Individual and Social Adaptions to Human Vulnerability by Donald C. Wood

Author:Donald C. Wood [Wood, Donald C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2018-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Methodology

The field interpretations on which this paper builds were produced through the classical anthropological research approaches of long-term immersion in the research community (partly participant), observations, and casual conversations. Fieldwork took place from August 2008 to July 2009 and from September 2014 to January 2015 in Mudzi and its surroundings and was carried out by me – a Dutch woman – and my research assistant – a Malawian woman named Gertrude Finyiza. Our research focused on women for various reasons which includes the fact that women were most easily accessible for informal interaction. Gertrude and I lived together in Mudzi for much of the first research year. We had in-depth talks with all 90 adult women several times throughout that year, observed community life around us on a daily basis, experienced the harsh living circumstances first-hand and, most importantly, had many informal conversations. During the second fieldwork period, Gertrude spent more time alone in Mudzi. This was because by then I had two young children at home, but also because I had found out that without me being physically present, women more easily shared with Gertrude the day-to-day concerns that they may have deemed too futile to share with me, but in fact interested me most. During these periods, Gertrude minutely kept track of what happened in the village, what she overheard and chatted about. She travelled to town every two weeks to have her fieldnotes typed out and emailed to me, after which we discussed these over the phone.

To gain some understanding of the ways in which money is handled at an individual level and how it relates to nonmonetary exchanges, I asked four Mudzi women to keep track of their daily incomes and expenditures (including nonmonetary commodity exchanges) for three-and-a-half months.13 We visited the women at least weekly during this period to discuss their diary entries. I paid these women for the work they did, realizing that this might interfere with getting a “clean” picture of their usual incomes and thus expenditures. However, it would have been unethical not to compensate them for a tedious job that would most likely never bear them any fruits. By paying them only once during the three-and-a-half-month period and once at the end, I aimed to minimize the “disruption.” Turning a disadvantage into an advantage, the provision of a salary gave me insights into the women’s financial decisions after receiving a relatively large sum of money. The fact that the money was quickly spent, led me to believe that the disruption of the usual course of affairs was relatively mild, as it lasted only a short time. The embeddedness of these diary notes in our thorough familiarity with the community adds to their value: we knew the dairy keeping women, their life histories, their living circumstances as well as many of the people with whom they exchanged resources. The diaries provided a far from exhaustive but nonetheless informative insight into the ways in which money flows in and out of the community, but particularly also into the ways in which it is circulated within the community.

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