I held my first focus group this week in Tama. I've come to call this my "control village" because I'm hoping to be able to conduct a comparative study on the environmental knowledge of climate change between this village and Weglega, which is currently receiving a pretty intensive water development project.Unlike the States, where I'd say we divide ourselves based on gender, race, politics, and to a lesser extent wealth, Tama divides itself by marital status, gender, and religion. The most salient groups are married Muslim men, married non-Muslim men (both Christian and animist), married women (of all religions), then unmarried boys and girls. For my first focus group, I wanted to speak with the women who are almost always the main agricultural laborers and, if you can get them in a group away from men, will tell you anything and everything.On the road to Tama.I don't now if the Conseil, the main political representative and authority in this (odd) village without a chief, misunderstood me or if it wasn't kosher to have a meeting with the women without first meeting the men, but when I arrived in Tama I found many men ready for my arrival. I planned the meeting at 9 but also planned to wait until 10 to get started. By 10:30, 20 men had gathered and 2 women. I decided to go ahead with the men even though all my questions--and vocabulary cram sessions the days before--were geared toward women.(As an aside: a focus group should be no more an 10 people and ideally between 4-8 in order to provoke discussion and provide a space where even shy people may speak. But I saw no polite way of limiting this number if invitees to these initial meetings.)I recognize I've made great progress in my Moore training. But I also know that I still have a long way to go. I finally have the tenses down and am building my vocabulary, but I stutter and stall like an old, beat up car when I speak. I form the words in my head, quickly running over the sentence to make sure it's grammatically correct before speaking. When the words come out I double check them to make sure the tones are right. The difference in a nasalized versus un-nasalized vowel can be an ocean of meaning. The result of all this scrutinizing and double-checking is VERY inelegant speech, which only makes me more self-conscious.We started the meeting and I immediately felt the pressure. I explained who I was and what I hoped to do in Tama. I did my best to explain what an Anthropologist is, and in Moore I got a sense of how utterly bizarre my line of work is. There's no word for culture in Moore. The best I could do was say I was interested in their traditions, a term which is itself a compound: "rog n miki" which literally translates to born to find/discover. So I say I'm interested in that which they are born to find; what is already here when they arrive; what is done by them, their parents and ancestors. Knowing that the words I had didn't quite fit my meaning, knowing that my language was elementary at best, knowing that there was already mis-communcation coming into the meeting culminated in me trying to keep my focus. Luckily, I acquired the help of a local teen who was able to translate for me through the rough spots. And in all, we talked for about 45min. By this time about 15 women showed up. I was feeling more confident and I figured, why the hell not? So we had a second focus group with the women that went much more smoothly. Despite my initial lack of focus I'm counting the focus groups as a success. I managed to acquire baseline data, I made additional contacts, I planned one-on-one interviews for the coming week as well as an additional focus group with the Muslim men. So it looks like big things are in the works for 2013!Bonne année, y'all!
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