. Rather than being a bunch of patriots (to a country that didn’t yet exist), the revolutionaries were rich landowners who were worried about the Haitian occupiers’ plans for land reform, backed by the Catholic church who were angry at the removal of the huge political power they enjoyed under Spanish rule. In much the same way that the leaders of the US revolution were not patriots, but a bunch of tax dodgers. Incidentally, as they seem so incapable of ruling themselves, we Britishers are going to revoke their independence. We would also like £752,291,184,290,437,613 in back taxes paid promptly. Cheques should be sent to Betty Windsor, Buck House, London.

Dominicans have little idea of what it is to be Dominican, and this is never talked about, yet it is enough to deny Dominican citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent, despite being clearly in breach of the constitution. Instead, people here are just ordered to ‘be Dominican’ without asking what this is.

This year marks three hundred years since the end of the country of my birth, Scotland, and the beginning of the country of my citizenship, the United Kingdom, and accompanying this has been a increase in volume of the omnipresent discussions on Scottish identity and independence. Whilst there are many inconsistencies and problems with Scottish national identity, mainly caused by Australian film directors, we don’t have either Scottish or British nationalism forced down our throats, and we are always debating what this constitutes. Those who criticise dominant views are given the opportunities to make television programmes and write books, yet if someone was to write what I have just written criticising Dominican national identity they would be lynched.

Just as well that no one reads this blog.

One of the benefits of living in this particular community is that the owner of the local electricity company (and owner of much else besides) has a weekend home close by. This means that in order to keep the neighbours happy, he ensures that we have a good electricity supply. Until recently, this meant the flow starting at 1PM prompt, and ends around 1AM, yet in recent weeks starting and ending times have been much more capricious, coming and going several times a day, never at the same time. This prompts the two Dominican catch-phrases “se fue la luz” and “se llega la luz” – “the power has gone”, and “the power has arrived”. This is present in every area of the Dominican Republic, except the apartment complexes of the rich and the all-inclusive tourist resorts, which can afford enough inverters and portable generators to get them through any blackout. It is much more severe in rural areas, perhaps because the deadly riots in protest against poor supply that have plagued the DR have all occurred in the large cities, rather than the remote campo. The peasants never seem to be revolting.

Electricity supply is a major political issue here, and the candidates for the presidential elections are slinging promises to the electorate and insults at each other with all the force and none of the accuracy of a baseball pitcher, even though the elections are fourteen months away. Each is promising to end power outages whilst criticising the vacuity of the plans of the other, as they know it is the key to electoral success. The politician who can ensure power to the people will be in turn given power by the people.

Apart from the catch-phrases, a far more audible sign that power has arrived in the village is that all the tape decks and CD players are cranked up, and the valley suddenly fills with music. This is mainly bachata, Dominican country music, which is quite pleasant, except when it is the same five-song CD repeated on an endless loop. Even though it disturbs the tranquil peace of the village, the songs seems totally at place, as they are about campo life, about working the fields, drinking rum, and having woman troubles, which accounts for pretty much all of the daily life here.

More alarmingly, less appropriate and much less welcome music has made its way up the mountains. Just yesterday, I was brutally attacked by the strains of the Crazy Frog. No place is safe now, and it is somehow even more irritating to think that I crossed the Atlantic partly to escape it, only for it to bite me in the arse when I am least expecting it. More surreally, the arrival of electricity today was accompanied by the strains of the MC Hammer classic, You Can’t Touch This. And indeed, you can’t.

Being on fieldwork presents various opportunities that might not otherwise occur in normality, although one should always consider them carefully before committing, in case they are dangerous, illegal, immoral or all of these combined.

One of these opportunities which I am currently and slowly undertaking is the freedom from nagging with regards to facial hair. As I am at a great distance from people who complain about how it looks messy and scratches, I have decided to grow a beard.

This is something I did last time I was on fieldwork, and something that every man (and some women) should do in their lifetime, for the simple pleasure of slowly shaving it off. After growing a full beard and moustache, you remove it in pieces, leaving you with a sequence flowing from mutton chops and goatee, to a Ming the Merciless beard that can be twiddle in a menacing manner, to a handlebar moustache, ending up with the Hitler smudge on the upper lip before emerging baby-bottom smooth once again. This year I might progress from handlebar to a Errol Flinn type pencil streak of hair, as I think that I might look rather dashing and adventurous. I fear that this might not be the case, but when I do the deed, I may publish some photos so you can judge which amount of facial fluff looks best, and give me reasons never, ever to do it again.

I am quite surprised that I am doing this, given that one of my particular hatreds is kissing men with beards. Having lived previously in a society where men do embrace and kiss each other, I am confident enough in my masculinity to take this comfortable, except when the other has too much facial hair, which gives an unpleasant sensation rather like kissing a sweeping brush. If done several times in the evening (and why not, if you are having fun) this can leave a rash. I always wondered what would happen if two people with more luxuriant facial foliage were to kiss, whether this would produce a Velcro type effect, leading to an awkward social situation where they try to separate themselves, producing that ripping sound. Perhaps if I leave this to grow enough, with any luck I might find out.

Things have been quiet for me recently as I took a short holiday. I was bored of all this Caribbean business so I decided to take two rainy February weeks in rainy Manchester instead. I haven’t been back since this project started, so all of my work with Manchester had been conducted by email. This has worked rather poorly, as the university is two months (and counting) late in paying my wages. This remote control is standard practice in Academia, where fieldwork means that everyone is totally dependant on emails to get stuff done. For example, one of my two supervisors, Prof T, has been on fieldwork in a remote corner of the world since before I started my current project, so all our conversations have been via email. Similarly, my other supervisor, Dr D, left for a separate remote corner in August. Emails from my and their respective remote corners have been exchanged, routed through Manchester.

I thought it would be a waste to fly across the Atlantic and not try and sort some things out, mainly because I could really do with getting paid. It was also rather nice to catch up with friends in the office. As I was on the way out the office, following rounds of coffee drinking with friends and angry exchanges with the finance office, a colleague informed me that Prof T was in town for a week, back from his remote corner for a meeting in London, but that he had popped up to Manchester to pick up some post. I took advantage of this to introduce myself to a man who is central to my work, but who I had never met. I had a vague idea of what he looked like.

Anyway, I knocked on his office door, he did know who I was, and was happy to chat about my progress. After a while of this, there was a knock on the door, and who walks in but Dr. B, who was supposed to be thousands of miles away, rather like Prof T and I. After the initial exchanges of “what are you doing here?” and “I was about to ask you the same question!”, we settle down and had a good meeting. It was all rather bizarre, but productive. I suppose that they can’t get miffed at me for taking a holiday from fieldwork, as it would be rather hypocritical of them…

This little story might be a good opportunity to talk about how the world is shrinking, or the international lifestyles of academics, but as the event was so improbable and bizarre, it is probably best to pretend that it didn’t happen.

The question of skin colour and race is particularly vexed in the Dominican Republic, which is just as well, as it has sustained the academic careers of a few friends of mine. I won’t pretend to explain the complex details of this vexation, firstly because it would take an extremely long time to do it, and secondly because I don’t really understand it. Suffice to say there are a number of curious observations that I have made, that generally worry me.

Of course, a large part, but not all, of Dominican national identity is the denial of the African/Haitian influence in favour of a European history, and this extends into ideas of race. Put simply, people would rather be rubio (literally blonde, but used to refer to anyone with pale skin) than prieto (dark). The reality of how Dominicans see race is far more complex, but this is a necessary simplification. The exact genetic cocktail mix is to take roughly equal parts Spanish ancestry and African ancestry (sourced directly from Spanish slave camps in west Africa or indirectly through Haitian invasions in the 19^th century), add a splash of indigenous influence. Make this a small dash, as although undoubtedly there, it is almost always greatly over-exaggerated. Strain loosely, garnish with a complex racial politics to retain the bitter taste.

Although the country is mainly in shades of brown, with many poetic descriptions ranging from azucar morena (brown sugar) to indio (Indian), by way of canela (cinnamon), the advertising and television is full of rubios. It is easy to spot if a programme or advertisement has been made in the US or the Dominican Republic, as the US productions are keen to show a veritable rainbow, to try and attract all the census categories, yet the Dominicans show light skinned, blue eyed people, as these are the idealised stereotypes that people are expected to aim for, yet represent a tiny fraction of the population. This is something that the two twentieth century strongmen made most of: the dictator Trujillo stirred up anti-black (i.e. Haitian) sentiment to consolidate the country and his power, whilst using the skin whitening creams that are still widely available, whilst Balaguer wrote a rabid diatribe denouncing the pernicious Haitian (i.e. Black) influence on the DR. Given the beauty of the descriptions that people give to the various shades of brown, let alone the beauty of the skin itself, this is something that really angers me.

Secondly, political correctness is decidedly absent in Dominican society. Everyone here is known by their nickname, and this often relates to their physical appearance. With the exception of my friend Orejas (ears), it is the skin colour that is the basis for this. One good friend is particularly dark, so he is known as Morenito (little brown man), whilst his taller cousin alternates between Moreno (brown man) and Prieto (darkie). Sometimes they are jokingly referred to as Haitiano. It is absolutely the norm here to call out to someone using their skin colour as an identifier. Coming from a multi-cultural society where we are busy trying to forget that skin colour exists, this came as a complete culture shock. I am now desensitised to people calling out “Rubio” (blonde) in the cities, in an attempt to attract my attention and sell me something. I also get called Americano¸ as people assume that all blondes are foreigners, and therefore American. This geographical ignorance is not surprising, given the lack of travel people here undertake, the hegemonic influence of the US, and the shocking state of the education system. The mentality here is that there exists their little island (with the cousins living in the western bit, which we don’t like to talk about), with another island somewhere colder, which is called New York, and there is everywhere else, which is broadly homogenous and uninteresting. I did try to explain the fact that I was Scottish, which is not English, and certainly not American, but I don’t think Dominicans understand the complexities of events of July 4^th 1776, let alone the west Lothian question. Some of them have clicked that I get annoyed at being called Americano¸ so they delight in doing so at every opportunity.

Another interesting observation is that the mountain villages where I live buck the usual trend. The richer Dominicans are, the whiter they are. My birthday party, or rather the one with all the rich people that I gate-crashed, was rather pale. This is because these rich families are exactly the same rich families that came over from Spain centuries ago, and who have refused to share their money or their genes with the rest of the population. However, the mountain villages are very different, particularly in the more remote places where the gene pool is more of a puddle. There they are full of blue eyed, blonde citizens, who look far more like a Gringo than I do. Of course, given the above point, these are normally nicknamed Rubio, Americano, Gringito etc. They counter every assumption that is given about the Dominican Republic and race, as they are white, poor, rural, powerless yet as Dominican as they come. I am not sure exactly why these mountain populations are so white, but genetic isolation is certainly what has kept them that way. I suppose it is just one of those fascinating things that show up in a society if you stare hard enough at it.

The baseball season is coming to an end, which means the end of one of the more bizarre aspects of Dominican life. I don’t really understand baseball, as it seems far to simplistic – there is really only one type of pitch and one type of batting action – the pitcher throws the ball as hard as possible, and the batsman tries to hit it as hard as possible. It lacks the nuances and tactical variation of football, cricket and even tiddlywinks, yet somehow the Dominicans remain rabid about it. Like with cockfighting, the other Dominican obsession, it is always far more entertaining to watch the crowd than to watch the action.

However, there is an altogether more interesting part to baseball, and that is the dialogue in the commentary. With its runs and pitches, it is a sport that naturally lends itself to statistical analysis, and like Test Match Special, the pauses in the action are punctuated by chat about statistical analysis. Although TMS compliments this with talk of cake and buses, Dominican baseball coverage punctuates this with advertising.

I don’t know if there is some sort of financial crisis in the Dominican broadcasting sector (there probably is, as everything else here is in financial crisis), but they seem determined to cram in as much advertising as possible. Not content with billboards, sponsorship and adverts in the breaks in play, as is present in every other sport, the advertising permeates the commentary, as the TV announcers are paid to read out commercial messages as they describe the action. What makes this even more bizarre is firstly the variety of messages, as household products are endorsed in the same sentence as presidential candidates, but also the way that the commentators don’t draw breath between describing the action and describing the new, improved variety of ketchup.

A section of play might be go as such:

“Well Jose, here comes Fernandez up to the plate in the 4^th innings. Buy Rica milk, for quality and value. He has a good average against the Tigers, of 0.324. The all new 2007 model Toyota is now available with generous financing from Santo Domingo Motors”

“Yes, that’s right. Remember, don’t drink and drive, it’s not just your life you are playing with. Of course, his career average is 0.267, although this season he has been batting at nearer 0.3. Vote Danilo 2007, a better life for everybody.”

“And here comes the pitch. Oh, and it is a strike. Ask for new formula whiten toothpaste from your local corner shop. He was miles from hitting that.”

“Presidente beer, ask for your cold one. He hit that great home run in the 2^nd innings, he just needs to get that kind of rhythm going. Miguel Vargas, a president for everyone. The interesting thing is that 64% of his runs come in the first 4 innings, so he starts well and fades. Tropicala paint, brighten up your life”

And so on, advert nauseum

Can’t see that on Match of the Day for quite some time.

Living within a community whilst simultaneously researching it creates a huge and complex variety of emotions. The research subject becomes a friend, neighbour and confidant to someone who is also the object of the research, creating a contradictory, schizophrenic and thoroughly uncomfortable situation. This is always compounded by the claustrophobia that is an unavoidable part of living in a small, remote, close knit mountain village. Today I have been feeling mainly guilt.

Of course, I am in close contact with the population of the village I live, and this means that I share friendships, conversations, jokes and secrets with them. At the same time as participating in this, I also listen with a professional ear to these conversations, jokes and secrets as a way of understanding how life in the village works. This is not a problem when one is discussing agricultural seasons or other light subjects, but when one comes to investigate social relations and divisions, it becomes a more painful matter. People tell me all sorts of negative things about other people in the village that I don’t want to hear on a personal level, yet are a central part of my professional project. I begin to see the cracks in the community, the dark sides to everyone that I know here, their scandal ridden past, their controversial and hypocritical acts, and their crimes. Of course, when one knows someone for long enough then their more human side becomes apparent, and one must deal with this, but the problem that I am currently grappling with is that whilst I am learning all this I am taking notes.

In any other walk of life, I could ignore, purposefully forget or skirt round these areas. I have always believed the vast majority of people are fundamentally good at heart, and so in everyday life I can justify underplaying the negative aspects of people’s character in favour of the parts that I like. However I find myself pushed by my research objectives to delve deeper into the dark side of people’s characters, because from this perspective they are more important that the positive elements. As a sign of how cynical social researchers are about human nature, we are always far more interested in discord, divisions and conflict than in friendships, closeness and harmony. A book on why and how people disagree and fight will always be better received than one exploring the nature of cooperation and understanding. Many universities, my own department included, teach courses on conflict, but much rarer is the class that studies peace. Ostensibly we are more interested in the negative side of life because we would like to solve the world’s problems, but I am not sure there isn’t an aspect of schadenfreude to our curiousity.

I am not sure how easy it would be to justify my actions to these people if they were to truly discover what I was doing. I have long since abandoned any notion that my research will have a significant direct impact on the life of anyone but myself, and that the best I can hope for is that the community I work in, and others like it, feel a subtle change for the better in the distant future, but nothing earth-shattering. I feel that I am spying on an innocent group for my own personal benefit. Many people are critical of the depths that gutter journalists plumb in order to rake up dirt on the private lives of politicians and the mildly famous, yet when an academic does the same thing but in more lengthy and less comprehensible prose, it becomes an important and masterly work of scholarship. There is very little difference between those nosy people who pry at the secrets of unsuspecting members of the public, and social researchers. I feel part spy, actor, tabloid investigative journalist, liar, mud-raker, hypocrite, and only partly like an academic researcher.

Today I stumbled across the skeletons in the cupboards of people I know, like and respect. I now look at them in a new light, but tomorrow I will have attempt to deal with them in the same friendly way, making me feel guilty and schizophrenic