So, you want to go do fieldwork?

2009-03-19T09:15:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-04-28T09:07:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-23T10:28:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-23T10:25:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-17T12:58:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-17T12:55:00.002-04:00

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.

2007-04-12T11:55:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-12T11:54:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-04-07T15:29:00.002-04:00

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.

2007-04-07T15:29:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-04-07T15:28:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-02T08:42:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-03-20T17:36:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-03-20T17:35:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-03-14T13:48:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-03-12T13:43:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-03-12T13:42:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-03-07T11:52:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-03-03T11:50:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-03-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-02-26T12:18:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-02-26T12:17:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-02-12T08:02:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-02-03T11:55:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-02-03T11:54:00.000-04:00

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

2007-01-30T11:59:00.000-04:00

Over the years I have had a variety of birthday parties, though turning a year older has lost its lustre since pass-the-parcel was relegated from the celebrations. This year’s celebration was interesting, unplanned and very bizarre.

My original plan was to head down to Santo Domingo and celebrate with a traditional birthday drinking session with some chums, but this fell through at the last minute. I then began to plan to spend the Great Day in the village, drinking some beers, loosing at billiards and trying extremely hard not to do any work. This last plan was broken by about midday, as I found myself trundling through the village on the bike, in search of a conversation about the minute and mundane details of life and work in the rural DR. I passed some friends who were busy working at the country cottage of one of the rich Santo Domingo folk, and who were occupied with injecting orange juice into the backside of dead pig. It turns out that they were marinating the animal which was to be roast at the birthday party of an extremely wealthy and famous Dominican, whose weekend home it was.

Of course, I couldn’t resist introducing myself to the man himself, who was busy wondering why a Gringo had just walked into his estate and interrupted a very important task. He was so shocked to hear that we shared a birthday that he couldn’t help inviting this complete stranger to his party. And that is how I ended up at the party of someone who I had only met before in the society pages of Santo Domingo newspapers.

In some ways, it was a distressingly low scale affair, just twenty or so rich businessmen and other friends from the capital, plus a couple of local employees. Whilst the pig was roasting, I got force fed whisky. Disappointingly it was Johnnie Walker, and for a man who is known for his ownership of a large beverage company, amongst other things, there was none of the family product. And of course, it was a long afternoon, so I had to keep drinking. It was not difficult, given the presence of free alcohol – you can take the Scotsman out of Scotland, but you can’t take the Scotland out of the Scotsman. Of course, given the amount of Scotch this Scotsman was putting in himself, there may have been a temptation to get that Scotsman back into Scotland. But the party kept in good spirits (with the exception of the Johnnie Walker).

The man himself was thoroughly charming, and we all had a good time drinking, chatting and eating roast pork after four hours cooking time. After the food it was time for a traditional activity here in the mountains, called “Teaching the Gringo to Dance Whilst Trying Not to Laugh, or Wince When He Steps on My Toes. Again.”.

Very patient, and all excellent dancers. Quote of the evening must be “keep your shoulders still and move the hips. Imagine that you are making love to a beautiful woman.”. My bad dancing was one of two faux pas in the evening; chatting to a major industrialist about his business I commented on how much I enjoyed a particular product of his, only to be met with a stony silence. I then realised that I had just mentioned not his product, but the major rival brand.

As I lived only a few minutes walk, they simply would not let me leave as people slowly departed for home. I ended up in a hardcore group of 5, drinking and singing along the explicit lyrics of various Dominican hit songs. Dominican country music shares the same universal themes as traditional rural music in other areas – drink and women, but combining these with Carry On lyrics. I seem to remember one with a chorus that went “Juana, peel my Banana”. We were all rather drunk, though I have to say that these fellows can’t hold it well, as I have vague memories of someone comically falling into a pot plant. A great time with the sort of people who I would have imagined that I would detest, but who turn out to be kind and generous.

It goes without saying that I am currently engaged in detailed research into local hangover cures.

2007-01-27T12:13:00.000-04:00

There is an anthropological approach called participant observation, which translates as learning through doing; in order to understand a group, one must behave as they do.

Now, anthropologists have a tendency to do stupid things. For example, I was recently reading an anthropology paper that stated “Somehow, I find the point easier to make in verse”, and then proceeded with 60 lines of tortuously bad verse to prove a pointless point (if you don’t believe me, the reference is Tilly, C. 1991. Dominance, resistance, compliance... discourse. Sociological Forum 6 (3):593-602.). Frankly, any discipline that prefers to make their academic arguments in verse deserves something a tad stronger than contempt. However, participant observation has some merits, mainly that it can be a lot of fun.

In the spirit of understanding the community better through participating in their activities, I have now joined the chicken owning society. This is an important activity in the village, for eggs, for meat and for cockfighting. Cockfighting is central to the lives of the men in the village, and many an hour is spent tending to and talking about their cocks. Incidentally, a cockfight is perhaps not worth the talk: twelve minutes of flapping wings and pecking beaks. It is rather undignified and inelegant, less resembling Queensbury rules championship boxing, and more like drunken women outside sleazy nightclubs at 3AM on a wet Saturday night in Manchester. Perhaps out on a hen night.

The animal that I now own is a young cockerel that was deemed by the owner to be too weak and wimpy to fight, so he sold it to me on the cheap. I did have ugly duckling type ideas, where I would rear the rejected creature to become a famous, brave and noble fighting animal, beating the chickens that were chosen over him at a young age, but this romanticism was defeated by a heavy dose of reality when I saw him being attacked by a female (henpecked?). Hence he has been named as “Montro”, a Dominican word that translates as “weakling”. He is currently serving his time as an alarm clock before being served up as a stew.

My ownership of this useless animal has confirmed my status as a useless Gringo. People laugh as they ask me how “the champion cock” is, which then provokes a joking conversation about how Montro will beat their best chicken any day. This often turns into a useful conversation that gives me some nice bits of information for my research. Perhaps I will write an anthropological paper entitled “methodological implications of penile poultry jokes for participant observation in a Latin American setting”. But perhaps I will prefer to keep my Geographer status, and the dignity that accompanies it.

I also have a few hens on order, to provide me with quality eggs, so I shall keep you updated on that.

2007-01-22T11:55:00.000-04:00

There have been a number of posts on this blog that mention shocking behaviour in public by Dominicans, particularly the complete obliviousness in public arenas to those around them. Before coming here I would have never imagined that cinema going involved audience participation (why would you want to give advice to an on-screen character?), and my staid Britishness is struggling with the queuing system. Coming from a country where people would rather kill their own mother than suffer the tutting and disapproving glances that result from skipping their place in a queue, it takes some adapting to a place where ones location in the queue is reflective not of the order in which one arrived, but the sharpness of ones elbows and determination to hit people with a handbag in order to save a few seconds getting on a bus. I still struggle to go up to the counter in my local village shop and just shout my order oblivious to the person being served. As I wait patiently for my turn, it is taken by the newly arrived. To my shame, I can’t bring myself to act as the locals do and elbow my way to be served, but as I live behind the corner shop and have a key, I just let myself in the back door, take what I want, and leave the money without having to shout and assert oneself.
This demonstrates two seemingly contradictory aspects of Dominican society. Whilst people are amazingly inconsiderate in their public behaviour, they are at the same time extraordinarily generous in many other ways. Whilst the behaviour of those in queues, cinemas, lectures, roads shows absolutely no regard for those around them, my landlady and village shop owner doesn’t bat an eyelid when I enter and take what I need. Likewise I can’t pass my neighbours house without them coming out into the street to invite me in for coffee and biscuits, if not lunch. I feel very guilty in these situations, knowing what percentage of their daily income this expenditure represents. If it is a family that I have been visiting a lot, I often feign stomach ache because of this guilt. Everyone has been incredibly welcoming, open to telling me all sorts of aspects of their lives, making my work a lot easier and infinitely more enjoyable.
I recently posted a thread on a Dominican affairs forum, in which I asked for help in understanding this inconsiderate-incredibly generous contradiction. In many ways it is the opposite of British behaviour of politeness, giving up ones seat on the bus, yet utter refusal to help strangers, which I suppose could also be seen as a contradiction. It soon became the hottest topic on the board, but none of the 200 plus replies that arrived in the first week helped me understand this contradiction. Most of them denounced all Dominicans as being childlike, and therefore deserving of being either ignored or patronised (patting them on the head and giving them a sweet), or criticising me for being an ex-pat who refused to give up my foreign ways and understand Dominicans – the complete opposite of what I am trying to do. Chiri and some others pointed out that the inconsideration/generosity divide could be likened to a class divide or an urban/rural divide, which have made it more comprehensible, but unfortunately not more tolerable.
Answers from anthropologists on a postcard please.

2007-01-22T11:53:00.000-04:00

Continuing a previous thread on the spread of gringoisms, I have come across some new ones. Many of course are the bastardisation of Gringlish words, such as describing 4*4s as yipetas, originating from the word jeep. Likewise, all the hip and very annoying young things constantly say es jevy, derivative of heavy, as a positive adjective. Hence these yipeta driving brats are known as jevitas, which is definitely not a positive description. Indeed this gringoisation extends into all aspects of their lives – one of the places where they drink in Santo Domingo is known as BoBos, which as the neon sign tells us is an abbreviation for Bourgeois Bohemian. With its shiny bar, fancy décor and outrages prices it is certainly one, but not the other. I hate that place and its clientele with a passion, preferring el Sarten next door, a down to earth yet madly vibrant bar that plays old time son music.
Anyway, I recently discovered that el marking tape is a crucial part of cockfighting, as this standard Blue Peter item is used to hold artificial spurs in place on the cock’s leg whilst the wax is drying. Random Gringlish words pop up in the agricultural outposts down the roads, which originate from the agrochemical industry. I passed a small shop that advertised itself as El Store de RoundUpPlus. There is a sense that your business is more reputable if it has a Gringlish word in the title, much like restaurants who think that because their menu is in French then the food tastes better. Hence Betty’s Salon can charge twice the price of Salon de Betty. Bonus points are given for incorrect grammar and spelling, though this afflicts the Spanish signage as well.
This trend also extends into naming for children, as they are often given Gringlish names, particularly ones relating to American presidents, names that have no Spanish origin. In my village there is a Wilson, a Washington, a Jeferson, as well as a Jefrey, a Jon-David. Someone up the road is called Welington, and I was laughing uncontrollably when he was introduced to me, whilst wearing rubber boots. Some things just don’t translate.
How they get these names I still don’t understand. I did hear that a new musical about DominicanYorks (a Gringoised word used to describe the expat population in New York) in which a major character is called Usnavy, after the first sign his parents saw when they arrived in the port of New York. I am still waiting to meet young RoundUpPlus Fernandez.

2007-01-22T11:52:00.000-04:00

Chiri has challenged me to tell you five surprising things about me. It has been a troubling editing process reaching these, as I know that many people involved in the more interesting stories read this column, as does my mother. So here are the edited selection, though I am sure I will be reminded of a few missing ones through the comments section.
1. Much to the amusement of my colleagues, I am considered (mainly by myself) to be the world’s fourth most eminent expert in the political aspects of forest fires. As they are quick to point out, there are only four people in the world who look at the political aspects of forest fires. If you are reading this, and know something about the political aspects of forest fires, please alert me and I will adjust my global standings accordingly (i.e. downward).
2. I once spent the best part of a week dressed up as a woman, very badly. In my defence, it was carnival, and most of the time I was suffering from the side effects of tequila. I still don’t understand men (and Cher) who go through to much effort to look like the perfect drag queen, with big hair and corsets. I feel that cross-dressing, like juggling with chainsaws, is much more enjoyable for the spectator if it is done badly. In the case of mixing tequila, cross dressing and flirting, the potential for disaster is much less when the cross dressing is done badly. And the flirting, for that matter.
3. I spent a large part of my teenage years, like many others, lying about my age/name/occupation. I never learnt Groucho Marx’s lesson, that any place that is prepared to let you in during these circumstances is not the type of place that you would want to be in. Apart from underage entrance to bad pubs, I once got a free backstage pass to a minor Spanish music festival by posing as a journalist. Unfortunately the music was so bad that I fell asleep, much to the disdain of the man who gave me the pass.
4. My right leg is almost an inch longer than my left leg. This didn’t cause me to walk round in circles, but my entire upper body has become slightly deformed to accommodate this irregularity. I only found this out when I was getting measured for a kilt and the tailor was wondering why the damn thing looked so bad.
5. I was so accident prone as a child that it is a miracle that I saw my fifth birthday. I had had pneumonia twice by age two, I tipped a bottle of paint stripper down my front on my first birthday, and I had a habit of regularly falling into very cold ponds. In retrospect, social services should have paid my parents a visit. However, apart from that I was a perfectly gorgeous baby, and any comments from my brother about a permanently dripping nose should be ignored.

2007-01-17T13:33:00.000-04:00

“Off to the Caribbean eh? What kind of excuse for research is that, sitting on a beach all day?” was a typical comment when I informed people about my plans. Sadly, they couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Unknown to some, the Dominican Republic has some bloomin’ great muckle* mountains, and I live on top of one of them. This particular mountain seems to catch everything the Atlantic can through at it. I am surrounded by what is technically known as montane cloud forest, which means that it is located at precisely the attitude at which moist air coming in from the Atlantic, and forced to rise over the mountains, condenses into semi-permanent rain clouds. Combining this general soggyness with the cold of being at 1200m altitude and it is not that pleasant a place to be. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I would rather have Manchester’s climate. Since I returned here almost two weeks ago from my brief sojourn in sunny Santo Domingo, it has rained for at least 12 hours every day, but nearer 18. That is not a typo.

The quantity and quality of the rain are both impressive. Firstly, it is near permanent, and secondly it ranges in intensity between drizzle that is irritating but relatively harmless to rain that comes down so hard that it stings. Any brief ray of sunshine is just an opportunity to better survey the mud ridden landscape before it is obscured again by dark rainclouds and bucketloads of water falling from the sky. It is truly miserable, worse than Glasgow. The roads have turned into something that reminds me of my time at Glastonbury. One architectural flaw has been revealed in this – all the roofs here are made of corrugated iron. When it rains here, the sound is like a symphony for timpani, a loud and constant crash. I am frequently kept awake at night by the sound of rain on the roof. Of course, that is when I am not woken up shivering by the freezing cold temperatures. It may be in the Caribbean, but it snows in the mountains near here. The lack of sunshine means that the mist chills you to the bone, and I have spent the last week wearing two jumpers, having forgot to bring my winter coat to the Caribbean.

It is truly miserable weather in the Caribbean.

My neighbours are all a bit morose, sitting around because they can’t work. They can’t harvest because the crops rot if collected wet, and they can’t apply fertiliser or such because the rain would wash it away. They can’t go and do other stuff, because that would involve getting wet, and we can’t be having that. It is part decent excuse, and part procrastination technique. And dear reader, it is one in which I am also participating.

(*muckle – particularly braw** Scottish adjective for large)
(**braw – Scottish word for fantastic)

2007-01-17T13:32:00.000-04:00

A friend recently made a joke that there is two ways to ensure a business is a success – sell alcohol or give it an English name.

Dominicans share Winston Churchill’s attitude towards drink: in victory they deserve it and in defeat they need it. When times are good they deserve it, but when they are bad they need it.

I can’t think of a way of shoehorning in the other great Churchill quote on alcohol: when a group of teetotal Mormons told him that alcohol stung like a viper and kicked like a mule, he replied that he had been looking all his life for a drink like that. Although I hear that some home made rums here sting like a viper, kick like a mule, and blind like a bat, but that is a story for another day.

People get paid here on a Saturday evening and some people head straight to the corner shop to drink until Monday morning, they run out of money or they fall over, whichever comes first. No matter how bad things are, there is always money for beer. Sometimes they accelerate the wealth redistribution process by betting on cockfights or billiard games to accompany the drinking. The more they drink, the louder they shout, and the louder they have to put the music so that they have an excuse to shout so loud. As I live next to a place with a reputation for boisterous weekend recreation, this does quickly become very grating, particularly as they appear to have one CD consisting of 5 songs, which is endlessly on loop. I have decided that if I am a bad person, I will go to a kind of personalised hell that consists of a bar like that, full of drunken idiots, whilst I am eternally on antibiotics and cannot resort to hard liquor to take the pain away. Hell truly is other people, but some people more than others.

Continuing on from a previous thread about the possibility of armed insurrection in this country, the last few weeks have seen high social tensions and anti-government feeling. Since the New Year, in accordance with International Monetary Fund austerity measures to pay for the monstrous cost of constructing the Santo Domingo metro, the tax on a bottle of beer has increased markedly, so a bottle of beer now costs about 25% more than last month. Of course the men complain more about this than they do about the accompanying reduction in the subsidy for basic goods such as rice, beans and propane. Their wives have a different perspective. Interestingly, the tax hasn’t been applied to rum, perhaps because sugarcane is grown in the DR, but the grain and hops for beer are imported. Suits me fine, as the rum here is good, and the beer at best mediocre.

IMF austerity measures have a nasty history here, as in much of Latin America. Sometimes they do have positive effects on the economy as a whole, but it is almost always the poorest who feel the pinch most, and it often provokes deadly riots, such as the ones in the late 80’s that were a key factor in toppling a government.

The subject of English names will have to wait, but ask me sometime about my neighbour’s rubber boots.

2007-01-06T20:35:00.000-04:00

2007-01-06T20:22:00.000-04:00

I recently read a magazine article that stated that an armed insurrection could never happen in the US, despite a distressingly high gun ownership. The argument is that people have got so complacent that all they would do if there was a oppressive and morally corrupt government would be to update their blogs.

[insert comment about how the current US government is oppressive and morally corrupt]

Here in the rural DR, the key factor is not complacency and blogs, but simplicity and chickens. I was having a chat with one of my neighbours recently, who informed me that she always voted Reformista because when it was in power in the late nineties, they gave her a chicken. She said "I always vote reformista because they are the only party that did anything for me. They once gave me a chicken." The president at the time was Balaguer, a man who made Machiavelli's prince look like Dubya. He knew fine that he could buy people's votes not with electrification schemes and improving the education system and hospitals, but with simple handouts to poor rural farmers. They saw the representatives of this man come to their village, and give them a chicken that they said was the personal gift of the president. In return, the villagers forgot all his violent repression and vote rigging, and committed themselves to a lifetime of voting Reformista, simply because of a chicken. One fears for democracy if the price of tolerating a fairly repressive quasi-dictatorship is a few chickens.

Of course, the other political parties have learnt from this. In the village, electicity was installed the day immediately before the presidential election. At the last election parties of all colours were seen handing out basic household goods (i.e. bags of rice and packets of beans) from pick-up trucks decked out in party colours. Every Dominican owns at least three baseball hats with a political slogan, though they are quick to say "it is for the shade only", rather than indicating any allegiance. If you want to find out what party they voted for, you are better off looking at the colour of their chickens.

2007-01-05T13:26:00.000-04:00

In case you were wondering what an overcrowded motoconcho looks like, here is a standard picture of a family day out, from the from page of today's Listin Diario. The first line of the article says "the growth of motoconcho use has been as massive as it is dangerous". This is truly a typical DR scene.

2007-01-04T19:37:00.000-04:00

Possibly my favourite place in Santo Domingo to take a wee stroll is El conde. It is a pedestrianised street that contains no great historical monuments, just boring shops, but its attraction lies in the unlimited people watching opportunities.

At one end is Paco's, a cheap restaurant with pavement tables which is a prime location for fat sweaty pink old foreign boars to meet their twenty year old Dominican 'girlfriends' and show them off to all the other old farts. Occaisionally you see them also walking down the Conde hand in hand, but they perspire and waddle, and find this a tiring exercise, preferring to save their energy for other activities.

A little further down is a games arcades, where the young folk hang out. Upstairs is a pool hall full of hustlers, but downstairs is where the real action is. Near the door is one of those great dance arcade games, where the player has to put their feet on certain areas of the dance floor depending on the symbols on the screen of the arcade, and to pass each level, the dancer must reach a certain score based on their timing and accuracy. There are two dancefloors to one arcade, so that two people can dance at the same time can compete. The guys who do this, and they are all teenage boys, see this as a form of gladiatorial combat, and they are very, very good. They always select the hardest level, and have clearly spent all their pocketmoney on the game to get the practice. At the hardest levels the music is fast, the symbols on the screen turn to a blur, and the feet move like an epilectic centipede on amphetamines. How they manage to stay on it for one minute, let alone pass level after level, is beyond me. A crowd of girls and other guys come to watch, eyeing up each other and the competition. The dancers clearly put a lot of effort into it, and perspire heavily. Most of the time they are stripped to the waist, which makes a certain sub-sect of the species that occupies Paco's rather excited. The combination of sweat, testosterone, teenage hormones and bad dance music reminds me of my school discos, and I quickly move on.

El Conde is also the prime place for the selling of tourist tat, and those guys persistantly pester me to buy their coconuts carved into comical monkeys, or bad pseudo-nativist Haitian paintings. However, today I had a far more irritating experience, one that made me take the nearest side street as an escape route. There are speakers on the street, and often in the evening they play soothing classical music, making for a nice stroll. Today, it being Christmas time, they decided to play the music of Sir Cliff Richard.

Ye gods, I fear for the children.

2007-01-03T11:29:00.000-04:00

I have just got back from spending a week in San Francisco, visiting la novia who was visiting her week-old nephew with the rest of family in tow. A great time was had by all of course, in a great city with some wonderful people, but now I am back in the surreal reality of fieldwork (although I understand that a visit to California is not the same as a visit to reality).

The reason that I like San Francisco is that the city, and parts of the suburbs, were designed for two feet, and this makes it very different from the average US city. It also makes a bit of a change from Santo Domingo, whose recent city design (as with everything else) is too busy looking at the US for inspiration rather than at what works. Hence rather than designing centrapetally, creating spaces for interaction, where retail, leisure and business spaces interact, they are just whacking sub-urban and sub-standard shopping centres up everwhere, and making it impossible to walk anywhere. The Foucault in me says this is a power exercise of the yipeta'd classes over the publico classes, excluding them from their spaces, but I often tell the Foucault in me to shut up.

Now, I am a big fan of Jane Jacobs (the Canadian, not the Australian). I believe that cities should be communities, and that designing around the car is the wrong thing to do. Perhaps that is why I like the colonial zone so much. It was a bold new project, and is distinctly different from its early 16th century contemporaries in Spain. Rather than having small side streets coming off the main street, the colonial zone has almost equally sized broad boulevards, set out in straight lines. This is clearly a space for interaction, rather than excluding the poor to the side streets.
It was also so the rich could drive their carriages everywhere, predicting events five centuries into the future.

My thoughts on this were provoked by a strange sight today, or rather, the absense of one. Normally the pavements around Parque Independencia are overflowing with people selling fruit, flowers, books and other assorted items. I often pick up some pineapple on my way around, exchanging money and pleasantries with the storekeepers. Today the pavements were empty, and had a post-apocalyptic air to them. The park had a completely different character, partly the result of the fact that you could walk along the pavement without being forced into the road by a pile of bananas. Having asked around, it seems that the town council has banned people from selling things from the pavement, as part of their plan to "clean up" Santo Domingo. In other words, make it like a US city, with no street vendors. This annoys me, as not only does it remove my source of cheap fruit, but also the street level social interaction that makes the colonial zone much more "alive" than the more sterile places in the middle class suburbs. Maybe the people who make these decisions don't want to interact with other people. Santo Domingo folk are pathologically inconsiderate to the feelings of others (witness their behaviour in public events), and their selfishness is creating an urban landscape that is selfish, devoid of character, unlovable and unlivable.

2006-12-24T20:44:00.000-04:00

I am spending christmas in Santo Domingo, having decended from the mountains on Saturday. I didn't want to come down until Sunday, so as I could catch the village christmas party, but the transport situation put a spanner in the festive works. I have to be in Santo Domingo to get a 7AM flight on tuesday, and the guaguas were all a bit more full than usual.

- A quick note to anyone who might be travelling in rural Dominican public transport, especially during busy periods. Bring plenty of caribiners so you can clip yourself and your luggage to the side of a pickup truck. Particularly important if your driver likes to take hairpin bends at speed, as I have seen luggage, although not people, thrown off the side.

I am glad that I finally caved in to advice and came down early. The roads were heaving with traffic, and every guagua had luggage on the roof, and people hanging out of the doors. My own journey took a bit longer than usual, not just because of the traffic, but because we got a puncture and also the engine exploded in the middle of the motorway. Our handy chofer fixed the thing in 5 minutes, Dominican style, with bits of electrical tape and an old t-shirt. A bit like Blue Peter on acid. However, the traffic wasn't too bad heading into the city, as most Dominicans go to stay with their family in the campo for christmas. Outbound traffic was horrendous, with big queues for guaguas.

I am a bit miffed at missing the party though, as I was assured of a good time. They were going to do a giant sancocho, a traditional stew, enough for the whole village. This was to be followed by the annual angelito, where villagers exchange gifts, having picked a name out of a hat a few weeks back to decide the victim of their secret present. Lots of individual households were also going to roast a pig over a fire - on Saturday morning at 7AM I was rudely awaken by the deafening squeals as my neighbours slaughtered their swine. They then gutted it and shoved a big pole through it to hang over the flames. There was a surreal sight of several pigs-on-a-stick lined up outside the corner shop. The rest of the night was to be taken up with dancing, and several ladies had promised to show me how to strut my stuff, Dominican country style. Tragically, I am going to miss this, but it's my birthday in a few weeks, so perhaps I will get a dance then.

Whilst in Santo Domingo, I am going to have an orphans' christmas with all the other foreigners I know who don't have enough money to fly home and see their family for christmas. Feliz navidad

2006-12-23T20:46:00.000-04:00

Possibly the most important skill in fieldwork, and one that is lost in the many research methods lectures on interviewing, positionality and so on, is the simple and vital art of biting one's tongue.

Of course, in all walks of life, one has to accept that not all people have the same opinion as you, and that you must respect that. However, there are somethings that are harder to cope with than others. In particular, I do get shocked by the way children in my village get treated.

Of course, children here are certainly well loved, and the intention is most definately there to take care of them. If their parents are out working in the fields, the children are passed around neighbours and relatives in a way that perhaps a lawnmower or a really good novel is passed around in UK society. Like lawnmowers and novels, they are given a lot of attention, then returned with a slight smudge from an unrecognisable source.

Perhasp it is because my own mother has spent so many years working in public health, but I do struggle to restrain my moralising tongue when I see what they feed their babies. Most women in the village have their first child age 15, disturbingly often with their cousin. It seems that breastfeeding is virtually non-existant, instead mothers go out of their way to feed them with powdered baby formula. I don't know if this is because like many other things in the DR people automatically assume that a shop-bought 'American' product is better than the indigenous or natural product, or if it is for far more controversial reasons. Like almost all other universities in the UK, my employer has banned all Nestle products from its union shops, on the basis that Nestle is aggresively marketing powdered baby formula over breast milk, the natural option being better in 99% of cases, with the risk in formula of illness from dirty water, and therefore putting company profit over babies lives. The water in the village is exceptionally clean, though not flawless, particularly for young babies with weak immune systems, so the issue becomes the relative expense and the absense of nutrition and natural antibodies when missing the natural product. This boycott of Nestle is a central tennet of the right-on thinking that dominates student politics, but it is also a view that I have some sympathy with, given my own experience.

Out here in the campo, all of the colmados (village shops) have some brand names painted on the outside wall, so the casual passerby can clearly see what this shop sells. Common brand names include Presidente beer, Verizon phonecards, and Nido, a Nestle baby formula. I don't
know if Nestle have paid for these signs to be put up, or whether this constitutes an aggressive marketing campaign that turns mothers off breast feeding, but it is certainly grounds for suspicion. For once, I think I support the right-on thinking of the wannabe parliamentarians in Student Unions across the land.

It would be far more challenging for these people to incorporate some of my other observations into their thinking, as some of the other stuff people here feed babies cannot be blamed on ruthless international capitalism. Seeing a three month old baby given sweet coffee and sugary soft drinks, and a four year old given neat rum to drink shocks me. I can bite my tongue many of the other things that go on here, the views on Haitians and so on, but I really struggle from criticising my friends when they feed such stuff to their babies. I can try and formulate academic reasons for it, such as a developmentalist discourse that automatically assumes that 'modern' products are better than 'traditional' or 'natural', but it is no use. So far, I have managed not to burst into a lecture, though I did in another village when I heard the shockingly ignorant views of a local teenager on the causes of AIDS, and how to prevent it. I felt it was my moral duty.

Talking of babies, congratulations to C and S on the arrival of M!!

2006-12-23T15:53:00.000-04:00

Warning: This blog contains infantile humour and references to animal cruelty.

After weeks of failures, when I arrived late on the scene to find only blood and feathers, I finally saw my first cockfight, an important part of rural Dominican life.

I wanted to see a cockfight partly because of the brilliant essay on Balinese cockfighting by Clifford Geertz (anthropology great of the 60s/70s), where he finally got accepted into his village after months of trying when he got busted by the police attending an illegal cockfight, but mainly I was driven by curiosity. I didn’t really need to attend a cockfight to become accepted in the village, as my fast spreading reputation regarding my inability to dance even whilst sober sorted that out - people are telling me all sorts of wonderful secrets after only a week of knowing me.

The first fight I saw was one on a little side path off the village road, rather than one at the cockfighting arena (i.e. shack) down the road. Such fights are used either to train novice cocks so they are ready to fight on the main stage, or to fight the weaker chickens who can’t handle the fiercer competition at the arena. Despite this being the second division of cockfighting, the handful of observers still got pretty excited by the whole thing.

It starts with two people with their cocks in hand, stroking them and eying up each others’ for size. They then set them on the ground and let them loose for a few seconds only, to see that both are in the mood for fighting and won’t run away. Regulation spurs are fitted, a designated timekeeper is set, and the chickens are let loose. I am not sure I understand the exact rules, but it is not just a simple matter of two chickens pecking and scratching each other to death. At the arena, where fights are every Sunday afternoon, the rules are stricter and written into Dominican law – there are even weight categories like in boxing, though there are perhaps more featherweight and Bantamweight categories in cockfighting.

The fight was a lot less spectacular than I expected. Cocks stare at each other for a few seconds before a flurry of wings as they peck at each other’s heads, slash each other with the spurs, or pin the other down with their wing to make pecking or slashing easier. The occasional feather or drop of blood splashes around, and after twelve minutes, a winner was declared. The proud victor was cleaned and petted by its owner, whilst the loser was dispatched for soup. Apparently it makes a particularly rich soup, the adrenaline released in the fight giving a distinct flavour to the meat.

Cockfighting is a crucial part of Dominican rural life, and an area that I am yet to scratch the surface of. The champion cock breeder in the village is an eighty two year old man, who is rarely seen without a cock in hand, and who mumbling to me how cockfighting is a reminder of life, struggle and death that is important to him in his old age. Certainly the cockfighting culture is much more than a simple exercise in sadism that it might be portrayed as. A good cock is described as being “brave” rather than strong, and there is great admiration for the many cocks who refuse to give up and fight vigorously to the very last.

After living a year in Spain, I began to understand that bullfighting is more of a theatrical exposition on death, life and skill, rather than a sport or pastime. Although cockfighting doesn’t contain the same level of theatre, perhaps because it is a working class rather than upper class pursuit, it is still a culture of death, life and struggle. Having watched a fight, I am not sure if I love or hate cockfighting – I did not get as wound up in the drama as Dominicans did, but nor was I totally disgusted with the violence on show. Perhaps my ambivalence is because I understand enough to realise that it is not common sadism, but not enough to know what and how much it means to people here.

2006-12-20T08:42:00.000-04:00

One of the techniques that I am using in the field is to try and construct family trees for all the families in the village. This should give me insights into various loyalties, land ownership issues and like. However, the results have been rather fascinating for entirely different reasons.

When I have been making enquiries about relationships here, everyone keeps telling me "we are all family here", and they are certainly not lying. The easiest way I can put it is that it is a 'limited' gene pool. Everyone seems to marry their cousins and the family trees are soon resembling plates of spagetti, with links in places which are as surprising as their are worrying. Unfortunately, one does not have to look closely to see that this lack of genetic diversity has had some clear effects on some individuals.

Despite my community being a stereotypical mountain village, I am rapidly becoming more certain that I prefer being with these people than with your average Santo Domingo resident. I can never do an interview or even walk past a house without being invited in for a cup of coffee and a blether, and often I get given a plate of rice and beans during any interviews I do at middday, without even being asked if I am hungry. It takes me so long to do the tasks that I set out for myself each day, simply because I get distracted by another unplanned conversation. I rarely complain because these almost always give me some more information on life in the village, revealing a previously hidden aspect to life in this close community.

The village is strung out along the road, with my shack being at the extreme of one end (technically in the next village, but they forgive me for that), and the other end of the road is 3km away. Despite this being a relatively short distance, I find myself using my motorbike to go to meetings at the other end of the village, simply because I know from experience that if I go by foot I will probably not make it, as I will be distracted and delayed by another cup of distressingly sweet coffee.

I did go to the Shakira concert last night, which was an excellent show, but my blood pressure is too high to tell you about it, following the disgustingly inconsiderate behaviour by spoilt middle class Santo Domingo brats. As my friend commented "it was a great concert, but it was a shame it was in a stadium full of the rudest people on the planet". The best moment was when Shakira informed the stadium how much she loved being in Santo Domingo, just as divine comedy intervention chose that moment for the power to go out - "ah, we have a problemita", she commented. How true, how true.

2006-12-19T12:25:00.000-04:00

In the course of my work, I have have either been inside a few embassies here, or walked past them. The character of the embassies is very much in keeping with the character of the nations themselves.

For example, the American embassy is a big sprawling complex covering several blocks of middle class Gascue barrio. The embassy, the consulate and the international aid buildings are all surrounded by three metre high concrete anti-car bomb walls, policed by severe looking chaps with big guns. They recently staged a three hour unannounced "anti-terrorism" excercise, waking up middle class slumberers at 6 AM on a saturday with armed troops running around, blocked streets, smoke bombs and the like. I know there is an anti-yanquista movement here, but they are a bunch of students who couldn't possibly pose a security threat.

I recently interviewed a senior official at the international aid branch of the embassy. It literally took me half an hour to get through security, they confiscated my passport, my laptop (after taking down the 27 digit serial number, for some reason), my mobile phone, and misteriously my pencil case, which James Bond style actually doubled as a high explosive anti-tank device. So just as well the bored security man took that off me. I had to pass through the metal detector twice (once would normally been enough, but theyhad forgotten to switch it on, so I had to do it again). I then passed through into the embassy to meet my interviewee, who then informed me that it was a bit stuffy inside and he would prefer it if we went across the road and sat in the park to have our chat. I gave the security man a dirty look as we walked past into the park, with its tweeting birds and members of the Caribbean branch of al-Qaeda behind every tree. Last week I ran into members of his family in the mountains where they were having a weekend camping. Makes a mockery of the situation.

The French embassy, like the Italian, Mexican, and Trinidad and Tobaggon representations, is house in a grand colonial mansion. It is an elegant, refined edifice that once was owned by Hernan Cortes before he went conquering Mexico and looking for El Dorado. It may also have been the house of Ponce de Leon, before he off to Florida to find the fountain of youth - it was unsuccesful as he died of typhoid in the first few months of his trip. Whatever he drank, it wasn't the fountain of youth. I think the French embassy has been there ever since, and it exudes a gallic air of snobbery.

The British embassy, for some unkown reason, is in the seventh floor of a decrepit insurance company in a depressing shopping district. It is truly a half-arsed attempt. There is no sign at street level to inform you outside the representation of Her Britannic Majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and you have to take the lift as the stairs have fallen down. Once you get into the building, security is minimal - the job of the security guard is merely to politely request, if you don't mind, to do something that goes against every part of the Dominican psyche, and turn off your mobile phone and wait your turn in the queue. How marvelously British.

I forgave their choice of location after that, and was only slightly disappointed not to be offered tea and crumpets.

2006-12-18T19:51:00.000-04:00

I have been re-reading for the umpteenth time James Scott's classic study of social change in Malaysia, the key influence on my own research, and there is a small detail that made me laugh. Talking about a rice farming community in the late 70's, he describes the social, economic and political importance of peasant ownership of Honda 70 motorbikes. His book contains a picture of one of these, laden down with sacks of rice, and barring a few Cristo Viene (Jesus is coming) stickers and pictures of la Virgen, it is the exact double of my own Honda 70. It is amusing that two studies nearly thirty years apart on very similar topics in different parts of the world should use the same motorbike.

In case I haven't told you, I have christened my bike in tribute to Che Guevara's bike in The Motorcycle Diaries: His was called El Poderoso (the mighty one), and mine is now known as La Flaquita (the weakling). She has certainly been struggling to get up the main road that travels into the mountains where I live, which is four thousand vertical feet of hairpins and potholes.
It is a veritable lesson in tropical biogeography that would delight old Professor Furley. At the start, as you climb out of the rice and tobacco growing plain of the Cibao, the roadside trees are dominated by cocoa small holdings, with red and yellow cocoa bean pods hanging from the branches. Further up and the smallholdings get too cold for cocoa, and turn to coffee, grown in the shade of many trees that I know neither the spanish or english names for. The slopes are very steep and very green, different shades but always at about 50 degrees to the horizontal. As you rise, you do so along with the air brought in from the Atlantic, which cools as it rises, leaving an almost permanent blanket of cloud at around 3000 feet. This is too cold and wet for coffee and other cultivars, so are dominated by Magnolia, with epiphytes growing up on the branches. This is prime territory for orchids, and there are some species that are only found on this particular slope. Further up and the air gets truly soggy, so that the top of the pass is populated by tree ferns. I notice the vegetation more on the way up, as I crawl up at walking pace, the engine squealing away. On the way down, I am too busy looking at hairpins and potholes to notice the trees. Just at the very apex is a shrine to la Virgen, and people either stop to light a candle or cross themselves as they pass it. This is either to give thanks to their engine for putting up with climb or to ask for divine protection before diving down the descent.

I live just in the lee of this pass, so while not quite as cold and wet, I am still woken up in the mornings by the sound of rain on my corrigated iron roof, to see my breath in the air. It takes a few cups of coffee before I remind myself that I am in the Caribbean.

2006-12-05T20:11:00.000-04:00

I have been trying to resist writing about Santo Domingo foot fashion, but I find the shoes here so fascinating that I just have to describe them before I head out of reach of my wireless internet connection.

Women here seem averse to wearing anything that doesn't have at least a three inch heel. Indeed they prefer it to be five inches, and platform. The shoes must not be simple brown or black, but must be a bright colour - flourescent green appears to be 'in' this season. A Santo Domingo lady chooses her clothing by starting at the feet, and working up, making sure everything is matching. Even Joan Collins couldn't out-powerdress these girls. The heels should be as loud as possible, so that not only do you tower out from the crowd on six inch height extending stilletos, but everyone will hear you coming as you clack-clack-clack along.

I hear that the fashion for flatform and high heels dates back to Rennaiscence Venice, where what was a practical measure to avoid getting wet feet on the flooded cobbles of St Marks became a way to get one over the rest of the society girls. The competition to have the highest platform shoes grew to such a height that they topped thirty eight inches, and having such an extended centre of gravity, the women had to walk with a servant on either side to support them as they waddled along. It was all worth it, as not only did you show that you were rich enough to buy ridiculous high heels and to have two servants to help you, but it showed that you were so separated from having to earn a living through work that you could strap on such ridiculous footwear as you pop out to buy a pint of milk and the paper. Santo Domingo women always make sure they are wearing innappropriate footwear when pushing the supermarket trolley.

You must bear in mind that Santo Domingo's streets are irregular, full of potholes, broken pavements, dogs, street vendors and other inconveniences. I struggle to walk aroun in my oh-so-sensible trainers, yet these ladies seem to manage fine. They get in and out of public transport wearing them, althought they do it subtly so that people don't notice that they are dismounting a guagua rather than a yipeta. It appears that the only thing worse for ones social standing than not being in ridiculous footwear is to fall over in heels. It has made me wonder if there is a kind of Darwinian process at play, whereby through natural selection Dominican women have developed a type of femur that can only function if supported by a towering heel, rather than flats. I have extended this idea, and decided that Dominican women who fall over in heels are treated like racehorses who fall and break their legs - they are shot and boiled down for glue.

Dominican men are no means less fascinating. All men, no matter what their position, must have immaculate black shoes. Even the people who I know struggle to pay the bills will always leave the house in polished black shoes. The shoes may be full of holes, the sole worn out, but they will be so polished that you can see your reflection. This is all the more surprising when you consider how dusty Santo Domingo streets are when the weather is dry, and how muddy they are when it rains. Providing a mobile service in maintaining one's mirrorlike lustre to one's shoes is the small army of shoe shine boys. These guys run around the city with an empty 5 litre oil can and a small box contain the tools of the trade. For a few pesos they will sit on the oil can with your foot up on the box, and restore the glossy finish with professionalism and care. Budding little capitalists.

I get away with my practical, dependable, dust coloured trainers because I am a gringo, and therefore am not expected to dress decently. God forbid that I would wear flipflops though.

2006-12-05T19:43:00.000-04:00

Today will be my last day in the city for a few weeks. I have got to the stage where my interviews are giving me diminishing returns, my list of potential interviewees is running out, and I feel that I am starting to succomb to what seasoned researchers call 'interview addiction' . This is the desire to do 'just one more interview', which of course is neither the last one nor is it productive. The researcher should start the next stage, either a different technique or analysis of the results. I know for certain that in my case, and I suspect in many other cases too, this is an affliction that results not from an enjoyment of doing interviews (they are tortuous), but rather a procrastination tool for delaying the next stage. A general hatred is the transcribing, the translation of texts from voices on a tape recorder to a written transcript of the conversation. It is dull, vastly time consuming, and I particularly despise it because I have a deep phobia about hearing my own voice (do I really sound like that?). It also makes me realise that I was asking the wrong questions, using poor grammar, getting verb tenses muddled, and generally looking like an incompetent adolescent in front of senior government officials, rather than the serious adult researcher that I aim to be. In my case, it is also delaying the trip out to the mountains.

Just to put you in the picture, I have spent five weeks working in a huge, bustly, polluted, noisy, 24 hour, sociable city, living in a great apartment with somebody (an American) who I can relate to when I need to be less Dominican, but who knows such a huge amount about the culture here that they have a source of many a great pointer. I have also had wireless internet access, permanent mobile phone coverage, reasonable electricity supply and a water supply that only works half the time, but at least I know which half it will or won't work. I will move from this to a tiny shack in a small mountain village with a few hours a day of unpredictable electricity, no running water, a half hour journey to pick up mobile phone coverage and important text messages, no water and a bunch of campesinos who I am sure will be welcoming and friendly, but who occupy a different world from myself. In a strange way, I feel that Santo Domingo is far closer to my world in the UK than it is to the mountains, even though the geographical distance is 100 miles rather than 8,000.

However, I know that I have lots of work to do up there, and that will keep me too busy to feel isolated, and that I need to be back in Santo Domingo on the 19th for the most important meeting of this trip:

I am going to a concert featuring Columbia's second most intoxicating export, Shakira. And I can't wait.

2006-12-04T10:39:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting poster that you see all over the place. I am sure I don't need to explain what this little pill supposedly does. The ubiquity of it is what surprises me, and they sponsor one of the major baseball teams - all those muscly sportsmen with the name of a "male help" pill on their backs.

I am a bit confused over this in a number of ways. Firstly the pill is called "La Pela", and my understanding of the word pela is that it is a slang term for a beating - "I am going to give you a 'pela'" means I am going to thump you. Quite why this is has become a name for a small blue pill is beyond me, though I am sure some feminist discourse analyst could spend many a happy year analysing it.

The link with baseball is also amuses me. There is a rival brand that makes a great deal about how it is endorsed by none other than David "Big Pappi" Ortiz, a major league batsman. Unfortunately, the nickname is not my invention, but on the poster is actually in a larger font than his first or last name. Their publicity has an interesting picture of "Big Pappi"; a huge, grinning, muscly baseballer gripping a baseball bat in a way that clearly shows he is compensating for something. I don't think the concept of male compensation is present in Dominican culture if all the blue pill manufacturers endorse big muscly sportsmen who swing bats. Either that or they have highly developed sense of irony, which I doubt.

Apparently these endorsements are worthwhile, as these pills are incrediably popular. You have young men popping these pills like crazy (surely young men are the people in least need of such artificial stimulants, or maybe I should ask their girlfriends. Though this sort of person probably doesn't have one). It has become a bit of a health risk as it is tampering with blood pressure.

The most surprising bit is that people here will openly talk about how they use them. The DR is an incrediably macho society, and no bloke ever wants to show their weakness here, least of all in the trouser department, yet that is not how it seen here. Rather it is seen as a point of pride that you have so many girlfriends that you need help in keeping them happy. Though I don't see why you couldn't just try helping them go shoe shopping......

Anyway, I think the DR is a long way from metrosexuality. I'll put my plans for a male moisturiser import business on hold.

2006-12-02T11:33:00.000-04:00

I am coming to the end of this stage of work in the city, and so I am reflecting on my experiences of the interviews and meetings of the last five weeks or so. I have been having meetings in a number of places: various government ministries, NGOs of all hues, international aid agencies, embassies and with individuals. One of the most striking things is that all these people appear to live in different time zones, depending on their occupation.

For example, meeting Dominican civil servants (who are never particularly civil) are people who work very much on la hora Dominicana (Dominican time). I arranged a meeting with someone at the environment ministry, scheduled it for 10 AM. I arrived at 9:55, all prepared and ready, only for the interviewee to turn up at 11:45, without so much as an apology for being late. I soon became used to Dominican time, and incorporated it into my working day. It is perfectly reasonable here to schedule a meeting a full hour before when you want it, knowing that people will generally turn up around an hour late. Most Dominicans appear to live in a time zone about 1 hour behind GMT (Gringo Mean Time). I have a suspicion that the same social trend observed in the lecture I went to applies here - that the later you turn up, and the more disdain that you give to people who expect you to turn up on time or at least apologise for being late, the greater the sense of superiority and importance that you exude. Perhaps a bunch of anthropologists would get excited by the social power things, and would start talking about Bordieau and such like, but anthropologists are a funny breed, and have a unpleasant tendancy to do things like that.

The problem with this is that I have a lot of meetings with foreigners and with Dominicans working at foriegn NGOs and aid agencies. In the DR, if you want someone to turn up within about half an hour of the scheduled time, you say a la hora Americana - American time. My own practice when meeting Dominicans who work for foreign organisations is to think that they have become half-gringoed, and so I expect them to turn up 40 minutes late. With foreigners who live here, I make a calculation on how long they have lived here, and how aplatanado they have become. For someone new to the country, I expect them on time, but for someone who has lived here for ten years, I expect them to be half an hour late.

Yesterday, I suddenly had to think in European time. I had a 10AM meeting with a German aid agency. I made sure I turned up at 9:55, and lo and behold, my German interviewee walked through the meeting room door at 9:59:59. He may have lived here for years, but there is something in the German psyche that prevents them from being aplatanado with regards to time keeping, no matter how long they may have lived here. I wonder how frustrated he must be with Dominican time keeping.

To my dilemna: I have scheduled a meeting for 9AM on sunday morning with an academic. I know that the interviewee is a foreigner, but has lived here for long enough to become semi-aplatanado. She is an academic (a geographer!!!!), and works for the state university here. Therefore my calculation as to what time I should actually turn up at is thus:
9AM sunday morning
-add 30 mins for being a sunday morning
-take away 10 mins for being a foreigner (she is French)
-add 30 mins for being semi-aplatanado
-add 15 mins for being an academic
-add 30 mins for being a state employee
I therefore calculate that I should turn up at 10:35. Sounds perfectly reasonable. I will let you know later how accurate this was, or whether she answered the door in her dressing gown.

I think I should create a website that does calculations like this, to work out the exact delay between the time-keeping of different Dominicans and Gringo Mean Time.

2006-12-01T19:42:00.000-04:00

I am suddenly realising that I am becoming "aplatanado", mainly because I am now unable to eat a meal without using 20 serviettes. To understand what this means, see Chiri's blog entry on the subject.

What 'aplatanado' means

2006-12-01T15:34:00.000-04:00

There has been a slight delay in getting this post up, as I have been out in the mountains scouting out my field site. I now have a place to stay (a hut at the back of the village store), and a mode of transport - a Honda 70cc motorbike, truly the workhorse of the Dominican Republic campo! Anthropologists take note - George is now entering the participant observation phase, and truly living the life of a campesino. There are a few things that I need to sort out; a mechanic is giving it a look over, and I need to pimp my ride Dominican style. This means that in addition to the "christ is coming" I have on the front, I need to pop into a botanica (voodoo supplies shop) and buy some stickers of La Virgin de la Altagracia, a few St Christophers (patron saint of travellers), some don't-break-down spray, and a tube of go-faster ointment. The Honda 70 has a power output of about the equivalent of a hairdryer, but that doesn't stop it from being an essential part of rural life.

Looking at the license documents and ownership papers, there are few interesting sub-clauses, here reproduced;

- All journeys that are longer than 20 yards must be taken on a motorcycle. If you own a motorcycle, it is undignified to use your feet for anything other than the gear shift and the brake.
- Your horn must be used on the following occasions; approaching a junction, overtaking, undertaking, when there are children/chickens/any other detritus in the road, when passing a vaguely attractive female, when people are trying to get to sleep, all other times. The horn is more important for your safety and wellbeing than your brakes - it is used more and should be serviced more regularly.
-In the interests of public wellbeing, your engine should be tuned so that it is as loud and high pitched as possible. Please visit a mechanic if it is not harming the navigation abilities of all bats in a 20 mile radius.
-If possible, avoid making any journeys alone that can't be made with your wife, three children, a propane tank, two chickens, a live goat and a sack of rice on the back.
-When not making journeys, you and your motorcycle should be parked outside the colmado, revving your engine and showing the world you are a man with a bike.

I notice that I have offended people (Chirimoya and friends) with my comments about Dominican cooking and cuisine. I stand by my comments, and invite them to prove me wrong, by having me round and cooking me a great dinner. Over to you.

2006-11-25T17:12:00.000-04:00

Here are a list of countries - Mexico, India (southern bit), Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Jamaica. What they have in common is that they all at the same latitude as the Dominican Republic, and all have similar climates - at sea level that is. The advantage the Dominican Republic has is that its mountains go up to over 13,000 feet, and it has a number of mountain valleys with unique micro-climates. The result is that all these places grow similar crops such as rice, coconuts, mangoes and other tropical fruits. The Dominican Republic, by virtue of its high mountains, can add chocolate and coffee to these, and in the cool mountain valleys a whole number of temperate crops such as apples, potatoes, and strawberries.

The difference between these other places and the Dominican Republic is that they have developed a indentifiable cuisine that can be identified with those places, and they have developed a distinct food culture. It is quite astonishing that the Dominican Republic, with its productive seas, tropical lowlands and cool mountains, and its history of mixing Spanish and French colonial legacies with West African slave histories and a smattering of indigenous influences, has spectacularly failed to develop a national cuisine that you would want to eat.

Much is made in places like France, Spain and Italy about how many of the classic great dishes, like Paella, Pizza, and Cassoulet are essential poor peoples dishes. They take cheap, locally available ingredients and add some innovation and pride to produce something magical. The array of cheap, locally ingredients here is amazing. I was passing through the market today, and alongside the onions, potatoes and apples from the mountain valleys were passion fruit, papaya, limes, plantain, and lots of other things that I don't know the english word for. I even had my first taste of raw cocoa bean straight out of the pod - a waxy texture, the flavour was dry, very bitter, but intense, fruity and definately chocolately.

The bit crucial ingredient missing from Dominican cuisine is care and enthusiasm. Despite the abundance of potential flavours, or because they have been spoiled by it, Dominicans seem to just view food as calories, rather than something to be enjoyed. All the many comedors I have been eating in seem to produce the same food - rice, beans, and chicken (fried or boiled), sometimes accompanied by the flavour-vacuum that is plantain. There is no attempt to be different, innovate, become known for producing a dish that is different or better than all the other comedors in the area. It is often quite greasy, which is OK because it lowers the potential for food poisoning - any bacteria that survived being immersed in hot oil will be killed by cholestorol poisoning. There is no sensitivity or delicacy, everything is boiled or fried until it has given up any potential for flavour or nutrition. Up market establishments are rarely better, they just have air conditioning rather than clackety fans, but the food is equally bland. It is frighteningly depressing, if it wasn't for stimulation from the roadside fruit sellers my tastebuds would have killed themselves long ago out of boredom. I find it amazing that countries such as France can breed thousands of types of types of beans, with unique flavours and textures, yet the Dominicans cannot be bothered to go past two - they probably think that it is already excessive.

This is in the city, I will soon move and live up in the mountains, where there is no tropical fruit, and I will be away from the valleys that grow temperate fruit. Where I will be going they grow coffee and some spices such as nutmeg and cinammon, but because the roads are bad, they can only import dried, non-perishable goods such as rice and beans - no tropical fruit! That is ok, I here you say, as you will be surrounded by spice production and some of the world's finest coffee, but unfortutely Dominicans ruin good coffee by saturating it with sugar until it is so sweet your teeth go numb, whilst the spices seem never to make the journey from the tree into the cooking pot. Rice and beans it is for me.

This has been by far the second most depressing thing about field work (la novia ausenta being number one) and it is driving me mad. If only the Dominicans could take some sort of pride in their food, think about how to cook and make the most of what they have, sensitively coax and cajole flavour into their dishes, not crudely bash it out. If only they could change their food culture towards one that produces a cuisine, like India, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Mexico, it will be a far nicer place to live. So far all it has made me do is vow to go somewhere else for fieldwork next time.

2006-11-23T21:55:00.000-04:00

Being an academic temporarily separated from the comfy world of abstract debates in seminars, I jumped at the chance to go to a lecture of leading sociologist of information Manuel Castells, held at the central bank. Although a rather excellent lecture from a great theorist, I learned more about the Dominican political class through participant observation than I learned about globalisation, development and the information society. The social anthropology on show was far more evident than the sociology being discussed. It was fascinating. Very similar to the displays of territoriality of silverback gorillas, or more aptly, peacocks.

It soon became rapidly clear that people had turned up not because they were interested in hearing the thoughts of a leading intellectual, but because to maintain their position in the political class they had to be seen to be in attendance. First off, entering the auditorium I noticed that I was virtually the only person not wearing a suit, which means that there were very few academics in attendance, as we would never dream of dignifying a visiting acadmic by making the effort to wear a suit and tie. It would give them too great a sense of self-importance, not good in our egotistic game. Having said that, perhaps it is different here, as Dominicans put an extraordinary effort into presentation - I am convinced that one of their biggest imports is shoe polish. How they maintain a mirror-like surface on black leather whilst living in a dirty, dusty, muddy city is beyound me. I noticed the relation between one's position in multi-stratered Dominican aristocracy and where one parks one's 4*4 (or yipeta as they are known), but this is a topic akin to heraldic shields, and will be explored at a later point.

Anyway, I tried to take my seat, I was asked by a steward which institution I was affiliated. I rose up, puffed out my chest at a the chance to show I was an international intellectual and informed her that I was from the University of Manchester, England, dontchaknow? I was was promptly informed that I could not sit in the front five (half empty) rows, and must sit towards the back of the auditorium. Imagine a lecture in the UK having reserved seating, the outrage there would be. Mind you, the situation would be the reverse, as everyone sits at the back so that they could get a quick exit before the Q and A. Here it is different, it is a clear mark of social status, the proximity to the front. Mere academics are not rated as wanted guests at a lecture by a Professor of Sociology, and must sit several rows behind the government officials, leading businessmen and bizarrely a four star general resplendant in ceremonial uniform. They had to be seen to be in attendance.

Of course, they wouldn't do something as humble as listening to the speaker, they had important things to do, mainly making sure that people notice them. Within seconds of Manuel Castells starting, the first mobile phone sounded. Normally in the UK this prompt a cutting remark from the chairperson, or at the very least a double-checking of pockets and handbags to ensure that you wouldn't be the next victim of a barrage of dissaproving tutting. Here, inaction was the policy and therefore the talk was punctuated every thirty seconds by another CrazyFrog. If they were not letting the phones ring, or even worse, answering them, the audience members took the opportunity to chat the people sat around them. Not a subtle whisper to the person sat adjacent, but a full conversation with your friend three rows back.

The anthropology in this is simple. The social credit gained from people looking at you whilst you talk on the latest mobile phone or chat to somebody, is far greater than any potential social credit lost through interrupting one of the world's leading intellectuals. In fact, the more distinguished the speaker is, the more likely it is that they are interrupted by some trivial phone conversation, as what better way of asserting that you are more important than someone than by interrupting their lecture. The more trivial the interruption, and the more eminent the speaker, the more social status gained. Phone etiquette, such as the totalitarian response that I employ in my classes (if one of my students' phone rings, I answer it, normally with an obscenity), is a completely alien culture here.

The actual lecture that was the distant backdrop to this battle for social supremacy was extremely good. Castells based his lecture on Latin America as a whole, claiming ignorance of the details of the Dominican development experience, and as result I don't know if he appreciates how much he insulted the way of thinking of those present. Firstly he described as outrageous the fact that the DR has had the fastest growing economy in Latin America as well as the fastest growing inequality, and he did so to an audience that had arrived in brand new yipetas, were clearly the ruling elite of the country, and had no intention of addressing the fact that they were the root cause of inequality. Secondly, he stated that the information economy came from lots of failed venture capital in micro-companies that were financed by a few successful startups, to an audience of people who maintain their economic power by stamping on the fingers below (like any academic, I will substantiate this with references, but at a later date). And thirdly, he stated that development in the information age comes from state investment in the things that facilitate increase productivity, rather than grandiose development schemes. This in a country that has cut the education budget to finance a fantastically expensive and probably unworkable Metro system. But of course, a Metro system will always win over investments in education, because it leaves a presidential legacy of Development, Modernity, Progress, Civilisation and turning the DR into a carbon copy of New York.

Of course, the fascinating bit came at the questions. The chair explicitly banned people from making long protacted points about their own perspective in the guise of a question. Imagine trying to do that at an academic conference - there would be lynching! However, although I didn't miss the egotripping, the questions betrayed a lamentable Dominican trait, which is a lack of critical thinking. The questions were simple, boring and largely irrelevant, not challenging any of the ideas discussed, or asking certain points to be expanded upon. I would have lobbed an incisive googly, but sitting in row six I wasn't allowed. An academic here described to me how there isn't the culture in the DR that there is in the rest of Latin America of critical intellectuals, for the simple reason that Dominicans can't take criticism. Here people get offended and will never speak to you again if you even attempt to constructively criticise them, and will kill your pets in return for a mild reproach. Social standing is everything, and woe betide he who is seen to be undermining it. The only way you can make progress is to say "well, you know, perhaps if I was in your shoes, but of course you know best, but perhaps I would consider...."

If people are not prepared to ask the questions, is it little wonder that this country has not provided any answers.

2006-11-22T11:51:00.000-04:00

Stop the press. I have found out the source of all that is going wrong with the Dominican Republic. The poverty, illiteracy, general malaise. Never mind the IMF aiming to radically restructure the economy, wacking up sales tax that will hit the poorest. Never mind all the people who try to blame everything on Haiti and Haitian immigrants. Never mind all the rampant corruption and the stagnating effect of a strongly partisan political culture. The cause of the Dominican Republics ills is simple:

There is only one person in the country with a PhD in Geography.

Simple.
And he got it from a Spanish university. The president should stop pouring money into the hole in the ground that is the Santo Domingo metro system and invest in postgraduate geographers. I know of at least two Dominicans with Anthopology PhDs, so this begs the question of how a country is to move forward where not only there are virtually no geographers, but also where they are outnumbered by anthropologists. And that is before I even get started on the number of economists.

Mr President, if you are wondering why the country has all of its problems, despite the intense analysis by economists, then it is precisely because you are asking economists and not geographers. If the answer is not 'geography' then you are asking the wrong question. You should do a regression analysis with extreme prejudice on the economists (i.e. throw them to the crocodiles, just as one of your predecessors did with his political opponents), and replace them with geographers. Soon life will be better, everything will work, and little children will run in the sunshine skipping and singing about space and place.

Rant over.
At least this explains why I get looked at funny when I tell people I am a geographer

2006-11-21T20:47:00.000-04:00

I took a wrong turning the other day, and it is all to do with the Dominican Republic's immature national identity.

The last few weeks I have been doing lots of interviews in government offices, which seem to be in the stranges places - to get to the national parks service office you have to get the guagua to a suburb that consists of a mix of crumbling apartments, informal housing (slum) and large factories, walk up a sidestreet, up a path past some dead dogs, and through a hole in the wall. It took me ages to find it. Some ministries are big imposing buildings, set back from the road through large archways, but others are up random alleyways in middle class suburbs. I have been buzzing all over the city, and am getting good at asking for directions (and another thing, Dominican house numbers are completely illogical - I was going to number 25, which turned out to be 300 metres up the street from number 27, right next to 141 and opposite number 8. Confusing and very frustrating).

Anyway, the problem is that about 160 years ago, during a time when the Haitians occupied the Dominican Republic, on the 27 of February, the trinitaria of Duarte, Mella and Sanchez, with the help of rich landowners and the catholic church, mounted a revolution, won independencia and kicked out the Haitians. As Dominican national identity is in a vast part determined as not being Haitian, they have developed an almost fascist obsession with the trinitaria, in particular Duarte. All the coins have his image, the highest mountain is called Pico Duarte, there is a bust of him in every school, most public buildings and every town square. There exists a Instituto Duartino, to promote patriotism in society. This obsession has led to a distinct lack of imagination in street names. In Santo Domingo there is a least one Calle (street) Duarte, Avenida (avenue) Duarte, Autopista (motorway) Duarte, Plaza (square) Duarte, and I am convinced there might be more than one of each. Added to the number of addresses involving Trinitaria, Mella, Sanchez, Independencia, and 27 de Febrero, and it is easy to get lost. If someone tells you to go to the corner of Independencia and Duarte, this could mean any number of places in the city. It has confused me more than once.

If someone who you don't like calls you up and wants to meet, just tell them that you will meet them at the statue of Duarte, on the corner of Independencia and Trinitaria.

Of course, I could use this opportunity to expand on Dominican national identity, but I am lost and trying to find my way home.

2006-11-19T15:30:00.000-04:00

The Dominican drinking session generally takes place on a street corner. Every street has its colmado, a small shop that sells all your daily needs, but which round here seem to make most money from the sale of alcohol. The more enterprising ones have invested in sets of plastic chairs, lights strung outside and a stereo, and people pass their evenings sitting outside, drinking, chatting and listening to music. One of my favourites is in a small plaza in the Colonial Zone, (Parque Duarte if you are ever in town) - the guys who run it have got a great reputation. At the moment, all the trees in the square are decorated with fairy lights, and in a bizarre touch they have strung up lots of empty beer bottles from the trees as substitute christmas baubles - surreal but pretty. They have a loud stereo but play only the best merengue and bachata hits, and have set up about 50 plastic chairs in addition to the park benches, and some nights you struggle to find somewhere to sit. Recently they have taken things to a new level by setting off fireworks at weekends at 9pm to announce the start of "happy hour". The crowd is great - arty types, always open to chat to a random stranger. The plaza also has a reputation for attracting the strange, I was informed today that until recently there was a man living up one of the trees. Every night there is a marathon playing of Conga drums with accompanying singing. This drumming and singing is associated with the santeria (Dominican Voodoo) festivals, and the African roots in the rythms and call-and-response singing is clear.

The standard drink is a Presidente, the local half-decent brew. The company also makes a second beer called Bohemia, which is also OK. The third beer available is Brahma, a brazilian beer that tastes like meado de gato. Otherwise groups go for a cuba libre servicio, which consists of a bunch of plastic cups, a bucket of ice, two cokes and a bottle of rum. Admittedly the high sugar content is about as intoxicating as the alcohol, but when in Rome.....

This weekend, we followed this up with a trip to one of the better colonial zone bars. There are a few too-cool-for-school yuppie bars, the type with water features in the window and aggressive air conditioning, who would rather serve rubbish imported Johnnie Walker than good local rum. However, next door to one of these is a great establishment called El Sarten, (in Hostos, if you are ever in town), which is a tiny bar that serves cold beer, but that plays amazing old style Son. Many people, because of Buena Vista Social Club, associate this Latin Swing with Cuba, but its origins are as Dominican as they Cuban. This tiny bar is always jam packed, but there are still plenty people dancing, young folk dancing with 80 year old men who still bust some great moves. The standard of the dancing is amazing, until I was forced to get up and give it a go. I tried my best, nobody cared that I didn't have the natural fluency and style of the Dominicans, and was told "Oh well, give it a bit of time and you'll get it eventually"

The Cuba libre servicio dampened the pain somewhat.

2006-11-19T10:36:00.000-04:00

Looks like I am not missing much in the UK, as my friend Nicky is now the
41st most elegible woman in Scotland

And that is official!

2006-11-17T20:41:00.000-04:00

These fruteros are the guys who save me from scurvy. You find them on loads of street corners, selling three bananas, half a papaya or pineapple (ready peeled and in a little bag so you don't drip everywhere) or even a mango, each for about 18p. Marvelous. I get my five a day within 100 yards of the door. And they are delicious.

They are basically wheelbarrow with a bike attached, so if business is slow, they pedal off elsewhere. You frequently see these guys pedalling 30kgs of tropical fruit down a 6 lane highway. Note the high-tech cooling and shading sytem, and the cutting edge brake.

2006-11-17T20:37:00.000-04:00

These are typical Publicos, though they are somewhat undercrowded

2006-11-17T10:37:00.000-04:00

Here are three stories from Latin America from the last two years
1. A few months back, the high prices charged by power companies, combined with city-wide blackouts relating to poor infrastructure investment led to demonstrations and riots. The police then shot 7 unarmed protestors dead.
2. Last year there was a prison riot in an overcrowded jail. During this a fire broke out, and 140 prisoners burnt to death.
3. A captain in the army was arrested, on the request of the US, on drugs charges. He was caught with 1,380kg (that is not a typo) of pure cocaine. Because of the bribes he had been passing out, including funding local hospitals and schools with drugs money, locals tried to break him out of jail. As the army is heavily involved in the arms trade, and because he had donated large sums to the two main political parties, this man had been known about at the highest level for a long time, but no one did anything until the US forced them to.

Now, if story 1 had been Bolivia, story 2 had been Brazil, and story 3 had been Colombia, then the BBC and the major newspapers would have mentioned it, if not covered it in detail.

All three occured in the last 2 years in the Dominican Republic

There seems to be a complete blackout of reporting of Dominican Republic stories. Numbers 1 and 3 weren't even mentioned on the BBC website, and number 2 had only a short story, half of which was taken up by references to smaller prison riots and fires in Brazil that killed fewer people. There is a great deal of fascinating stuff going on here, more interesting than much of Latin America, but the DR just isn't on people's radar. There isn't an image in Europe of what the DR looks like, other than a tourist destination, so it is difficult to communicate. We all have multifaceted images of Brazil, combining football, good looking women, beaches, the Amazon, favela slum-towns, violence etc. Our image of it is such that we can cope with top footballers and slum-town violence coming out of the same country, but with the DR it is a cheap holiday destination with all inclusive resorts, and we don't know much more about it. The European media couldn't manage to talk about rampant army-run drugs trafficking in a country rarely mentioned outside of a Thomas Cook brochure.

I reckon most people who go on holiday to the DR from the UK couldn't point it out on a map, and that is sad, because it is a fascinating place with lots of crazy things for geographers to get stuck into.

2006-11-16T17:12:00.000-04:00

Today I had the first taste of fieldwork blues on this trip. That is, the sensation that you don't know what you are doing, have no research to write up, are just floundering around without direction, that no-one is willing to cooperate with your research, that when you return you will be ripped to pieces for 'not getting things done', that your carefully developed plans are being shredded, that you might as well go home and work in a bar, because that is all you are capable of.

Of course, this is linked to the secret insecurity that every PhD student has, the fear that some day they will be sitting at their desk, and the vice-chancellor, flanked by the head of deparment and supervisors, will rush in and denounce you as a useless fraud who has no right to be at the university, and has fifteen minutes to clear their desk. Every PhD student constantly has moments of self-doubt about their ability and direction of their work, but they are amplified ten times when on fieldwork, a combination of culture shock, language problems, and the shift from theoretical speculation to data collection.

Admittedly these feelings have diminished significantly as two important interview subjects have set dates to talk to me. Typical law of averages, just as soon as you are getting fed up of plodding along without getting anywhere, you find out something important.

I definately haven't reached the stage I was at during my last strech of fieldwork. Then I was pretty down about my work, and at one point resolved never to do fieldwork again. Cue sixteen months later..... The big difference is that this time I have much better ideas about what my research is about, my aims and questions are much better defined, and I am generally more prepared. Also this time I am here for much longer, so I have to accept that I am living here, and can't try to drift through it. This entails a totally different mindset to short term fieldwork, and most people tell me that paradoxically the feelings of fieldwork blues are much less acute in long periods of fieldwork, because of this different mindset.
My advice to people who want to go on field work is:

Thoroughly prepare your ideas and research questions. Don't have the attitude that you will work it out when you get there. Of course, the better defined your questions are, the more likely it is that they will change, but at least you have something to work with. Always have a plan that can fall apart.
Accept that you will be there for a long time, and bloomin' well act like you are living there
Go somewhere nice. Caribbean comes with positive recommendations from me! If the funding councils are paying you to go somewhere, you might as well go somewhere good. My friend Charlie originally proposed to do work in the Scottish Islands, thought about it, and then moved her research to the South Pacific - smart girl!

Oh well, now that I have arranged them, I'd better prepare for these meetings.

2006-11-14T18:20:00.000-04:00

How I get to work in the mornings: The joys of Santo Domingo traffic.

As I am sitting in the house, drinking the day's first cup of fine Dominican coffee, I make sure that I have enough small change to get me to wherever I am going. I live very close to the old colonial zone, about 40 yards from the square that is a bit of a transport hub, but I have been working in the periphery, about 7 or so miles away.

There are two types of public transport in Santo Domingo: Carros publicos are cars (for some unknown reason 90% of them appear to be 15 year old Toyota Carollas), with a driver licensed to run a particular route. These travel up and down the main arterial routes of the city, and will take you any distance for 10 pesos (about 20p). To stop one, you need to give the right hand signal - waving a finger means that you want one going straight on, pointing sideways means that you want one turning right, and a thumb means one turning left. Confusingly, different hand signals are used in different routes, so I always check by asking the driver if he is going my direction. This sorts out any potential problems, apart from the time when I confused the cemetary (cementerio) with the cement factory (cementera) - unless I wanted to get buried in concrete. Be warned, the official capacity of these nominally 5 seaters is in fact 7 full grown adults and any luggage that they may have. Two people share the front passanger seat (if the person on the door side is rather large, the person on the inside might find the gear stick curiously uncomfortable), and four squash on the back seat, plus driver. Not confortable in hot weather on terrible roads, especially when there are small children, who sit across people's knees. Once I was in one of these publicos with maximum adult capactiy of seven, as well as two children, one of whom had a live chicken in a cage on their lap. Today was less interesting, just someone's four foot artificial christmas tree stretched across our laps.

It should be mentioned that these generally have the windows wound down to allow the breeze to circulate, along with dust, pollutants and anything else in the air. They almost always have a cracked windscreen, held together with tape, and so many dents and scrapes they look like they have been made from scrunched up tinfoil. I was once in one of these when the bonnet was blown off by an explosion in the engine, which emitted vast plumes of acrid grey smoke. The driver charmingly apoligised for the inconvenience, and promptly refunded us as we were pushing the flaming wreck to the side of the 6 lane motorway.

Despite the discomfort endured in these journeys, I rather like them. Firstly, the people are always in a good mood, never complaining about being squashed up to a 16 stone man with bad body odour and a live chicken. They greet everyone as they get in, and chat or sing along to the radio. They even tolerate envangelical preachers, who try and save their soul on their way home from work. Secondly, the drivers manage to get some wonderful performance out of these old bangers, weaving in and out of traffic, squeezing at 40 miles per hour through gaps that leave and inch on either side, just to be as efficient as possible and process as many passengers as possible. Dominicans use the horn rather liberally, as no one ever indicates with flashing lights - they just beep to tell people they are manouvering, and then move. There are subtle differences in beeps, a dialect almost, telling people that they are turning left or right, that they are impatient in traffic jams, or they are trying to attract the attention of the attractive girl walking past.

The other type are guaguas, equally beat up minibuses, usually with the doors taken off for easy access. They work in teams of two, a driver and a cobrador, who deals with passangers. They hang out of the moving vehicle shouting out their route. Sometimes I look for shouting "feriadoceferiadoceferiadoce", meaning that they are going to the Feria, the district with government offices, before heading to Kilometro Doce, another transport hub. Other times I look for "chuchichuchichuchi" meaning that they are travelling up Avenida Winston Churchill, a collection of anglosyllables unmanagable for the hispanophone. Again these have liberal attitudes towards maximum capacities and seating arrangements. At busy intersections and areas of slow traffic, people will grab hold of the outside of the bus, standing on the wheel arches, trying to sell biscuits, water or fruit to the occupants as the bus drives along.

The great thing about this system is that with certain knowledge and suspension of ideas of personal space, one can travel from one side of the city to the other cheaply and quickly. The traffic is very bad at the moment on my main route, as there are whacking great holes in the road and closed sections, forcing drivers to take detours down side routes. These holes are tunnel excavations for the Santo Domingo metro, part of the government's drive for a Developed, Modern, Progressive Nation. Although there are many cases of egotistic grand projects in the Dominican Republic's history, this one seems like a good idea. Whether it will work, given life and electricity supply here, will have to be seen, but it should do wonders for the massive polllution on the roads. The guaguas and publicos will probably survive, and people will just squash up and socialise in the metro just as they currently do on the roads.

2006-11-13T17:56:00.000-04:00

My current problem is that reality is getting in the way of theory.

I have spend the last two and a half years working on developing hypotheses and theories about what the world should look like, and it seems determined to prove me wrong in a rather spectacular way.

Aparently, it is called "making progress in your research", although what it is going to progress to is as yet unknown. It is incrediably frustrating, as have spent months working out in minute detail what current thoughts and theories suggest the world of conservation politics should look like. And it doesn't resemble it at all. I would tell you what it does look like, but I would probably get sued. You'll have to wait for that one.

On the plus side, my work therefore has the capacity to contribute something new to academia. A physical geographer friend of mine says that you know that an article is human geography, rather than sociology or economics because it contains the phrase "this work challenges important assumptions...". It is a phrase that we do hold dear, and love to use at any opportunity, in the same way that anthropologists prefix most things with "meta", and cultural theorists use "post". I could probably do well as a cross disciplinary academic by talking about "this work challenges post-colonial meta-assumptions...." . At the more boring conferences, I am sure there are sweep stakes on how long it takes this phrase to appear in presentations (other suggestions for academic catchphrases welcome). Therefore I can assert my claim to be a human geographer as I now have not only an assumption, but a newly discovered challenge to it.

The reality of this is that the work seems incrediably frustrating. It has been my full time job for a whole year to develop ideas and write literature reviews, essays and research proposals, and for this to be (partially) torn up in a few days is depressing. If I was told when struggling over my literature review that most of it I would later reject, I might well have become more dissolutioned than I ever was. It does seem that all that reading, thinking and writing was a waste of time, but I am sure that my colleagues will remind me that it wasn't, because I am now in the position to know when I am wrong....... as Donald Rumsfeld so nearly said.

Update: Just recieved this in an email from supervisor: "Always a good thing to have as many of your expected ideas to be refuted as possible on a phd. Its a sign of thorough preparation (for without it you would not have made such detailed refutable speculations in the first place). "

Still doesn't make me feel better.

2006-11-11T22:53:00.000-04:00

Was out sitting in the park this evening, watching the world go buy, when a man came up to me, offering these two amazingly cute puppies for sale. I thanked him, but told him I wasn't hungry.

I suppose one of the most irritating things about doing fieldwork is that the food is terrible. I am currently in a rented apartment, but as the gas isn't working I can't cook. Given that I was in a hotel for the first week this means that I haven't cooked anything since arriving here, apart from making the odd tomato and coriander salad (but that doesn't really count).

I have therefore had to live almost entirely on street food. Given that I am somewhat obsessed with things culinary, this has grown to be rather depressing. On the plus side, the combination of street food, a hot and sweaty climate and developing world hygiene means I am developing an immune system that could survive a plague epidemic. I would give a list of foodstuffs that I really want, alongside details of what I would do to obtain them, but it would be a thouroughly upsetting business.

As much as academics rant on about positionality, methodology and suchlike in research, surely it is the radically mundane things like wanting something that tastes of flavours other than salty grease that affects how you go about your work. I can predict that a constant theme of this blog in future months will be the way that research training tells you the obvious about positionality and the irrelevant about methodology, and how this is only exceeded by the way it ignores the everyday emotions of fieldwork.

2006-11-11T13:04:00.000-04:00

In response to this wonderful article about writing about Africa, here is a rip-off about how people think about the Caribbean:

Admittedly, part of it is written in frustration about going to Caribbean studies conferences and seeing yet another presentation on Jamaican poetry. I remember one incident at a globalisation conference for postgraduates, when I introduced myself to someone working on banking in Trinidad. I was told that the Dominican Republic wasn't "the proper Caribbean".

When talking about the Caribbean:
- Talk about cricket, strong accents, reggae, and the Windrush. Ignore the fact that the four biggest populations in the Caribbean are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Puerto Rico. Therefore don't mention baseball, Spanish, merengue/bachata/son, or about Cubans in Florida and or 1,000,000+ Dominicans in New York.

-All sentences spoken in the Caribbean end in "yeah mon". Ignore the fact that English is only the third most spoken language in the Caribbean. Don't mention the Dutch or Danish Antilles (come on, how many people know there is a Danish Antilles?)

-The caribbean is a selection of small islands that are all close and similar enough so that they can play as one cricket team. It is not a group of islands over 1000 miles across, with a total population of over 30,000,000, and a huge variety in size, wealth, culture. That it sits in a wider basin surrounded by Latin America and the US, with their economic and political influence is mere details.

-Any article with anything negative to say about the Caribbean by law must have "Trouble in Paradise" as part of the title.

- If you are going to mention Haiti, make sure you mention Voodoo, as there is nothing else there. Voodoo is a bizarre mystical magic (not a religion), that involves skulls, ceremonies in cemeteries, and crazy ancient old witch doctors. Voodoo is not an off-shoot of catholicism involving patron saints and middle class businessmen. Voodoo dolls do exist outside of Hollywood.

-Caribbean people leave on decomissioned troop carriers to go drive buses in Birmingham. They don't leave in overcrowded sailing boats in the middle of the night, running risk of drowning to become an illegal immigrant washing dishes for $3 an hour in New York.

-Any mention of the Hispanic Caribbean should be limited to Cuba. Remember that Cuba didn't exist until 1959, except in Hemmingway novels. All mentions of Cuba must talk about delapidated old buildings, 1950s Chevrolets, Buena Vista Social Club, Fidel Castro's longevity, and possibly the US blockade. Every sentance should include the following words or phrases "Revolution", "a bygone era", "cigar", "in defiance of the US", "beard". It must be accompanied by a photo of Che Guevara smoking a cigar or of a 1950s car. It should not mention poverty, lack of human rights and freedoms. Everything that happens is romantic, accompanied by a smiling singing old bloke, some dancing and ends in a nice cigar. Ordinary mundane things don't happen.

-Feature white sanded beaches, turqouise seas, coconut palms. Don't mention rain forests, alpine forests, big smelly overcrowded cities.

-Talking about post-colonialism is essential. In fact, everything in the Caribbean can be explained through post-colonialism. Post-colonialism is the grand unifying theory that determines everything that occurs in the Caribbean. The most important factor in society is post-colonialism, and so post-colonialism's influence on society should be mentioned at every possible opportunity. All that caribbean people do all day is to find their new post-colonial identity, through writing poetry and painting.
It is critical to make sure that the colonialism involved Oxbridge graduates who brought cricket in exchange for sugar, and ended in the 1960's. Christopher Columbus is irrelevant, as is Simon Bolivar, Jose Marti and the 19th century. When mentioning post-colonialisms influence on Caribbean society, remember that trade agreements, IMF and US influence, and all other things that pass in other areas for important structural influences are mere details.

-The main exports of the Caribbean are Bounty bars and rum.

-All Caribbean people are black. There are no shades, European heritage, mulattos, complex racial politics, racism, or Chinese immigrants.

-Caribbean people sit in beach side shacks, selling coconuts whilst listening to reggae whilst avoiding the stresses of the world - this called living a simple life. Talk about relaxation, chillin', but don't mention poverty, unemployment, lack of power, safe water and sanitation.

-Pirates were bearded people who had all sorts of adventures. They didn't sell DVDs on street corners. Crime in the Caribbean involves boarding ships with cutlasses, in search of buried treasure. It doesn't involve murder, violent robbery, corrupt officials, or bribing police officers. Always mention the eyepatch and parrot.

2006-11-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

I was recently told that the biggest growth industry in the Dominican Republic is gay sex tourism, and that the Dominican Republic's biggest export is prostitutes. Certainly sex tourism of all types has moved out of the all enclusive beach resorts, and has moved into Santo Domingo. Everytime I walk round the historic colonial zone I pass bars with fat balding white tourists, apparently mainly Germans, drinking and holding hands with stunning local 18 year olds. Neither of them speaks much of the other's language, nor probably do they have an interest in deep and meaningful conversation. The stereotypes are all there. I have also noticed a number of middle aged white ladies, who are apparently all Canadian, walking around with local 20 year old guys.

Don't get me wrong, there are many expats here who meet a girl and have a relationship that is more than financial. Although there are plenty of girls known as "buscavidas", or looking-for-a-life, more interested in the colour of their man's passport than his personality, there are certainly lots of happy trans-national families here. However, there remains a common assumption that a foreigner travelling on their own must be looking for a more intimate experience of local culture.

The sex tourism thing is a funny one. There is quite a specific geography to it, as the different villages around the different beach resorts specialise in different types of relationship. If you are in the know, you arrange your holiday at one specific hotel if you are a man looking for a stunning younger lady, another if you are a lady after a man, a man after a man, or woman after a woman (although I have been told plenty about the other three types, I am yet to hear of stories of international lesbian sex tourism. I am also aware that those last four words of that sentance may bring some interesting and probably soon to be disappointed google traffic in the way of this blog). There is undoubtably a geography PhD to be written on the subject, though mine is not going to be it.

Thinking about it, the sex tourism business is probably the Dominican industry most in tune with customer needs, and as any business entrepreneur will tell you, that is why it is the most succesful.

Some of you were probably waiting to see if I would post on this subject.

2006-11-10T18:54:00.000-04:00

2006-11-09T12:43:00.000-04:00

The expats here in Santo Domingo are all a fascinating bunch. Unlike other expats who live their American lives behind walled compounds (of which more soon), these guys are deeply embedded in the way of life here, running businesses, raising families etc. They are full of deeply revealing and incrediably useful hints - the following are bits of advice given to me yesterday on how to keep out of trouble with the law.

Number one - never have a proper visa. If stopped by police, explain that you a tourist who has lost their tourist visa. This gets you more respect, and less likely to be asked for a bribe.

Number two - when you get your passport photo taken, always wear a suit and tie. As I was told "you never know when you are going to be crossing the Haitian border, in rags and with a 10 day beard, and you need to be taken seriously." Useful advice for everyone, I think.

Number three - as the police are always stopping motorists 'for having a dirty car' and 'fining' them (any excuse for a bribe), then if waved over by the police, just give them a smart military salute and keep on driving. They are then in two minds - is this person really a police or military person, or am I going to get in trouble for stopping a General? Apparently, it works every time. When you are not in your car, just flash any official looking document at them - they are generally illiterate and if you do it with confidence, they are not going to challenge you.

Number four - if anyone asks you were you are from, say China. As the geographical knowledge here is so bad, then they are not sure whether you are having them on, as they kind of know what a chinese person looks like, but are not too sure. They never challenge your chineseness. This is not really for avoiding trouble with the law, but it is great fun to see the confused look develop across their faces.

2006-11-07T15:39:00.000-04:00

All young researchers doing social research have to undergo a number of courses entitled "research training", teaching you about statistics, how to do interviews and suchlike. They are mostly useless and irrelevant, but with the occaisional gem. What they never prepare you for is the practical and emotional sides of fieldwork.

Today's experience was Dominican public service at its very best. Having arranged an interview with the secretary of someone at the national parks office, I arrive to have them tell me that they have never heard of me, and that I should really speak to their colleague, who will be back in January. Not wanting to waste the effort I went through to get out to the office, I then head to the park services library archives (the three bookshelves in the basement). Having asked for a copy of the budget and annual report for the last 5 years, the reply comes that they think they have something to do with budgets from 1982, and will this do? It didn't matter anyway, as they had no idea where it was.

To make up for this, I try to go to national statistics office, to get hold of the budgets from them. Turned down by the doorman for not wearing a tie. Seriously. It certainly says something about the stupidity of the bureaucracy that archives are harder to get into than swish nightclubs.

The flip side of this, and the thing that makes this country such a fascinating place, is that people outside of officialdom are more than willing to share experiences and help each other out. At this time of year there is a huge rainstorm at about 4pm, which starts with some threatening clouds, a few drops which are promptly followed by rain so hard it hurts. Everyone runs for shelter. The trick is at precisely the right moment to be walking past somewhere with a large overhang and cold beer. The folk round here learnt that a long time ago, and this need is amply catered for. Everyone just gets chatting, the younger folk start flirting, and the older folk start taking bets on the outcome of the flirting. People are generally interested to chat to one another, something you would never see in the UK. They are often absolutely hilarious, more of which I am sure will come.

Through such a random incident, someone referred me to an American lady running bird watching tours in the south west. The Dominican Republic is a paradise for birds (an endemic and endangered species of parrot breeds where I am currently staying, and if it keeps on depositing just near where I am walking, it will shortly become more endangered), and lots of migratory species overwinter and breed here. A quick chat turns into a two hour conversation, the loan of a number of books, an invitation to spend a weekends birdwatching and a dozen phone numbers and contacts I should follow up. Plus I am now renting a room from a internet contact I meet up with for a quick chat about national parks.

The road traffic still makes me laugh. Today's sight was a fresh faced traffic cop directing traffic whilst chatting to his mate on his mobile. He was still blowing his whistle as he talked, so the friend was either very deaf or very patient. Suddenly bearing down on him at 40 mph come a dozen police motorcycle outriders and five big blacked out 4*4s - the presidential motorcade. The poor boy doesn't know whether to stop the traffic, salute or what. In the end, he just ignores it as if this huge kerfuffle wasn't happening. The president speeds through, and life continues once more.

2006-11-07T15:35:00.000-04:00

A common experience in the Dominican Republic is the sudden, unannounced power cut. These are a result of electricity companies unwilling to invest, and their poor relation with the populace. Indeed, if a barrio has more that 50% of customers who are not up to date with their bills, then the barrio is cut off. It is generally a call for curses and the search for a torch in order to start up the power generator. If they are short on generator fuel then people just carry on as usual – tonight the boys at the gay disco round the corner simply moved the party into the street, carrying on the fun. There was an outage, so to speak. If they are longer people start to kick up a fuss – a few months ago there were power cuts that resulted in riots and a dozen protestors being shot dead by police.

The people you meet in hotels are generally a bit more interesting than your average. Meeting the ubiquitous, and rather charming, Australian on the ubiquitous world tour was followed by a rather senior Dominican expat who had returned from New York for 10 days for some “f****n’ and suckin’ with some of my girls”. Bit tongue, crossed legs and winced.

2006-11-05T14:56:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes. Santo Domingo appears not to have changed in the last 18 months. There are still the same fruitsellers on the same corners, the same smells, the same roadworks, the same sense that everyone thinks you are american.

Still, thanks to increased expenses budget, I am not in the same old brothel, but in a proper (cheap, backpackers) hotel, and the best bit is that it doesn´t charge by the hour!

Tried to spend some time in the National parks office archives department (i.e. a room with three bookshelves, and a bored teenager talking loudly on a phone). The parks office is literally in the middle of a slum town on the edge of the city. Major traffic headache to get to. Really, smelly dirty horrible place, ideal for creating plans to protect beautiful rainforests. Anyway, there appears to be no indexing system, and the folk who work there clearly only got the job because they have the right connections, and are less than useless. Still, am off to the national statistics office on tuesday, so lets hope things are better.

I then proceeded to get slightly drunk on rubbish beer outside of a corner shop, chatting to the boy who works there about how he is trying to save 80,000 pesos (about 1,600 sterling) to pay for the illegal boat trip to Puerto Rico, where he is going to work as an illegal immigrant on a building site, before going to New York. These two incidents show what is holding back this country, that the only way to get forward is to either work as a corrupt public official, or to leave and go to the US.

Sight of the day: A seven tier baby pink wedding cake being driven at high speed through the streets, on top of a rusty van, with two blokes hanging out of the windows to hold it down. I am never surprised but always amused by Dominican Transport.

Ah, beautiful Santo Domingo, so glad to be back.