It was recently recommended to me that I read a paper by a certain anthropologist, and having done so, I am now wondering about the mental state of academic researchers. I have been alarmed by the mental state of anthropologists for some time, but this has implications for the rest of us too.

It was written by a man infamous for his four years spent living around and researching young crack dealers in New York. His book on the subject is full of stories about overdoses, gang rapes by teenagers, babies killed in the crossfire of drive-by shootings and many other unpleasant occurrences. One has to have a strong stomach to finish it, despite being so unusually well written for an Anthropology text.

What this other paper revealed to me was that his PhD research was abandoned after only three days of fieldwork, possibly a record. Back in the early eighties, he had decided that he wanted to spend a long time researching peasant communities in El Salvador. This was during the darkest period of the war, and the US backed Salvadorian military attacked his village just three days after he arrived. He then spent two weeks with the villagers as they ran to safety in Honduras, being bombed and shot at all the way. He talks about seeing teenage boys blown up in front of him, and about mothers who strangled their babies lest they cry and give away the hiding position to the soldiers who would have killed them all. It is all rather harrowing stuff, but it raises the question over why he feels this strange attraction to go and study in such detail cases of such horrific violence and suffering.

We try and justify this by saying we are interested in studying suffering so we contribute to its alleviation, but sometimes it seems that there is a schadenfreude like competitiveness to study the most horrible and distressing topics. This might be linked to attempts to outdo each other with regards to fieldwork. Academics are such a competitive bunch, because our careers and our egos depend on it, and this creates an incredibly scandalous and backstabbing office politics which makes the plot lines of Mexican soaps look like an episode of The Waltons. Part of this is the tendency amongst some people to go on fieldwork for the longest possible time in the most remote place possible. The fact that I am only spending six months or so in a place that has at least a few hours of electricity most days, and am very close to a paved road, marks me out as a sort of wimp. I only deal with mildly severe poverty (the starting wage for an agricultural labourer in my village is £2 per day, about four times that of neighbouring Haiti), and the violence is generally fistfights, rather than genocide, although I did find myself investigating a murder the other day.

I don’t think that such academics can be directly compared to grief tourists, a strange breed that like to go to nasty places for their holidays, the sort who travels to Brazil just to see the slums. It reminds me of a story I was once told about an edition of Vogue Interiors, a very upmarket interior design magazine, who did an extended article on the interiors of slum housing in Johannesburg, and telling the reader how they could be inspired to decorate their (£3 million) house using the same colour scheme and use of objects, what with chronic poverty being the in colour just now. The difference between us and them is that it is our job to deal with these things, rather than a ‘leisure’ activity, although like them we have a choice, and we choose to look in great detail at human suffering.