Go West, young man, and grow up with the country. The passageway into the bus terminal is wide and angled slightly uphill, with a big sign reading “Oriente” hanging ominously at the end. It could serve well enough as the setting for one of those dramatic movies, in which a group of astronauts / soldiers… Continue reading Go East, Young Man
We are trained to look for problems. We go into the field armed with theory that tells us that development programs are inevitably ill-conceived and incompetently managed. We assume that governments and NGOs never learn the lessons of past failures and that they always ignore feedback from local communities. We know we will always have… Continue reading Anthropologist’s Worst Nightmare
It’s always exciting when something is published in the popular press on my research interests, and even better (academically, at least) when it is sufficiently off the mark to make me think that people really need to know about what I’m discovering. I’m fairly sure everyone in elementary school hears about how the rainforest is… Continue reading One step forward?
Yesterday I interviewed Pablo Fajardo, and – while I knew it before I went in – the guy is a genuine hero. It’s easy to find information online about Pablo—I recommend this Vanity Fair article (really) or the movie Crude—so I will keep this introduction brief. Fajardo is the son of poor campesinos, born the… Continue reading Inspiration in the most likely of places
A few days ago, I was thrilled at how things were progressing here. I had scored a few helpful interviews, found a few restaurants with decent vegetarian food, and—most importantly—progressed in my Spanish enough to be able to make my self understood, albeit in a broken and grammatically incorrect fashion. Half a week later, not… Continue reading Bilingual Blues
When I embarked on my thesis project on freeganism, I envisioned myself as following the model of some of my favourite professors—Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, David Graeber, and Peter Singer come to mind—in combining genuine academic inquiry with a strong commitment to social change. Ít wasn’t enough to just be a neutral observer of a group confronting… Continue reading Promises I Can Keep
I’ve been telling everyone that this is my first time in Latin America, but it’s not quite true, since I’ve gone with my family a few times to gringo-filled destinations in Mexico. Without a doubt, our family vacations inevitably found us staying in places with some borderline-catastrophic flaw. There was, for example, the apartment in… Continue reading Good Intentions and Unneeded Courtyard Fountains*
I overcame—or, at least, semi-successfully confronted—two of my biggest fears today: talking in Spanish, and talking to strangers about my research (or anything, really). After six exhausting hours of language class (it’s hard to say that talking all day is “working hard”, but seriously, this is grueling), I went to my professors house to hang… Continue reading Yo Bus Attendant: Write My Thesis
There was a time, I imagine, when doing field work in developing countries was legitimately scary. Anthropologists studying remote islands or indigenous tribes might be cut off from contact with their home countries for years. Without the internet or television, their immersion in their place of study was total and non-stop, even in the worst… Continue reading Sink or Swim
In my last post, I explained why I think the local politics of climate change are an underconsidered factor in the success or failure of efforts to limite greenhouse gas emissions. Finding an appropriate site to study this topic, though, is not straightforward. Climate change remains an issue of marginal importance for many, especially in… Continue reading The Project, Part II: Yasuní
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 