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Memoirs from the Field

Genevieve Bedoucha, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, is an ethnologist who specializes in the study of water and agriculture, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa but also in France. Her L’eau, l’amie du puissant (1987), an important social anthropological study of an oasis community in southern Tunisia is notable for treating water as a subject of serious ethnographic investigation. Eclipse de lune au Yemen is a memoir of her fieldwork experiences. An introduction, roughly translated as “What Has to Be Said,” provides background on the author’s life, career, and research and is especially illuminating on the way her position as a woman may have affected her fieldwork. (This latter aspect of her memoir complements other reflexive writing by women ethnographers in recent years.) Bedoucha made several trips to Yemen from 1984 through 1986, finally settling in Wadi Akhwan (northern Yemen), where she did research on highland tribal irrigation and cultivation. Though Yemen is the focus of her story, she weaves into her textured account valuable recollections of her 1970s fieldwork in Mansoura, a Tunisian desert oasis. For example, she reports that by the time she came to Yemen she was no longer so naive as to reveal her Jewish identity, not to mention the fact that the man who accompanied her (whom we know only as Gaini) and posed as her husband was only a colleague and friend. The ethical quandaries that these and other minor dissimulations presented are subtly explored. The ensuing three sections—“Finding the Valley,” “Lunar Eclipse,” and “Spring Showers”—are all written in “diary” form. The status of these entries is intentionally ambiguous. They were not, like those of Malinowski’s field diary, written in the field but clearly crafted retrospectively, no doubt drawing on field notes and other written records produced in the field but also on recollections and reflections many years later. Allusions to rereading the fieldnotes in subsequent years and to comparable experiences in Tunisia meld the voice of the fieldworker with the voice of the ethnologist recollecting the field. And a date above a text such as “April 24, 1984,” is also ambiguous, on the one hand calling to mind a diary and on the other simply serving as a device for distinguishing the succession of days. Interesting things are implied about time and memory that deserve closer analysis than a casual reading of this text would at first suggest. This intricately layered account presents us with some charming portraits of people encountered in the field as well as deeply felt ruminations on the meaning of those encounters. It has to be said that we do not learn very much about irrigation practices, but we do gain some skillfully rendered and beautifully observed scenes of what cultivation might be like as an experience, especially for women. Work in the fields and fieldwork are almost magically blended in the text. Just when the author thinks that she is being drawn completely into the world she describes, something happens that makes her realize how different she is from the people she so much admires and likes. Their fears of the lunar eclipse, though culturally understandable to her, disturb and alienate her. Her sense of disequilibrium is made more complete by her being practically evicted from the country by the national security forces and told never to return—for reasons that were never made clear. This book joins other recent attempts to blur the genres of ethnography, memoir, and travel writing on the Middle East such as Abdellah Hammoudi’s (2006) A Season in Mecca and my own Yemen Chronicle (Caton 2005), which deal with very different aspects of life in that part of the world (for Hammoudi Islam, for me warfare and mediation). Hammoudi’s and my work are more ethnographic than Bedoucha’s (which might be best described as a phenomenology of fieldwork). Hammoudi’s book is less a reflection on the vicissitudes of fieldwork than a rumination—almost mystical at times—on existence and the soul. All three books are reflexive in the sense that the authors ask how their positionality in the field affected the outcomes of their research—Hammoudi’s being interesting because he is an ambivalent Muslim making the pilgrimage, Bedoucha’s because of her ambivalence about being a woman in the field and the complexities and unexpected opportunities this position afforded her, and mine for its exploration of the way events in the field can make fieldwork uncertain and precarious.