Extracts from my fieldnotes:

22-11-2006

“Basically this morning as the fog contemplated lifting, we had some light rice/veg and marched off towards a village below Rinchenpong where JD (as he seems to be known as by the "fieldworkers" of this NGO) was expected to attend a village meeting to verify the progress of the toilet-building project, supported by the State and his Health and Environment Conservation Society. The down hill was tremendous. Extremely steep and continuous, without a moment of flatness, and occasionally extremely slippery on wet rocks,. something my hard-soled boots are not great at dealing with. Down down down as the knees crickled, down towards the village of Chingthang, largely Rai. There were a couple of people assembled but basically the men were off as it had rained in the morning and the assumption was that the whole thing would be postponed . A large number of toilets had been built with money given by the State (1500 rupees towards costs), but people were still not really using them, and there was no running water to the toilet. JD had to go down to Legship to sort out some financial business (as he is the Gram Panchayat secretary for this area and has to sign off paperworks and permissions). I walked to Hee Bermiok, through Barfok (mostly Gurung, as are the villages on the other side of the valley to the village of Berthang), with JD's fieldworker (just finished school in March and will start up college doing CPI (chemistry, physics and maths: he earns 1000 rupees a month as fieldworker. The accountant in the Health/Environment NGO earns 3000). Walking mostly flattened out until we headed down to the river then up to the village as a short cut across the valley. Intensely and basically unbelievably exhausting. I had so many thoughts about fieldwork, about Bolivia and Yaranda, about why I wanted to study Lepchas in particular and why not study Nepali's in Sikkim (pretty unusual though they are the majority, and this would also coincide with the increase these days in studies on diasporas... I kept thinking about the unit of analysis; what would it be: a village-level study, or an ethnic group? the problem is that most villages, well at least many of the ones around here, are extremely heterogenous. What is the point of going after villages that are homogenous when they are not the norm - in the sense that they are representative of Sikkim in some way. The Lepchas are such a minority now and mostly live only in Dzongu homogenously (though even then there are Nepali labourers, either semi-permanent or seasonal), and in a few villages in North Sikkim near Mangan, supposedly. These are the villages that I should go and visit next...”



25-11-2006

There must be a considerable amount of health-maintenance/promotion knowledge that is not formalised, and most probably not transmitted consciously. Most of this knowledge probably deals with minor health-imbalances such as headaches and stomach problems: the common complaints. More chronic illness or severe (how to decide what and when this is?) is probably dealt with more formally, either with a dhami/jhankri or at the (sub or main) Primary Health Centre. It is interesting to think about the aspects of people's life and culture that are more visible (ritual is in part more visible, though the meanings, effects, interpretations etc..are not), and those that are less visible, such as ideas about health and healing. The science partly comes into play when you develop methods, ideally systematic and replicable, to uncover these hidden or partially covered meanings and activities and explain them in terms that other people can understand. Seems obvious enough except that I do find the distinction between visible and partially/complete hidden interesting in that it is usually the visible that one first notices, and can most easily document, and it is certainly the visible that most interests economists and politicians: how many rice-paddy's do you have? - That sort of question. The partially/completely hidden is more the work of the culture-surgeon anthropologist(!)


25-11-2006
I had thought up an interesting and simple way of measuring what people desired materially, or at least, that which they knew could be purchased. I was thinking that this could be added to the general Economic module in the TAPS research project. The question would be simple. To ask the person what they would do with X amount of money. To have perhaps three figures, low, middle, high and ask the question for each one. Here in India the unit could be 100 rupees (perhaps something temporary and more immediate, but probably more than just a bar of chocolate or good quality rice), 1000 rupees, and 1 lakh (100,000 rupees, or as they write it here 1,000,00). I guess the problem would be a classic anthropological one of realising that there is always a difference between what people say they do (or would do) and what people actually do. This could be tested on a small scale I guess by randomly alloting people with small sums of money that they had previously (say 1 month before) said they would spend on X-thing. The trouble then is that peoples minds change. Perhaps they said they wanted a pair of shoes, but at the time decided a 10 pairs of thick socks would be better. Of course the additional problem is that small sums are necessarily for smaller and more temporary desires. I couldn’t randomly assign 100,000 rupees to 25 % of the sample to test the theory. Though it would probably be the larger dreams that would change less.