Brokering Local Knowledge in the Field
(azungu) researchers he works for. Later, John and Victor lead a training ses-sion to familiarize the new fieldworkers with the questionnaire. In addition to going over technical details pertinent to conducting a good interview, they provide the fieldworkers with some advice that might make their work go more smoothly. Victor explains:
We aren’t there to correct their [traditional healers’] misconceptions, just to collect them. Even if we know what they are telling us is wrong, about aids or what ever, don’t be judgmental. . . . Know how the healers are. They want re spect and can be hard to deal with, as they expect to be treated like big men even if they are no big deal at all: “Take off your shoes when you enter my house, or bow down to greet me.” If they want you to take off your shoes and bangles so you don’t disturb the spirits or whatnot, just do it! [Chuckles from audience.] It’s the same thing with the pastors we’ve met [on past proj ects], where we pray with them before we start [the research] to connect with them.1
Victor brokers local knowledge to diff er ent audiences. First, he clarifies the fuzzy picture Dr. Cook holds of traditional healers in Malawi. Second, his advice to novice fieldworkers bridges a potential gap between urban- dwelling and college- educated fieldworkers and the traditional healers they will soon encounter. This scene captures some of the expectations of individuals hired as knowledge workers on survey research proj ects. I use the term “knowledge worker” deliberately here for two reasons. First, the term is often associated with elites who “think for a living,” and falls on the “skilled” side of a modern-ist dichotomy between “ labor of the head” and “ labor of the hands” (Arendt 1958, 90). In using it to refer to fieldworkers, I trou ble the assumption that fieldworkers are unskilled laborers or minor actors in survey research; in fact, knowledge production depends on their innovative work in the field. Second, the term is capacious enough to capture what I deem to be two impor tant dimensions of fieldwork: (1) the pro cess of producing data, tangible material units (e.g., survey responses recorded on a page) that fieldworkers help along a life course, rather than abstract statistics; and (2) the ways in which field-workers work to produce and claim owner ship over the kinds of local knowl-edge researchers value (in the pro cess, working knowlknowl-edge to their benefit to protect their economic niche in a larger global health apparatus).
As middlemen, knowledge workers skillfully mediate between disparate spaces and groups of people on a daily basis. In addition to filling in gaps in the course of survey design and fieldwork, they also police bound aries be-tween kinds of knowers and produce the forms of difference that data
col-lection relies on. Traditional healers— often framed as repositories of medi-cal knowledge— are, in Victor’s view, saddled with misconceptions about aids that will soon be collected in the space of an interview encounter. In foregrounding the cultural obstacles fieldworkers might face (superstitions, traditional beliefs and customs, and inflated big- man egos), he marks the healers as Other and emphasizes the status differential between interviewers and their interviewees. Meanwhile, the fieldworkers chuckle at the thought of disturbing spirits during routine administration of a survey, making known their own disregard for such backward beliefs.
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Chapter 1 illustrates how the tangible pages of a questionnaire— yet to be administered— are material manifestations of researchers’ dreams and de-signs, a template for proper collection of data. Whereas the foreign and Ma-lawian researchers we encountered in survey design sessions are the familiar and recognizable experts of global health in Africa, the value of survey data is constituted by the largely invisible labor performed by the hundreds of field-workers and supervisors— such as the one pictured in figure 2.1—in the field who are the focus of the next three chapters. Field research, even as it appears to be simply the systematic collection of information from respondents, necessitates a complex and flexible assembly line of people, equipment, tech-nical and logistical know- how, and appropriate social and environmental conditions. The field is not just a place from which data are collected; rather, it is a constructed and negotiated space in which knowledge, value, and new kinds of relations take form (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Schumaker 2001).
The transformation of raw information into statistics that become evidence for policy or interventions is facilitated by many individuals who shape data as they travel in their life course, the large majority of whom— unskilled data collectors— have until recently been overlooked by ethnographers of global health (Kamuya et al. 2013; Kingori 2013; Molyneux et al. 2013; Engel et al.
2014; Prince and Otieno 2014; Kingori and Gerrets 2016).
Since the earliest surveys and research endeavors enacted in sub- Saharan Africa, fieldworkers have appeared in accounts as individuals whose menial labor is necessary to field research, but without any par tic u lar kind of exper-tise. In the Nyasaland Survey (1938–1943), for example, “native assistants”
appear as an undifferentiated mass of individuals whose work entailed, for example, collecting stool and urine specimens in chip boxes and test tubes or mea sur ing gardens by stepping out their circumference with the aid of a compass (Berry and Petty 1992, 290, 29). This chapter aims to challenge such
depictions. The increasing expansion of markets for knowledge work amid proliferating global health proj ects affords Malawian fieldworkers new op-portunities for social and economic mobility, however precarious or short lived those opportunities may be (Prince 2014). As this chapter illustrates, while foreign researchers tend to view local knowledge as a stable entity that streamlines everyday fieldwork, fieldworkers capitalize on the fact that their expertise is not stable or inherent but rather malleable and performative. In-spired by Lambek’s (1993) classic study of knowledge in Mayotte, I consider how local knowledge is produced, distributed, and consumed, paying close attention to how the forms and techniques of knowledge in research worlds emerge from a crowded social field of diverse actors.
Reflecting on the place of local knowledge in data collection, longtime fieldwork supervisor Andrews suggested, “Researchers don’t just want a tour guide; they want a Re nais sance man!” Rather than a tour guide who might provide mere geographic direction in an unfamiliar place, a Re nais sance man figure 2.1. An lsam fieldworker checks a survey questionnaire near the house hold where it was administered. Photo by the author.
possesses diversified knowledge of a local context that is crucial to the smooth running of data collection.2 Presuming local expertise to be embodied, re-lational, and improvised, this chapter argues that the local knowledge and professional identities of Malawian fieldworkers are cooked and commodi-fied in the practices of data collection in the field. In what follows, I provide an ethnographic glimpse at some of the everyday interactions between field-workers, supervisors, and researchers, each of whom is differentially invested in a shared knowledge- making proj ect.
First, I describe fieldworkers’ interests in maintaining owner ship over the local knowledge foreign researchers expect them to possess. I examine prefieldwork training sessions as an impor tant site where fieldworkers are ini-tiated into new professional identities and where the social bound aries (be-tween knower and known) and spatiotemporal bound aries (be(be-tween office and field, urban and rural, and modern and backward) that undergird data collection are performed and practiced. Following fieldworkers into the field, I then show how such tactical boundary work informs research encounters and revalues and redefines the local expertise at the core of data collection.
Throughout, the chapter takes an interest in how the governing structures of research work as temporary, underpaid, and difficult— glossed by fieldwork-ers as living proj ect to proj ect— nonetheless enable them potential access to social, cultural, and economic capital and facilitate the imagining of new futures.
Recruiting Knowledge Workers
Survey research proj ects afford some mea sure of economic and social mobil-ity to a cohort of young Malawian secondary gradu ates and college gradu ates who find temporary, contractual employment in the world of aids research.
These individuals are hired as fieldwork supervisors, interviewers, or data entry clerks. The uncoupling of authorship of data from a singular sovereign researcher entails both possibilities and pitfalls for the kinds of knowledge produced. Table 2.1 summarizes the major daily duties of these individuals.
While the table overlooks the contributions of other members of fieldwork teams (such as drivers, cleaners, and cooks), it reflects the focus of this chap-ter on knowledge workers, or individuals who have sustained contact with data in some form. The duties summarized here are elaborated in the course of the chapter.
Many of the college gradu ates employed at the time of this research were contract workers with the Centre for Social Research (an arm of the
University of Malawi whose history is elaborated in chapter 1) or a consult-ing firm. These organ izations hire out ready- made teams of experienced fieldworkers and field vehicles (minibuses or suvs), displacing much of the responsibility for survey research logistics from foreign researchers to local firms or centers.3 Whereas mayp, ram, and gsip sourced college- educated fieldworkers in this way, lsam preferred to pick and choose its own field-work teams, recruiting fieldfield-workers locally by posting printed advertisements on trees, walls, or at the district offices some days ahead of its arrival at a field site. On interview day, hundreds of secondary school gradu ates from the proj ect’s sample areas turned up with their school certificates in hand. For aspiring fieldworkers, securing a temporary but stable job was a welcome and unusual opportunity. In some cases, after lsam finished data collection in one region of Malawi, interviewers would migrate with lsam to its next field site in a diff er ent district with the hope of securing the same position there.
College gradu ates, too, sometimes traveled from the city to rural recruit-ment sites to apply for these jobs, in a reversal of the more familiar Malawian countryside- to- city labor migration path.
The relatively small number of lsam fieldwork jobs available often engen-dered accusations from locals that persons selected to administer surveys in table 2.1 Fieldwork Team Members’ Roles
Job Title Summary of Duties
Fieldwork supervisor Supervise a team of 5–10 interviewers in the field, check and monitor the pro gress of data collection in real time, make decisions and set agenda for daily data collection, interface between foreign researchers and fieldwork teams, attend daily meetings with foreign research-ers, fieldwork trou ble shooting, hiring and firing of interviewers (sometimes), provide input and feedback on the content of surveys and other data collection instruments, introduce fieldwork teams to traditional authorities and district officials
Interviewer/data collector Work as a member of a fieldwork team, visit individual house holds to collect survey, hiv test, or anthropomet-ric data, check surveys or other data before submitting to supervisors, provide input on daily logistics and fieldwork schedule
Data entry clerk Enter survey and other data into a growing digital data-base as it is submitted in hard copy by fieldwork supervi-sors, help with orga nizational and office tasks as needed
their district or village were outsiders taking their jobs. Hiring practices ex-pressed and reified under lying ste reo types or caricatures of ethnic groups.
Supervisors who interviewed potential employees lamented the paucity of educated Yao speakers (making timely administration of surveys in Yao- speaking areas difficult), and also considered Yao interviewers to be “dull[er]
and slow[er]” than interviewers of other ethnic backgrounds.4 Likewise, fieldwork teams considered Balaka District in southern Malawi their least preferred fieldwork site, complaining, “Yaos [a large, primarily Muslim ethnic group in the district] have so many spouses and so many children” (making filling in a house hold register on a survey an onerous task) and that Yaos are uneducated, making them more likely to accuse research teams of bloodsuck-ing or to refuse to participate in surveys. They claimed that Yao men were difficult to find for interviews, as they were always out “ doing business.”5 The construction of both Yao interviewers and respondents in research cultures enlist popu lar notions of Yao- ness as they play out in the Malawian national imagination and showcase the ways in which survey proj ects become sites where social bound aries and difference are (re)in ven ted and performed.6
Swidler and Watkins (2009) term secondary school gradu ates in Ma-lawi such as those who work intermittently for research proj ects “intersti-tial elites”; in a country where only a small minority achieves the status of either secondary school or college gradu ate, they aspire to a bright future.7 However, because they are not sufficiently educated, for example, to be com-petitive for ngo jobs in the cities, these young people— like others of their generation across sub- Saharan Africa— often also find work as volunteers in donor- implemented programs or aids interventions (McKay 2012; van de Ruit 2012; Madiega et al. 2013; Swartz 2013; Prince 2014; Maes 2017). These positions come with benefits such as small stipends and the possibility of being hired as a paid employee in the future. Similarly, research jobs provide a temporary paid break from farming and petty trading. Many fieldworkers suggested that after a proj ect left town, they would return home to do farm-ing and “wait for [more] jobs from proj ects,” and most articulated ambitions to return to school for degrees in practical fields such as computing or ac-counting if they saved enough money in the future. In 2008, I administered a short survey (n = 117, response rate 98/117, 84 percent) to a cohort of field-workers (supervisors, data collectors, data entry clerks, and hiv test coun-selors) working for lsam, mayp, ram, gsip, and other survey- type proj ects in 2007–2008. The survey revealed that the average age of fieldworkers was 25.41 years old; 30 percent were secondary school gradu ates; 60 percent had also attained a postsecondary school certificate (in fields such as accounting,
vct, or secretarial skills); and 10 percent were college gradu ates (percentages rounded to whole numbers).
Brokering Local Knowledge in the Field
As a fieldworker, the [hiv] counselor should . . . know that culture has been there for ages and your plan is new to them [the villa gers who are participating in research] and it might also take another generation to change the culture.8
This excerpt from a training manual distributed to fieldwork teams by lsam— authored by veteran Malawian fieldworkers— implicitly solidifies bound aries even as it attempts to make them permeable, much like the supervisor’s words during the training session at the start of this chapter.
First, it rhetorically places a boundary between the vct counselors and their subjects, rural Malawians, by confining culture to the villages and associat-ing the power to change culture with counselors. Likewise, in its objective to train or teach the counselors to be good fieldworkers, it draws a boundary between the proj ect and its employees. Solidifying and emphasizing bound-aries between themselves and their employers and between themselves and rural research participants enables fieldwork supervisors and interviewers to preserve owner ship over local knowledge and to ensure it remains valuable.
As we will see, within a survey proj ect, it is not just data that are produced, but identities, dreams, and social bound aries as well.
training for the field: boundary work and the production of difference
During the first week or two of a fieldwork season, lsam, gsip, mayp, and ram all held extensive training sessions for their fieldworkers. These trainings took place in rented facilities (such as a teacher’s college or a hotel conference room) or at the guest house where fieldwork teams stayed for the duration of data collection. Their purpose was to encourage bonding among the field teams, to determine before fieldwork began which fieldworkers should be let go, to familiarize fieldworkers with the survey or other instruments to be im-plemented, and to standardize and harmonize data collection procedures as much as pos si ble. Becoming a competent fieldworker necessitates training as a mode of professionalization into the world of survey research. Fieldworkers are trained to transform villages into “the field,” snippets of conversation into data, and rural dwellers into interviewees. Instead of initiating fieldworkers
into local culture, these trainings initiate them into research culture and, in the pro cess, facilitate new imaginings of self and other. Whereas chapter 4 shows how the epistemic virtues held by demographers come to be embod-ied—if imperfectly— during the administration of surveys to rural Malawi-ans, this chapter focuses on how data collection produces new kinds of social bound aries and forms of difference and revalues local knowledge. In fact, it is in their interactions with data and standards for their collection that field-workers gain the local expertise they offer to foreign researchers.
Participants in the training sessions coconstructed an archetypal villa ger or research subject to facilitate their work in the field. Engagement with this ideal villa ger necessitated preparations and forethought as to proper com-portment, be hav ior, and dress code on the part of the fieldwork teams. On day two of a joint training session for lsam interviewers and hiv counselors in May 2008, Francis, the Malawian vct team supervisor, provided a rapid- fire set of guidelines to his trainees: “How do we dress for the field? We put on chitenje [cloth wrap worn by most rural women]. We can’t wear what we wear in the city. You have to suit the environment. Strong perfume can make the respondent uncomfortable. Manners affect every thing. Chewing gum is rude.
Don’t whisper or appear to be gossiping in front of villa gers.”9 The supervisor closed this session with a per for mance of a commonly known piece of village culture in Malawi: he clasped his hands together and thanked the trainees for their attention: “Zikomo! [Thank you!]” The gesture— Zikomo— was explained for the benefit of those who may have been unfamiliar: “Always do this if you pass someone in the village or if you wish to enter someone’s compound.” Instructions such as these belied an assumption on the part of lsam’s Malawian supervisors that fieldworkers must be familiarized with or acclimated to the field. As they are trained to embody a new occupational role, they are also taught that they are fundamentally diff er ent— more urbane, more familiar with international branding, more sophisticated, more open- minded— than the villa gers they will be interviewing (Pigg 1996).10 However, Francis’s instructions also point to the supervisors’ interest in maintaining a boundary between themselves and their trainees: they are the experts im-parting accumulated fieldwork wisdom to a group of initiates (see Englund [2006] on the production of such bound aries in professionalized human rights advocacy spaces in Malawi).
Proj ect guidelines for dress and comportment were meticulously observed
Proj ect guidelines for dress and comportment were meticulously observed