Surviving fieldwork: Food

Now that I'm in Guwahati and able to better control when I eat, what I eat, and how much I eat - or almost, since the guest house only has Indian food and serves dinner at 9pm (but I can choose not to eat here) - I thought I'd about my eating experiences from the past two months and some strategies I've adopted in order to survive. It's not that I was mistreated or anything, but sometimes being the guest has its risks. Also bearing in mind that every household I've been too has had different eating habits, the three main factors I want to mention here are: 1) what is being served; 2) how much is being served; and 3) when it's being served.

1. What's being served
To begin with, I'm pretty lucky in that I can stomach most things - from amphibians to innards to fermented soya beans - and I can handle spicy food to a certain degree. So when my hosts ask me what I eat, I say I eat anything. But this actually surprises them, since most visitors to Nagaland are from the rest of India, and generally more picky about their food. Some of my friends also don't eat dog (which I wouldn't actively seek out) or blood curry (which I would actively seek out). Nagaland isn't kind to vegetarians (except at that Lotha wedding I attended in Kohima) but people are generally able to still cater for them, even if it's just a single vegetable dish and dal. After a month of feasting, I really wasn't that keen on meat and fat anymore - and thankfully neither were some of my friends.

I don't do so well with monotony, so being served the same dish everyday makes me lose my appetite (my friend Lauren is more familiar with this), but I remember that this trip I mentally prepared myself for rice at every meal and to focus on the variety of meat and vegetable dishes I was getting. (At the end of my last trip I had such a bad craving for salmon sashimi. I was surprised and thankful this trip when Ab.'s brother brought back seaweed sheets from Delhi.)

2. How much is being served

The ideal situation is being able to serve yourself, so you can eat as much or as little as you want. The most important rule here is controlling the amount of rice on the plate from the very start (and to take into account the fact that you're expected to have seconds). Of course, sometimes the host insists on serving the rice from the start - one person did so even after I had quite loudly protested. The problem here is that many people are used to eating mountains of rice and also to serving mountains of rice to their guests, where I would only have about the third the amount back home. My last trip I remember absolutely dreading every single mealtime because of the vast quantities of rice I felt compelled to eat. It doesn't help that since I'm bigger than most people here, they instantly assume I eat more than them.

But mealtime shouldn't be nausea-inducing, and I did discover this trip that it is perfectly reasonable to give rice back right after it has been served without offending too much - it's much better than having a heap of leftovers on the plate that might be taken as a sign that the food isn't good. Another thing I've had to get used to is eating a lot more rice with a few dishes, since I used to having a little bit of rice with a whole lot of other dishes.

I know friends doing fieldwork in other parts of the world often face the problem of not getting enough food (some hosts may think a couple of biscuits is enough for a meal), but in Nagaland, the danger is more from being overfed as the guest.

3. When it's being served
Towards the end of my stay in Nagaland, I was asked at what time I normally 'took food'. My reply:

"I eat when I'm fed."

And it was true. My stomach no longer knew when it should be filled, simply that it is should be filled when food was provided. My first week I had to get used to having lunch at 8am and dinner at 4pm. Then at another friend's place, I was having lunch at 11am and dinner at 8pm. On Christmas Day, I remember getting tea, biscuits and Sumi sho at 7am, then being offered lunch at 8am, before the Christmas feast at 2pm. After nightfall I think I just had a light snack.

I suppose there's not a lot one can do about mealtime, apart from adjusting slowly to it. One thing I did to cope with having a big meal at 8am (remember, mountains of rice) was to wake up early, like between 5 and 5.30am so that my hunger would build up slowly. The other thing I did was to have snacks on hand like dried figs, or ask for bananas to quell my hunger during long stretches without food.

A pretty nice dinner set-up - and just the right amount of rice for me!

Also, these mostly apply to more intimate settings when I've been invited to people's homes for food. Ironically, it is much easier to get through the big feasts without feeling nauseated because they're all done buffet style, so you just line up, take as much or little as you want and go sit somewhere where people are too busy to observe how much you're eating. I also noticed when returning my plate that other people had left mountains of rice on their returned plates, which made me feel better about myself.

Standing 3 hours on a train

Just when I thought the adventures were coming to an end for this trip (it's less than a month till I'm back in Singapore), I arrived at Diphu station this morning at 6 to learn that the train (the Brahmaputra Mail) was late. By 10 hours. Apparently it was only leaving Dibrugarh at 10am, and would take about 6 hours to reach Diphu.

As L., who's from Germany, said, "Back home, we call that a 'cancelled' train."

Since I had to get to Guwahati by afternoon to move into the Guwahati University Guest House and to meet my Assamese tutors, the next best option was to catch the Mariani Guwahati Intercity Express - which my friends called the 'Mariani Special' - scheduled to leave at 8.15am and arriving at Guwahati around 1.45pm.

Unlike the Brahmaputra Mail or the Jan Shatabdi (the train I had caught from Dimapur to Diphu), there are no seat reservations for the Mariani Special. The scene on the train when I boarded at Diphu looked like this.

The train just got more crowded as it absorbed all the other Brahmaputra Mail passengers further down the track, and it was only 2.5 hours into the trip that I got a seat. It was pretty much forced upon me by two middle-aged gentlemen who knew I was a foreigner (like that should matter). I felt quite bad, but I was really sleepy, my back was hurting and they insisted. But I said we could take turns sitting down. However, about half an hour later a woman in her 30s or 40s came up from behind and demanded the seat. The men told her about me, but I ended up giving up the seat to her after 15 minutes. She turned out to be a lecturer in political science at a local college and she was quite lovely to talk to.

Eventually the train emptied itself as people got off at their respective stops before Guwahati and I got to sit down for the last hour of the journey. I also got to see a few things I hadn't seen before on trains here. Since I've usually had a comfortable set in the 'cleaner' and less crowded compartments, I hadn't seen as many men selling badam, channa and other snacks walking up and down the crazily packed aisle. There was also a pair of girls who got on while we were on the outskirts of Guwahati and started doing backward cartwheels and somersaults in the aisle.

We finally arrived in Guwahati at 2.15pm, just half an hour behind schedule. My voice went hoarse from yelling at people trying to board the train while people were trying to get off. A Karbi guy I met on the train and his friend helped me with my luggage and got me an auto to the University Guest House.

Overall, it actually wasn't too bad an experience. It reinforced my already positive impression of people from NE India as being friendly and accommodating.

Karbi Anglong

Given that I've spent most of the past week here, it's only fair I post a thing or two about Karbi Anglong. It's the largest district in the state of Assam, with its headquarters at Diphu, which surprisingly isn't even featured on the map in the Lonely Planet guide to North-east India. The name of the district translates as 'Karbi Hills', the Karbis being the dominant ethnic group here.



I'm here visiting my friend L. who's been doing research on the Karbi language for some years now. I got to sit in on a few sessions with her main language consultant which was really cool. I'm also staying with a Karbi friend whom L. introduced me to when I first visited in early 2009 and have been staying at her family (apart from the 2 nights I was at Kohora).



The Karbi totem pictured above is known as Jambili Athon and consists of a bird at the apex surrounded by five smaller birds and two even smaller birds on the main body of the totem. I like it because the main bird is a drongo, usually a species of racquet-tailed drongo with its long tail feather extensions. You can find drongos in rainforests across SE Asia and they're always a pleasant find (unless you're from Australia, where the word 'drongo' refers to an idiot). Anyway, according to my friend here the drongo symbolises the king of the Karbi people, and the four birds around it represent the four main Karbi clans. The little birds are also said to offer food to the drongo, who pretty much lives in luxury.

One reason my friend says the drongo is respected is its ability to mimic most other sounds, including the barking of dogs - a fact I'm familiar with back from my nature guiding days in Singapore. Its call also signals the presence of danger nearby, although I'm not sure what one would listen out for it in the jungle, given its ability to mimic most other sounds.

L.'s language consultant called it a 'bird of paradise', which is apparently what many people call it in English. However, true birds of paradise are only found on the island of New Guinea.

Now the last time I visited Diphu in 2009, the situation wasn't terribly stable. I remember there was a protest march near the football field and seeing a few fires lit. I'm not quite sure, but it was probably led by a rebel group agitating for independence / greater autonomy from Assam, following the shooting of someone by the police.



Since then, the situation has stabilised with the surrender of most members of the Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF). In exchange, the government has offered them both amnesty and plots of land. According to my friends here, some people who weren't KLNLF members also 'surrendered' in order to get some land. Hmm....

A take on Indian English

I always say that NE India really isn't like the rest of India, but something that does remind me that I'm in India are the brands of English I hear around me. They're not all the same, but given the prevalence of Indian TV here and the fact that many English teachers have come  / still come from the 'mainland' (the rest of India), I often still find some features I associate more with Indian English here. (I'm also aware that Indian English itself comprises numerous variants, but this is my own overgeneralised impression.)

It's not so much the phonology (speech sounds) and intonation I notice - there are too many accents, which seem more heavily influenced by speakers' first language. As a point, my Sumi and Angami friends often make fun of the English spoken by Ao speakers. Rather, it's certain collocations that use the verb 'take' that have stuck in my mind and after two months here I've taken to using some of them in my daily life as well.

The first one I use all the time is take food. People always ask if I've 'taken food' and I will often ask people if they've 'taken food' as well. If I'm in the mood, I usually reply that 'I've taken / not taken food.' but if I'm not, I will tell them that 'I've eaten / not eaten.', which is what 'taking food' means.

Another one I hear often and sometimes use is take rest. People will tell me to 'take rest', which as you can guess is an invitation to 'have a rest'. But I'm not sure if I would actually tell people to 'have a rest' back home, unless they were lying sick in bed...

Finally, there's one 'take' collocation I heard used a lot at the Ahuna festival in Zunheboto, and then again at the Hornbill Festival in Kisama. Before each item, the announcers would invite participants to 'take the stage' and 'please take your time'. I was first a little taken aback by such brazen use of sarcasm at a public event, till I realised that they were actually telling the participants: 'use the time allocated to you to perform'.

I suppose it's kind of like telling people to 'seize the day'.

(might upload a video if I find one where the announcer was saying 'take your time')

[UPDATE 11/01/11: The Assamese caretaker of the guest house I'm staying at just told me not to take tension, meaning 'don't worry'.]

Hey BRO, whaddup?

If you visit Nagaland, one thing you may notice on the drive from Dimapur to Kohima are signs along the highway issuing warnings to drivers. They generally start with 'Bro' and are followed by the usual 'Watch your speed' or 'No mobile while driving'.

Some even extend into the realm of the philosophical, with sayings like 'Money Isn't Everything'.

But if your initial impression - like mine was - is that these signs are trying to appeal to younger male drivers and / or are being sexist in assuming all drivers are male, think again.

'BRO' just stands for 'Border Roads Organisation'.

Still I can't help but feel that the sign makers are aware that 'BRO' is read as 'Bro' and are using it to their advantage, sexist as it may be.

Facing up to your food

I often believe that if people living in cities in developed countries had to kill their own animals for meat, meat consumption would be much lower than it is. My mum would always tell us that back during those kampong days in Singapore (when most of the population lived in small villages across the island) they had to kill their own chickens for food. Fast forward to today's Singapore, and there are people who've never seen a live chicken, though they may have eaten plenty of them.

A few years ago, a friend of mine in Melbourne decided to stop being a vegetarian. However, in order to make the transition, he decided he had to kill a chicken himself, which I suppose was a symbolic gesture to acknowledge life he was killing simply by purchasing and consuming meat. (Jed, if you're reading this, correct me if I'm wrong.) A few weeks ago, while I was staying at my friends' place in Kohima, she asked half-jokingly if I wanted to kill the chicken that a relative had given. Her husband was out of town that week and it's usually the men who slaughter the chickens. I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to, since I didn't know where to begin strangling the poor bird. In the end, and to my relief, my friend said she was just going to send it to the butcher's to do the dirty work.

It's odd though, that despite all the slaughtering, much of the killing has been out of my sight. Most of the time, it's freshly killed animals I've seen being prepared for cooking - not unlike being at the butcher's back home. Still, it can be a confronting experience for people unused to seeing certain animal parts, especially for people who only eat meat which does not look like it used to be alive. Also, given the lack of proper refrigeration, the best way to keep meat fresh is to keep the animal alive. It's a little disconcerting for some to see an animal that was alive and kicking one day (and making a helluva lot of noise) lying lifeless the next, having its feathers plucked or its fur singed off.

I admit I've become a little desensitised to the killing. I can still bring myself to eat an animal which I had previously seen alive, fully conscious of the fact that I am eating something that once had a beating heart. I personally think it's healthy to acknowledge that, given that most of us are so far removed from the process of killing to obtain our meat.

However, there are still limits to my desensitisation. When I stayed with a friend in Dimapur, I had a lot of fun playing with the very cute puppies at her place - that is, until she told me that her external family members would come round for dog soup when they were sick. The thought of it made me feel slightly queasy myself, especially with the puppies right there. No offence to dog eaters, I just wouldn't be able to consume dog unless I had no other choice.

**WARNING**
Some readers may be disturbed by the following images of dead animals. (And no, there are no pictures of dead puppies.)

*   *   *

One thing I notice about pigs is how peaceful they look when they're dead.

When the guys were singeing the hairs off a pig for a Christmas feast, it looked like the pig was just sleeping.


I suppose it's because they look like they're smiling when they're dead.


A dead mithun, shot in the head for the Christmas feast.


Cutting up the dead mithun. I thought it was a rather artistic pose. You can't see it in this picture, but unlike pigs, all the mithun and cattle heads I've seen have them sticking out their tongues after death.



On New Year's Eve I saw a pig being dragged out of its pen, squealing in fear as a group of men stabbed it in the heart. I took a video of the whole affair, watching as the pig started to cough out blood from its mouth. I was quite disturbed, especially the way they guys were laughing about killing the animal, but I suppose they view animals very differently to the way I view them.

Given the amount of pork I consumed during my time in Nagaland, I figured I should watch the death of at least one pig. And I did manage to eat that pig I saw die.

Surviving fieldwork: Space, Stimulation and Sanitation

Doing linguistic / anthropological fieldwork in any place which isn't your own native environment can be a daunting task. Alhough I wasn't doing fieldwork this week, some of the principles of surviving fieldwork still apply. Many people doing fieldwork have the romantic notion of 'living like the locals' (that's also assuming all 'locals' live the same way which isn't the case), but for a healthy fieldwork experience - and I'm speaking only from personal experience - there are three necessary conditions that need to be met to the satisfaction of the researcher. If these are not met, one should get out of the situation before it takes its psychological toll with the researcher wondering what the heck they're doing there, longing to hide in a room or run away, and basically not getting much research done.

For the sake of alliteration, I'm naming them: Space, Stimulation and Sanitation.

But before I talk about them, here's a little preamble about the events of the past few days which have led me to post on this topic.

So having left Nagaland, I arrived in Diphu in Karbi Anglong - the largest district in Assam - on Tuesday. On Wednesday my friend here invited me to spend a few days with her at a cultural festival organised by one of the main political parties in the district. The festival was taking place at the new 'ethnic village' in Kohora close to the entrance of Kaziranga National Park. Having just left Nagaland, I was up for another adventure. I'm not quite sure what my friend expected was going to happen at the festival, but for me, living arrangements did not meet these 3 Ss.


1. Space
When doing fieldwork, one of the first things to establish is your own space - space to put your things, space to rest, space to hide from the rest of the world whose language and culture you barely understand but are - hopefully - trying to learn. The amount of personal space needed differs from person to person, but generally, a nice secure location, if only to store expensive equipment, is preferred.

For the 3 to 4 days I was going to be at the festival (my friend wasn't certain when we would be coming back), the sleeping arrangement was simple. There were two parts to the model house in the 'ethnic village'. The women were to sleep on the floor in the main part of the house, while the men were to sleep in a smaller section of the house right next to the toilets. During the day, these areas were used for the exhibition area and a baggage storage area respectively. This meant that the sleeping mats were only set up when guests had stopped visiting for the night and they kept early in the morning to prepare for any arriving guests.

3 to 4 days may not sound like a long time and one might say, "It's only a few days, I can suck it up." But imagine having just travelled 4 hours from a different town, arriving in a new place where no one's telling you what's going on. All you want to do is lie down and take a rest, but there's nowhere to do so. You don't know when people are going to bed, and you don't know what time they're waking up. Worse, because you don't speak the language and people don't speak English or may be shy to do so, no one's telling you what's happening, and your friend's busy with her own work and doesn't quite know the situation herself. In fact, 3 to 4 hours is generally more than enough time to get frustrated with the whole set-up.


2. Stimulation
Being in a foreign environment is often an isolating experience. Even if people speak your language, they may have a completely different view of the world, and many conversations don't progress beyond 'Hi, how are you?' or people asking about what you think of their town / village / customs. It's a legitimate question, until everyone you meet asks you the same question every time and you find yourself having to praise even the dullest of locations. It's quite easy to just go into your own internal monologue and shut out everyone around you. It's necessary to have some sort of mental stimulation to avoid this - and not research-related stimulation either. For many, a book to read or a journal to write in might be enough, unless it's too painful to do any reading or writing that isn't research-related.

Being at a cultural festival doesn't guarantee all-day entertainment. After looking at the models of traditional houses at Kohora (and the workmanship really wasn't as good as what I'd seen at the Hornbill Festival at Kisama and at the Agri Expo in Dimapur), there's only so much dancing and singing I could take before calling it a day.

The first evening was probably the worse, because everyone was busy setting up for the exhibition, while I had absolutely nothing to do for about 5 hours. I didn't have a book to read (nor light nor a space to read if I wanted to) and I had no one to talk to. I had visited all the traditional houses (which took about 15 minutes) and there was nothing to watch apart from the long meeting held by the organisers of the festival. Worse, because I didn't have a space to lie down, I found myself pacing up and down like a caged animal. At one point I found a stone block under a pavillion to lie down on, but when I got up, I realised I'd be lying next to a dog the whole time!


3. Sanitation
This is probably the most important to many people. Keeping clean is an important part of feeling happy. Some, like myself, are psychologically prepared not to bathe as often as they are used to when they are in a different environment, especially if it's very cold and hot water comes in buckets (it's the time spent drying off afterwards that really bothers me). Access to a clean toilet is definitely a must, even if it means getting used to squatting and not using toilet paper for some. Also, for researchers in South Asia and other areas with heavily sweetened drinks, daily toothbrushing (and flossing) is essential if you don't want a hefty dental bill when you return home.

Now, between the 20 or so people staying in the house for the duration of the festival, there was one toilet and one bathroom, neither of which had any water. To make things worse, the toilet seat wouldn't stay up, so the guys simply peed on it. Naturally, many of the women refused to pee there so they used the drainage hole in the bathroom instead. The bathroom door didn't have a lock on the inside, so every time my friend went I had to stand guard outside.

Now, I was clearly aware that the sleeping arrangements were well outside my comfort zone. But I was more aware of the psychological trauma of spending 3-4 days in this kind of environment and I wasn't about to be gungho about the whole thing.

In the end, I only spent one night in the house, on the condition that my friend help me find a way back to Diphu the next day. However, it soon became clear to me that my friend did not want me to leave the next day since she herself felt uncomfortable in this situation - a clear sign that me as a foreigner shouldn't be in that environment. It was only after my mini-meltdown, when a guy I had spoken to for 2 minutes asked for my number simply because I was a foreigner, that she said it would be alright if I left.

In any case, transport back to Diphu that day turned out to be a bit of a problem, but thankfully her boss was able put me up in a hotel close to the festival ground the next day. However, that day I was actually moved no less than four times from one hotel to another (for various reasons), with people simply coming in to the room and telling me to "packing". Such uncertainty is another source of trauma. Also, although my friend's boss's bodyguard always had a cheerful smile on his face, I was always wary of the semi-automatic weapon (I think it was semi-automatic) he had slung over his shoulder.

I finally got back to Diphu yesterday when my friend's brother drove the 4 hours to the festival just for the afternoon.

This photo was taken after my friend had just made all the women move to a different section of the house so I didn't have to sleep with the boys next to the toilets. [UPDATE: the reason why I look so miserable in this photo wasn't because I had to sleep on the floor, it was because I was feeling super guilty that my friend had made all the women move out of the area so I could sleep there.] There was another guy sleeping next to me, so I wouldn't feel too bad.

But did I mention he snored like a dying pig?