What’s in a name?

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What's in a name?

2015-08-31 04:34:28

By Ruth Goldstein

“Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper towrite? Is it done?”

- Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations

~ ~ ~

“I choose… Estrella. Yes, you can call me Estrella when you write.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Estrella nodded her head, a wisp of dyed honey-blonde hair coming loosefrom behind her ear. Her long earrings, the gold paint flaking around aplastic ruby, swayed back and forth as she nodded in affirmation. Yes, shewas sure.

“You can write if you want,” Estrella gestures to my notebook that sits onthe table. I write instead on a napkin. It feels less official and thus lessobtrusive. “Unless you prefer napkins… This is what you callanthropology?” She laughs and pats my hand, pen frozen on the flimsypaper.

I look at my scrawl on the napkin. I have written the date, her chosenpseudonym, and the location of the café where we sit. “Yes,” I tell her.This is what I call my anthropological practice of ethnography. I bring outmy field notebook, already swollen with the additions of drawings andpressed plants that women have given me. The drawings are the result oftrying to keep sex-workers’ children occupied while I talk with theirmothers, which at times becomes a baby-sitting arrangement if a clientinterrupts our conversation. Estrella leafs through these. She has severalchildren of her own, but they live with her mother in another part of Peru.That childhood home is far from her adopted one, which is a place of workin the prostíbars (brothels) of the Peruvian Amazon’s region of Madre deDios (Mother of God).

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“Do you always ask people what name they want to use?” She wanted toknow.

“Yes.”

At the time of this initial dialogue with Estrella in 2011, this was true. Butideas and ethnographic practices change with the dynamism of everydaylife. I offer this participatory process of “choosing names” as anethnographic case, one way that ethnographers can serve to further thetrust of people whose lives and stories we analyze. My fieldwork, whichhad begun in 2010, examined three modes of “traffic”: in women destinedfor the sex-trade, plants studied by pharmaceutical companies forreproductive health, and gold, made solid via liquid mercury along LatinAmerica’s Interoceanic Road. I traveled the 3500-mile road from theBrazilian Atlantic to the Peruvian Pacific coast, traversing the Brazilian,Peruvian, and Bolivian Amazon. From rainforest to laboratory, from brothelto bank, “traffic” functioned as my analytic to examine physicalencounters and collisions as well as entwined questions of the dynamicvalue of people and things traveling across borders and through globalcommodity-chains.

“Welcome” sign over the start of the South leg of the Interoceanic Road,from Cusco all the way to São Paulo in Brazil. (Photo taken by the author)

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Traffic(king) of People and Things along the Interoceanic Road. (Phototaken by the author)

Map of Road Integration, Peru-Brazil. (Peruvian Ministry of Transportationand Communication)

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The gold mining, which fueled interdependent economies, had its greatestconcentration in Madre de Dios where I first met Estrella. Situated near theborders of Brazil and Bolivia, Madre de Dios had earned the nickname “ElWild Wild West” for the implosion of lawlessness and prostitutionreminiscent of the North American gold rush. The fall of the U.S. dollar andthe rise of the price of gold had coincided with the construction of theInteroceanic Road, which was the first paved thoroughfare in the region(marked in black on the above map). Where artisanal mining hadpreviously meant backbreaking work for little return, the price was nowright for a livable wage. Male miners from Brazil, Bolivia, and Perustreamed into the rainforest mines. Female sex-workers hailed from thesecountries, in addition to Colombia and Ecuador. During my two yearsconducting research along the Interoceanic Road (2010-2012), I wouldask miners and sex-workers, along with environmental engineers,biologists, indigenous leaders, and government officials, what name theywould like me to use when I wrote.

Government officials almost entirely chose their own names for accountswritten about them. Sex-workers already operated under a host of fakenames to protect themselves and their families from embarrassment and,in some cases, violence from clients and police (who were oftenone-and-the-same). Miners similarly conducted their operations illicitly.They did not employ their legal names (if they had a national identity cardfrom Peru or a neighboring country) – not among one another in themines, not with the environmental engineers who tried in vain to regulatethe proliferating artisanal application of liquid mercury in the mines, andcertainly not with me. I asked people how they would like to be “named”because people’s words have a different quality when their narrativesbecome legible as a creative process and practice of co-authorship.

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Gold “changing” — burning the mercury to leave pure gold; a highly toxicprocedure. (Photo taken by author)

Transport in the gold mines. Mercury turns the rainforest landscape into adesert. (Photo taken by the author).

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Regional Peruvian health team performing rapid HIV/AIDS testsanonymously for sex-workers and gold miners in rainforest mining camps,pictured here outside of a brothel. (Photo taken by the author)

Despite my desire to make my ethnographic fieldwork as interactive aspossible, I soon realized that I could not always uphold a practice ofinviting people to choose without any intervention on my part. As I becamemore ensconced in fieldwork, I realized the high stakes in employingpeople’s legal names, even if they wanted me to do so. When it came towriting about indigenous activists, I did not always feel comfortablehonoring a person’s request to employ their full and legal names. Gainingone’s identity card and displaying nametags has become a proud gesturefor people – indigenous or not (and that category of the person also goesup for debate) – so often ignored by the State. This process echoesMarcel Mauss’s notion that having a name forms a critical step in takingon an identity as a person (Mauss 1985). Yet while indigenous activistsmay have felt confident in their personhood and in asking me to use theirfull names, environmental activists, particularly indigenous ones, representeasy assassination targets for disgruntled loggers, oil speculators, miners,and drug traffickers. Naming people in full might not only undermine theirefforts, it might also put their lives in danger.

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Sex-workers, unlike indigenous activists, did not tell me their real namesand I did not ask for them, knowing that they protected their own identitiesfrom their customers as well. I may never have learned Estrella’s realname had a competing exotic dancer not stolen it. “Véronica” became thefirst person that selected a pseudonym that I refused to employ on ethicalgrounds. Véronica knew Estrella’s full legal name and had taken it torepresent her exotic dancing persona. This meant that she exposedEstrella to social harassment at best and to police violence at worst. Mostworrisome for Estrella, however, was that in the event of a police raid, thenews media – armed with video cameras – would take footage and revealher identity. Family members did not know about her line of work, andEstrella feared that they would find out. She hid under the beams of policesearchlights and news cameras as best she could. It was she who pointedout to me some of the similarities and differences between sex-workersand indigenous activists. “We are both trying to stay alive. Thegovernment needs us but also hates us. They will stand and show face,but we do not.” Estrella’s comment that the government both needed andhated sex-workers and indigenous activists came from her observationthat both were necessary for a strong tourist industry. But both were toooften found floating dead downriver.

In November 2014, just as Peru prepared to hold climate talks in Lima,four indigenous activists died when illegal loggers attacked them. Deaththreats had become a common way of life for activists and leaders at theindigenous federation of Madre de Dios (Federación Nativa del Rio Madrede Dios y sus Afluents – FENAMAD). Hunt Oil, the powerful petroleumconglomerate, began its drilling in 2006. It’s not clear whether thePeruvian army, police officers, company cronies, or all of them togetherphysically attacked protesting indigenous groups. The Peruviangovernment renewed the nine-year contract with Hunt Oil for another threeyears, without consultation with the indigenous communities living on theland under extraction (FENAMAD). With oil and gold ever moreextractable, and with growing infrastructure, people and informationtraveled faster than they had along rivers when I first arrived in 2010. Inow constantly question how quickly – or slowly – my own words andnaming practices might also travel.

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Peruvian Army extracting illegal gold miners from a rainforest conservationarea. (Photo used with permission of Peruvian environmental engineers)

This might not have been a necessary concern had my fieldwork not cometo an abrupt and undesired end in March of 2012 when a gold miningstrike in Madre de Dios turned bloody. The Peruvian government sent itsarmy to pacify protesting miners, joined by the indigenous federation ofMadre de Dios. An estimated 15,000 gold miners went on strike tocontinue working, demanding an alleviation of environmental regulations.Several thousand sex-workers joined them. The indigenous federation,misjudging the political climate, walked with the gold miners in hopes ofentering negotiations with the State over land claims. The plan backfired.The Peruvian media painted the indigenous federation as betraying theearth by making an alliance with the gold miners. Already targets if theydid not cooperate with marauding loggers and miners, Amazonian activistsonce again became the focus of the Peruvian government’s “extraction”efforts (large-scale protests in 2009 along the InterAmazonian Highwayhad also turned bloody). The choice of the word “extraction,” as Peruviansecret servicemen explained to me while asking me to provide names andinformation to help them, was a euphemism for “extermination.”

Forced to leave and worried that I would endanger people who had trustedme with their words, I set about destroying identifying data. Without astrong Internet connection to digitally save interviews, everything wentonto a small external hard-drive. This ended up pressed between my skinand the elastic of my clothing. I jammed the RAM on my computer so that

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it would not turn on anymore. I explained to the government agents goingthrough my bags that the rainforest humidity, former ethnographicfoe-turned-friend, had destroyed my digitized data.

Making ethical decisions about how to protect the people thatanthropologists work with during ethnographic fieldwork is, as Paul Stollernotes, “a very messy business.” The debates surrounding AliceGoffman’s book, On the Run, have helped to crystalize a differencebetween journalists and ethnographers: whereas journalists must checktheir facts, the very concept of a fact and what constitutes truth havebecome part of a critical inquiry for social scientists. Ethnography is notabout “fact-checking,” Stoller notes, but rather a weaving of personal andprofessional interactions into fruitful, if not fruitfully frustrating,entanglements. Acknowledging the precariousness of other people’slives, a precariousness that the writer often does not share, may meanblending the “facts” to protect people’s identities.

The theoretical ground as well as the lived terrain surrounding Goffman’suse of anonymity has incited continuing debates that dance around theissue of race. While I find the critiques from journalists on this question offact-checking easily addressable, the dynamics and ethics of race, and ofwhat it means for a white social scientist to do an ethnography in/of anAfrican-American community, merit further thought. Whether one agreesor not with Goffman’s fieldwork location and subsequent analysis, I doadvocate for the care that she took to blur details, places, and events. Shegave pseudonyms to protect – which I gather was also done out of respect– for the people who shared their lives with her.

These swirling debates around Goffman have given me pause to reflect onDerrida’s questions that I pose at the beginning of this piece. “Is writingseemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper to write? Is itdone?” I brought these questions with me into (and out of) the fieldbecause they not only urge me to consider my whiteness and privilegewhen I write, but also how I write. The attempt to collaborate in thechoosing of pseudonyms is one way that I attempt to answer the questionsof what it means for the writer to cut a respectable figure when analyzingthe lives of others. Paulo Freire, Brazil’s revolutionary thinker and writer,espoused a pedagogy that was a “naming” of the world, engaging in adialogue with others. “If it is in speaking their word that people, by namingthe world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which theyachieve significance as human beings” (Freire 1970: 88). This resonateswith Mauss’s assertion that to become a person, one must first have aname. Freire’s formulation, however, goes one step further in highlighting(as he does throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed) human relationality,how we bring one another into existence through naming practices. ForFranz Fanon, being called a name other than one’s own creates a severe

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sense of trauma and alienation from one’s self (Fanon 1967).

This is why inviting people to participate in their pseudo-naming, andtelling them why I may not be able to honor their requests, meantsomething more important than “fact-checking.” It meant explaining toVéronica, who had stolen Estrella’s true name for her nightly activities,why I would not do as she wished. This did not provoke a positiveresponse from Véronica, but it did mean that trust with Estrella and hernetwork of sex-workers deepened. This in turn enriched my connectionswith them. Mauss’s concluding words, after considering whether thestable category of the person and naming might someday fade away,brings my own ethnographic case to a close: “Let us labor to demonstratehow we must become aware of ourselves, in order to perfect our thoughtand to express it better” (Mauss 1985: 23). That strikes me as a seemlyand respectable answer to my own questions of how writing might bedone.

—–

This piece is dedicated to Estrella as well as Juana and Jorge PayabaCachique, two indigenous Shipobo activists in Madre de Dios, Peru. Jorgepassed away in November of 2014. His sister, Juana, fights illegal loggersand gold miners on Shipibo community land while facing death threats.She continues her brother’s work, advocating for the protection of “lospueblos indígenas en aislamiento voluntario” – “indigenous communitiesliving in voluntary isolation” who live along the Peruvian and Brazilianborder.

—-

Ruth Goldstein, PhD is a medical anthropologist in the AnthropologyDepartment at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research stemsfrom over ten years of examining human rights and environmental issues,with a particular focus on gender-based violence and women’sreproductive health. She can be reached at [email protected].

—-

Derrida, Jacques. Disseminations. Barbara Johnson, trans. New York:Athlone Press, 1981, p. 74.

Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967[1952].

FENEMAD. Gobierno amplía por tres años contrato de licencia a Hunt Oilpara explorar Lote 76, Noticias Fenamad, August 5, 2015.

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Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myra Bergman Ramos, trans.New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000 [1970].

Mauss, Marcel. “A category of the human mind: the notion of person; thenotion of self.” Translated by W.D. Halls. In The Category of the Person:Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Edited by M. Carrithers, S. Collins, andS. Lukes, pp: 1-23. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,1985.

Stoller, Paul. “Alice Goffman and the Future of Ethnography.” HuffingtonPost, June 15, 2015.

Stoller, Paul. “In Defense of Ethnography.” Huffington Post, August 24,2015.

Watts, Jonathan. “Spotlight on murders of activists as Peru prepares forLima climate talks.” The Guardian, November 17, 2014.

Soros, Alex. “Local activists are paying with their life to protect their forestsin Peru.” The Guardian, November 17, 2014.

AMA citationGoldstein R. What's in a name?. Somatosphere. 2015. Available at:http://somatosphere.net/2015/08/whats-in-a-name.html. Accessed August31, 2015.

APA citationGoldstein, Ruth. (2015). What's in a name?. Retrieved August 31, 2015,from Somatosphere Web site:http://somatosphere.net/2015/08/whats-in-a-name.html

Chicago citationGoldstein, Ruth. 2015. What's in a name?. Somatosphere.http://somatosphere.net/2015/08/whats-in-a-name.html (accessed August31, 2015).

Harvard citationGoldstein, R 2015, What's in a name?, Somatosphere. Retrieved August31, 2015, from <http://somatosphere.net/2015/08/whats-in-a-name.html>

MLA citationGoldstein, Ruth. "What's in a name?." 31 Aug. 2015. Somatosphere.Accessed 31 Aug.2015.<http://somatosphere.net/2015/08/whats-in-a-name.html>

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