A Motive to Celebrate

One of my classes this semester is at my school’s downtown campus. My class sometimes touches on performances done about the downtown eastside of Vancouver (which is an ethnographer magnet to say the least). We read literature and watch certain community plays about the homelessness and poverty in the area. When class ends I step outside onto the border between the downtown eastside and the business community. It is interesting to be immediately immersed into the very marginalized area that I have just been studying in a comfortable seat while drinking coffee. The experience of what I have just talked about in class is different than the one that I experience when I leave. What does this say for other more remote Ethnographies? What can what we have ‘brought back’ to our society really tell us about the people that were studied?

These questions became quite apparent to me as I was waiting for the bus one evening after class. My classmates and I had just watched a play (on DVD) that emphasized the strong and silent history of the downtown eastside. This play showed a number of different stories and attitudes about the street that I was standing on while waiting for the bus. I felt proud to live in such an interesting and exciting place and was excited to get on the bus and watch the various happenings of the 100 block of East Hastings (this block was of particular interest because it contains the most open display of downtown eastside culture).

The feelings that I had were soon extinguished as a homeless man came up to me and asked for change. I gave him the money I had in my pocket and after a “wow, thanks man… I got to get a place to stay tonight,” he was gone. A part of me wanted to talk to him. I wanted to yell, “Hey, I was just studying you guys in class! You seem very interesting. I’d like to talk to you!” but I couldn’t. That would have been really awkward. I in turn started to feel awkward and out of place. I felt bad for celebrating this area while I watched the man limp down the street towards the hotel area of Hastings. I thought about all the hardships and life threatening episodes this man must have had. Those three dollars were just going to be spent and nothing was going to improve.

Carnegie Center on the 100 block of the Downtown eastside.

I then remembered all of the things I have seen on this street at night; the overdosed people lying face down on the sidewalk (and sometimes literally in the gutter); the women screaming as loud as they could, running through the streets with their skeletal and bruised bodies thrashing around on the cement like fish; the crowded ally ways concealing people with their backs turned to the street while shooting up; the riot gates and vacant rotting buildings; the stilleto short skirts smiling at passing cars; skeletons with numbed expressions and paper bags. The only celebration was in the literature.

I had been deceived. This was not so much a place of rich history and culture as it was a place of indescribable complexity with far more sadness than happiness. In these streets, the only happiness that comes late at night while it’s raining and people huddle in door alcoves is through the crafty penmanship of someone who has never had to beg for change in order to sleep in a rat infested and moldy hotel.

What does this say about the ethnographic things that I have read? The only reason why I realized this flaw in ethnography was because I walked on the same street that I studied. The ethnographers that have studied the downtown eastside are not ignorant to these things. There is a choice made to celebrate things that one studies and this might me done unjustly. This experience has further alienated me from my studies in anthropology because it is becoming ever-more obvious that the objectives of research have personal goals laden within them.

Discussion:

In all fairness, however, it is impossible to be able to completely understand and even more impossible to transcribe the exact culture of a specific area; especially as an outsider. what I was trying to express was the difficulty I am having with the misrepresentations of certain descriptions of culture. I still think that there is a very interesting and unique culture in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, but sometimes the representations of such are misleading because certain areas are stressed too much. This causes other important descriptions needed to grasp a culture (at a very basic level) to be left out.

This raises another question which is not uncommon in anthropology: Who is the researcher representing? If the researcher is representing his/her personal goals, some problems arise. Things that are of little purpose to a culture may be over represented when the researcher makes evaluations. This will unavoidably lead to a different theoretical framework and a skewed overall tone of the finished product. This differs from concentrating on a function or process in itself within the framework of the culture because the researcher then has established boundaries in which to work while inevitably resorting to a general overview of the culture to explain what is going on.

Conversely, if the people being studied are too able to shape the research, then other things are being left out. I think it was Phillip Bordeaux who said something like ‘That which comes without saying, goes without saying.’ That is to say, things that a group of people regard as obvious and unnecessary to discuss often don’t talk about them (yeah, it’s not that deep). Therefore, it is up to the researcher to find the values and connotations of such things. My experience may have something to do with this principle as well. The people being researched may be interprited any way the researcher chooses in the end.

I will be adding to this post as I research more about methods and representation.