Travel

While catching up on my New York Times, I came across 36 Hours in Rajasthan, India. I can't believe it's been almost three years since I traversed the route this writer recommends. In planning the next steps of my life, I hope that I make time for travel. There is nothing so perspective-granting as a visit to another culture.

Worth a Read

Postcards from America: The New York Times asks four writers to report on their local economies. I was particularly struck by the Iowa story, which, after seeing Food, Inc. recently, really resonated with me.

The Marvelous Chaos of Applying Methodologies to Daily Life

Professor Harrington sits on the table, eying the 14 of us encircling him. He uses his hands to steady his aging frame on the table's edge, turns slowly towards me, and quietly asks, "What's happening here?" Taken off-guard by the non-rhetorical nature of such an obvious query, I quickly respond, "we're students sitting in a room, about to learn." He grins and asks, "is that what's happening, or what you think is happening?"

And so begins my dizzy spiral into the world of ethnographic methods. The prefix title of this class, the part before the colon (often described as "the category of interest"), seemed meaningless when the class appeared on a list of requirement-fulfilling courses. "Methods of Inquiry." It sounded like it would offer an overview of a particular research method and provide an opportunity to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and premeditated choices of the research I've been reading in other courses.

As I've now learned, one of the core features of ethnography and participant observation is triangulation, the merging of multiple methods of gathering data and the cross-checking of this data through these multiple sources. To get triangulation, we ask three questions: What do people say is going on here? What should be going on here? (Or, perhaps, what do people say should be going on here?) And finally, what's actually going on here?

The funny thing about answering these three questions on the same topic is that the answers are rarely synonymous, despite the fact that we arrange our lives on the presumption that they very often are. It's both disorienting and liberating to know that what's supposed to be going on is very rarely what's actually going on, and often not even what the participants say is going on. Does this mean that we are constantly deceiving ourselves? Are we resistant to seeing the real occurrences of our daily operations, our societies, or our behaviors? Which of the sources or answers holds the greatest truth: our reality, our perception of it, or our expectations (essentially our understanding of the order of our activities and our world)? Finally, how do we ever really assess what's actually going on here, when that assessment is almost always human-determined, and every one of us brings a lens that forms a unique perception of the situation?

I couldn't help but write down Professor Harrington's comments on the first day of class regarding the absence of truth in science. He said, so matter-of-factly, as if it were the simplest comment worth saying, that scientific inquiry is about building connections between truths. Not discovering the ultimate truth, not uncovering anything at all, but building--taking two things that already exist and developing a model for understanding their relationship. Ethnography, of course, is exactly that.

In learning about ethnographic methods I am also learning how covertly I've been trained to think as a sociologist. When told to "do research" my mind immediately runs toward random samples of large populations, surveys, statistics, and ways that we can quantify our questions despite their focus on abstractions like "race" and "learning." In this course, we're learning how to sit down and talk with people, to build a big picture from a very small one instead of the other way around. Our ethnographic methods rely on spending lots and lots of time in the community or institution that we're studying, with the aim of answering the three questions above through direct observation and participation. At a very basic level, this makes sense--what better source of information than the participants and the settings themselves? Go straight to the source, take good notes, and build yourself a model of that tiny universe to help you understand some things there and even beyond.

This alternate role of participant-observer has, in my own life, presented an entirely different vantage point from which to consider all the relationships and scenarios I encounter. Out I go each day, examining and hypothesizing, asking questions of all the things I have historically taken for granted. Why do drivers stop at a red light? Is it because it's the law, because they don't want to hit a pedestrian, or because they don't want to be hit by cross-traffic? Why do children who fight in the classroom play together on the playground? Why do small, mixed-income immigrant communities flourish in pockets in this city where neighborhoods are so stiffly defined by socioeconomic status? Am I suddenly asking these questions because of the exciting prospect of field research, that golden gem of ethnography, which would require me to get out there and experience the scenarios behind these questions? Or, am I now realizing that every procedure, every situation that's part of our daily operations, has a story behind it and a logic that may not be what it seems? It's all chaotic and wonderful, wondering and questioning and theorizing about the best way to get to the bottom of this and that. I'm on my way to the train, a ho-dum process I engage in twice daily, and oh, I spy a curious scene!, off the brain wonders to consider triangulation.

Taking Harrington's advice and looking at scenarios through all the theories I've learned, I now want, or perhaps even need, to ponder, "what's happening here?" Playing detective like a five-year-old, I am rediscovering the beauty of the hidden methods and patterns of our crazy, unconsciously orderly lives, and it's marvelous.

On Old Subway Cars, and Growing Up New York

The subway seats are orange on this train; surprising, because the facade is sleek and clean, digitized, the kind they introduced in the early 2000s on all the lines we never take. When we'd venture onto the 4 or R platforms, we encountered these beasts like modern aliens, their interiors lined with light blue bench seats. Now they've permeated the outer lines like ours, the A and the 1, these high-tech warriors ready for the repetitious battle of the evening commute. On this A train with a modern exterior enclosing those old orange, classic three-toned seats, we take standing room amidst a mezcla of New Yorkers speeding uptown, past the slow stuffy stops of the Upper West Side, directly from 59th to 125th. We will stay on a few more stops beyond this gateway to Harlem, but as the doors open here our eyes drift across the station in silent homage to our haunt of earlier New York days. When the doors close we return to our activities, writing and reading, reflecting and learning, two things these four-eyed sisters do best.

We both wouldn't mind slipping into an orange seat right now and feeling the cool plastic on our tired backs, dropping our bags from our shoulders to our laps. Most of the seats are occupied by bodies we may never know, despite the familiarity some of their faces present from previous travels along the A.

It's been a year and six months since we moved further uptown and to the west. Though we've switched our primary train (a life status change for a New Yorker, akin to divorce or an empty nest or a new job), we seem to be plotting our old patterns, tattered, tried, and true, onto this new map. To get to the places we've grown to love, we simply walk farther; to continue our quest for a moment on each inch of Manhattan, we venture deeper. Along these new routes, we grace the same orange seats, hosting us for the mere minutes between each of our destinations, the traverses of our concrete geographic pattern.

Framework for Summer

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;
This printed and bound book...but the printer and the printing-office boy?
The marriage estate and settlement...but the body and mind of the bridegroom? also those of the bride?
The panorama of the sea...but the sea itself?
The well-taken photographs...but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
The fleet of ships of the line and all the modern improvements...but the craft and pluck of the admiral?
The dishes and fare and furniture...but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
The sky up there...yet here or next door or across the way?
The saints and sages in history...but you yourself?
Sermons and creeds and theology...but the human brain,
and what is called reason, and what is called love,
and what is called life?

-Walt Whitman

Amazing Things Are Happening Here

Following the blocks from the 1 train to my apartment, I can tell what time it is by which stores still have their lights on. I know it's late when even Starbucks, after the midnight hour, has closed. For the most part, the streets are deserted, except for the smokers escaping crowded, merengue-and-salsa-filled bars, nurses leaving awkwardly-timed shifts, mothers returning home, weighed down with groceries and kids' clothing and burdens.

Each morning, heading back towards the 1 train I am greeted by the sun streaming through transparent, lofty walkways connecting the 8th-10th floors of buildings over Fort Washington Avenue, igniting a huge red canvas that screams: AMAZING THINGS ARE HAPPENING HERE.

Fighting crowds just to walk down 168th Street, I examine my enemy warriors and wonder where they're going. What amazing things will they accomplish today? How are they contributing to what's "happening"?

Here, on 168th Street and Fort Washington Ave, is the Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. What goes on inside its towering buildings and interconnected walkways is all but invisible to passersby, whose glimpses are limited to the wear on the face of a tired surgeon in scrubs grabbing 5 coffees at Starbucks or the quick transfer of a person on oxygen from the back of an ambulance to the hospital's emergency room.

This city is filled with these microcosmic concentrations of activity. Within the Medical Center's towering halls, scientists are building new vaccines, grandmothers are receiving their final doses of long-time medications, hungry student eyes are watching with careful attention procedures they must learn by rote. Further south and east, somewhere between the giants of Park Avenue and the art beat of the Lower East Side, the NYU Medical Center pursues the same activities, building another medical force and affecting another subset of our city's population.

These massive functions of institutions and structures so tiny within the grand scheme of this city keep me in constant awe of New York. Thousands of minute interactions build hundreds of daily rote processes and dozens of new discoveries all within this one four-block radius where, as it also happens, I make my home with hundreds of others who take their daily activities beyond the short limits of this neighborhood.

The interconnectedness of these tiny spheres forms the glue of this city. When a patient arrives from downtown or the Bronx, he brings his mother, who cleans houses in Queens, and his brother who used to own that beloved corner deli down the street. All the neighborhoods that comprise this city become intricately connected through the movements and alliances of the people who inhabit them. And so it goes, in all the many definitions of that vague word of place, its meaning rooted in the mind of the listener or speaker, amazing things are happening here.

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"Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

From Berlin, 3.18.09

A City Divided, united by the tearing down of a wall twenty years ago, struggles to build one cohesive identity to present to the world. More so than culture, economic realities perpetuate two worlds, one modern, progressive, western, the other the recent aftereffect of communism and inhibited progress.

This city serves as an excellent case study for tourism. The physicalities that so recently defined this city now provide more learning, cultural and commercial opportunities for tourists than for locals. We have been so quick to objectify these places, to historify them, that they have become fossils, informative and dead. Yet these places are remnants of an immediate past. 1990 is within the living memory of the majority of the world’s population. These places shaped day-to-day life for many of our neighbors, colleagues, friends and leaders—their footsteps remain in the annals of their rememberances—crisp and vivid and alive. Such quick memorialization quiets the immediacy—it puts these days in the bucket of the past. Yet it is apparent in Berlin that there were too many years of separation. How do they begin to participate in the same economy? What are their municipal priorities? Who does, and who should, this city serve?

Still, Berlin is alive—it is in that earlier, grungy state that once characterized London’s Brick Lane and New York’s East Village. Giulia raves about the inexpensive, inexplicable nightlife, the cultural energy, the constant flurry of parties and galleries and delicious food and watching the sunrise on a balcony in a new neighborhood each night. Much of this has been fueled by Berlin’s lack of cohesiveness, its inability to pull it all together into something subject to clear identification and resulting gentrification. Much of it hinges on uncertainty and perplexity at how to handle East Berlin. This is a unique situation that may prevent Berlin’s trajectory as a London or New York or San Francisco.

Yet for all the glamour and grunge, I don’t think Berlin is for me. In its youthful population, this city is dominated by floaters and dreamers, artists and thinkers who are driven toward a lofty aim or who are adrift, passionate yet uncertain of their ultimate direction. I thrive in cities that demand competition and competence—I need to be surrounded by creative energy that’s being funneled into targeted, meaningful production. There are elements of Berlin that I would cherish in any city—lazy Sundays, six languages being spoken at a bar, partying until dawn without spending more than five Euros, art everywhere and always, buildings with history, neighbors with incomparable stories, the fusion of cultures from Europe, Turkey, and the world beyond. Take all this and couple it with a city with unmatchable global power, with a city that demands a place on everyone’s map, if not as a destination than as a place that absolutely must be known, and that, that place is my city.