The Whales Beneath the Surface: The Muddled Story of Doing Research With Poor Mothers in a Developing Country

Abstract

In this article I attempt to show how research ideals of social change and usefulness can lead to “research paralysis.” I also argue that if there is sufficient reflexivity about the research process itself, paralysis is not inevitable, and useful knowledge can indeed be generated. I substantiate this by illustrating how the same interview data can be analyzed on multiple levels, rendering it useful in different ways in different contexts. I thus argue that reflexivity is essential in the Community Psychologist's struggle for usefulness: it is in reflecting on the complexity of the research task (the demands of different contexts and different communities) that the Community Psychologist can engage strategically and productively with the possibilities and the limits of her usefulness. The data that are the focus of this article were generated in a long-term qualitative research project focusing on low-income, Black mothers from a semirural community in South Africa.

Notes

¹We are mindful of the fact that the use of racial categories in South African scholarship is controversial. Such categories are socially constructed, however, and carry important social meanings. As such, we believe that, following the argument presented by Jewkes and colleagues (1998), it is impossible to conduct a meaningful analysis of our findings within the context of postapartheid South Africa without making reference to previous racial classifications, since these still inform existing power relations. In this article the category of “Coloured” will be used to refer to South Africans said to be of diverse and mixed racial origins; designated under Apartheid racial classification as “Coloured.”

²Foucault (1980) articulates something about the agency of the seemingly powerless in the midst of social constraint. He says, “Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.”

³Foucault highlights the social researcher's task to understand the need for closure as follows:

What needs to be done is something quite different. One needs to investigate historically, and beginning from the lowest level, how mechanisms of power have been able to function. In regard to the confinement of the insane, for example, or the repression and interdiction of sexuality, we need to see the manner in which, at the effective level of the family, of the immediate environment, of the cells and most basic units of society, these phenomena of repression and exclusion possessed their instruments and their logic, in response to a certain number of needs. We need to identify the agents responsible for them, their real agents. … We need to see how these mechanisms of power, at a given moment, in a precise conjuncture and by means of a certain number of transformations, have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful. I think that in this way one could easily manage to demonstrate that what the bourgeoisie needed, or that in which its system discovered its real interests, was not the exclusion of the mad or the surveillance and prohibition of the infantile masturbation, but rather, the techniques and procedures themselves of such an exclusion. It is the mechanisms of that exclusion that are necessary, the apparatuses of surveillance, the medicalization of sexuality, of madness, of delinquency, all the micro-mechanisms of power, that came, from a certain moment in time, to represent the interests of the bourgeoisie. (Foucault, 1980, pp. 100–101)

⁴It is Geertz's well-known story that seems to best capture the incompleteness of cultural analysis: “There is an Indian story—at least I heard it as an Indian story—about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down’ ” (1973, pp. 28–29).

⁵I am well aware of the controversy around using the term “community” (Harding, 2001; Walby, 2001). The ideal of community has been very central in feminism (see, for instance, Goldberger et al., 1996). Young states: “Community is an understandable dream, expressing a desire for selves that are transparent to one another, relationships of mutual identification, social closeness and comfort” (1990, p. 300). This positive orientation toward community can be understood in the light of Tonnies’ (1957) analysis of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. With the advent of capitalism and industrialization, smaller and more concrete communities of face-to-face contact (corresponding with the preindustrial community or Gemeinschaft) were replaced by larger more abstract social collectives (Gesellschaft). Paradoxically, Tonnies (1957) states, the need for community is a feature of the impersonal Gesellschaft. It is exactly because the word community evokes such romantic fantasies of internal consensus, shared norms, and separateness that makes it appropriate to use in this context: the use of this word highlights the idea that knowledge is validated by groups of people with interests and agendas. Walby (2001) proposes the use of the word “network” instead. I agree with Harding (2001, p. 517) that the use of the word “network” can deemphasise the politics of knowledge.

⁶In her argument about story telling, Walby (2000) states that even if story telling is good for feminist politics, it is not necessarily good for feminist theory. She says that she is reluctant to equate feminist politics with feminist theory and states that feminist theory is not advanced by story-telling (Walby, 2000). While it is very difficult to define what counts as “feminist theory,” it seems that in reviewing different discussions of feminist theory, one always find some kind of analysis of power relations (domination and subordination) and some notion of liberation, emancipation, and social transformation. Feminist theories therefore always include some explicit or implicit reference to political strategy. I would go so far as to say that to engage in feminist theory is to be a political activist. In fact, as Foucault has argued, to engage in any theory is a political act. This should not paralyze us into not using theory. It should, however, make us more self-aware.

⁷When there is such an emphasis on reflexivity, an insistence on looking at the personal stories of women on so many different levels, the question of where the researcher herself stands when doing all this reflection arises. Harding (2001) says that while no one can ever get completely outside their culture's assumptions, “only a small amount of alienation or separation from some such assumptions is necessary to create the possibility of bringing it into critical focus” (p. 518).