Dreamwork and Fieldwork in Sri Lanka

I woke up one morning in 2004 out of a dream that held the solution to an ethnographic puzzle I’d been struggling with. At the time, I was in Sri Lanka finishing a month of fieldwork following up on research I had conducted there between 1999 and 2001. During that 2004 visit with families I had known at a rural village in the center of the island, I saw something I had not taken note of before. When little children screamed for things, their mothers and other older people usually gave in to whatever the children demanded. This was the kind of behavior that I—like most people in the U.S.—called “spoiling.” It was the kind of parenting I expected would lead children to become increasingly demanding, selfish, and out of control as they got older. However, contrary to my expectations, the older Sri Lankan children I knew were remarkably undemanding, restrained, even self-denying. So how did this happen?

I had been struggling to make sense of this question in the weeks before the dream. I had been asking mothers and others about this, but they told me that children just stop demanding things on their own starting around five as they develop a capacity to “understand.” Adults didn’t need to do anything in particular to teach children this, and in fact it was useless to try to do so. Until children can understand, one can’t reason with them; so, if efforts to distract or ignore failed to stop a child’s demands, one usually just gave in to those demands, no matter how unreasonable. This all made perfect sense to the adults I talked to in Sri Lanka, but it didn’t to me.

I have written at length elsewhere about these observations, the research I did to investigate them, and my eventual analysis of it (“We Have to Give: Sinhala Mothers’ Responses to Children’s Expression of Desire,” Ethos, 38: 4, 2010, pp. 354-368). But in doing so, I have omitted the dream that provided the key insight to my analysis, a dream that I wrote about in my fieldnotes that morning in

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2004. I quote the segment from my fieldnotes at length:

My dream…was about Ann [a pseudonym for a U.S. friend] who was on a plane to go on a trip without her kids—I was keeping her kids. Heather [her daughter, also a pseudonym] was at the door crying and screaming for Ann, so Ann stopped the plane during take off and said she wouldn’t go if Heather was so upset. I disapproved (though I hadn’t thought out exactly why) and then Ann got mad at me later and said that I was the kind of parent who would rather hit their kid than give up what I wanted—or something like that. I was furious and took her aside, away from the kids and said I was so insulted—that she made all these assumptions without asking and that I would first of all never hit a kid and second of all, if she really wanted to know, here was the problem with what she was doing, not that it was my business except that I cared about her and cared about Heather.

[I said] that Heather should be allowed to be so sad and express that without it reaching out and controlling Ann. That was too much power to give a little girl, and it was overwhelming. It was asking her to do something she could not reasonably be expected to do at her age—it asked her to deny or at least not express her feelings or else be responsible for making her mother unhappy. She has to choose between her own happiness or her mother’s with the mother refusing to take responsibility for the situation. The child’s feelings are so powerful and overwhelming to the adult as well as the child that they dictate the outcome of the situation. So that’s the bind for the indulged child—that’s the bind for kids in Sri Lanka I think. If they experience and express frustration, it overwhelms the parents who give in. The child doesn’t experience butting up against limits that they must accept. Instead, those who love them let them live in this

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boundary-less world where their emotions and desires are all-powerful. However, the parent and others around also disapprove and resent the giving so the child is in a bind as they come to “understand” that—which is what everyone has been telling me. When children understand that something is limited, they should not ask any more. Their wanting is undeniable to others, so—unless they want the judgment, rejection, and responsibility for hurting those they love—they must deny their own desires since no one around them will. Also though at the same time, the idea that someone would deny them something is so horrible a prospect—as the child has no experience dealing with hearing and accepting a “no,” an “eppa” [the refusing “no” in Sinhala] as not a rejection of self, not as evidence of lack of love, but as a simple boundary another sets up without dislike.

I need to continue to work this out, but I think this is right (too bad it’s so pejorative).

This dream work was not only about my own psychodynamic conflicts—although it clearly was, given that I had been away from my own seven-year-old for nearly a month, having flown off in a plane and left him behind. It was also an effort to work out deeply felt puzzles about what I was observing in the field, suggesting that children might have a more psychodynamically complex response to indulgence than my own cultural model allowed.

The dream suggests something further: the process of ethnographic research is a psychodynamic one. The analysis of data from participant observation is not something that can be done by a software program, feeding in fieldnotes and getting back meaning. Our interpretation of other people’s inner and interpersonal lives is a process in which our own inner and interpersonal lives are deeply implicated and required. My interactions with people over my lifetime and the sense that I have made of them contribute to the understandings of people that I add to intentionally and systematically with my research observations and interactions. My own internal

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object world is part of what I think with, part of the unacknowledged tools of anthropology. This can be embarrassing, because this is not how science is thought to be done; it is not strictly rational and objective.

There is a deeper source of embarrassment in this dream, too. Even as I wrote about it in my fieldnotes, I knew it was “too bad it’s so pejorative.” We feel so grateful to those who open up their lives and their hearts to us, that it is horribly guilt inducing and anxiety provoking to think of saying anything negative or judgmental, as well as potentially shameful in an academic era in which we call each other to account for our own ethnocentrisms and collusion in systems of oppression. This nearly pre-conscious self-censorship in response to our anthropological superegos often, I think, leads to overly rosy, sometimes defensive-feeling ethnographies in which we romanticize the people we represent. We displace our negative judgments and our own repressed hostility onto exploitative colonialists, benighted NGO workers, tyrannical regimes, and greedy multinational corporations.

This is what the dream did for me. In the dream, I articulated things I would never have said to any mother—not a friend in Chicago and certainly not a friend in Sri Lanka. But in the dream, I was freed from those constraints to lash out in fury and in a flurry of words, saying what I saw happening. When I wrote it down, I could see that it was not just about my friend in Chicago, but about the parenting all around me in Sri Lanka. Pejorative though it may have been, it helped me identify what I had been seeing all along. It also laid my own judgments before me so I could identify them, too—and question them, using them to think about difference, how it might be valued in other ways, and where my own biases were.

This is how ethnography is done—messily, from a particular perspective, and with all parts of the researcher’s self. At least this is how ethnography is done by me.

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