I've been working in Guatemala in various capacities on and off for the past 6 years--as a community-based health worker, a qualitative health researcher, a fledgling medical student, a language school director, and an ethnographer--the direct result of which is a very complicated relationship with "the field."
In anthropology, "the field" is the site where we conduct our research, and it's often far away from home. The unspoken rule of academics is that the farther you go from home to do your research, the more legitimate of an anthropologist you are--a philosophy that betrays the colonial origins of our discipline. So if you're from the US doing anthropological research in Melanesia, you're golden.
My field site is not that far away from home, but it feels a million miles away at times. And it's certainly exotic in many of the ways that tend to pull anthropologists in like magnets. There's a history of colonialism and genocide, and poverty and oppression are tangible in daily life. These themes, the bread and butter of much scholarship about Guatemala, are always ripe for political economic analysis. And furthermore, the majority of the population here is indigenous, which translates to opportunities for rich (and often overly dramatic) explorations of local symbolism and Maya cosmovision.
I didn't know I'd end up here. It happened by accident. I learned about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company and the US CIA-staged coup of the 1950's in high school, but never did I suspect then that I'd be spending a good chunk of my life working in the land of eternal spring. Through chance connections, I began to work with an NGO here and haven't stopped since. Guatemala is enchanting, and I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word.
Many of the formative moments of my twenties happened in Guatemala: sharing nauseating glasses of corn gruel with impoverished coffee pickers, feeling human spirits float out of dying bodies in sterile hospital wards, breathing in the grime of a dirty third world capital in a state of hyperaware insecurity. I'm not sure what there is left to experience or that I want to go on experiencing it at this liminal phase in my life, in which I lack the skills and power to remedy any of the injustices I've been silently bearing witness to on a daily basis.
Some anthropologists, after learning the ways of a new culture, mastering a local language (or not realizing what was lost in translation), and developing meaningful relationships in "the field," never go back. I vowed to never be one of them. More often, I'd like to hope, anthropologists find ways to stay engaged with their research site. They go back periodically to visit old friends, conduct service projects, or (very typically) unearth new research avenues that will position them well on the path of "publish or perish."
I have many friends here. I have many acquaintances. There are many people here that I care deeply about. But I also feel spent, exhausted, tired--gastada, agotada, cansada. My dissertation research (which has entailed many an interview with cancer patients and their family members) has been emotionally tiring. Within and outside of my research and medical work, portraits of suffering await me at every corner, at every turn, whether they are unleashed as an avalanche of pain in a medical history, or whether they are puzzle pieces of a troubling life history that are slowly handed to me by my closest friends. Surely, there is more than suffering in Guatemala. There is much more. But it is much of what I perceive on a daily basis, and it has hollowed me out.
I'm ready to go home. But the hard part of leaving the field is not knowing when I'm coming back or in what capacity.
I've done research here for some time now. It's important, I love it, and yet it's not enough. Now--as long as my PhD committee members agree that I've done my time--I'm not obligated to make another trip to Guatemala to continue interviewing people about cervical cancer. And I really don't want to; the sorrow from all those encounters has seeped into my bones and I'd like to recover and sponge it out.
Yet I still want to come back to Guatemala.
And do what?
I'm no longer in the mood to be an anthropologist in the field. I still haven't mastered being a conduit rather than a container, and all I can anticipate is more sad stories that I can't do much about.
But then am I supposed to be a physician in the field? My fieldwork has filled me with doubts about who should be providing health care to the rural poor, what high quality care entails, and what being a responsible practitioner of social justice medicine means in the short and long term. Does Guatemala really need another gringa physician traipsing between villages for a few weeks or months every year, counseling diabetics, deworming malnourished children, and providing prenatal care? The selfish part of me says yes, yes, let me do that! That naive part of me that strives to emulate a young Paul Farmer, hiking through the Haitian mountains with a backpack of medicine, is still alive. The part of me that has matured over the years says no, there must be a better solution than a single socially conscious foreign doctor providing care for the Guatemalan poor, even if she is working with local staff in long-term programs. Where is a single individual to direct her efforts to make the field a better place?
In the end, I have no answers, only doubts. I'm not sure what path the MD/PhD treads to get back to the field or what she does there. It is a lonely path and there are many forks, and it is a big field.
