Preliminary Fieldwork - Moving forward 3/3
I have started with the desperate attempt instead of using the keys I already had in hand. Out of fear of getting stuck within my own social bubble, I have set unnecessary obstacles on my way.
Paris, quais de Seine.
I have refused to reach out to my own network. I have tried to reach out to “anyone who can be interested” instead of meeting with those who are already, publicly discussing these issues, dreading to fall in the intellectual/activist bubble trap which is not representative of the general French population. I have been tricked by my sociological training! I am an anthropologist now, I do not have to (and I should not) build representative samples of an exhaustive demographic analysis of the population. I need to build relationships. And relationships do not sprout out of forced interactions at a street corner.
Working through my own network will force me to rethink my questions and the way I articulate them. Rather than imposing my theory onto the conversation, I need to let them take me to the point, which might be other than mine! It is funny how graduate school has been mostly about learning (the theory of) how to talk with people in order to gather valuable data, and here I am, realizing that my approach has been wrong all along despite having argued about method on a daily basis for years. Mainly I blame the cultural disconnection I have suffered from evolving in US academia these past three years.
Both the fact that I left French society five years ago, and the fact that I got acclimated to a predominantly intellectual environment weigh heavily in this disconnection. The concept of “colonial debt” that I have been grappling with some time now has never raised an eyebrow among social scientists. When I expose my interests, they almost always immediately know which theoretical frameworks I am referring to. Yes, France colonized Africa. Yes, independence was hard won and, still, French neocolonialism is a reality. Obviously, there is a link between colonialism and migrations. I have been comforted in the idea that these questions were easily answered. But I cannot afford such assurance, especially as an anthropologist who has got to test each and every hypothesis on the ground.
Even if I am convinced that the colonial debt generated by decades of exploitation, extraction and humiliation is at the core of the affective dynamic existing between French state and African immigrants (and their descendants). It is not necessarily expressed nor verbalized in the way I express or verbalize it. I should always keep in mind that French people do not speak of these things like Americans do! One of the first questions I should ask myself is the following: how to think through (let alone articulate) the mere concept of colonial debt in a country where colonization does not even exist as a concrete reality?