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February 12, 2007
Walking Without Accident
If you live or spend time in a large city, it's happened to you. You've ended up standing right directly in front of someone else who was, until just then, going in the opposite direction, doing an awkward mirror dance. You move left, to go around the person, just as they move in the same direction. You move right, same thing happens. Eventually, you sort things out and move along.
Have you ever wondered why this happens so infrequently? Chances are, you haven't. But when you do, when you start to observe exactly how it is that you let others know your intentions, you'll notice a small miracle of interpersonal communication taking place every time you pass on the street, one that yields volumes, in its small way, about the importance of unlearned learnings and, in turn, the value of field research.
Next time you walk down the street in a city you call home, pay special attention to the kind and frequency of eye contact you make with approaching strangers headed directly for you (i.e., on a collision course unless somebody changes direction). If you're in the U.S., here's what I expect you'll observe.
A. Contact. You and another person make initial eye contact.
B. Signal. One of you--typically the one who will change course--looks down and to the left or to the right to indicate the direction s/he plans to veer in. Alternately, if the person appears to look directly at your legs or the ground in front of you, s/he is indicating that you should change course.
C. Validation. (Optional) You make eye contact again, as if to say "yes, agreed."
D. Course Correction. You follow the directions you've agreed to.
I find three things about this absolutely amazing. The first is that it works so well. The second is that this set of rules has clearly developed from consensus and is entirely untaught. The third is that it's actually quite regional. (I think this may explain why you find yourself bumping into people more frequenly when you travel far from home.)
What does this have to do with field research? Everyting, actually. The point of doing field work is to understand exactly what you don't understand already simply by being alive on the same planet at the same time with the same (or similar) general educational and media inputs. It's to avoid what Mahmood Mamdani (in a clearly different context) called "history by analogy," the process of understanding what we don't by analogy with what we do and thereby missing all the really important bits.
Like, for example, how we walk past each other without bumping.
Mostly.
And less some places than others.
Posted by davidkippen at February 12, 2007 08:59 PM