Defining Context and Gaining Focus

Over the last couple of months I have been struggling mightily with my dissertation project. As I switched from the field to the archive, from the oral to the written, I switched from collecting information that I think is important to sifting through information that other people thought was important (to investigate, write down, and preserve). This has its benefits; things that I never would have thought to ask about suddenly appear – sites of cattle dipping tanks, government subsidized maize schemes, the first beetroot plant. And I can experiment methodologically with tangential data collection without tiring out interviewees.

The archives have also helped to remind me that this small, remote, rural area is a part of a much larger network and country. Indeed, the archive at the University of Witwatersrand contains information from the National Health Services Commission, which used Pholela as a model for the rest of the country. And the archive of the Rockefeller Foundation in Tarrytown, New York houses an Annual Report from Pholela and letters from its founders, showcasing Pholela’s global reach. This larger footprint is indeed exciting; however, it also leads to problems – defining the context of this project.

No single dissertation can do everything. Or at least that’s what our advisors tell us when we begin this process. Sitting in my office on the fifth floor of Science Hall in Madison I was convinced they were wrong; my dissertation could and would do everything. I would trace the global impact of Pholela while understanding the intricacies of the labor migration patterns as related to industrial capitalism while also understanding how topography, crops, and nutrition all interact in the bodies of HIV+ young women.

Sound ridiculous? It was.

Therefore, after ten and a half months of research, I have been convinced, once again, that my advisors are correct. No single dissertation can do everything. And it is this realization that brings us to the subject of this post: how does one define context and gain focus (in the middle of the project)?

I spent the first six months of my research wandering through the rural areas of Pholela, volunteering, conducting a household survey, and interviewing various people from sangomas (traditional healers) to old housewives. While attempting to keep some focus on health and nature broadly, I spent these first months doing what one of my advisors referred to as “getting lost.” I collected lots of information, much of which I still do not know what to do with. But while I collected this information I asked questions. There were, of course, unexpected answers, but my question guided the conversation.

I then spent much of the month of September working in the archives during the day and compiling my field notes at night in an effort to figure out what exactly my dissertation is about. My notes covered topics as disparate as stories of monster snakes, 1940s plowing techniques, and how much money a household earns from government grants. Once I compiled all of this information I spent hours trying to figure out how it all fit together and then how it related to the things I was finding in the archives. And guess what I discovered: it doesn’t all fit, at least not into a single, cohesive, and well-argued dissertation.

This epiphany was not an end in itself, rather it was and is the beginning…of a lot of work. I have spent the past two months working to retool my focus; to find a core that is manageable. This has resulted in two new central questions: why has small-scale agriculture in the Pholela region of South African changed from 1936 to the present? And how have changes in human health and ideas about health evolved with changes in agriculture? These questions are specific and focused, yet broad enough to show something interesting.

But what does this mean for actually conducting research?

First it means that I must define the context, or the extent, of my project. And I can do this by asking more specific questions. For instance, does WHO policy on global health affect the Pholela Community Health Centre? Perhaps. But is it directly relevant to changing agricultural patterns in the area? Probably not. Does the mineral content of the soil affect agricultural practices in this area? Probably. But is it relevant to understanding how ideas of health, even nutrition-related ideas of health, are related to agriculture? Probably not. Do labor migration patterns from the late nineteenth century affect agricultural patterns in the mid-twentieth century? Certainly. Would in depth, primary research of the late nineteenth century seriously enhance a story that starts in the middle of the twentieth century? Probably not. Or do scientific ideas and experiments about nutrition have a bearing on the health of people in the Pholela area? Undoubtedly. But to what extent should one do primary research on scientific debates in distant cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria? Probably not to a large extent.

Defining context is about setting limits, necessary limits, on what you will research. These limits can be geographical – I am focusing on three small rural communities that are within 40km of each other. They can be temporal – though I recognize that history does not begin in 1936, my story starts then because it was the moment the government took an interest in the environmental health of the area. There can be methodological and research time limits – I would love to know about soil, but I neither have the knowledge to take soil samples nor do I have the time to take and analyze them properly. Defining context is also about knowing your focus and setting limits on how much primary research you conduct on areas peripheral to your core interests. For example, while historical scientific debates on nutrition are fascinating, the results of those debates – the lessons that health assistants brought in to the homes of Pholela’s residents – are far more important for my project than the various papers published on nutrition.

Defining one’s context is especially important in working in the archives. But as I return to the communities to continue my oral history collection and ethnographic observation I find myself faced with the flip side of the context question: what is the core focus of this research? As one moves and interacts in these communities it is clear that there is a larger geographic, temporal, and ideological context to agriculture and human health. However, following this larger context would likely take away from more specific understandings, from the focus of the research. I need to know my focus in order to direct conversations and observation. For example, following from the key questions, detailing and understanding agricultural change is at the core of my project; helping in fields and with livestock must be primary objectives. However, agriculture is only a part of the livelihood system in this area. As a result, going with people to collect their monthly pensions and to shop for food (to supplement agricultural yields) will also be important. But there are limits. Remittance income from family members working in urban areas supplements household livelihoods. However, I do not have unlimited time and so I likely will not go to cities to interview those family members about their income and what it is spent on. If agriculture is my focus, time would be better spent on interviewing people from the Department of Agriculture, rather than following remittance flows, even though both likely affect agricultural decisions.

What I have discovered over the last couple of months working through field notes and finding archival documents is that focus and context are intimately related. Without knowing your focus, you cannot set the limits of your context. And without knowing the contextual limits of things like geography, time, and subject one cannot understand what is most important to focus on.

As I switch gears from extensive to intensive collecting mode I know that I will continue to find new and interesting ideas, which will challenge my focus and my context. I will adapt to some of these, as they help to strengthen my project, and others I will note in a place designated for future projects. I have come to realize that without these limits this project would fail to say anything meaningful, and this would do great injustice to the very people who are giving so much to help me understand their agriculture and their health.