I am so much cooler in Bolivia.

“Really, I am!” I want to shout at people I meet here in DC.

I suppose it’s a matter of social positioning, and I can’t really help it. Here I am a grad student and adjunct professor. I either stay in sweat pants all day or try to fight my younger-than-I-actually-am appearance by trying to dress like an academic. I hate when librarians ask me if I’m looking at information for a class paper. But in La Paz, I am one of the cool kids. I wear vintage, rockabilly dresses or ripped jeans and t shirts given to me by tattoo artist friends. I’m a live music junkie, a tattoo shop groupie, booze-slinging benefactor, restaurant aficionada, mural-painting sidekick, dj enthusiast, and a legitimate luchadora who rarely pays for a drink.

I wrote in May that I’m famous in La Paz (only half-jokingly), and its (half-jokingly) true. La Paz has the feeling of a small town, and if I don’t know everyone, I at least know someone who knows them. DC is small too, but rather than being comforting, its almost oppressive. When I left here in April 2011, I had good friends and a comfortable repertoire. I return to a place that feels empty. Most of my friends have left (such is life in such a transient city). With others I have grown apart. Evenings feel empty here as I crave distraction, camaraderie, excitement.

I came back in a depressed state, and googled “post-fieldwork depression.” Most of what turned up was written by people who disliked their field site and were depressed in the field. I felt the opposite. I longed to return to my friends, my usual days of training, reading, writing, visiting friends workplaces or homes, nice dinners served by my favorite Belgian, and the free tequila shots that went along with it. I missed the guessing games of who I’d run into on the street (there was always someone, but you never know who). Slowly it gets better. Easier. I instinctively put paper in the toilet, and don’t turn my nose at tap water. I wait patiently at bus stops, and thoroughly appreciate my electric heater. But I’d happily give it all up, even knowing there are horrific electric showers waiting for me on the other side.

But this is how it happens. We re-integrate ourselves to the best of our abilities. We find the little things that make us happy (hot water in sinks) and try to forget the things that were so magical about our other home (evening light on Illimani). And at the very least, I’ve found a bartender here who hooks me up as well as I was taken care of in LPZ.

I had been back from a 2 week rendezvous in Bolivia for about 48 hours, and was contemplating returning to vegetarianism. For lunch, I made myself a tofurkey sandwich with vegan cheese and spicy honey mustard. I washed it down with the overly sweet canned maracuya juice I had been so excited to find at Safeway. As I chewed the last bite and slurped the last bit of juice, I walked into the kitchen to put my plate and cup in the dishwasher. There was some mustard stuck to the plate, so I turned on the sink to rinse it off. I put the plate and my hand under the water, and I literally jumped backwards. The water was hot.

Plenty of times in my life I’ve had a similar reaction. Scalding water gushes out of a sink, or the shower suddenly turns ten degrees hotter with no warning. But this was not one of those cases. The water was not painful. It was just hot. Maybe even just warm. But I had become so used to washing dishes in cold water I was startled. I was so used to the possibility of warm water coming out of a faucet being entirely beyond comprehension that I had a physical reaction.

And it got me thinking…..

Now, before I go any further I want to remind all the dear readers that I am truly, utterly, madly in love with Bolivia. I don’t necessarily agree with all the politicians or politics. I don’t even necessarily agree with labor union tactics, or all the artistic expressions of Bolivians. In fact, I tend to critique the overly-romanticizing gaze many in the North Atlantic cast on Bolivian revolutions and protest and the like. But I love so many of the people, I love the thin air, I love the sun, and gazing up at Illimani, and buying Viva phone credit, and salteñas for breakfast, and even the long ride back from El Alto after a long day of having my body repeatedly thrown onto blanket-covered wood palates.

me & illimani

But I don’t love the water in the Bolivia.

Point 1-Sinks. Only cold water comes out. This is all well and good, but when your hands are freezing from just the general cold that permeates daily life in the shade (and most sinks, being indoors, are in the shade), it’s a new level of annoyance. And since it is quite cold in the shade, and it seems that most water tanks are kept in the shade, when I say cold I do not mean room temperature, I mean a few degrees above actually freezing. Now, you can always boil water for washing dishes, doing laundry, etc., but that is not always particularly convenient. Though at least water boils at a lower temperature at such high altitudes.

Point 2-Drinking water. Don’t do it. I brush my teeth with it, and rinse glasses (see above), and use plain old tap water for most daily activities. But I’ve also had enough cases of parasites and vomiting or diarrhea from unknown causes that I stay away from drinking the stuff. And Agua Vital by the 2 liter is cheap enough. But if you find yourself parched late at night without a bottle. Or worse, if you’re sick and go through your supply and feel too weak to walk uphill to the tienda to get more, knowing better than to drink tap water can be truly excruciating.

Point 3-Showers. I have had good showers in Bolivia. Ekko hostel has some very nice gas-heated showers and I love them. Most of the places I have showered in Bolivia, however, have electric showerheads, which come in a variety of qualities. The good ones are good. Nice hot water comes out and lasts at least 5 minutes so you can actually wash everything you’d like to. But even these never seem to be powerful enough to heat the whole bathroom, so you’re still left stepping out from behind the curtain to a chill-inducing tile room. And then there are the bad ones. The electrocute you when you turn them off. Or sometimes start spewing sparks. Sometimes they only get luke-warm. Sometimes they just decide not to produce any warm water at all. And that might actually be preferable to the ones that purposefully trick you with about twenty seconds of warm water—just enough time to lather the shampoo in your hair—before they go cold for good. And others tease you with two-second alterations between pleasantly hot and scream-inducing cold. Oh, Bolivian showers, I do not miss you.

the nicest bathroom i had in la paz, still with electric showerhead

In February, I had the first of several flu-like experiences of last year. While chatting online with my friend Kate in New York, I complained: “If only I could just take a good, long, hot shower, I feel like it would clear out all the mucus in my head and I’d feel so much better.” She responded. “Do it! Better yet, fill up the tub with hot water and take a nice long hot bath!” I laughed to myself. My shower at the time did not even have a defining border. It was simply a shower head hung over the drain in the center of the bathroom floor. Oh a nice long hot bath. Sounds nice….

I realize these are complaints one could have about more than half of the places on this big earth. And these water issues won’t keep me from going back. But they sure do make me appreciate the water in the US. But the real point is, that the body adapts so quickly. When I pulled my hands back from the sink, it was not a mindful experience of water, but an embodied, conditioned response. And its only a small example of the ways that our conditions of existence, whether they be life-long, or temporary, impart themselves on our techniques of the body.
 

Not only does chance pervade the notebook, but certain moments of chance are formative of entire projects and paradigm shifts.
-Michael Taussig

I once wrote a poem about a kitchen in Lima, Peru. I’m sure in actuality it was not as poetic as I’d hoped. I’m sure it did not live up to the nostalgic feelings I hoped it would convey.

That poem was about a moment that perhaps changed my life. I moment I have retold in countless stories. A moment I remember in both English and Spanish. A moment in which I took a “drastic and irrevocable turn.”

The introduction to my dissertation (at least in its current draft form) begins as such:

On a typically gray July day in Lima, Peru I sat in the kitchen of the family home where I was renting a room. Juana, the cook and housekeeper was boiling water in the corner, and Carmela the matriarch of the family was sifting through the Sunday newspaper, El Comercio. As she discarded sections, I picked them up, scanning through them, mostly looking at pictures. I was staying in Lima for a month to take Spanish lessons and volunteer at a local hospital, thinking I would soon apply to graduate school in medical anthropology. In the paper, I found a retrospective on Foucault in the lifestyle section, and saved it to practice translating. I folded the page and put it in my notebook, then grabbed up the sports section Carmela had tossed aside. This was sure to be more readily understandable and have more pictures.

As I flipped through it I noticed a picture of two women in polleras, traditional layered skirts worn by Andean women. They stood squared off in a wrestling ring, and I flipped the page back and forth a few times, trying to make sense of what I saw. I glanced through the short article, and learned that in La Paz, Bolivia, a new wrestling phenomenon was becoming popular—the "cholitas luchadoras." Having already snatched up the article on Foucault, I refolded the section and left in on the table, sure that Carmela's husband Fernando or their nephew Carlos would notice a page missing in the sports section—especially during the 2006 World Cup. But later that night I searched online for “cholitas luchadoras” from the family computer and began my fascination with the phenomenon.

Taussig, in his book, I Swear I Saw This—a treatise on drawings in fieldnotes—gives the necessary credence to chance encounters such as this. He outlines the factors of the famous incident when Laura Bohannan tells the Tiv people of Nigera the story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, now famously recounted in her Shakespeare in the Bush. As Taussig writes, the unpredictable facts of the rainy season when people sit around and tell stories, that Bohannan had a copy of and had been reading Hamlet, and that the elders demanded she tell them a story were what led her to “stumble” onto “the most marvelous manner of illuminating one society in terms of another” (2011:59).

And I began thinking about my own string of unpredictable facts. A page later I was mentally catapulted back to that kitchen, sitting at the table with Carmela, and world cup scores blaring over the crackling radio. 

In June 1966 a friend casually tossed the morning newspaper, La Republica, to Daniella Gandolfo in a café in Lima, Peru. She was in Lima, her hometown, as a graduate student in the anthropology program of Columbia University, New York, to carry out research on the history of the city of Lima. On the front page was a photograph of a middle-aged woman street cleaner who had taken off her blouse to reveal her breasts when confronting the police in a workers’ rights demonstration. The police backed off.

On seeing this photograph by chance, Daniella writes, “Then it was as if the entire course of Lima’s 460-year history had been abruptly arrested in the street sweeper’s image, turned inside out and eviscerated into a moment of the city’s prehistory…In retrospect the moment I laid eyes on the image of the street sweeper, the still forming idea I had for an ethnography of Lima took a drastic and irrevocable turn.” 

Forty years later, in the same city I too looked at a newspaper and everything changed. I had been interested in physical pain (though acknowledging this is inseparable from emotional pain) and the ways it emerged as a site of gender instantiation. Medical anthropology then seemed like the obvious path. But as my interest in the cholitas luchadoras grew, an anthropology focused on representation and popular culture became more pertinent. And a year later as I sat in my apartment in Washington, DC staring at a blank grant proposal form, I took a deep breath and wrote “La Paz, Bolivia” instead of “Lima, Perú.” 

But these are just two moments in a long string of events that led me here. I remember the moment I decided to declare anthropology as my major as an undergraduate. My good luck to be at the right university at the right time to be inspired by performance studies sage Dwight Conquergood, who shaped me in so many ways. The (now understandably) fortunate fact that after college I ended up in terrible administrative jobs that slowly ate away at my soul, thus allowing me to maintain my desire to enroll in graduate school. Before that I remember my high school friends beginning their own “underground” amateur exhibition wrestling league. And more recently I think of the chance encounters in La Paz. Asking “y que piensan los luchadores varones?” enough times one woman finally suggested I call her friend Edgar to ask him. And the (now understandably) fortunate day when I arrived to interview Edgar a third time without a list of questions and a recorder with dead batteries. That was the day we just talked for an hour and he insisted that when I return the next January I begin training with Super Catch. 

“Such an intricate weave of events piled one on top of the other must be what we mean by ‘fate,’ yet fate seems far removed from the mechanical world of cause and effect for ‘fate’ implies mystery” (Taussig 2011:59).

And perhaps that’s what makes fieldwork the magical thing that it is. “The way [Taussig sees] it, a plan of research is little more than an excuse for the real thing to come along, I much the same way as the anthropologist Victor Turner described the value of writing down kinship diagrams as largely an excuse to stop falling asleep on the job and provide a situation in which the real stuff got a chance to emerge” (Taussig 2011:59). I just happened to meet the right people at the right time and they asked me to train with them, I always thought to myself or said to people, somehow feeling like a fraud. Because I didn’t ever use rigorous methods. Because I don’t dissect narratives with diacritics and rising intonations, or even with critical discourse analysis. Because I have no statistical tools in my bag. Because the arc of my interview questions doesn’t follow Bernard’s recommendations. Which is not to say these things are not worthwhile. But Taussig reassures me, for some people, these are just the excuses. Certainly for me, my interviews—no matter how haphazard—eventually allowed the “real stuff” to emerge.