Africa on My Mind: Encounters in the Field

Abstract

Some years ago Robert Merton (1964, p. 19) observed that our literature on research methods tells us ways in which we ought to think, feel, and act but says precious little about the ways in which we actually do think, feel, and act. The significance of this insight became painfully clear during my most recent research stint in southern Africa. Certainly the tradition of sharing personal reminiscences about research and setting remains, for reasons related to discipline norms, rare among sociologists. Our stress on detachment and the public persona ordinarily precludes concern for the interaction between private person and the field. There are notable exceptions, of course-one thinks of William Foote Whyte's disarmingly candid accounts of his Street Corner Society work (1981, 1955), or Renee Fox's essay on her Belgium medical research (1962).1 But we have little of the richness found in the memoirs of anthropological scholars such as Malinowski (1922), Bohanon (1964), Briggs (1970), Mead (1977), and more recently Ben Reina (1984). They are reports that I have come, quite belatedly, to appreciate in spite of having long internalized sociology's proscriptions. The fact is that by the time I returned from South two years ago, I felt an urgent need to share something more personal with colleagues than the typical preliminary findings or state of South Africa report. Following a brief presentation in this vein at a departmental colloquium, colleagues urged me to develop the theme. After some hesitancy-there is professional risk-work is underway,2 and KU's invitation to send MARS something on current research seemed a propitious opportunity to stray from the more traditional chronicling into the experiential mode. For with me still is the intensity of feeling that South evokes; perhaps my commentary will provoke some rethinking re sociological endeavors.