Ethical Research

When I envisioned this blog I never imagined that I would include a post on the ethical quandaries of field work. As I have mentioned in previous posts, this was a space for thoughtful, analytical reflection on topics of relevance to what will become my dissertation. It was not a space for musings about my personal experience.

However, after more than a year in South Africa, I have come to accept that the ethics of research are not simply a part of my personal experience, but that they are central to this very dissertation project. These ethical dilemmas force one to ask: “What is the point?” and “Who is this project for?” Both of which strike me as being at the heart of any dissertation.

Ethical quandaries and questions began almost immediately upon my arrival in South Africa. For example, I am conducting my research in three communities in the area formerly known as the Pholela District. I chose two of these communities because they were the first two communities absorbed into the focus area of the Pholela Community Health Centre in the 1940s. As a result, they have the longest set of historical records. I chose the third community because I wanted a place that was outside of the Pholela catchment and because I had heard that the people in that place still relied heavily on subsistence agriculture. By choosing three communities I felt like I was making my study *somewhat* more representative than had I chosen just one community. However, by choosing only three communities I have given only three groups of people a voice in the academic world. On a practical level I had little choice, but on a moral level I must recognize that this choice has consequences.

I confront other ethical questions almost daily. For example, not two days ago I was visiting one of the Mkhulus (Grandfathers) whom I regularly go and see. He and his wife were weeding their garden in anticipation of planting beans. We (Thokozile, my research assistant, and I) came by to talk to him about life, agriculture, health, and witchcraft in the mid-1950s. Because he was working we decided to just ask him questions as he weeded. We came to the topic of gardens and asked him what was in his garden in the 1950s and he listed several things. So we followed up by asking if they had planted any vegetables back then. He said no and that even now they could not plant vegetables because they did not have a consistent water supply. He said that a number of families in his section of Nomondlovu wanted to buy some pipes and a couple of tanks to deliver a continuous water supply, which would enable them to irrigate their fields. However, it will cost R40,000 (or just over US$4,000). Predictably, the conversation immediately turned to me and whether I can help them get this money, either by giving a donation myself (though there is some recognition that I could not give them R40,000), or by telling my friends and family overseas “how poor they are,” or, and this is the most favored approach, by leveraging my education, experience, and most importantly my whiteness to get the government to give them “the pipes for free.” After going through all the ways they could raise money for water pipes, this Mkhulu went on to say that I should give them a donation to show that I am not just using them for their knowledge and rather that I recognize that they are poor and need help.

And this Mkhulu is, of course, right; on so many levels.

First, I must fully recognize and accept (and hope) that I will gain professionally and as a result financially from this experience. (I have already and continue to gain personally.) And moreover, the people of these communities, especially the older people who I spend most of my time with, will likely not benefit financially from this experience. Second, I do have access to international financial resources that these people would never have access to without my presence. Third, these people are poor and though there are certainly degrees of poverty, poor is poor, and I am not poor. And finally, by virtue of my status (as a well-educated, white, American woman) I *might* be able to at least raise some awareness and interest with the government.

But there are other ethical concerns as well. When I received approval from the University of Wisconsin’s Internal Review Board (IRB), I agreed that I would not compensate my research “subjects;” that participation would be entirely voluntary. When I was conducting the household survey and taking 90 minutes of a person’s time, this seemed reasonable. Now I tend to spend most of my time talking to, working with, and learning from a handful of families. They have invited me into their lives largely because they are interested in my project, enjoy my company, and are happy to talk about their lives and their gardens. But I also suspect that many of them see the continued presence and interest of a white American as leading to benefits for their communities and possibly even themselves.

I have done everything right according to the IRB. I have explained what me research is, told people that participation is completely voluntary and that they can stop at any point, and explained that I have no money to compensate them. Everything is supposedly clear. There will be no compensation. At least today.

But the hope continues with the eight families I visit weekly and the communities they come from that by working with me, letting me enter into their lives, and teaching me about health and agriculture in these areas there will be a direct (monetary) benefit to the community.

This hope, this belief is ever present as I conduct research, both in a very direct way as in the case of the Mkhulu asking me to donate money for his pipes, and in indirect ways as people constantly ask Thokozile if she will go overseas with me and ask when my book will be published that will make them famous. The omnipresence of these expectations reminds me that I have a responsibility to these communities that goes beyond the academic realm. As a result, my dissertation must be meaningful to both academic debates about nature and society as well as to the improved living conditions of those societies and natures. While this adds a layer of challenge to the dissertation project, it also makes for richer work.

And although facing these expectations day after day can make me want to curl up in my bed with a novel, I know that with good work comes great responsibility and I can only hope that the enormous gift of time and friendship that these people have given me, which will no doubt launch my career, can in some way be rewarded with some help to their communities.

Those of us who work in places far from home and in situations completely different from the ones we are accustomed to constantly face a mismatch of expectations between the people we work with, the rules of the ethics review boards, and, to be honest, ourselves. But to do good work is not to choose one set of expectations over the other, it is to strive to fulfill them all. For as scholars it is both our professional responsibility to honestly represent the people and places we research and our moral responsibility to ensure that we give back to the very people who have given us so much.

What is Agriculture?

At first this question likely seems ridiculous, at least to my sensibilities.

Conceptually agriculture is unlike health. It does not include physical and mental aspects. It does not vary in meaning (though it almost certainly varies in practice) between places. It is the production of food.

But is it really that simple?

Shortly after my Christmas break I went to spend nine days in one of the communities where I am conducting research. I stayed with my research assistant at her home and had the opportunity to experience all facets of rural life. I helped to fetch water from a protected spring, wrote my field notes out long hand by candle light, bathed in a bucket, and helped to cook over the open fire. During our free time we visited with Thokozile’s (my research assistant) friends and family, we attended a funeral on Friday and Saturday, and church on Sunday.

In addition to experiencing every day life, we continued to conduct our research going with a couple of the Gogos to collect their monthly government pension, weeding in one family’s garden, and spending a day walking to the forest to collect muthis (traditional medicines) with a sangoma (traditional healer).

While invaluable in providing me with insight into the rhythms of rural life and into health and agriculture in this area, I had anticipated all of these experiences.

However, there was something very unexpected: food.

I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, of course I had anticipated (with a bit of anxiety) an unsettled stomach. However, I hadn’t thought much about how much I would learn by simply eating. I hadn’t really thought about how connected the act of eating is with agriculture itself. I hadn’t really connected production to consumption.

As we walked from household to household chatting with different people we would invariably stop and pull a peach off of one of their trees to see if it was ripe. As we visited different households, one family would give us a couple of plums to eat and another would give us a pear. It turns out that those trees that often line the periphery of a household’s garden are actually an important source of seasonal nutrition.

And so begins research via the stomach.

Through the simple act of snacking my original concept of agriculture as grain and vegetable crops in fields and gardens combined with livestock production expands.

Continuing on, in trying to understand the connections between consumption and production, we turn to food preparation.

Food preparation begins with gathering the ingredients. Because it is summer, almost every meal includes food from the garden as well as food from the shop. This much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the number of meals that included wild vegetables. These imifinos (green leafy vegetables) form the accidental ground cover of gardens, grow alongside rivers, and exist in forests. In summer they contribute valuable vitamins to people’s diets and are an integral part of a family’s summer menu.

Here again my stomach led me to an expanded understanding of cultivation; the inclusion of wild cultivars as a part of the subsistence side of a family’s diet expands ideas about subsistence agriculture to include non-cultivated, or wild foods.

Take this expansion of food and cultivation a step further and all of a sudden agricultural landscapes look very different.

Already some of these gardens seem quite different from the neat, rational, and scientific agricultural spaces of monocropped fields; they seem unkempt, even random in their planting patterns and varietals. If you add to this the trees on their periphery and the forests and rivers that sit on the edges of the community, suddenly the agricultural landscape is unrecognizable.

This newly expanded agricultural landscape brings us back to the question that we started with: What is agriculture? Does it require active cultivation on the part of people? If so, who is to say that by harvesting wild imifinos people aren’t “cultivating,” aren’t manipulating the environment so that imifinos grow consistently in these wild spaces? Does agriculture assume a limited spatial extent? If so, then are some wild imifinos (the ones that grow on their own in the garden) part of the agriculture system while others are not?

As seems to be the case more often than not, I’m not sure I have a good answer to this question. What I do know, however, is that when trying to understand how subsistence activities contribute to a household’s diet, and through that to their health, crops that grow in the garden, fruit that comes from trees, and wild imifinos gathered from the forest, the river, and the garden all must be included. So perhaps then agriculture does include wild spaces along with wild foods. Thoughts?