First Contact...

Well....drumroll...first contact has been made! Quite an exciting afternoon. I had tried to set up a meeting with an individual from the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), which has it's national headquarters here in Sao Paulo. I spoke with someone on Tuesday, and sent them a copy of my research proposal. However, I kinda got put on the back burner, and never heard back. As I'm leaving tomorrow for Belem (in the North), from where I'll travel down to Maraba where I'll be staying at the Eldorado das Carajas settlement (I know it's confusing), I needed (really wanted) to meet with someone today. So I called again, and although the guy I originally spoke with wasn't there, someone else was......and so I downed some coffee, grabbed my equivalent of a physician's bag (complete with GPS, digital audio recorder, waterproof field book, and consent forms) and headed off into the rain and onto the metro....

Across town, I walked to the proper address (and actually found it!). The MST have a very beautiful old house in the city as their headquarters. There is nothing from the exterior that gives the building away. But when one enters there is incredible MST related artworks, art that captures the nature of the movement, and the struggle of the settlers for land (I'll try to grab some pictures next time). What followed was very intense: I met with a young woman, who basically interviewed me for about 45 minutes about the nature of my research and all sorts of stuff. Luckily, she spoke Spanish, as I would have done an even more abominable job in Portuguese. It was an interesting discussion, that I won't go into too much, but the upshot is that I think I passed...the first gauntlet. She gave me the go ahead, and from a critical anthropological perspective gave me some meaty bones to chew on, namely that I couldn't compare settlements that are using agroecological education curricula with those that are not (my original plan) because they are all using such curricula; that's the kind of meaty theoretical bone that I was kinda waiting for as it obfuscates more than it illuminates; with settlements spread throughout the country, and in a wide variety of ecological and sociopolitical conditions, it seems clear that the ubiquity of agroecological curricula is if anything a discursive and political phenomenon, and one that I doubt is having as widespread on the ground impact as one lets on....ok well that's kinda letting the cat out of the bag. (Un)fortunately, that meaty bone is also a monkey wrench in the gears of my proposed research, because it will make it essentially impossible to investigate changes in soil fertility as a proxy for the effectiveness of an agroecological program (if all settlements are ostensibly using such curricula); yes, I still could use remote sensing images and look at vegetation changes over time as an ecological proxy for effectiveness of these programs (i.e. charting the changes in vegetation over the last tweny years using aerial/satellite photos, examining the changes as one moves from a non-agroecological curricula to an agroecological one)...but whether that type of analysis will actually work is a completely different story. Ok, well if you made it to the end of that soliloquy...congrats! Now you have a better idea of what doing anthropological research feels like....on the metro home I surmised it as such: waking up from a nap in the middle of the day (when you shouldn't be napping) and then having someone waterboard you, and then letting you go and giving you a double shot of espresso, followed by a giant slurpee that gives you a brain freeze that makes the world starts to spin, and then makes you do a handstand.....all fun and games right.....

and that's not even broaching the subject of what happens when you forget to tell your credit card company that you're leaving the country for a few months and not to block your card....but that's another brain freeze....