Negative Productions during Fieldwork in the Hometown

Abstract

Through autoethnographic writing, I reflect on “negative productions”—the “nonproductive” events that initially seem to create frictions against the disciplined acts of data gathering. Locally valued concepts such as supog (shame) and ginakanan (place of origin, genealogy) could materially press on our academic creative projects. In my discussion, I provide two examples from my field work in my hometown in Nabua, Philippines: the nonscreening of my film Baad ng Pauno (Restless) and my eventual retreat from the filming of events involving retired U.S. Navy men to which I already had access. I push for the reconsideration of what initially appears to be “negative” as productive, while also thinking about the inevitability of our participation in the messy work of knowledge production. While negative productions might unsettle our academic ambitions, they open doors for rethinking self-reflexivity, empathy, and our ethical commitments.

我透过自我民族志书写来反思“负面生产”——本质上似乎创造出与有纪律的资料蒐集行动产生摩擦的“非生产性”事件。诸如supog（羞耻）与ginakanan（发源地、族谱）等受到地方重视的概念，在物质上强加于我们的学术创造计画。我于讨论中，提供我在家乡菲律宾纳布亚从事田野工作的两个案例：我的电影 Baad ng Pauno（躁动）未能放映，以及我最终退出原本参与的有关美国退休海军的拍摄事件。我推进重新考量本质上被视为“负面的”作为具有生产性的，同时思考我们参与混乱的知识生产工作的必然性。虽然负面生产可能会动摇我们的学术企图，但却也开啓了重新思考反身性、移情，以及我们的道德承诺之契机。

Por medio de un escrito autoetnográfico, reflexiono sobre las “producciones negativas” ––los eventos “no productivos” que inicialmente parecen crear fricciones contra los actos disciplinados de recolección de datos––. Los conceptos localmente valorados de supog (vergüenza) y ginakanan (lugar de origen, genealogía) presionan materialmente sobre nuestros proyectos académicos creativos. En mi discusión, presento dos ejemplos sacados de mi trabajo de campo en mi pueblo natal de Nabua, Filipinas: la fallida proyección de mi película Baad ng Pauno (Inquieto) y mi eventual retiro de la filmación de eventos en los que estuviesen involucrados hombres retirados de la Armada de los EE.UU., a los cuales yo ya tenía acceso. Recomiendo con urgencia una reconsideración de lo que inicialmente pareciera ser “negativo” en lo productivo, al igual que pensar acerca de la inevitabilidad de nuestra participación en el complicado trabajo de producción de conocimiento. Mientras que las producciones negativas podrían perturbar nuestras ambiciones académicas, sí abren puertas para repensar la auto-reflexividad, la empatía y nuestros compromisos éticos.

Key Words:

• autoethnography
• field work
• methods
• migration
• Philippines

• 自我民族志
• 田野工作
• 方法
• 移民
• 菲律宾

• (auto)etnografía
• autoetnografía
• trabajo de campo
• métodos
• migración
• Filipinas

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my mother and to the elders of the Fleet Reserve Association Branch 127 for sharing their stories with me, and to my townsmates and friends who helped me connect with many people during field work. My peers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Philippine Studies Series continue to give me incredible support and inspiration during my writing. Leonora Angeles, Alexia Bloch, Geraldine Pratt at UBC, and Deborah Dixon and the anonymous reviewers for GeoHumanities gave a lot of care and attention to the drafts of this article.

FUNDING

My thanks go to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my doctoral research.

Notes

1. I am not alone in drawing attention to the negative, absence, failings, silences, collapses, disappearance, and other negative descriptors. Rony (1996), in fact, pointed out that a central theme in the works by non-Western filmmakers is their “not-photographing” of subjects.

2. My larger research project is an ethnography of one of the many towns in the Global South whose residents’ experience of migration is inflected by intersecting forces of colonial encounters and global economy. Interested in looking into the entangled workings of migration and intimacies in everyday life, I look at both quotidian and spectacular events in the hometown to contribute to scholarship that pushes for the understanding of particularly local practices such as kinship, ritual, and so on, as simultaneously global and intimate (Pratt and Rosner 2012). Following phenomenological scholarship (Fabian 1990; Ahmed 2003; M. Jackson 2013) that has pushed for a nuancing of the lived experience, my initial idea was to use the audiovisual in reflecting on intimacy in rigorous ways.

3. For many years, Filipinos were only recruited to the Steward Branch where no white Americans were allowed. Ingram (1970) later called U.S. Naval ships “floating plantations” in comparison with the historical organization of slave labor in agricultural production in the U.S. South.

4. I sought oral consent from my informants, many of them my own relations. During interviews and conversations, informants would often note which parts of our conversation needed to be “off the record,” and some of them were up front in steering the direction of my research. Obtaining consent or permission is entangled with interaction processes contingent on existing, developing, and built intimacies between the researcher and members of the community that other Filipino researchers interested in “decolonizing methodologies” have already problematized (Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino 2000; Enriquez 2008).

5. The worldwide screening was in 2009, under a contract with a Filipino satellite TV channel that caters to overseas Filipino subscribers.

6. I called those who have expressed kinship or other nonconsanguineal connections with my family “uncle” or “grandfather/granduncle” (Lolo) and those who share some connections with my family, Manoy (elder brother). I called members of the club Mister, Sir, or Doctor if we have not mutually established direct kinship ties or other connections. I also called the navy elders I met through old and close friends Lolo, following what my friends already call their beloved elders.

7. I am aware that some critics have dismissed indigenous psychology for carrying the dangerous card of nativist essentialism. I am more inclined to follow San Juan (2006), who wrote about indigenous theorizing in the Philippines as “a Filipino response … to continuing U.S. interference in Philippine society, culture, and politics … it is not equivalent to nativization since it involves a radical political program to democratize the social structure and its undergirding fabric of norms, beliefs, and constitutive behavioral elements” (52–54).

8. I am limited by space in further deepening my discussion on the tensions in researching family and others. Autoethnographic works provide many compelling accounts, but I would like to highlight Ellis’s (2007) proposition for “relational ethics” in researching and negotiating with “intimate others,” which include not only our immediate family members, but also informants who became our friends, and so on. In her occasionally unsettling piece, Ellis wrote about the different routes she has taken in negotiating with others and herself about what and how to write. In her account of her lifetime work, Ellis wrote about the different shades of negotiations with her intimate others to suggest that figuring out what could be written or revealed is always in process.

9. Both Rose and England have reflected on “failure” in their research. Rose (1997) suggested that anxieties arising from self-reflexivity could weigh down academic work, leading to what she called knowledge production from a “sense of failure.” In her research about lesbians in Toronto, England (1994) understood the community leaders’ nonresponse to her queries as cues to their disinterest in participating in her project, leading her to call her project “failed research.” In my discussion here, I take interest in the notion of failure by proposing to reevaluate negativity as not necessarily leading to a dead end.

10. Bisa is a gesture of respect for elders that includes a younger person taking an elder’s hand to bring it to touch their forehead.

11. The concept of the uragon as used in Nabua as well as in the larger Bicol region, is a value that alludes to one’s excellence in several aspects of life. Excellence here might be related to skills, technical abilities, intelligence, interpersonal relations, and so on.

12. Many have written about the blurriness of the boundaries between the field site and the spaces where we write. Katz (1994), for example, wrote of the “field” as “multiply determined” and in these, “we are everywhere, always in” (72). Kim (1990) told us how the “emotional weight” of collected data from the field is transported to his writing desk. It could also be that even “natives” returning to their own communities might find it difficult to locate the “field” (D’Alisera 1999). Nast (1994) reflected on the “field” as space that is “in-between,” writing of it as “always politically situated, contextualized, and defined and that its social, political, and spatial boundaries shift with changing circumstances or in different political contexts” (60). My “field” is clearly separated from my “desk,” and I call up these works to recognize the persistence of questions about the field and home that researchers continue to struggle with.

Additional information

Funding

My thanks go to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my doctoral research.

Notes on contributors

Dada Docot

DADA DOCOT is co-founder of the UBC Philippine Studies Series (http://ubcphilippinestudies.ca), and PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. She is also a filmmaker whose works focus on Filipino migration.