In the Field. Prof. George Gmelch
2-2. A typical unauthorized Traveller camp in Finglas, county Dublin.
Participant observation is a research technique in which the anthropologist learns about the life and culture of a group by living with it for an extended time—usually a year or more—and sharing in its activities on a daily basis. The goal is to develop as complete an understanding of people’s lives as possible, including the behind-the-scenes behavior that survey research or a visiting interviewer seldom catches. Learning about a culture in this way also generates insights and questions that a researcher might not otherwise formulate, and it provides many opportunities to check ideas and interpretations with the people under study. Since an important goal of anthropology is to grasp the emic, or insider’s point of view, what better way to achieve it than to live alongside people and participate in their daily lives. A drawback of participant observation as a research strategy, however, is that it cannot be replicated by another researcher nor its conclusions easily evaluated for reliability. And sometimes dangerous conditions may put the resident researcher at risk. We dealt with discomfort and occasional fear while living with Travellers, but seldom more.
After visiting most of the camps around Dublin, we began concentrating on two official sites. Both had large, somewhat stable populations who were not subject to eviction as were Travellers camped on the roadside or squatting in vacant fields. Labre Park, located in Ballyfermot on the west side of the city, was Ireland’s first Traveller site and had space for thirty-nine families who lived in small one-room dwellings called tigins (Irish for “little house”), with extra family members occupying wagons and trailers parked nearby. Holylands was an undeveloped site in Churchtown on the opposite side of the city. Here, families parked their wagons and trailers on two wide strips of asphalt separated by a central, grassy field. A single water tap and a rarely used outhouse were the only amenities for about twenty families.
FINDING A ROLE AND DEVELOPING RAPPORT
Arriving in a camp, we’d park our battered VW and walk off in separate directions to approach individuals or groups of Travellers, hoping to engage them in conversation. Our first impressions were not flattering and were undoubtedly colored by our own insecurities. The men looked tough and intimidating with weather-beaten faces, tobacco-stained fingers, and an evasive manner. The women, although less forbidding because many were pregnant and somewhat matronly in appearance, also seemed distant. Fieldwork among Travellers, we feared, might be more difficult than we had anticipated.
Travellers’ initial reactions to us varied. On early visits we were usually surrounded by children clamoring for a handout—“Aah, miss, could you give us a few coppers?”—as they did with most buffers (non-Travellers) they met. We never gave since doing so would have cast us in a role that was incompatible with fieldwork and the friendships we hoped to create. No matter which camp or official site we visited during those first weeks, the men remained aloof. Sometimes George would approach a group standing around a campfire only to have it disintegrate as, one by one, the men drifted away until eventually he was alone. It was difficult not to take such rebuffs personally. I had more luck with the women, but even they were not always friendly. Some people were curious about us; others, suspicious.
A common problem in doing field research in many places is that the anthropologist doesn’t fit into any familiar outsider category. To the Travellers, we were neither social workers, settlement committee volunteers, government officials, clergy, or police. On top of that, we were Americans. We later learned that some Travellers initially suspected that we were undercover agents. Our first visit to Holylands had taken place just one week after a suspicious death: a man had been found hanging from a tree the morning after a drunken argument with his wife. She, we were later told, had raised her skirt over her head, exposing herself to others at a campfire and thereby deeply shaming him. The police concluded that the death was suicide, perhaps accidental, but some in the camp believed it might have been a murder and initially thought that we had been sent to investigate.
The early stages of fieldwork, whatever the setting, are often challenging and stressful. Untutored in the culture and the nuances of language, beginning fieldworkers are unsure of what behavior is appropriate and, consequently, are forced to learn largely by trial and error. Moreover, they are dependent on the cooperation of people they hardly know. During the early weeks, I always felt on guard, constantly monitoring my behavior: wanting to be friendly but not too friendly, wanting to show interest but not be overly curious or intrusive. We both ate whatever food was offered us, casually negotiated our way around the scrap-metal piles and animal excreta that littered the site, and strived to act composed no matter what happened, which included sitting on mattresses saturated with baby urine on a couple occasions.
Early on, Travellers repeatedly asked me the same questions, even during the course of a single conversation: “Are you married? How long have you been married? Is he your husband? Do you have any children? Don’t you like children? Are you from America? Have you seen cowboys? Do you know Elvis?” Travellers were genuinely curious about these things, but we also had few shared experiences on which to base more wide-ranging conversations. I also interpreted their questions as a test of our truthfulness. That is, were our answers consistent? Some days, the thought of seeking out people to talk to, risking rejection, and answering the same questions over and over was almost too much to bear.
At first, most of our conversations were with children, teenagers, and the elderly. We tried to clarify our role as American anthropology students who wanted to learn what it was like to be a Traveller. We explained about writing doctoral dissertations, which they interpreted to mean books. When they asked how long we were going to stay and we answered, “A year,” they were skeptical. Most contacts Travellers had with outsiders were short-lived—a brief economic transaction, questioning by the police, and the like. After repeated visits, however, people began to realize that we might be serious. As we became more familiar, they became friendlier. We were gradually building rapport—that necessary sympathetic relationship and understanding between a researcher and the people he or she lives among. Not being Irish may have worked to our advantage. Besides the novelty of our being Americans, it probably lessened their suspicions that we were something other than what we claimed.
After several weeks of commuting between Dublin camps, we chose Holylands as our primary research site.4 Its layout was better for fieldwork than that of Labre Park since the families were camped in wagons and trailers facing one another across a central field rather than being strung out single file in crowded tigins. This made daily life readily observable. Holylands also contained a better cross section of the Travelling community. Some families hailed from the more prosperous East and Midlands, while others came from the poorer west of Ireland. Some had been living in Dublin for nearly a decade, while others were recent arrivals and still quite mobile. Besides a stable core of families who remained on the site the entire thirteen months of our research, another dozen or so families came and went.
Although we had met most of the families living at Holylands by the end of the first month and felt quite comfortable with them, commuting to camp each day from our rented bedsitter was unsatisfactory. Travellers often made plans on the spur of the moment. Some days we would arrive in camp to find that virtually everyone was gone. George’s attempts to accompany various men on scrap-collecting or horse-buying trips were no more successful. He might arrive at the site first thing in the morning and then wait hours, never certain they wouldn’t decide to skip the activity altogether. Few Travellers could tell time or had any need to, and understandably, our “appointments” were far more important to us than to them.
Increasingly, we realized that we were missing out on important events. This was reinforced each time we arrived in camp to be told something like “You should have been here last night, the guards [police] came up and took Big John.” More importantly, we wanted to lose our outsider status and get “backstage,” to borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s metaphor, to blend into the background of camp life so that people would feel comfortable and act naturally around us. Travellers were used to dealing with non-Travellers in superficial and manipulative ways. It was important for us to view their lives from the inside, to observe everyday behavior, and to try to learn what they really thought and, as much as possible, to see the world as they saw it. Moreover, because Travellers had never been