I've posted fairly frequently about the ever fleeting passage of time as I conduct my research. This is my biggest fear: running out of time. It's not coming down with malaria or wrecking in a motorcycle accident. Yes, these are concerns. But the overarching fear, the thing that keeps me up at night (like tonight), is the fear that I won't have enough time to collect all the data that I need to collect in the time I have remaining.I am a nomadic anthropologist. I was introduced to West Africa by Togo. I conducted preliminary research in the Sahel, hardest hit by climate change, in both Niger and Mali. I've ended up in Burkina with equal parts chance and intellectual curiosity. The lack of ethnographic roots has meant that I've never really understood--I mean, viscerally understood--why an anthropologist would choose to go back to the same fieldsite year after year. I know understand.One of my valued research assistants, Amadou Nikiema, me, and my valiant steed. Photo by Stephanie Scott.I've just wrapped up my second round of preliminary analysis; a moment to take stock of what I've done in the past 8 months and to decide where I need to go in the remaining 4. Where are the holes in the narrative? What questions do I need to ask? What questions will be most reasonably answered in the remaining time? The analysis has been both rewarding and intimidating.Looking back to where I've been I can pat myself on the back. I've accomplished a lot. But I can look ahead and begin to worry that the growing list of questions to be asked can conceivably extend for as long as people are around. Conducting ethnographic research is like tracing a metaphysical knot that continuously entangles itself. I pick up a thread and see where it goes. It crosses under and over other threads, other strands, other cultural dimensions. I may follow those for a while, trying to keep in mind the over arching question for why I'm here. But the knot continuously moves and reshapes itself as people, nothing if not sociality incarnate, live their lives, threading the warp and weave of culture.*This second round of analysis has forced me to compile not only the list of questions I need to fill the remaining gaps in my current research, but to list entirely unrelated and potentially fruitful research projects. The knot is larger and more complex than I could ever have imagined. And it continues to change.So here I am: excited and nervous, confident and worried. Quality sleep is a thing of the past. I'm reading and rereading past fieldnotes. Pouring over interview transcripts. Pulling up published articles for insight and inspiration. "Fieldwork doesn't end," a colleague once told me, "you just feel OK about stopping." Well, I'm not ready to stop, not just yet.____________________*I wish I could take credit for these metaphors--they are immensely constructive--but I can't. Donna Haraway, a contemporary, gets credit for the "knot-in-motion" while Ruth Benedict, one of the founders of our discipline, wrote of culture as a fabric with varying "warp and weave."
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