My experience as a market seller

So today, for what I think was only the third time in my life, I tried to sell to people in a market. The first two times had been in Bolivia and perhaps do not count for so much as I was only the assistant on both occasions.

On the first occasion I had helped Isaac Condori, the father of a friend, to sell home-made bread in the Huancasaya market on the border of Peru (Huancasaya was in Franz Tamayo, the neighbouring province to the one in which I was based for my fieldwork, Bautista Saavedra). We had had to get up at around 3am to take an open-top mini-bus from the town of Charazani to Huancasaya to be there to set up for 6am when the sun came up and the customers would begin arriving. Some of our sales seemed to be the result of long-established relationships with known customers (many of whom crossed the border from Peru - the border being the river Suches), and even those who Isaac did not have a relationship with, knew that there would be bread for sale. The bread sold like hot cakes. I enjoyed the experience, and as his assistant, Isaac was obliged to buy me lunch - as I recall, I had trout (though it seemed that he did so reluctantly, only after being reminded by the fellow sellers from Charazani that this was the expected behaviour of the trader towards his assistant.

On the second occasion, I assisted my friend Natalio from the highland community of Qullpani in selling alpaca meat at the nearby market of Patamanta (which is held on the same day at the Huancasaya market). Like Huancasaya, Patamanta is right next to the border with Peru and many of those who come to buy do so from the neighbouring country. My job was to check the weight of the alpaca meat while Natalio held it up using both his scales and the scales of the buyer. Although I didn't directly receive any meal in return that day, I had been staying at Natalio's house the previous few days and received many hearty meals, several of them using organs of the alpaca which if they were on sale in the UK I would have turned my nose up at (e.g. tripe, intestines), but due to hunger had learned to enjoy sufficiently to not to embarrass myself by refusing meals (though the alpaca bran soup which I had in one of the nearby communities of Llachuani as difficult to feign enjoyment of).

There were several alpaca-herding families, who I spent time with during my fieldwork, not just in the Aymara-speaking highland communities of Qullpani and Llachuani, but also a family in the upper valley (around 3,900 metres in altitude) community of Moyapampa. This was the family of Petrona Flores Mamani, who I had got to know through the Kallawaya autonomy assembly and with whose family I ended up spending time with for periods throughout my fieldwork. During my time with them I would help them planting in the fields, herding their alpacas - and once, in skinning an alpaca. Petrona's family had a loom in their house and made alpaca-wool scarves at home, which Petrona would take to La Paz and try to sell. I bought a scarf from them in my first week of fieldwork, which served me well, and several more in my last week which I took back to the UK with me and gave to friends and relatives as presents.

After I had been back in the UK for around a year I managed to find Petrona and her daughters on facebook. It wasn't long before one of Petrona's daughters began trying to persuade me to try to sell in the UK the garments which her family makes. After a year trying get s student society interested in taking this on as a project, and eventually realising this was a dead end,  I decided that I would take the bull by the horns and put my own money in to try to sell them myself. The first package came over in May in the luggage of a friend who was travelling from Bolivia. I thought it would be difficult to sell any at all in the summer, but was pleasantly surprised when, after informing the Collaborative Anthropology group about the scarves two lecturers and one fellow Phd student bought scarves straight away. One of the lecturers went crazy for them, emailing me to bring the scarves to her office immediately, as soon as she found out about them. She was almost certainly more excited than I had ever seen a fellow human being on the topic of scarves. "Do you know how many bags of scarves, I have?" she asked me. "Eleven bags of scarves! And those are just the ones I had to give to charity because I had too many scarves" (I am paraphrasing a little). My first thought was that she clearly had a problem which could not solved by the purchase of more scarves. To my good fortune, however, her analysis did not concur with mine, and not only purchased some for herself and as gifts, but filled my head with grand dreams of opening an emporium of alpaca scarves.

As Christmas began approaching in November I asked Petrona to send more scarves, and this time hats, and at the same time asked the Social Anthropology school President to inform the undergrads. When she told me she had forwarded an email from me to 588 undergraduate students I expected myself to be overwhelmed. But so far the deluge has been... slow. By then I had already paid a deposit on a space to sell the scarves at a market in a local school in St Andrews, on what turned out to be St Andrews day. I had been worried about not having enough stock after selling some to students, but luckily another box arrived three days before the market. On the day it was bleak. Windy and rainy and I had to carry a card table with my to the venue in addition to the hats and scarves.

When I arrived, I had been unable to find the organiser of the market, Janet, who I assumed would tell me where my pitch would be for the day, but I was advised that it didn't matter, and to just find a vacant spot. I set my table (a small card table which I had been able to carry from home) up between two ladies sell what I think I could categorise as knick-knacks, and they were to be my companions for the afternoon (or from 11-4, the hours of the market). The lady of one side was selling scented textiles made into the shape of animals (dogs, mostly), other ornaments shaped to appear like ducks, Christmas wreaths, and 1930s-style hats. The lady on the other side was selling coasters, cards and cushions imprinted with various designs. Some of the designs showed animals, such as dogs (she proclaimed at one point in the afternoon, when a dog-walker went past, that she was a dog person), and drawings of East Nuak villages and St Andrews. By far the most popular of her items, she told me, were those with the drawings of St Andrews on them, which perhaps give a sense both a sense of St Andreans pride in their town and the general perceived attractiveness of it.

They were both very friendly towards me and the lady on one side gave me not just two cups of tea to keep me warm, but also a (small) free gift when I took an interest in the various nice smelling things she was selling. Although I felt very much like an outsider, this being my first attempt at market selling on my own and my very first in the UK,feeling like a novice surrounded by experts, my neighbours brought me into the fold. They gave me advice on the positioning of my table (that I should try to move it forward, closer to the people walking past), the presentation of my wares (that I move my (rather amateurish) sign up to make it more visible, and that I make clear that the alpaca scarves and whatnot were Bolivian. They also encouraged me as the day went on, telling me that I was gaining in confidence when I actively greeted passers-by, and tried to engage them in conversation. We were also united by our common experience of the cold.  

Before the fair I had tried to think about what I needed to make my table attractive. I printed out a photo of Petrona,which I taped to a Bolivian aguayo (for these purposes, a tablecloth). I also printed out an A4 piece of paper on which I had written in big letters "Alpaca scarves and hats". Only later did it occur to me that I needed to have written "Bolivian alpaca scarves and hats", to make clear their provenance. One thing I did not do was to write down the prices of the items. I had considered this as a possibility, but had, I think,taken the Bolivian markets as my guide. I could not recall ever seeing prices for similar items in Bolivian markets,and so decided not to attach visible prices to mine, on the basis that if someone was interested they would ask the price, and I would be perfectly open to haggling.

I sold two large scarves all day long. One to a librarian, who I recognised and who recognised me, and who it was therefore easy to strike up a conversation with, and another to a friend from the Social Anthropology department who I could have sold to in the department anyway. The ladies at the stalls either side of mine put the blame largely on my lack of visible pricing for my lack of success. When Janet appeared late in the day she also remarked that this may have been a factor. She told me that women like to see prices or they won't take an interest in the products. Men might approach to ask, but women would not. She was probably right. I think only one or two people approached to ask about prices. Others I volunteered the prices to myself.

The size and location of the table may also have been a factor. The fact that I had such a small table meant that if I was near the table then nobody could approach to look at the items without my presence. I tried moving the table forward and backwards and backwards, and eventually put an aguayo down on the floor in front of the table with scarves on to spread things about a bit. The fact that it was cold and rainy outside - and we were outside ourselves in the courtyard of a school, did not help to attract customers, and it not until I had been at the stall for a good two hours that there was much footfall at all.

It's a learning process though... I will be attempting it again in two week's time, thankfully next time inside in a place where they will give me a table.

Midsummer

So last weekend a terrorism-obsessed Zebedi (obviously this isn't his real name, but having found it amusing to change the names of my friends in my last post I thought I'd try it in this one too) came to visit for the weekend. Why Zebedi finds terrorism so fascinating I can't fathom, but it has led him to study for a master's degree in the subject and next year will be embarking on a Phd in the same in our very own venerable institution. Somehow he manages to bring the subject of any conversation round to the subject of terrorism, which you would think might kill the atmosphere somewhat, and very often you would be right.

Last night I joined him and others at the postgraduate bonfire on the beach, where he was smoking shisha with Syrian friends from the International Relations department, many of whom were studying subjects as depressing as he. I had brought along a friend who studies physics and told him about how the first I had been introduced to one of Zebedi's colleagues, humpty-dumpty (yep, I can easily amuse myself with this name-changing lark) I had thought he had told me that he was studying tourism. To be precise I seem to recall that I heard him tell me that he was studying how people became radicalised into tourism in Syria. You can imagine that I wondered firstly about what it meant to be radicalised into tourism, and secondly what would possess tourists to visit Syria these days. When I related this story to Zebedi he told me that there was such a thing as "jihadi tourism", by which people went to went, had a holiday and went home again. I marvelled at his gift of word association.

It was at this point that the police arrived and asked what our group was smoking. The owner of the shisha pipes (I presume they have another name, but hey, I'm not going to look it up) told them - I presume truthfully - that it was flavoured tobacco, and invited the police to try for themselves. They of course declined. The spoilsports. This rather reminded me of the time when, at around the age of seventeen I was returning home from midnight ten-pin bowling. For some reason at the weekends, with friends I had taken the habit of going bowling in Basildon from midnight. Quite why we chose this hour I forget. I presume for no other reason that it was cheap. Our car was stopped by the police around the local shopping centre after 2am. I think they may have been looking for drugs. Quite why they thought that we might have drugs with us I am not sure, because they couldn't possibly have spotted us calling at the petrol station to buy nothing other than biscuits. Anyway, the policeman asks us all to get out of the car, checks in the bowling balls, and then sees what looks like a gun in the side of the car door on the drivers side. My friend hastily tells him that is is cigarette lighter (it was). "How does it work?" the policeman asks him, to which the reply obviously was "you pull the trigger". I forget which of them demonstrated that it was indeed a cigarette lighter. Sometimes friends can have pretty idiotic cigarette lighters.

Braemar

Last weekend I took a trip wit three Spanish friends to Braemar, in the highlands, about two hours from St Andrews by car. To be a tad more specific, Braemar is in the Cairngorms. The idea of taking a walking trip this weekend had first been proposed a couple of weeks ago, and I had at first had my doubts about going. The original idea had been to visit Ben Nevis, but the idea had been to go for an entire weekend and leave Friday afternoon, but I didn't feel I could afford to take what would be two and a half days away from writing my thesis. Ben Nevis incidentally, was the only mountain I could think of when asked by a Kallawaya friend, who was at that moment conducting a spiritual healing ritual for me, for the names of sacred mountains where I am from (because offerings were about to be made to the local mountain deities, and in addition one offering would be made to my own sacred mountain). Obviously, then, as my sacred mountain I ought to visit it when less weighed down by the cares of my thesis, and able to pay it due reverence and attention. This trip was only a little over a day, and I thought it a realistic amount of time to take away from the PhD to recharge the batteries and whatnot.

The trip started uneventfully. As is customary in these circumstances, I left the house in a hurry, about 5 minutes after I was supposed to meet my friends outside TESCO, and jogged quite a bit of what is usually a 20 minute walk. My friend Josep (I may or may not have changed his name) and I met inside said supermarket. He was paying for his goods as I entered. After he showed me what he had bought, and indicated to me that these were to share, I then proceeded to duplicate most of his own items. Thus I met Josep outside and we compared the week's worth of food we had bought between us for our day trip. As we stood where the Romanian Big Issue lady usually sits, and who I usually pretend not to notice, but who when I do buy a copy of her magazine suddenly attempting to talk to like a long-long friend, the TESCO lorry pulled up with supplies for the store. As we continued to wait, and made sure to get out the way, whilst trollies of toilet paper passed us, we amused ourselves by identifying places on the British food map on the side of the lorry. Cornwall was a cornish pasty, this made sense. Ireland was an Ireland represented by a lot of meat, but no fish (the only fish was in the highlands of Scotland, presumably a Salmon), we thought this odd. "Where are you from?" Josep asked me. "I'm from... onion". "Is Essex famous for onions?" Josep asked me. I racked my brains. Essex was (in)famous for many things, but to the best of my knowledge, onions wasn't one of them. St Andrews, in case you were wondering, or rather, the East Coast of Scotland roughly equating Fife, was represented by biscuits. After we had examined much of the British Isles in this way, Butterfly and Obama (I may or may not have changed their names) arrived to meet us, and we were on our way, on our way to salmon!

Despite my three fellow adventurers being native Spanish speakers and myself being fluent in the language, they proceeded to speak in English both to me and between themselves. I wondered how long this would last if I didn't say anything. I didn't say anything, and it last the whole car journey. Even after I spoke to them in Spanish once we had arrived they continued almost entirely to speak to one another in English, so I concluded they just enjoyed speaking English. At one point during the journey, Obama, who was driving, asked me were I was from. "Onions" I replied, and Josep and I laughed.

When in the hostel, we had a light supper of bread, ham, cheese, liver, and various biscuits, after which Josep, Obama and I felt the need for a short walk. We wandered around what seemed to be a Swiss ghost town. Not a car passed us. Many of said ghosts were probably haunting the shop entirely selling things made from deer antlers. Whilst Josep and Obama went on to discover the delights of a local tavern, I made my way back to the hostel, to read and doodle in the half-light, and then attempt (for an annoyingly fruitless length of time) to sleep. The lack of fruit was not a facto in my sleep, however, but rather the conversation between one snorer and another across the room between around 12am and 1.30am. The conversation may well have continued after that, but eventually I managed to count enough sheep not to notice.

In the morning, after showering, I met my friends downstairs, and we embarked on our morning feast. Butterfly asked me in Spanish how I slept, to which I told her in Spanish that I didn't sleep very well because of all of the people yawning. I think you want to say "snoring" instead of "yawning", she told me in Spanish. I was nonchalant enough in response, I think, to show that I didn't care about making the odd mistake, that yawning and snowing are basically the same anyway, and so on and so forth, whilst inwardly cursing myself for making myself look like someone who couldn't tell the difference between yawning and snoring. Obama (who I had met for the first time) asked me in Spanish how much I could understand. "Just, so-so?" he ventured himself. Inwardly outraged, I replied, "No! Ninety to ninety-five per cent" This was truthful but now unconvincing.

After breakfast we made our way outside, and to our disappointment, but not a bit of shock (we been forewarned by the weather forecast the day a few days previously), found the air was wet and falling. It was only spitting, but this set the tone for the day. We drove out in Obama's car, out of town and down a country road past some deer whose adornments would no doubt eventually find their way to the shop in town, until we arrived at a car park from which we aimed to begin our journey up Ben Mcdhui, at whose summit we rather ambitiously hoped to see "The Big Grey Man" (http://www.biggreyman.co.uk/legend.html).

The walk started out well enough, and although it was windy and spitting intermittently for the first couple of hours this was nothing more than we had expected from a walk in the highlands. Once we had started walking our names became Frodo, Sam, and those other two that nobody remembers - we settled on Bilbo as a third, even though he doesn't travel them on their adventure. We walked for several hours in a valley, with mountains either side of us looking for the path on our set of directions up the mountain, and avoiding the puddles as best as we could. After five hours of walking we were drenched and had still not found the path. We realised that we had gone too far. By now, however, we were so wet we just wanted to return, and so gave up the possibility of seeing the Big Grey Man, and had to return without the ring. It was a long walk back with wet feet, longer than we had remembered walking on our way there. Every bridge we came to seemed to be the last one, only for us to pass it and come to another last bridge. By the time we got back to the car we were exhausted. I was yawning all  back to the land of biscuits.

Kukuchi

Looking back over my fieldnotes recently I was amused by the following extract:

The vocabulary of Petrona's (the woman whose family I had been staying with) little girl, Tina, seems to have expanded ever so slightly recently. Occasionally I hear her say words like mamay (mum) or tatay (dad), but 90% of what she says still consists of three words: achachi (hot); kukuchi (scary thing), and zapato (shoe). The first two words are not used nearly as much as the last. She seems to be able to use the word as if it were at once a noun, verb, adjective, exclamation and every other form of grammatical form. This morning we were having soup for breakfast and she was repeating "zapato, zapato, zapato..." I decided to try to teach her a new word. "No es zapato" (it isn't a shoe), I told her, "es sopa" (it's soup). "Sopa", she replied, "sopa... to".

My efforts to expand Tina's vocabulary clearly hadn't met with success.

When reading for my thesis I came across some explanation for one of the other segments of Tina's vocabulary, kukuchi. According to Catherine Allen, in her article "Body and Soul in Quechua Thought" (1982:187), Kukuchis are "almas [souls] who, even after eight days, cannot free themselves from the dead body, and thus remain to molest the living". From Allen's description, kukuchis are disgusting, cannibalistic creatures who are especially likely to eat their closest relatives. I imagine that Petrona must have been scaring Tina with tales of kukuchis. It makes me wonder whether the reason she repeated the word so much in my presence (often, now that I think about it, whilst attempting to hide behind her mum's skirt) was that she took me as a kukuchi. She had probably even been telling Tina that if she didn't behave then I would eat her. Perhaps the reason that she was so obsessed with shoes was because she thought that she might need to run away as fast as her little legs could carry her when I became peckish for human flesh!

Collaboration

A group of us in the Social Anthropology department at St Andrews have recently started up a collaborative anthropology research group. So far we have only had one meeting in which we shared a few thoughts on what we considered collaborative about research projects we had done or had in the pipeline. I didn't feel that my own research was especially collaborative (besides being anthropology and therefore collaborative by nature), but had gone along to the meeting anyway out of interest. The extent of my collaboration at present (and the present moment is dominated by writing my thesis) is to send drafts of chapters to my informants in the field for them to read, in the hope that they would be able to provide me with useful comments on them which will help me to know whether I am on the right track. Yesterday another member of the research group told me that she thought I was very brave to do this. Instinctively, I felt both that she was right -  that I was brave in way because I felt I was taking a risk -  but that I should do it more or less without thinking in any case, more or less as a duty to my informants. I shall share here some of my musing on sharing my work with my friends in my research fieldsite in Bolivia.

The first thing is to say that to be participating in a research group concerned with collaboration at all seems to have something absurd to it, because collaboration is so inherent to the research methods of Social Anthropology. Anthropologists need to engage with people for their research. Without collaboration with the research subjects such research is generally (though I acknowledge that of course some people manage to do anthropological research in archives where the subjects of their research have limited ability, to say the least, to engage with the researcher). Engaging in non-collaborative research would have conceivably meant conducting research in secret without permission. But I suppose the question of my permission to do research is one of the reasons I feel compelled to share with people where I can now while I am still writing up my thesis. Even when we as anthropologists have got permission to conduct research, how aware are the participants in this research of how they are going to be portrayed in our writing? Even despite being aware of what it is that we are researching, seeing us take notes on everything, they could still be surprised that we have picked up on a particular utterance. Even though I have made pains to portray none of my informants in such a way that would give offence, I still wonder whether a person may object that I had taken a remark out of context, or worse object to being referred to in my research at all.

One of the main reasons for sharing my writing with the subjects of my research though of course is because I would like to receive comments back. If memory serves me right I have sent chapters of my thesis out to four different people who I knew to varying degrees (certainly I knew three of them quite well). I sent the chapter drafts with the utmost trepidation at what they would think of them. Two of them had asked for me to send chapters, the other two I had sent the chapters to in a more unsolicited fashion simply because they were personally protagonists themselves in these chapters. Frustratingly, three of them have barely given me any comments whatsoever on the chapters that I have sent them. I wondered at their lack of response. I wondered whether they may have taken offence to something. I wondered whether they had even read the drafts.

The one man who has given me comments on my work is my compadre, Feliciano. I probably mention Feliciano in every one of my chapters, I spent quite a lot of time with him during my fieldwork, and conversations with him guided the direction of my thesis. When I met Feliciano I felt like he was a godsend. He always had time to explain to me the history of the province (and his part in it), and to help me to join the dots a little in my research by suggesting to me other people I should talk to in other communities (I would often generally myself to them by telling them that Feliciano had suggested I look them up). He wasn't the only one who did this, though he more than anyone had a hand in directly my research in particular directions whilst I was still in the field. This, for me is collaboration in Anthropology. We also discussed working on a book together as a potential joint project.

The collaborative aspect to my research has at times led me to feel a sense of guilt that I was using the knowledge of others to further my academic career. At times this point would be made to me by others in my fieldwork. There are moments I remember when I would be enjoying the company of friends in the field and then would take out my notebook to note down something interesting that they had said, and would see their discomfort. Worse, I might ask to take a photo, and would be surprised to be told - sometimes by someone I was friendly with - that I should pay (this was infrequent, but not uncommon) because I would use it in my thesis and therefore make money from it myself. At the time I laughed at the idea - writing up seemed so far off - but now as I put those photos in my thesis I feel I understand. The Kallawayas are used to anthropologists showing up periodically, staying a while, a year or two, perhaps returning, and making academic careers from writing about aspects of their culture. It was made clear to me (even before I met the Kallawayas) that many of them view the anthropologists who have worked in Kallawaya communities in a particularly negative light. They seem to regard anthropologists as engaging in a kind of intellectual or cultural theft. This has contributed to my own sense of guilt regarding my use of the material I had gathered from fieldwork. In the Andes the concept of ayni (reciprocity) is important in all aspects of life. It has been expressed to me by people in met in my fieldwork that through my research I was "taking" something, and that I had to give something back. I feel that debt as something which somehow, at some point I have to repay.

Once I returned to the university the collaborative aspect soon felt lost for me. All I had were my notes. I think it took me six months to write anything decent because of the sense of academic guilt which I felt that I had left those collaborative relationships and was taking advantage of the material gathered in fieldwork to write my thesis for what felt like my own benefit. I tried calling several friends I had met in fieldwork and found it difficult to get through to them, and soon lost touch. However, after a year back at university I managed to acquire Feliciano's phone number and was able to send him drafts of my chapters to look at. I feel like I am sending a treasured pet out into the wild to fend for itself when I send him the drafts to read. Although he has now seen two chapters and a paper which I have written, and given me positive feedback on them, I still feel an enormous sense of trepidation at sending Feliciano translations of the next chapters. What happens if he doesn't like or disagrees with a chapter, and I am left wondering whether I should re-write aspects? Perhaps that is why it is brave!

The awkwardness of meeting someone unexpectedly

Last week, as I was idling around Boots looking for some presents for my mum for Christmas, I got a phonecall from my office-mate, asking me to do her a favour. She was calling me from Poland. It turned out that all of her housemates had left for the winter and the last one to leave the house had taken the back door key with them, but without securing the house first. She asked me if I would go to her house and lock the back door. Naturally, I assented, and gave her my address for her housemate to send me the key. I then went back to shopping for the foundation cream (for face) which my sister had suggested that I buy my mum. After telling the shop assistant what I was looking for, she showed me a dazzling array of options, and rather optimistically, it seemed to me, expected me to know which one my mum would prefer colour-wise. I took a wild stab in the dark and when it came to giving her the present it turned out to be a lucky guess.

The next day the key arrived in the post. I walked to my office-mate's house, let myself in through the back gate, and then in through the back door, as she suggested, and then locked and unlocked the door just to make sure that I was in the right house. Then I looked around me. I was unprepared for the mess I was surrounded by in the kitchen. There were piles  of empty pizza boxes on the table, and a load of oven chips uneaten on hob. I was surprised because I had been told that the house was empty. I felt like one of the three bears having come in to find goldilocks having left the house in a state. Curious as to whether the other communal areas were such a mess I ventured further in the house, and found myself walking up the stairs. As I reached the top of the staircase I was stunned to find a door open in front of me and someone I knew (rather vaguely) come out. I had been told before by my office-mate that he had been staying in the house and sleeping on the sofa, but had naturally assumed that he had left for Christmas. Not so. He looked surprised. I explained quickly, that my office-mate had asked me to come and lock the back door, as though I was giving an alibi for a crime I was in the act of committing. "I thought the house was empty". "Yeah", he told me, "I didn't want to leave with the house unsecured". I gave him the keys. "You'd better leave them somewhere obvious for her when she comes back", I told him. And with that, I left, feeling awkwardly as though I had been caught appearing to burgle the house.