Dearest team,
I’m sitting here in an English bookshop, waiting for the flight that will take me home later today. Besides the fact that my return flight was cancelled and I’m now traveling with a long delay, there was something else uncomfortable about this trip: I flew here for just a day and a half. That’s obviously questionable – so many emissions for such a short trip! Normally, I prefer not to fly if the trip is brief (instead, if such opportunities arise I prefer to meet online, or to postpone until I get the chance to stay longer, for example by combining a conference with a holiday or fieldwork). Or I take the train. But this time, I made a different decision, and I am so glad I did.
I flew here to meet one of my most important informants from the time I was still doing my PhD – him and I have now known each other for fifteen years. He’s about my age, and we liked each other from day one, even though our lives could not have been more different up until the moment we met. He lived in an extremely poor neighborhood in Indonesia, while I arrived as a privileged PhD student in his country, his city, his neighborhood, where he would help me find my way. My friend is smart, both intellectually and in a streetwise manner. Tirelessly, he explained how to interpret what people were really saying to me, which was important, because in Indonesia people often speak much more indirectly and subtly than I, an ever-blunt Dutch person, was used to. Time and again, he drove me on his motorbike to village chiefs, to tiny shops I could never have found myself which sold that one, specific electric cable I needed to get wifi in a riverbank settlement, or to food stalls with the best – on this we always agreed – stink beans on rice.
He was, as we so awkwardly call it in anthropology, a ‘key informant’, and he became, as we call it in ordinary life, a dear friend. Over the years, his English got better and better while my Bahasa Indonesia faded. When, years after I had left his country and we met again, he lifted his newborn baby in his arms to show him to me, it brought me to tears – as if the pride and amazement I felt seeing him as a father was somehow my own achievement. Years later, again, he stayed in my apartment with that same child, then a toddler, who pulled all my books off the shelves – including the dissertation I wrote, and with which his father has helped me with data collection. And now he was in England, unexpectedly, for all sorts of reasons, and this day and a half was the only window we had to meet. The flight was only 55 minutes.
Yesterday, we sat together on a terrace with a beer in front of us, talking about my divorce a few years ago; our children; our old neighbors. The bond felt more equal than when we first met, settled into something between friendship and family – by which I mean, it’s become what the best family relationships can be: completely natural to support one another when needed, even if you don’t see or speak to each other for months. That’s how it is for us – but when a message from me to him goes out, or some photos come my way, we’re suddenly back again in the space that we carved out together in this life – in that poor neighborhood where he grew up and I lived beside him for a few years, with the loud music of market stalls being set up and the smell of clove cigarettes, or, as now, in a setting that’s more familiar to me, with its polite conversations over wiped-clean tables, where he smiles at me and says, kindly, “you always do that, Anne” – only he is allowed to call me that.
Of course, not every informant-researcher relationship turns into a deep friendship, but what developed between him and me is also not unusual in anthropology. We anthropologists don’t just do our research as researchers; we do our research, above all, as human beings. We bring our own personalities into the field, our own moods and insecurities – the heartbreak from the week before, the doubts about the week, month, or years that will come after this period of fieldwork. And so, in that tangle of professional ambition and everyday personal preoccupations, we meet people whom, in our writing, we rather distantly call our ‘informants’ or ‘research participants’. But of course, they are so much more than that, just as we are more than just ‘researchers’.
Those two people – he and I; you and the person you’ve met in the field – observe each other, talk to each other, get to know each other, start to understand each other a little better. And as that relationship grows, so does our responsibility not to simply cut off the bond that forms between you and the other once the research formally ends.
With many of my ‘informants’, I keep friendly contact in the months and years after leaving the field. Especially if I spoke to them often, spent a lot of time with them, or did in-depth interviews; conversations in which both they and I revealed more of ourselves than was strictly necessary for the interview.
Afterwards, I send them, for example, the results of my analysis by email, ask for feedback on an article I’m working on; they message me about something they know is relevant to me or my work, I ask how that one work problem turned out that they told me about back then, or I congratulate someone on their birthday (hooray for digital calendar reminders!). More isn’t always possible or necessary – it would be impossible to maintain an intense bond with everyone from your research – but it is important to offer at least the respect of continued attention to people who once gave you and your research their time and help.
And if you’re lucky, you meet people in the field who sneak into your heart, stretch it out, and never leave that new space inside you. In those cases, maintaining the friendship is a natural consequence of your own desire; it doesn’t cost you any effort, it just brings you the feeling of a flapping bird in your chest, as the one that accompanied me yesterday on the plane, and that will fly back with me soon again. And for that feeling, dear teammates, I’m more than willing to accept an occasional dose of #flightshame.
Warmest wishes to all of you,
