Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing
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Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing
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Overview
Contributors. Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Stuart McLean, Todd Ramón Ochoa, Anand Pandian, Stefania Pandolfo, Lisa Stevenson, Kathleen Stewart
A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373261 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2017 |
| Series: | School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Stuart McLean teaches anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His books include Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edge of the Human.
Read an Excerpt
Crumpled Paper Boat
Experiments In Ethnographic Writing
By Anand Pandian, Stuart McLean
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7326-1
CHAPTER 1
The Ambivalent Archive
ANGELA GARCIA
Letter to Eugenia:
April 7, 2006
I am doing my best to keep my mind so it means a lot to know that you are doing ok. Everything is the same but I have blisters on my wrist. My skin hurts. I was upset at the c/o for not taking me to the infirmary. She ignores me everyday. I told her the yard had no shade and my skin was burning. I walked up to her and showed her my arms. She ignored me and looked the other way and I started yelling and waving my arms. I didn't hit her but my mind was saying STOP but I couldn't stop. She ignores me. I need my cream. Can you please let them know? PLEASE. She ziptied my hands behind my back. She made me sit in the yard even when everyone else was called inside. She separated me. I was afraid I would go to Level 5 because she threatened. I just had to sit in the sun like that for hours. Even though it was cold the sun burned.
I feel like I'm shouting and no one hears. It's hard to write because it hurts. I have to be honest with you. It bothers me my cellmate gets more visits from her family even though they live in Window Rock. I think that is further away. That's what she said but maybe she's just trying to get me. She's seems pretty nice though. She reminds me of Piñon because she is so short and round. Why don't you come? You can ask Laura to give you a ride. Her sister is in Level 3 and I heard from Brenda who is here too that she comes at least once a month.
You are in my prayers. Please keep me in your prayers. Please don't forget me. b.
This is an account of my encounter with a collection of letters written by three generations of female kin in New Mexico. It is a story about the pressures through which these letters emerged and the processes through which they were eventually shaped by me into an archive. I am not a historian and I am not specifically trained in archival methods, so I use the term archive with some reservation. Nevertheless, I call the collection of letters an archive and not, for example, an album or a scrapbook because I believe that the stories that inhabit it deserve to be taken seriously as historiography. I also want to underscore the materiality and meaning of the archive to illuminate writing as a site of intimacy and struggle, mourning and survival, both for the authors of the archived writing and for the anthropologist who engages it at a later moment.
This struggle is multisited. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida notes that the word archive stems from the Greek arkhe, the place where things begin and where power is exercised. The meaning of the word archive is traced to the house of citizens with the power to watch over and signify the documents therein. This definition is unsettling to me but instructive, for the archive that I discuss here is located, literally, within my home. Over the last four years, it has traveled with me from New Mexico to Los Angeles to Oakland, has moved from a garage to a bedroom closet to a cabinet in a home office. No matter where I am within my home I am aware of its presence. The archive watches over me as much as I watch over it.
It's hard to write because it hurts.
These are Bernadette's words, written while she was incarcerated for a drug-related offense. Intended as private correspondence to her mother, her words seek to maintain a connection to life under the shadow of loss and isolation. The letter was eventually given to me, a kind of message in the bottle seeking an afterlife. I can only make sense of why this occurred within the context of broader relations that have connected lives and texts across time.
Anthropology is a part of this story. More than a "discipline," it is involved in the process of creating the connections between life and text, opening them up to new cadences and horizons. I have released these connections into their own materialization, into this ethnography — another kind of archive. My ethnography affirms, rather than covers up, its own ambivalences, in order to hold open the possibility of a return, a response, through which the archive is woven.
Why don't you come?
I met Bernadette in 2004, shortly after I returned to northern New Mexico's Española Valley. I have roots in the valley and had lived there as a child. I returned as an adult to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on heroin addiction; the Española Valley suffers one of the highest rates of heroin addiction and heroin-induced death in the United States. Several of my relatives and schoolmates died of heroin overdose; still others struggle with the disease. Each week, I read the online version of the obituary section of the local paper, scouring names and photographs of the deceased, looking for old friends.
These deaths haunt me and have prompted me to return (again and again) to the Española Valley and to the question of immemorial loss and the recovery of loss. What has been at stake for me is engaging loss as a form of relationality, which moves one toward the anticipation of an unknown future. The archive of letters I discuss in this chapter is one site for the development and enunciation of this melancholic movement.
The Rhythm of Writing
In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau notes, "Writing speaks of the past only to inter it." The rhythm of writing is the rhythm of mourning, which transforms absence into an enduring presence. The losses tied to Bernadette's letter are tied to my own. The archive materializes Bernadette's loss and opens up a space for my return.
Please don't forget me.
In 2004, Bernadette was ordered to attend a drug recovery program in the Española Valley, where I worked as an ethnographer and clinical staff. I observed her monthlong stay during my work on the night shift and often attended to her basic needs, like providing her food or medications or dialing the telephone for her outgoing calls. We were close in age and got along easily — so well we wondered whether we were friends as young children.
Having been a patient at the clinic before, Bernadette was used to the routine of rehab and avoided conflict with the other patients or staff. I was new and the only staff on duty at night, which often felt overwhelming. Without my ever asking, Bernadette helped me wash the evening dishes, sweep the floors, or fold the bedclothes. In casual conversation, I learned that her mother, Eugenia, was also addicted to heroin and suffered from depression. I also learned that Bernadette had two children, an estranged teenage son who lived with a distant relative and a young daughter named Ashley who had lived with her until her arrest.
On the day of Bernadette's departure from the clinic, an electronic monitoring bracelet was attached to her ankle and she was confined to her trailer until her impending trial date. Her only legal time away from home was to meet with her drug counselor or to attend recovery meetings. Still, she would steal a few moments between these meetings to visit her daughter, who was under the care of another relative, or her mother, who lived only a few miles away from her own. Mostly, however, Bernadette waited at home, alone.
I started yelling and waving my arms.
I visited her often during this period, making the short drive from my village to hers. I brought her groceries and cigarettes and she told me stories about her life. Often these stories centered on "another time," well before she started using heroin, when she and Eugenia lived in their ancestral village, in their ancestral home where Eugenia was born and where her own mother died. Bernadette spoke nostalgically about the home and the events that took place within it: birthday parties, Christmases, picking fruit from the apple and apricot trees on the surrounding land. But the bucolic image of the house and the quaint memories of it stood in tension with the other stories Bernadette would eventually tell me: stories of her mother's addiction and mental state, their deepening poverty, and her own growing loneliness and worry.
During an especially difficult time, Eugenia sold the beloved ancestral home, and the two relocated to a rented trailer in the town of Española. At the age of thirteen, Bernadette worked in the evenings and on weekends in order to contribute to the running of the new household. There were very few mental health or addiction services in the area, despite the growing drug problem. The profound stigma attached to being a heroin-addicted woman, especially a mother, made accessing these limited services even more challenging for Eugenia. Mother and daughter thus crafted their own services by caring for each other, often obtaining medicina (heroin) to relieve Eugenia's pain. Such work is typically conceived as an effort to provide care and protection, as well as a means to live.
Bernadette once described how when her mother was high, things would go back to normal. Eugenia would stop hurting or crying and would be released into feelings of love and tranquility, feelings Bernadette also craved and needed. But such feelings diminished as Eugenia's state worsened. Heroin soon became a medicine Bernadette needed too.
Sepia Tone
A childhood memory returns. I am at the weekly swap meet with my own mother on a hot summer afternoon. Neighbors become shop owners for a few hours, selling old tools, mixing bowls, outgrown clothes. There's the old man selling watermelons blessed by Jesus, the old woman with the live chickens squawking in their metal cages. Heat bounces off the black tarmac. I want to go home but my mother's not finished searching for something ... what? I pull at her shirt. I am seven, maybe eight years old.
My mother gives me a dollar to buy a snack or books, to leave her in peace. I take the money and wander, watching my feet pass discarded household goods for sale. I peer over foldout tables where the finer objects are on display: jewelry, calculators, typewriters. I stop at a table covered with small, cardboard boxes juxtaposed like puzzle pieces. Each box contains photographs, many of them from bygone days. One of the boxes of photos captures my interest: it holds about two dozen images featuring the same family. They are on holiday somewhere far away from New Mexico.
The photos are small, no larger than the palm of my hand. The women have short bobbed hair and wear old-fashioned bathing suits or wide-legged pants and fitted blouses. The men wear neckties. Everyone is attractive and smiling, posing confidently by the beach, in front of a stately fountain, beside an elegant automobile. The old man selling the photos tells me they are his relatives. He is dark, Mexicano; the people in the image are white. I ask him how much the box of photos costs — he quotes me two dollars but accepts my one. I keep the photos hidden from my family.
Figure of Isolation
In 2005, Bernadette was convicted of a felony-level drug crime and was given a five-year sentence at a women's prison located about 150 miles from home. Anticipating her conviction, she had already made arrangements to place her personal belongings into one of the many self-storage facilities in the Española Valley. Initially, Eugenia paid the monthly fee. When she fell behind in the payments, the contents of Bernadette's unit were auctioned off or destroyed by the facility management.
I visited Bernadette in prison many times. We'd sit together in the brightly lit visitation room amid families huddled over small metal tables bolted to the floor. Blue jumpsuits and shackled ankles and wrists differentiated prisoners from those in the free community. Although these visits were designated "open contact," meaning prisoners were not separated by a screen or intercom system, touch was prohibited. Bernadette was untouchable.
There were excruciating stretches of silence during our visits, which lasted several hours. I often thought of leaving, mentally counting to three, then to five, then to ten, trying to muster my body for exit. Bernadette may well have done the same. In any case, for likely very different reasons, we waited it out, saying good-bye only when the visitation guard demanded it.
Bernadette was paroled in 2009. She returned to the Española Valley and lived with her mother and daughter. Their housing situation was unstable: Bernadette couldn't find a job and Eugenia's monthly Social Security check barely covered the rent for their efficiency apartment. During a visit, I found their residence worryingly empty. I was concerned Bernadette might relapse, which seemed related to living with Eugenia, and suggested alternative living arrangements for her and her daughter. Bernadette was patient with my worries but said that there was nowhere else in the world she would rather be, or even could be. After such a long and painful period of separation, she had no intention of leaving.
Before we said good-bye, Bernadette asked me if I would do her a favor and presented me with a large box. She asked me to store it for her, explaining that she didn't want the contents around her or her daughter any longer, but that she didn't want to lose them either. I told her I needed to know what was inside before I could agree. She set the box on the floor and ripped off the tape that sealed its worn edges. She reached in and pulled out handful after handful of paper, letting them fall around her feet like leaves. "They're just letters," she said. "Nothing illegal, nothing to worry about." The following afternoon I carried the box back home with me to Los Angeles for what Bernadette called safekeeping.
Convergence
Another memory. We are heading south, caravanning down Interstate 25 — my mother's yellow Volkswagen Bug, followed by her boyfriend's van and my uncle's pickup truck. Each vehicle is stuffed with our belongings. The dishes rattle in their boxes while my mother talks about a fresh start. My face presses against the backseat passenger window as I whisper good-bye to my friends, the juniper-covered hills, the river. My little sister squirms in my lap. My older brother squeezes his eyes shut, feigning sleep. Our mother pleads with us. Look, she says, I've got to get out of there. One day you will understand.
We arrive in Albuquerque. I can't decide if the distance between the two places is great or short. The two-bedroom house my mother arranged for us feels no different from our old house, and the new neighborhood looks just like the one up north. I tell my mother this but she insists that we are a world away. To prove her point she drives us to the west mesa. We climb onto the hood of the car and watch the city stretching below. Dusk turns to night and the amber lights of Albuquerque shimmer thickly. But we live south of the river, in darkness.
Blue Years
For several months, the box of letters sat undisturbed in my office. Then one morning I opened it, only partly by accident. I pulled out one letter and began to read, and then another, and so on. The basic plot was familiar to me: a mother's mistakes, a daughter's loneliness and worry. Reading the letters felt like weaving together the connective tissues of lives, images, and emotions that had been forced apart.
I wanted to read them all, felt I shouldn't, but did. Multiple calls to Bernadette after my period of passionate reading went unanswered. I flew to Albuquerque, drove north to Española, knocked on her apartment door, not knowing if she had moved on. After a couple of unsuccessful visits, I finally found Bernadette inside, visibly loaded. The box of letters was far from her mind.
The very first letter I drew from the box was undated and addressed to Eugenia. It says, "As long as you keep writing back I'll be OK. Pero los días que no me escribes se sienten lonely. Se sienten azules ... [But the days you don't write me feel lonely. They feel blue ...]" Bernadette's description of waiting and longing assumed the form of a haunting image — the image of lonely days, blue days. I still dwell in the density of feeling in this fragment and its palpable sense of loneliness and longing. The fragment carried excruciating affective intensity, in part because the letter's material texture makes legible the constraints that shaped Bernadette's words; the paper she used to write was the prison's blue-tinted stationery. Thus, the blueness of days is not only a melancholic account of Bernadette's interior world, but also an expression of the institutional barriers that structured her writing of despair.
Possession
Letter to Eugenia:
[undated excerpt]
I hope you are OK. How is mi'jita? I miss her so much. So much. So much. I am just trying to stay out of people's way so I can get back home. It is turning winter already. Sometimes I can smell firewood in my mind. Thanksgiving is coming. We're making decorations like we did when I was a kid, but they don't let us touch scissors. All the ladies are trying to make the best of it. What else can we do?
In 2006, a communications representative gave me a guided tour of the prison. I never saw Bernadette's cell, never saw where she slept, or wept, or wrote. Although I sent her letters and wired money at her request, I never received a letter from her. So I was surprised when I first saw Bernadette's broad and looping script, how her words shifted back and forth from print to cursive, English to Spanish — fashioning an intimate, bilingual language caught within the monolingual grammar of the prison. Toward the end of the letter excerpted above, Bernadette writes: "How is my little Ashley? I miss her so much. ... Cuídala bien, mamá. Cuídate bien. [Take good care of her, mama. Take good care of yourself.]" She closes with "I know you can't come. Pero send me a little something? Necesito escuchar tu voz [I need to hear your voice]."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crumpled Paper Boat by Anand Pandian, Stuart McLean. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiPrologue / Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean 1
Introduction: Archipelagos, a Voyage in Writing / Paper Boat Collective 11
1. The Ambivalent Archive / Angela Garcia 29
2. Writing with Care / Michael Jackson 45
3. After the Fact: The Question of Fidelity in Ethnographic Writing / Michael Jackson 48
4. Walking and Writing / Anand Pandian 68
5. Anthropoetry / Adrie Kusserow 71
6. Poetry, Uncertainty, and Opacity / Michael Jackson 91
7. Ta'bir: Ethnography of the Imaginal / Stefania Pandolfo 94
8. Writing through Intercessors / Stuart McLean 116
9. Desire in Cinema / Anand Pandian 119
10. Flows and Interruptions, or, So Much for Full Stops / Stuart McLean 126
11. Denial: A Visit in Four Ethnographic Fictions / Tobias Hecht 130
12. Ethnography and Fiction / Anand Pandian 145
13. SEA / Stuart McLean 148
14. Writing Otherwise / Lisa Stevenson 168
15. Origami Conjecture for a Bembé / Todd Ramón Ochoa 172
16. Ethnographic Excess / Daniella Gandolfo and Todd Ramón Ochoa 185
17. Conversations with a Hunter / Daniella Gandolfo 189
18. On Writing and Surviving / Lisa Stevenson 207
19. A Proper Message / Lisa Stevenson 209
20. Fidelity and Invention / Angela Garcia 222
Epilogue / Kathleen Stewart 225
Bibliography 231
Contributors 241
Index 243
What People are Saying About This
"Boldly experimental, the contributors to this invigorating collection reveal the seriousness and creativity with which contemporary anthropologists—alert to the explosion of narrative form in fiction, poetry, cinema, and elsewhere—are breathing new life into ethnographic writing; in so doing, they reopen the possibilities of this most vital form of ethnographic expression."
"This is an extraordinary project. The powerful writing does exactly what is promised: it is a demonstration of the value of what the editors term experiment, and a case for writing as pragmatic intervention."