Laying some foundations: Rapport (i)

Which way forward?

Saturday morning. My first morning of fieldwork, I am lying in bed, wide awake, waiting for the sun to rise. The challenge of building appropriate relations is immediate and continuing, crucial and mostly beyond the fieldworker’s control. And so it is with a touch of apprehension I consider the day ahead. Over the sound of the air conditioner, I hear the solid, continuous, chug-chug-chug of diesel engines. What could it be?

 After breakfasting and showering, I follow the sounds and turning around the corner behold a hive of activity. Two cement mixers are pattering away and plenty of men working around them. It must be around 7am. I am nervous about approaching, but summon up some courage and ask one of the men what is going on. Apparently, this is a community effort to lay the foundations for an extension for a house. A lot of guys are volunteering to help. 

Two cement mixers

An incredible amount of synchronisation and coordination goes on; it does not seem that anyone is ‘in charge’ but the cement mixing and laying proceeds like clockwork. A man with a fishing shirt on was directing us. An older chap always has to check that I had put the required 11 shovels of sand to the one bag of cement mix and 3 buckets of water. Nek Shazwan (the father of the male owner of the house) is working the mixer. Once the mix is good, Nek Shazwan tips the mixer so the wet concrete falls into a waiting wheelbarrow. Four guys man the wheelbarrows. They push the wheelbarrows over to the foundations area and tip the cement in. Then the guys working at the foundations flatten out the concrete. Meanwhile, the concrete mix guys take turns at emptying the bag of mix into the mixer. Other guys are carting the cement mix bags from the piles to the mixer; others are bringing around drinks. Some are just resting, taking turns at the work. The other mixer has the same system. Over the morning the mound of sand, bags of concrete, and buckets of water are transformed into part of the foundations for an extension.

One of my children took this photo from over the road.

Behind the scenes, the women are also ‘in the mix’ as it were. Moni comes to join them, bringing Kiki and Joey. In the kitchen, the wives of the workers are preparing dishes for the men to eat. Some have been brought theirs from home, others prepare them on site. Speaking to Nek Shazwan’s wife and her married daughter Zulaikha at the side of the house, Monika is told that the women of the extended family have been cooking since after the dawn prayers, or about 5am. They begin to bring out their plates and dishes. On the lids of the dishes or the backs of the plates is written the name of the woman or the house number. These are placed under a white tent. It's probably too obvious to say it, but this level of cooperation requires strong social bonds.

Foundations (left background) and white tent (right background)

From a bird’s eye view, the work would look like the inside of a watch. The bag of cement, the shovels of sand and the buckets of water are three wheels attached to cement mixer. After a hundred or so revolutions, a lever is clicked and another wheelbarrow leaves. After a number of wheelbarrows leaving more stacks of cement are brought. All the time a larger wheel is the drinks circulating around the group. Granted the “like clockwork” analogy I’m using is a little stale. But if the reader can persevere with it, the question gets to the heart of anthropology, and thus, what it is to be human.

Guys working around mixer (including me, in white shirt). Women and children in shade to the right.

So to get back to the question, what is determining the movement? In a word, “culture”. Not “culture” as in a listening to a symphony orchestra in Paris culture. But “culture” as in all that information that we learn and share. “Culture” as in that which imparts, in the first place, a sense of responsibility to community; an obligation to give; a connection with ‘family’; languages to talk in; a division of men and women. Delving into the forms these take: who, for example counts as family; what different kinds of uncle are there? What are the responsibilities of the grandmother? This is the job of the anthropologist.

Scrutinizing the work.

And even though the metaphor’s effect has dwindled, I want to ask, who or what is the ‘watchmaker’ that designed all this? God? Evolution? A gene? Now I’ve gone past socio-cultural anthropology, and unfortunately, before I can answer one of humankind’s greatest questions, the foundations are complete and it’s not even 10am.

Spreading the concrete.

The mixers are washed and cough to a halt. My ringing ears thirstily drink in the ensuing quiet. The men make their way over to the tent and stand and sit around the trestle tables. Plastic plates are handed around. Initially no one moves so as not to appear greedy or selfish. Some of the men entreat me, the outsider, to go first and relieve the stand-off. But I’m going to wait. Eventually one gets up, then another, soon there’s a huddle around the table and we are helping ourselves. There is so much to choose from, including such Australian delicacies as meat pies and lamb chops, and international foods such pizza (but no cornflakes). I eat a little bit of rice, sambal, with a side of a small fried fish, a fried chicken wing, and cucumber. This is the kind of food I ate and grew tired of during fieldwork in Indonesia, but how much I have missed it--it actually tastes like 'real food'. The other guys are chatting amongst themselves, and occasionally encouraging each other to eat more. There were a few laughs, but I can’t quite catch the jokes—beyond my language abilities unfortunately. Then men get up for some sweets. Having finished these people begin to announce their departure.

A moment of discussion.

I follow suit, “OK I’m heading home now, balek rumah [heading home]”.

 A younger man, the guy who owns the house, Pak Nabiya, said “banyak, banyak terima kasih [thanks so, so much].

He seemed genuine. A bit overcome I say, in English, “no, thank you for the experience”.

It was meaningful for me on many levels: feeling constructive, building rapport, getting a good sweat and workout as well as a burst blister on the side of my right thumb. It had been very satisfying watching cement gradually filing the allotted space, knowing that the sand I was shovelling was contributing to that. I hope that I have also started to build my relationship in the community.

Initially reticent, the men then came up to get their food.

Anthropology, most textbooks instruct, is dedicated to putting yourself in ‘their’ shoes. To achieve this, the discipline’s principal methodology remains participant-observation. You research a group of people by getting to know them well; you develop trust, understanding, sympathy, and, ideally, empathy. In other words, you create rapport—long term relationships of trust and understanding.

“Rapport” is central to our understanding of anthropological research. For example, a recent anthropology textbook explains “rapport” to undergraduates in even simpler terms:

Ethnographers strive to establish rapport—a good, friendly working relationship based on personal contact—with our hosts (Kottak 2000, 35)

These formulations seem common enough. They make ‘good sense’; we need rapport for ‘good’ fieldwork.

When teaching the importance of rapport in socio-cultural anthropology to undergraduates, the ‘go-to’ text is Geertz’s (1972) “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight”. Ostensibly, Geertz wrote about “deep play”: a cultural disposition by which we get involved way over our heads in games and competitions. Geertz analyses, for example, why a Balinese man bets on a fighting cock that he thinks will lose. But like most other readers, I want to overlook his point. What stands for us is Geertz’s account of how he and his wife Hildred were initially accepted by the villagers. The story has now become part of anthropological lore.

Things didn’t start well for the couple. Geertz describes how he and his wife were initially held at a distance: “everyone ignored us in the way only a Balinese can do”. However, after days of being treated as if they “simply did not exist”,  they had the good fortune to attend a cockfight. These are illegal in Indonesia and the police raided:

People raced down the road, disappeared head first over walls, scrambled under platforms, and folded themselves behind wicker screens, scuttled up coconut trees... Everything was dust and panic."

Husband and wife scurried way, following “another fugitive” who “ducked suddenly into a compound....and we...followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard”.

Long story short: “Everyone in the village knew we had fled like everyone else” (Geertz 1972, 4). 

They all knew that the Geertzs had “demonstrated [their] solidarity with what were now [their] co-villagers”. A, a result of this shared experience their relationships changed, literally overnight:

The next morning the village was a completely different world for us. Not only were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of all attention (Geertz 1972, 4).

The shared experience of escaping the police at the cockfight:

was the turning point so far as our relationship to the community was concerned, and we were quite literally "in." The whole village opened up to us, probably more than it ever would have otherwise (Geertz 1972, 4).

Geertz explicitly credits this experience for:

achieving that mysterious necessity of anthropological field work, rapport…It led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance into a society extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate. It gave me the kind of immediate, inside-view grasp of an aspect of "peasant mentality" that anthropologists not fortunate enough to flee headlong with their subjects from armed authorities normally do not get (Geertz 1972, 4).

As a result of their cockfight experience, the Geertzs built rapport very quickly and by accident. It’s not always as simple as that. As turned out, helping lay the foundations was not enough to ‘cement’ my position in the community, nor should I have expected it to be. Nevertheless, being the very first morning of my visit, this was a much better start to fieldwork than I could have had hoped for.