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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Lecture over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am probably better off sticking to my own research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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