Evening in the kitchen. A mere footnote to a footnote.

Your unbounded hospitality is unpretentious. It grounds me as it most likely has grounded every anthropologist, especially apprentices (hopefully the effect continues for senior professors, too). There is no arguing with you about whether I should not rather sleep on the couch. You make me food, and I am so grateful I could break down. You organise a car for me to move my things and you laugh at the way in which the steering wheel chirps and sings. You accept my inaptitude of that treacherous, beautiful language of yours, mocking me only sometimes for my, at times, stubborn and silly refusal to say anything I cannot say properly. Being a foreigner is an exercise in humility, in patience, in deference, and in acceptance. You may not make me feel like a foreigner, but I know I am one. I can understand the language if it is fixed in print, but often, on TV, and especially during the news, it comes at me too fast, and I get lost in the melody, making out a word here and there, and attempting to ignore the bubbling, noisy boiler in the background that decides to interrupt and colour the fast flow of words with a rumbling bass line. You translate into common patterns of behaviour. I stir my tea intently, I listen to what you tell me, I try to understand. I may feel happy, sheltered, here in this kitchen, yet I feel incomplete, I feel incompetent, I feel too-much in-the-process-of to know anything. I feel foreign, but am constantly attempting to overcome obstacles, try harder to get the information needed (what is relevant information? In what context?), get beyond grumpy guards and smile at them no matter how they respond, rework what I know, shaping and twisting and exhausting myself into a different kind of being. I want to be a sponge, but have limited take-in and take-on capacity. I learn absence. I begin to understand loyalty, restraint, appropriateness, strength. I get tired, I get ill, I happen to wake up having nerves made out of china paper. I get out of bed on certain days weighed down by an undefined reluctance, I listen to the news half asleep, make my coffee with a grumpy head, and… I finally face the dawn and the music. Often I get up and want to dance straightaway. I want to, need to, have to, work on my research, yet I need to seek isolation for documenting the social (not as silly as it sounds, at least in the kind of work I do). I hasten through the city on high-heels to the next interview. I enjoy meeting very different kinds of people with very different outlooks on life. I adopt a different attitude depending on who I meet, I ask different questions, I try to get to what it means to be this or that, and do this or the other. I am driven by the implications of my project and by learning about empathy. I am longing for my stable environment of family and friends, yet should not remain too involved with affairs far away. How can one possibly ask this? I am reliant on those far away who may have understood the workings of my being for a long long time. I cannot express to you the emotional relief of a word from them on a bad day. I am subject to friendliness, nastiness, rudeness more intensely here quite possibly because the work turns on me and becomes private. The boundaries between the routinised, I-keep-things-at-a-distance-so-they-cannot-hurt-me ‘professional stranger’ and the emotional, responsive, captivated novice are permeable. This is how I work and live. This is what I do. This is how it feels.
I have no intention, rest assured, of turning this blog into a rant about the difficulties of doing field research, but felt this entry is quite representative, so I decided to include it. And, in any case, I am enjoying what I cannot get anywhere else: licence to write about what I feel like with no external censoring authority. What’re ye gonna do abuut it? Show the anthropologist some pity. Most other people do…