tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5263183685364131312.post9115924282629210150..comments2023-09-16T10:53:49.712-05:00Comments on Round and Square: Fieldnotes From History (34)—Snake AlleyRound and Squarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12034747929658750371noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5263183685364131312.post-5917938855745260372012-04-10T22:27:29.624-05:002012-04-10T22:27:29.624-05:00Thus, though I only have one daily journal/fieldno...Thus, though I only have one daily journal/fieldnotes notebook, it's not that I don't find using multiple modalities and places for writing extremely important. For some reason, I am having trouble writing fieldnotes, but not letters or blog comments or Facebook captions, about my recent visit to the Mother Tree... probably because it was experienced mostly in a non-verbal, collective conversational mode... for example, the way I stopped short and felt as though everyone present gasped when I accidently knocked off some vodka offerings off one of the tables as I tried to "prestate," rather than scatter or drop or deposit, some dried curd (aaruul) my companion had given me on the piles of bottles, cups and cartons of vodka and milk strewn all over with candies and curds. And now I can't help but wonder whether or not this is why I have had a sinus infection for the last 48 or so hours...<br /><br />*interestingly not celebrated in Mongolia, but with a couple of Revolution-era (1920s Communist as well as 1911 fall of the Qing) period movies beating Hunger Games at the box-office though the later has way bigger and more prominent posters, I can see it happening in the near future.Marissahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13323590167634329390noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5263183685364131312.post-82688263184851748762012-04-10T22:26:37.141-05:002012-04-10T22:26:37.141-05:00First of all -- Chinese people eating snakes, one ...First of all -- Chinese people eating snakes, one of the key examples of Chinese foreigness Mongolians will always give you... and blood-drinking, like eating raw meat, would also I believe strike them as down-right inhuman... so I bet they probably drink it ritually too sometimes. Anyways...<br /><br />Thanks in no small part to Nancy and her friend/my advisor Rena (Lederman), I'm fascinated by other people's fieldnotes... I'm struck by what you call the "sense of audience" in your notes and how it differs from that of my own. My notes, at least for the past few months, are quite stream of consciousness rather in neat sentences, and I think of them as 1) inscribing not just on the paper but in my mind/memory and furthering analytical themes, which I usually don't write in the fieldnotes but in other forms of writing as letters and through face-to-face conversations, which then appear in later fieldnotes and 2) something that I might come back to not just to check for details (though I find that is mostly the case when I do consult them) but that will raise a tide of emotional responses that bring back strong memories (as well as evoke past analyses and stimulate new ones), often with even more detail than I wrote down, but also often missing some of the transcribed details. In other words, I don't worry about trying to write about how I felt about people dragging that sheep up the steps in the dormitory where I live to butcher it in the common kitchen on the second floor, because when I read the fieldnotes just mentioning it as one of the things that happened that day (nowhere near as poetically evocative as your "bladder-baggie," "unsterilized glass" and "cottage cheese on a celery stalk," I'm afraid), I'm probably going to feel how I felt when I saw it, and how I felt a month or so before that when I saw some guys bleeding a sheep out into a tub in the kitchen, to seeing Grandpa hanging up an elk in his garage to drain... and on and on down a chain of associations as far as I let myself go... (yes these definitely need to be controlled in a narrative). This is also I think why I dread looking over my past fieldnotes though when I do they are incredibly engrossing. They consist mostly of reported conversations and interactions more than descriptive details, eluding to other fieldnote-conversations, so when I read them I am reminded, for example, of relationships that I feel I have l let flag, terrible under-reciprocation. They also tend to evoke the sort of thing that you bemoan in the 1911 holiday* note, the strong emotions and opinions that may embarass, but captivate, my present self. Nancy always advised me to keep separate notebooks -- one a journal about feelings, rocky relationships, etc. and the other more "descriptive," which definitely worked for me when I worked with her on an ethnographic project in 2008. But now I think that these have, not regrettably or unproductively, merged. One of Rena's tips, write so that your future self (which I am thinking here as infinitely multiple) will know what you are talking about, fits what I am doing well here I think. (Though I also worry, will I still experience the feelings connected to the descriptions when the time-distance is 10 or 20 years instead of 2 or 5 years? On the other hand, another argument for writing about feelings, and also analyzing, too much in the fieldnotes rather than working through them in conversations-- face to face or letters-- and evoking them in successive reading and writing, it just takes so long and can be so distracting...)Marissahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13323590167634329390noreply@blogger.com