Day 2-Deep Hanging Out

Dispatch 2 from Sao Paulo

It's funny, when I arrived I thought "Great, there's only an hour time difference from the East coast, so I'm not jet lagged!". Only thing I didn't realize is that it gets dark here at 5:30 because it's winter in the Southern hemisphere! I don't know if I've ever experienced a "day light change" like this before, but it's quite strange, because the time hasn't really changed (like it does when you arrive in India thinking it's breakfast when in fact it's dinner) but my body feels confused (yes, more than normal) because I left the states with it getting dark around 9. Ok, enough cursing the oscillations of the sun and its effects on our wonderful little planet.

Today I took care of some more logistics related to my research. Unfortunately, this involved what we in the field of anthropology refer to as "deep hanging out". As you can see from the photos below, taken at the unbelievable Parque Ibapuera (the equivalent of central park on steroids for Sao Paolo), deep hanging out can be very tough...




What this green oasis doesn't show is that I was forced to battle plants, yes, that's right, wild plants, such as this strangler fig!



Which for those of you aren't familiar with Latin American botany, was a harrowing experience that I barely escaped from...

Aside from battling strangler figs with my mandolin, which might be all it's good for, I've been working on setting up the framework for a collaborative research protocol. What this means, is that unlike our anthropological forefathers, who went and observed the "natives" taking their "data" back to the "first world" (ok, enough quotation marks) I'm interested in having my research be more ethically guided, and thus collaborative with the organization that I am interested in working with and studying. For those of you not familiar with the field of "deep hanging out", this move towards collaborative ethnography (ethnography being the methodological bread and butter, or steak if you will, of the discipline. What this entails is a longer process than most research/researchers would take in terms of laying the groundwork and working to determine in collaboration with one's traditional research "subjects" what the goals of the research should be, from each entities perspective, what benefits as well as potential threats could arise from it (no, no lobotomies scheduled yet), and how data will be used, repatriated, etc. All of which requires some very deep hanging out......