Stones Speak Louder Than Words

I found a petoskey stone in the pocket of my orange hoodie the other day. I had been rubbing it absentmindedly between my fingers for the past couple months, without remembering where it came from or taking it out to look at it. When I finally did, I felt my heart break a little bit for those perfect starburst lines radiating from dark centers and ending at the outlines of imperfectly round white flowers, and I remembered that the seamstress who lives across the backyard of my mother's house had given me a petoskey stone the day before I left for Bolivia. She had just gotten through shortening the strap on the shoulder bag that was to become my constant companion here in La Paz, and she pressed the stone into my palm and said: "So that you don't forget where you come from."

A wise move. Sometimes, I almost forget. I am surprisingly comfortable with many of the details of everyday life here: I skip down the long, smooth stone steps of Landaeta or Aspiazu and forget that sidewalks—and streets!—don't eventually become stairs everywhere. I duck into the cool underground market on Sanchez Lima and stop by each of my preferred vendors, getting their attention by calling out "¡Caserita!" ("My dear vendor!") and asking for havas (fava beans), camote (sweet potato, which hides a beautiful magenta color just beneath its skin), mangas (a hybrid mango, which is larger and has a meatier texture), plátanos de postre ("dessert bananas," which is to say, plantains), ají panka (a spicy red chili paste used in small amounts in entrees), and, if I am feeling extravegant, perhaps some lomo (literally, "back"—in this case, of a cow) or cold cut slices of jamón. I run out in front of oncoming traffic and avoid being plowed over by just a few moments, or else I would never be able to cross the street. I set aside entire afternoons to wash my clothes, donning a wide-brimmed hat and carrying my socks and underwear and sheets down to the sinks in the yard to soak them in powdered detergent and scrub the dirt out of them with a bristly brush, then rinse and ring everything three times. If I'm lucky, the scorching sun will still be out when I hang my sheets up, in which case they dry in ten or fifteen minutes. I braid my hair almost every day because it is more practical, and more modest, than wearing it loose. I have gotten used to coming over to someone when they blink their eyes at me from across a room, in a tasteful gesture that replaces our brutish American use of hands or entire arms to motion someone towards us. I have also gotten used to kissing almost all Aymara women over 40 on the lips when I encounter them. I wake up and fill my electric water heater to boil drinking water for the day. I never throw toilet paper in the toilet itself.

Yet in spite of how familiar the strange has become for me, I am still, essentially, a stranger here. There are so many little gestures, implied consequences beneath circuitous speech, motivations and logical connections that I know I don't understand. So just imagine all the things I don't know I don't understand! This is one of the reasons I have decided to involve "natives" in my research as much as possible at every step of the process, not only as well-respected informants, but as workshop designers, dialogue facilitators, interview question writers, interviewers, and participant-observers. Over the past week, I have gone through the process of soliciting and hiring five research assistants from amongst the students in the Methodist hospedaje I live in, and in my hiring interviews with each of them, I made it clear that in this project, I wanted their own ideas to shape the questions we ask, and for us to ultimately arrive at their own conclusions about the problems, solutions, and complexities of gender in the Methodist Evangelical Church, above all amongst young people like themselves. My job, I told them, is to facilitate this process and get out of the way as much as possible, then represent your perspectives as faithfully as possible in my thesis. Furthermore, I promised them that I would not simply take their ideas with me to the United States for the benefit of my own academic accolades, never to be heard from again. Rather, I promised them that I would return, sooner or later, with my thesis in hand, translated into Spanish, and I would present it to the church for its own use. And who knows, I might come back as missionary and stay awhile, continuing to collaborate in the facilitation of dialogue and auto-analysis in the church.

I'm a woman who keeps her word, so I guess there's no backing out now. Before I left for Bolivia, I was reading the autobiography of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian miner's wife who was a leader in the Syndical Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB) and the associated Housewives' Committee (Comité de Amas de Casa). In a conversation she had after the sociologist she dictated the book to, after it had been published—which formed an introduction to the edition I read—she was clear about what she thought should be done with academic representations of the people of her country; that is, what exactly such research is for in the first place. She explained:

I've been interviewed by hundreds of reporters, historians, lots of people... [and] anthropologists, sociologists and economists come to visit the rest of the country, to study. But of all those materials that they take away with them, very few have returned to the heart of my [economic] class, of my people... I think that the movies, documents and studies that they make about the reality of the Bolivian people should return to [us]...so that we can analyze them, criticize them. Otherwise, we'll stay the same, without any contribution that helps us to understand our reality better and solve our problems (p. 9, my translation from the Spanish).

The moment that I read these words, I knew that I had to make it a constant and central aim in my research in Bolivia to emerge with a study that would not only please my professors, my outside examiner and perhaps other members of the academic community, but rather one that could, indeed, be presented to my very research subjects themselves. I realized that it had to represent them in a way that they themselves would want to be represented, and that if this wasn't the case, I would be nothing more than the "literary wetback" that anthropologist Ruth Behar feared she was being by taking a Mexican woman's story across the border and turning it into a book that won her respect and popularity as an academic and writer in the US. In my opinion, the resulting book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border With Esperanza's Story, proves Behar's fears to be well-founded: while it resulted in all kinds of benefits for Behar and the rest of the North American academic community, the originator of this rich material did not see such benefits in her own life from having shared it. However, the same could be said for probably the vast majority of anthropologists in the US, and I'm not so sure I'll manage to exclude myself from this group.

My ideal of remaining faithful to how my research subjects would represent themselves is also a product of several studies I read that insisted on coming up with all kinds of reasons Bolivians (or, in some cases, other Latin Americans) have converted to Protestant Christianity besides the simple fact of their belief in the goodness and truth of the religion. Not to say that analyses of socio-economic factors and emotional needs and so forth aren't useful in studies of religious commitment, but I couldn't help but wonder how the people who participated in these studies would feel if the works were translated to Spanish and handed over to them. They would read their religious lives shrunk down into a few sentences about how Catholic fiesta sponsorship became too expensive for them in a time of economic crisis, or about them being women trapped in a patriarchal system that makes paternalism attractive, even though they are ultimately repressed by male dominance and the precariousness of relying on male benevolence. I, for one, would be indignant.

Perhaps this means I'm not cut-throat enough to be a truly critical, analytical anthropologist, but in this case, at least, I just don't feel capable of doing on to others as I would not want them to do on to me. Hence, my plans to become a minister, rather than a professional anthropologist. However, there is certainly a place for the kind of anthropology I am trying to do, and I don't plan to turn in my critical academic tools the day I get ordained in the church. (I did, after all, announce to my mother when I was four years old: "I am very good at academics!", and have ever since set out to prove myself right.) I have been particularly inspired recently by Julia Paley's ethnography on a Chilean shantytown and their political organizing in the rhetorically democratic, but effectively disempowering, atmosphere of post-dictatorship Chile (Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile). At one point, in a transcript of Paley's conversation with a Chilean sociologist friend, her friend asserts that the difference between anthropology and sociology is that in sociology they "don't believe what people say," and Paley concurs, adding that in anthropology, on the other hand, "it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. What's important is what it means to them" (p. 182). Indeed, Paley's analysis is not hers alone, nor is it a collaboration simply with other academics; rather, she worked with health promoters, teenagers and other locals to jointly construct analyses of their history and their present situation. To underline this point, her book-length ethnography is followed by an article-length one written by health promoters from the neighborhood in which she carried out her research. Likewise, all the people she worked with in the health organization wanted her to use their full, real names in her book, as contributors to an intellectual work. Similarly, Rober Galo Condori Machicado dictated his full name to me during our hiring interview the other day, to make sure it would appear correctly in my thesis about his religious community.

Although the vow I originally made when I read Domitila Barrios' exhortation to social scientists was simply to write something that could be read by my research subjects, now I am committed to writing something that will be read by my research subjects. Thus, Barrios' insistence that studies serve the people rather than simply represent them or debate them has become all the more relevant. The good news is that I am not going to take on such a monumental task alone. Indeed, I couldn't. I will need lots, and lots of help from all my hermanos and hermanas in the faith here. Fortunately, my new research assistants are as excited as I am about delving into the craft of field work, even though none of them could exactly pinpoint what "anthropology" is when I asked them, although a couple offered alliteration-inspired guesses that it had to do with "bones and ancient civilizations." Beginning with a lunch meeting I am planning for my assistants this coming week—for which I will cook them a soup out of the chicharrón (pork), choclo (boiled corn) and chuño (freeze-dried potatoes) I bought from a group of students who were selling it this weekend to raise money for the hospedaje—I will teach them a little bit about participant-observation and making the extremely familiar a little bit stranger to their own eyes. I will assign them to record and analyze an event or even a personal encounter in the context of the church, with all their five senses plastered against the world like a kid's nose against a fish tank. As we move forward, I will try to give them the sort of tasks they feel they were made for. Rosmery, who loves to "listen to people's problems" and try to understand them and help them, will be my primary interviewer of young women. Rober, who wants to be a politician of the common people, "like Evo," but does not want to seek a high-ranking position in the politics of the church—as he sees it, pastors shouldn't be serving God for their own benefit—will investigate the church political structure and the dynamics that prevent women from being represented in almost all areas of its decision-making processes. Amalia, who seems to have a special attraction to formulaic academic work, will be in charge of carrying out the surveys she has envisioned herself administering, even though I hadn't originally planned to include surveys in my research design. Eddy, who wants to "understand other cultures," and how people think in "the pueblos"—despite the fact that he himself is from one such rural pueblo—will be my representative and investigator amongst the young men at a national multicultural assembly of Methodist youth. Rossío is a firecracker: she is at once incisively critical of the divide between egalitarian rhetoric and actual discrimination in the gender politics of the church, yet at the same time fulfills traditional overworked and underappreciated womanly roles in her living situation with her brothers, and takes it all on like a dimpled, smiley and sugary-sweet warrior princess. I'm not sure yet what her specialty will be in my research, but I have a feeling she will have much more say in the matter than I will.

My own research plan includes the facilitation of three dialogues that will take place in the hospedaje on gender, romantic relationships, and religiosity and spirituality in the Methodist church—one with women, one with men, and, finally, one with both genders—which we will draw on in order to write our interview instruments. Then, with our lists of interview questions in hand, we will each carry out a couple of interviews with young men or young women in the church, to explore these themes more deeply, in individual lives and experiences. I think that what my researchers don't understand yet—but which I am hoping to help them grasp clearly through the methodology we use—is that they themselves are the primary subjects of their own research, and that rather than looking for "the other" in the people we interact with throughout our research—the "people with problems" or "the people from different pueblos"—we will be looking for ourselves, and trying to understand ourselves better, even as sometimes the radical difference of our fellow Christians will be exactly what pushes us to these new understandings.

But then, these are simply my plans, and as I've learned from the three national Federación Femenina Metodista leaders I work with—none of whom I have ever seen make a decision without first deliberating the matter with the other two—my work in the church is not just up to me. If I tried to make it that way, I would soon be alone and discounted as a leader. Perhaps this is why the people in peak positions of the church hierarchy at various levels and in various areas are called "coordinators." For example, in a meeting with the 14 district coordinators of FEFEME the other day, Hermana M., the national coordinator of FEFEME, explained that there was a lack of female scholarship recipients to use up the funds provided for this purpose—conditional on their complete use—by the Methodist Church in Sweden, and after she finished she said: "What do you all think we should do? What suggestions do you have?" In turn, I am asking my hermanos and hermanas in the hospedaje, "What do you think we should research? What does this mean to you?" If I can successfully coordinate their efforts to seek out their own meaning, maybe I'm worth my salt as a leader in the church. And maybe my thesis won't meet its end gathering dust in the Literary Wetback Archives, or worst yet, accolades in the Literary Wetback Showroom.

Meanwhile, my petoskey stone's flowery eyes are blinking up at me from my desk as I write, and I am remembering how my friend M., who has been known for a strikingly accurate psychic reading or two of my life, once told me: "You know what you need to do, Sari? This is all you need to do. Take a couple of stones and carry them around with you in your pocket. Then, when someone asks you, 'How did you get this way?' or, 'Why are you so happy?', just take one of the stones out of your pocket and give it to them. Without saying anything." Serendipitously enough, this friend happens to live in the town of Petoskey, Michigan. I am remembering his words right now and agreeing that probably the best thing I can do is not to explain, analyze and shape the reality I am living here, but simply to take the stones out of my pocket and, inexplicably, give them away. Maybe they will inspire someone else to do the same.