Are you ready for the Cockpit country?

Although anthropological fieldwork often has been portrayed as a journey to an external world, its inhabitants and social relations, for me it has always also been a highly introspective affair. I know this sounds pretentious. But everytime I have left the familiar and comfortable for the unfamiliar and uncomfortable it has put the spot light on the strange and exotic aspects of my own life. Family, friends, work place, society, emotions, relations, memories. All of it usually locked up and sealed in my mind. Now placed in a light in which I seem to discern structures, patterns, contours. Rarely do I get as strong impulses to look into myself in my suburban, academic middle-class, commuter life between Uppsala and Stockholm.

There are many reasons why these psychological processes intensify during my absences from Sweden. One is the occasional boredom of fieldwork (I have mostly lived and worked in rural areas of Africa and as much as I love these remote places...sometimes nothing happens there), a second is the loneliness one sometimes feels in a foreign envirionment far away from your family and without the social and language skills to function smoothly in the everyday or to express exactly what you're feeling and experiencing. Third, is good old evasion - trying your level best not to concentrate on the difficult task at hand, your research.

More important, however, is another key aspect of anthropological fieldwork and the ethnographic method: the constant swing between the familiar and unfamiliar in social life. Ethnographers enter social and cultural worlds unknown to them in order to gain an understanding of how people live and communicate through these worlds. The research and writing process means both to get closer to (to understand) and to distance oneself from (to analyze) social life. It is inevitable that this defamiliarization works both ways and that, as you gain familiarity with (for you) new ways of being in the world, accepted behaviour may be questioned.

This time round, I am distracted by my family history. A cousin in Jamaica, Karen, who was previously unknown to me, contacted me via e-mail. It turns out that she was doing some research into her own family history and, when googling her maternal grandmother's name (Josephine Minto), she found an entry which I had posted several years ago at a genealogical site. I was looking for information about the background of my now deceased father Clarence, who had been extremely vague or even secretive about his life history. Josephine Minto is also my (paternal) grandmother, mother to my father and to Karen's mother Daphne, although they have different fathers.


My cousin Karen, a Minto relative, and my Aunt Daphne in Martha Brae, N. Jamaica

Through my father's birth certificate and through a brief conversation with his older brother Eric, I knew that Josephine was probably working as a domestic servant in my grandfather's household in the village of Martha Brae, Trelawny Parish, but that she eventually left to live in St Mary Parish. Judging by the little I know about my grandfather Edward Goodwin Barrett, I imagine him to have belonged to the type of men we often find in novels about late 19th and early 20th century colonial society: self-centered, cruel but complex patriarchs ruling their little universe of subordinates - slaves, workers, women, children - through exploitative economic relations and oppressive political institutions. Allegedly, Edward had more than ten children with different women in the vicinity and none were with his legal wife (is it a coincidence that her name is unknown to me?). His nickname was "Busha", the local term for an overseer derived from the time of slavery but apparently living on through emancipation, apprenticeship and independence.

Beginning to understand my family history, my enigmatic father (whose life history spans continents, World Wars and social and racial boundaries) and in the end myself, means starting at this place and this time: the village of Martha Brae at the time of Busha Barretts courting of Josephine Minto - a mere 80 years after the abolition of slavery in the West Indian colonies.

It might be a story of great interest to me right now. But it is far from the whole story about me. As one of my close friends like to ask, does my dark skin and black hair prevent questions about my maternal descent, my equally formative family background in rural southern Sweden, dying fishing communities, domestic servitude, and the urban industrial proletariat of Malmo?

At a professional level, this gives me the opportunity to address some of the criticism (often fair, sometimes rather one-eyed) of social and cultural anthropology and humbly introduce my own vision of the discipline's quest for knowledge about human relations. The fair critique concerns anthropology's obsessions with the exotic others of the world, an obsession that should have been abandoned on both empirical and theoretical grounds (Shatanawi). It also concerns anthropology's alignement with colonialism and imperialism and its continued preference for "studying down" and avoiding "studying up" and "sideways" (Erikson). Here's where current theoretical developments within the discipline and my own Martha Brae case fuses together. An increasing number of dissertations in anthropology are about "our own" society, its institutions and social relations. Many of them are still focussing on the "others", the disempowered or exotic within. Very few are actually about the ethnographer him- or herself.

Very few anthropologists have taken the step to write, what Swedish anthropologist Shahram Khosravi in a recent article calls, an auto-ethnography. Shahram uses his own migratory history and that of his family to present a poignant and uncanny image of Fortress Europe and to analyse the paranoid security and identity politics which in effect lead to the harassment and systematic discrimination against people that look non-European/dark-skinned/muslim etc. My view is that anthropology can only become a truly universal endeavour when we as ethnographers abandon the high ground of being observers and allow ourselves to be the objects as well as subjects of ethnography.

My own story has a twist in this general direction. In the course of my cousin's research into her family history, she came across (like I did) the wonderful book Martha Brae's Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (2002, The University of North Carolina Press) by Jamaican-born anthropologist Jean Besson (now at Goldsmith's College, London). One of the many merits of this book is the chronicles of some of the historically influential families of the village of Martha Brae (among them the Mintos and the Barretts). Karen believes (and I'm prone to agree with her) that it was no coincidence that Jean happened to be visiting Martha Brae last week, when she was taking my Aunt Daphne to see the village and the grave of our common ancestress, the African slave, Marrie. When Jean heard the story of my father and the continuation of the Barrett and Minto lines in Sweden, she, like any contemporary anthropologist would, asked Karen for my contact details. And I'm looking forward to her call and to becoming, finally, an informant.


Anthropologist Jean Besson on the left