In the Field. Prof. George Gmelch
location. We usually found government officials, who are appointed civil servants, to be much more supportive of Gypsies and their needs than were local councilors who were elected by residents and beholden to their constituents. For them, supporting a Gypsy site could cost reelection.
Every few months, we attended DOE steering-committee meetings in London to report on the progress of our research. Midway through the research, we began to make some preliminary recommendations. At a meeting in January, we were told that we needed to pay closer attention to the “perspectives” of local authorities—in other words, to scale back our recommendations. For example, we had argued the importance of providing individual flush toilets on camping or transit sites, rather than the much less expensive communal and chemical toilets that many local authorities favored. We knew that the latter would not work, as they were inclined to smell, and no family, especially Gypsies, wanted to share a toilet or to clean up after someone else. Gypsies have strong “pollution” beliefs related to personal hygiene and separation. Unlike American camping and living trailers, no Gypsy trailer includes a toilet; they are considered unclean, both literally and symbolically, especially in such close proximity to living and food-preparation spaces.
As a personal experience, our research in England was enormously rich. We spent a year traveling throughout England and Wales and took short research trips to Scotland and Ireland. We interviewed people in nearly one hundred Gypsy camps and also spoke to them at major gathering places like the Appleby and Cambridge Fairs and The Derby at Epsom Downs, where Gypsy and Irish Traveller families camped next to each other, yet separately, on the infield, while the queen sat in the royal box to watch the races. We felt fortunate to meet so many interesting people. Our disappointments related to the restrictions surrounding the research, particularly having to rely so heavily on a narrowly focused survey. To get around this, we included as many open-ended questions as we could, kept detailed field notes, and, later, included lengthy quotes in the final report to enter the Traveller “voice” into the record. It was our first applied research, and we went into it without fully comprehending its highly politicized nature. Political and policy considerations slowed the research down in the beginning, kept its parameters narrow, and eventually sidelined it.
Figure 3-3. Inside a Gypsy “flash” trailer at Appleby Horse Fair, a traditional gathering place for Gypsies and Travellers.
After a year of traveling, hundreds of hours of interviews, and additional months spent analyzing our data and writing a 175-page report, remarkably little happened.11 The report was shelved. We never got an exact accounting of who or why that decision was made. The research had been conceived under a Labour government but hatched under Margaret Thatcher. During her Conservative Party’s rule (1979–1990), Gypsies and Travellers fell to the bottom of the government’s priority list. A civil servant in the DOE did write a brief watered-down “circular,” purporting to be a synopsis of our research, which was sent to all local authorities. It contained little or no mention of many of the things we had recommended, such as providing a national network of transit sites for long-distance Travellers that contained individual family amenities (toilet, electricity, and water), architecturally defined spaces, and trash removal. In effect, it was similar to the Bush administration’s deletions of major sections from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports on climate change in the early 2000s, and the Trump administration’s deletion of the EPA’s climate-change website.12 Our report also underscored the right of Gypsies and Travellers to continue traveling. But it was entirely the wrong political climate for such recommendations and the government expenditures they would require. As Gypsy Margaret Boswell told us after the research, “The Gorgios [non-Gypsies] doesn’t want sites being built. . . . They just want us to disappear.”
EPILOGUE
Government policy toward Gypsies at the national level has swung back and forth, alternatively punitive and somewhat “positive,” depending upon the party in power. In 1994, the Conservative government of John Major released all local authorities from their statutory duty (under the Caravan Sites Act of 1968) to provide serviced campsites for Gypsies and Travellers. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a further shortage of authorized places for families to camp. In response, more families began purchasing land in order to build their own private sites. In late 2015, in an ironic move after years of discouraging nomadism, the Conservatives mandated that in order for Gypsies or Travellers to be legally eligible to apply for planning permission to develop their own private sites, they must first prove to local authorities that they lived “a nomadic lifestyle.”
Public attitudes have not softened either. In 2003, the Guardian newspaper reported the following incident.
Imagine an English village building an effigy of a car, with caricatures of black people in the windows and the number plate “N1GGER,” and burning it in a public ceremony. Then imagine one of Britain’s most socially conscious MPs [member of Parliament] appearing to suggest that black people were partly to blame for the way they had been portrayed.
It is, or so we should hope, unimaginable. But something very much like it happened last week. The good burghers of Firle, in Sussex, built a mock caravan, painted a Gypsy family in the windows, added the number plate “P1KEY” [a derogatory name for Gypsies which derives from the turnpike roads they travelled] and the words “Do As You Likey Driveways Ltd—guaranteed to rip you off”, then metaphorically purged themselves of this community by incinerating it.13
During a discussion of the problems posed by an unauthorized Gypsy camp in 2007, an official with the South Cambridgeshire District asserted that the council would “never get rid of the bastards,” adding, “If I had cancer, I’d strap a big bomb around myself and go in tomorrow.”14 More than thirty-five years after our research, it seems that the more things change, the more they have stayed the same—especially when politics is involved.
4
Applying Anthropology in
an Alaskan National Park
This chapter describes fieldwork conducted for the National Park Service (NPS) on the activities of commercial fishers and hunters in a rugged wilderness area that had been added to Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Before I (George) discuss the research, which was undertaken to help the Park Service develop a management plan, a little background is necessary. Glacier Bay is a world-famous region where tidewater glaciers spill from high mountains, filling the bay with icebergs. It has long been a favorite destination of cruise ships bringing tourists who thrill to the sound and sight of calving glacial ice. The new wilderness area being added to the park was located over the mountains on a remote stretch of southeast Alaska’s outer coast that is inaccessible except by bush plane or, with great difficulty, by boat. Called “Glacier Bay National Preserve,” the park’s new area is locally known as Dry Bay.1
Dry Bay was used seasonally by fifty to sixty salmon fishermen, both Tlingit and non-Natives.2 A few hunting guides also flew clients into the area to hunt moose, bear, and mountain goat. When this remote region was ceded to the NPS, which then took responsibility for its protection, little was known about it. Nor did managing commercial fishermen and hunters fit with the Park Service’s standard mission of protecting nature—wildlife, flora, and water resources.
Anticipating difficulties, based on an ongoing conflict between Tlingit and non-Native fishermen, the NPS had tried to swap the Dry Bay area to the state of Alaska for a different wilderness parcel. When the state declined, the NPS was forced to undertake the research for which I was awarded the contract, aided by the support of an anthropologist-friend in the Park Service. Unlike my previous fieldwork in Ireland and England, each of which had lasted over a year, this research, typical of many applied projects, was to be completed in one summer.
LEARNING THE ROPES
I first flew to the Park Service’s Alaska Headquarters in Anchorage to be briefed for a few days and outfitted for living in the bush. There I received a cram course on subsistence issues, Alaskan Native cultures, and NPS policies. My primary mentor was Ken Schoenberg, a short bespectacled archaeologist with years of