HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 22 Number 1 Himalayan Research Bulletin No. 1 & Article 4 2 2002 A Taste Shared: Reflecting John Hitchcock and the Good in Fieldwork Tom Fricke University of Michigan Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Fricke, Tom. 2002. A Taste Shared: Reflecting John Hitchcock and the Good in Fieldwork. HIMALAYA 22(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol22/iss1/4 This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Taste Shared: Reflecting John Hitchcock and the Good in Fieldwork1 Tom Fricke University of Michigan What is this I am doing? . .. What do I say I am do­ Compare those to the other questions. There are those that ing? Many of my countrymen have heard of your lay their answers down in front of you, only waiting for countJy; many served with you in the war and ad­ time to focus your eyes. These stay around a while. We of­ mired you. But few know anything about you really. ten come on both the question and its answer days, months, I have come to learn so that I can tell them . ... Your or years after the first intuitive asking. And there are also children willlmow nothing [without a histmy} about the questions of fact. These easily answered ones are the their forefathers and how they lived. The answers: most forgettable, the ones that barely recur because the act Why should your count1ymen or our children want of answering seals them forever. All three sets animate our to know how we live? Our children should be glad work as anthropologists and our lives as people. It's the to forget it . .. They are ve1y clear why I am here. To paradox of our discipline, concerned with the human con­ earn money. .. though they may add, to cover any dition and all it implies, that we often use these last as the conceivable insufficiency, that it must also be for measure of how well we do with the others. "name." How not admit this? Social scientists are notoriously skittish about the best questions. We settle on fact, even when we count it as slip­ John Hitchcock pery. We settle on how to get it, even though the how is Fieldwork in Gurkha CountJy2 related to the why. We keep a ledger that separates science from art, even though mi lends the emotive power that al­ Those questions do not, of course, go unnoticed by lows science. The authors of a book (King et al 1994) I those of us to whom they are posed. Questions of sometimes use in my graduate seminars insist that qualita­ fact are easy; we reply with the knowledge we have tive and quantitative studies are underlain by a common acquired. Questions that have moral implications are logic. These authors think of themselves as mediators, calm­ harder to hem; are not so easy to answer, and, for ing the roiled waters of a long argument. But even as they many ofus , persist long after they have been asked­ make the claim, they exclude the questions that they call indeed, become our questions, posed to ourselves. "philosophical." These are precisely those questions that every field worker must ask: those that turn on the researcher Robert Coles herself, those that follow from the "What is this I am do­ Doing Documentwy Work 3 ing?" that find their way into field journals. We all have them. Whether in reflective scribblings that The best questions are those that are never completely break our field accounts of everyday life or in the quiet mo­ answered. We hold them, like broken pieces of quartz, to ments of exhaustion when the talking around us fades into the sun and twist them one way and another. The time of background, the primary questions come to us. These are day, the season, and the angle of our holding all work to­ the ones about selfhood and purpose and who we are. The gether to reveal some new detail, some new possibility. ones that get elided in the methodological focus on how to do it. I look at my own twenty-year-old field journals and am surprised to find how my own mood and feelings tracked I Many thanks to AI Pach for comments and memories lead­ pathways cut before me, how my own words echoed John ing up to this version of the paper. Thanks also to members of my Hitchcock's from another twenty years earlier: Fall 200 I University of Michigan seminar on ethnographic field- work. 2 Originally, Hitchcock 1970. Reprinted without the cntcial I am frustrated. I crouch on the porch, the pleasant opening paragraphs in Hitchcock 1980: 111-137. steam of my coffee rising in the evening sun. I look 3 Coles (1997: 51). north to the mountains, to the Ganesh Himal, to the FRICKE/Reflecting John Hitchcock 3 snowfields, the monsoon-fed green of the lower More than many, John Hitchcock's life and work forces us slopes. I listen to the constant sound of falling wa­ back to the best questions. Soon after he retired from active ter-this valley of waterfalls-and unformed senti­ teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1982, AI Pach ments, thoughts, move inside of me, ready for articu­ and I wrote a short retrospective of John's contributions to lation, waiting to be carved into some mane wall for Himalayan anthropology (1984). I followed up with a dis­ others. They leave me with my coffee's breath-gone cussion of his place in cultural ecological studies in another into the mountain air. And I'm left like a mute, with publication (1989). These necessary accounts have the qual­ only feeling and the fleeing notion that I have some­ ity of fact. They detail the fit of John's research within the thing to say but lack the skill to say it. I want to say community and nail down how we build on it in our con­ things about freedom and choice-these grand senti­ temporary work. But by themselves they focus on the man's ments that come to me as I hunker on the tenace over­ doing rather than his being. In doing so, they cheat us ofthe looking the village. I think often of why I'm here and lessons we can learn. what I can make of it. Too much self-absorption! Moral philosophers have a way of talking about the per­ (Tim ling Journals, 21 July 1981)4 son that opens us to these lessons. Their phrase is the narra­ tive unity of a life. Anthropologists have picked up the no­ And I see that my uncertainties then about the legitimacy of tion, too. We organize our lives through story. Our mean­ these thoughts and feelings resulted in a sudden cut to the ings lie there waiting to be heard. Of course, there are dif­ apparent work at hand: Too much self-absorption! ferent kinds of stories. Some are barely stories at all, mere It's easy to see why these questions are avoided in social summaries or vignettes that imply something more. These science. Our disciplines seek the steadying answers that al­ are the ones that tell a community how to appreciate their low us to move on. Questions about what we are doing and honored ones. They are often fragments used to capture the why we are doing it too quickly slide into philosophy and, smaller lessons that, strung together, approach a whole. worse from the point of view of these skittish scientists, to Poorly done, they mn dangerously toward sentimentality. questions of the moral and the good. Easier to keep toques­ Well and more complexly done, they gather like trickster tions of method. And even our tenuous forays into the eth­ tales or the stmy cycles of desert saints. ics of field research too quickly turn on a list of behaviors. Similar to these are the personal tales, still told by oth­ We emphasize what we ought to do rather than reflect on ers, that begin the binding oflives one to another. No longer what we should be. communal, they are the work of singular memory and the There is pleasurable irony here. After all, every serious beginning of lessons for the memorist. Lying at the inter­ anthropological consideration of culture insists that no be­ sections of lives, these stories take their flight from inti­ havior can achieve coherence, and no analyst can under­ macy and personal knowledge. They hold mysteries known stand that coherence, absent such pivotal understandings as best to the teller. what it means in a given setting to be a person, to act in More beautiful still are those stories we tell ourselves terms of some notion of good, or to be a part of a nanati ve about ourselves. These are our answers, always moving and sequence of other meaningful behaviors. Appeals to these growing, to our questions of who we are, of being rather truths happily cross into philosophy. 5 More rarely do they than doing. We judge them by how well they cant toward tum their analysis to social scientists as people. tmth, an angled approach that is always changing to account for growth.