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Home Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies – here I come!

Published on May 14, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Post-fieldwork

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I wasn’t selected for the quantitative methods workshop in Paris. Not so strange perhaps, since there is hardly any counting in my work… However, the competition was far fiercer for the other European Science Foundation happening I applied for, and there they wanted me (out of more than 260 abstracts :-) ) Paris is slightly more enticing that Linköping, that is so, and it would probably have been a very good learning experience one way or the other to hear more about how to study “discrimination” and particularly “integration” quantitatively (which is quite hard for us qualitatively focused people to see). And, not least, one of the organisers, Patrick Simon, has done a lot of work on Belleville. It would have been an excellent opportunity to network a little.

I’ve realised that networking, whether I like it or not – which happens to be the case – is an important part of this game. One comes nowhere without networks, a fact I learnt after I got a ridiculously meagre response to a workshop I tried to organise recently. And one day I’ll be finished at my old university, and that day is approaching faster than I like to think of. Home Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies in Linköping will also be an excellent place to start. From the program, I see that people come from all over the world, and it looks extremely interesting. I’m very much looking forward to going and I’ve already booked the trip. (It will be quite an adventurous journey it seems, as it’s almost as difficult to travel by train from Oslo to neighbouring capital Stockholm as it is between Thessalonica and Istanbul…).

The title of my paper is “Cosmopolitan space, place and notions of nation: Narratives of migration in Parisian performance poetry”, and I will look at how certain stories performed at the slam soirées play a key role in creating the cosmopolitan character of the sessions. Now, it’s just to get time to write it…

Ouch!

Published on September 22, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Post-fieldwork, Writing

Ouch! High summer is long gone! Clearly, it’s autumn out there: The air is brisk, the sun is lower in the horizon and red, orange and yellow have started to invade the greenery. Not only do I not particularly like autumn (however nice the weather might be, it never escapes melancholic undertones), but also do I not like to get surprised by how fast time passes. And high summer is ages ago!

One year ago today…

Published on July 10, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Post-fieldwork

Leaving Paris by train

Today, it is one year since I packed my bags and left the field. I left a little earlier than planned because the field exhausted me and I wanted some calm. The last ten days I had lived in an hotel, because the letting contract had run out and I was not in the mood, nor had the energy, nor the extravertness to ask any of my acquaintances for a place to stay. After sleeping 6 months on the world’s hardest futon four floors above the madness of Rue du Faubourg du Temple, the crammed hotel room with thin walls and slamming doors almost felt like a relief. Instead, I think it was the nature of the fieldwork itself that exhausted me.

In London, I lived in a great flat share (in such a lovely British terraced house with blackbirds, squirrels and cats in the greenery outside my window), where I could withdraw from the maelstrom of the field for some hours or a day or two, with people to share my frustrations and find inspiration. In Paris, I had nothing but aloneness – and probably quite a lot of loneliness – when I refuged from the field. In addition, the field itself was several levels more advanced than what I had sharpened my anthropological tools on in London.

My command of French limited, but had I not chosen to study a group of people whose force was their command of language, game of words and poetry? In London, practically all my “informants” were my peers, in terms of level of education and to some extent social background, and they were no more than ten years older or younger than me. In Paris, the majority hadn’t even finished 12 years of schooling and only a handful had been to university. Instead, many had been through a whole different school of life than I could imagine. In terms of age, they ranged from 20 years younger to 35 years older. Moreover, while my focus of study had been of great interest to the people concerned in London, I never really felt that that was the case in Paris. Perhaps it was the language that made me qua researcher far more interesting to spend time with in England than in France, perhaps it was the subjects of concern, or perhaps it was just the French tradition of liaisons that rarely let me qua femme (et blonde et exotique en plus) retreat in favour of the researcher and even friend. I wouldn’t say that this fieldwork demanded black belt in professional and language skills and social sagacity, but it demanded enough to make me so exhausted in the end that I voluntarily left Paris more than two weeks before schedule. But it was really an awful summer anyway. And besides, I had important business to sort out at home.

After an autumn of absence, the field started coming back to me. When I hurried through my old neighbourhood in East Paris for a quick coffee by Canal Saint Martin on my way back from Corsica to Oslo in the spring, I realised how much I missed the atmosphere. What atmosphere? I can’t say for the moment, but that particular feel the streets of North East Paris instigate is something I grapple with in my writing at the moment. The sheer diversity of human beings and activities everywhere at all times, the history, beauty and grandeur emanating from the buildings and boulevards, the touch of anarchy and creativity in the street art and street life… I don’t know, but there is a difference. It was very hard to live it, but I really miss it. Now, for the time being, I’ll have to make do with trying to describe it.

Leaving Paris by train

Today, it is one year since I packed my bags and left the field. I left a little earlier than planned because the field exhausted me and I wanted some calm. The last ten days I had…

Steps to an analysis: from impressions to data

Published on March 17, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Post-fieldwork, Spaces

After I mapped out an outline two and a half months ago, my project has appeared amazingly ordered and under control. Perhaps it’s no wonder then, that I’ve postponed delving back into my fieldnotes for as long as I could, keeping myself busy with ordered and controllable intellectual activities like reading books for literature seminars and writing abstracts for upcoming workshops and conferences as well as even an article.
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But I know the kind of chaos that waits in my eight small notebooks and six larger ones, one personal diary, skype chats, e-mails, smses and scattered word documents, and what kind of threat it poses to the ordered outline. Is my fieldwork as I remember it to be? I try to start from the beginning, but quickly gets discouraged. The notes from my first months are chaotic. All kinds of impressions and observations are jumbled together, often without even reference to where and when:

“Nuit noire [“black night”, 17th Oct. 1961 when several hundred peaceful protesters against the war in Algeria were thrown into the Seine]: that was of course what that they were commemorating…” Who, where?!?

“Sarkozy – visit in the banlieue on the news a few days ago. He was thrown things at…” And my comment, without question mark, with capital letters: “what they show on tv”… If I’m not completely wrong and Sarkozy was thrown things at in the suburbs many times in October 2005, this must have been the time he uttered the (in)famous words about using a high-pressure water cleaner in the suburbs (nettoyer au kärcher) to get rid of the hoodlum (voyous). I think perhaps I was surprised that the interior minister got mixed up in such a violent confrontation and uncivilised behaviour and that they showed it on tv, but my comment is of little use.

On a more positive tone; my first fieldnotes indicate what issues I noticed and found worthwhile writing about. Sarkozy’s mediatised confrontation with people in the suburb happened just a few days before the death of the two teenagers that spurred the three weeks of riots in October-November 2005.

The month I was in Paris before the riots broke out, I was mostly concerned about various aspects of identity like gender, ethnic background and class in my neighbourhood in East Paris. Not so strange, since the reason why I had chosen to live in that particular area was it’s ethnic mix. However, I think the link between identity categories and public space was not something I had planned to look for. A blog post from two weeks after my arrival, signals how early that interest struck me. In my fieldnotes, in between page after page with descriptions of interaction between strangers, I found this comparisons between middle class and working class behaviour in the partly gentrified area:

On my way to the bus stop, I walk behind a very agile 6-7 years old girl in full rollerblades gear, and her mom, apparently, wearing a spring green skirt and shirt in another bright colour. A boy, just a little younger, turns to look when the girl swirls past. He tries to copy her superb turn- and break movement (with her heal) and says something to his mother (or grandmother) in French. She (rather plump, in tight-fitting trousers in polyester) replies brusquely in a Slavic language. She takes his hand, and stops, indicating that he should make space for me to pass.

I had just read Distinction by Bourdieu, and I was thinking about the bourgeoisie [in this case a typical bobo bourgeois bohemian] who teach their children to be self-assured about the space they take up in the world, while the children of the working class should be seen but not heard

For about a month, before the riots started, the weather was wonderful and I spent much time outdoors, just walking around, getting a feeling for this part of the city, for gender, class, ethnic background, age… the presence, mixing and variations of these variables. And then came the riots, and emphasised even more strongly the connection between space and categories of people.

Yes, my research blog is really supposed to continue…

Published on February 20, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Blogging, Cicilie among the Parisians, Post-fieldwork

Oslo one month ago

Three recent events have inspired me to get this blog going again. The last drop must have been a post by the incredibly prolific research blogger Mary Stevens. In her last post, she tells about her PhD viva and her examiners’ interest in her research blog:

One of the things they were particularly interested in – and of which I didn’t make that much in my write-up – was this blog and the specific contribution it had made to the research experience. I talked about the inspiration, in particular C. Wright Mills‘ idea of the research file, and how it helped extend my presence in the ‘field’ into the virtual arena. Overall, they seemed to think that in an ideal world all researchers would be blogging, as a way of communicating their research to their peers and to the general public, and as a means to keep a kind of intellectual diary. Their enthusiasm has inspired me to find some way to carry on, although I suspect in a new form, as I think this blog has outlived its usefulness (as my failure to post over the last few months has amply illustrated). (Read the whole post on Mary Steven’s blog here.)

As I’ve been chronicling my experiencing continuously, I feel I shouldn’t stop now: The strange things happening after leaving the field, when experiences are turned into data and written documentation, are of course as part and parcel of the research process as is the hanging around in Paris-life I was writing about until last summer. But until now I haven’t

The second event spurring me on to continue blogging, was a brief remark from one of my colleagues who recently got back from his fieldwork: “It’s funny how your friends slowly turn into your informants when you get back to academia and start writing up,” he said. How right! That uncomfortable fact is exactly what’s been churning around in my mind for months now, and I feel it’s urgent to voice this phenomenon/experience in a research blog at this stage.

The third event is the sheer joy and inspiration it gives me to read the research blogs from some of the Master students I was teaching in the spring who now are out in the field all over the world: Rakel blogs (with photos!) from Malta, Nina from Cuba and Inger from India (I think she’s a photographer, ‘cos her photos are really incredible)…

Ah finally, there it’s done, my first post for more than three months…

Oslo one month ago