Kichwa word of the day: fakchaman = "cascada" / "waterfall"

Hi, how’s it going?  Day 18 here after a week-long hiatus.  I’ve got the usual setup: sitting at my desk cocooned in my sleeping bag, watching my cup of tea get cold, sheep grazing on the hills outside my window, and of course, having the looming shadow of perpetual loneliness settle in just in time to keep me company for lunchtime once again.  Just your typical Saturday afternoon.

By this point I don’t even try to hide it: I don’t think I’ve ever been this lonely my entire life.

It feels rather contradictory that an Anthropologist should feel lonely in the field, doesn’t it?  It’s like an accountant who goes home at the end of the day and slumps down in their seat and thinks, “Man, I wish I got to see more numbers today 😦 ” or something like that, I mean I don’t actually know what accountants do but this is the first analogy that came to me and we’re gonna run with it.  It’s been hard for me to justify this feeling—it’s our job to be around people all the time, building relationships and becoming intertwined in people’s lives.  How can someone spending hours of their day studying human interaction feel so deprived of human interaction?

But alas, that’s where I am right now, and it’s where I have been for the past two weeks, and probably where I will be for the rest of the field season.  Turns out it was not Malaria or food poisoning that I needed to worry about here; it was the incurable malady of missing home.  It’s not like I haven’t been homesick before.  I get homesick even in Los Angeles, just six hours away from home.  But loneliness?  I can’t remember ever feeling lonely while traveling solo; if I have felt lonely, it obviously wasn’t enough to deter me from wanting to go out there on my own again.

But there’s a big difference between those trips I’ve been on and what I’m doing right now. I’m not a traveler this time—I live and work here.  It’s not so much an adventure as it is everyday life, something that is so easy to navigate when the conditions are right but when they’re not, it’s damn near impossible to adjust to.  While on a backpacking trip you’re practically fueled by the unfamiliarity of it all, eager to find new clever ways to be challenged by novelty, during fieldwork you’re trying to rebuild the familiarity that normally keeps you afloat in daily life, in order to integrate into the community as best you can, while still trying to maintain your perspective as a researcher—as an outsider.

Gosh, what a gloomy way to start a post.  I want to be honest with you about this whole process, but at the same time, being mopey is not what we’re about here on A Grain of Nice.  My tagline is field notes of a hungry optimist, for goodness’ sake; I have a reputation to keep up.  So don’t worry.  I have my moments, but I’m learning to coexist with my loneliness—as in, I’ve accepted that I can’t overcome it, but I’m not going to let it get in the way of me living my life.  And life’s been pretty good here.  This has been a big week in particular. Below are some snapshots of the colorful life in this community, starting with photos from the Fiestas de la cosecha San Pedro, San Pablo, y Santa Isabel. 

Note: This summer festival should not be confused with the Inca tradition of Inti Raymi, or “Sun Festival,” celebrated in Peru.  These communities suffered both the Inca conquest and the Spanish conquest that destroyed their cultures and dispossessed their peoples—so these festivities actually represent the resistance to the empires that tried to take over their land, and celebrate their prehistoric ancestors and Pachamama, or “Mother Earth.”

And now, the moment you probably weren’t waiting for, but should have known was coming because this is my research diary—we have a research update:

During the several days that I didn’t write, I was at a low point of going to bed every night feeling like I shouldn’t be here. In addition to wishing I were back home, I was grappling with impostor syndrome and a tremendous amount of self-imposed pressure about being productive—literally, having some sort of product at the end of the day to prove I did something worthwhile.  I was making zero progress, felt like I was a failure, and basically doubted if I could really do this. 

If you’ve ever talked to me in real life—even for just five minutes—you’d know that my entire conception of who I am is based on what I study.  For the past three years, it’s the one thing about me that has remained constant, reliable, absolute.  But it’s risky to build your identity around just one thing, because what happens when it suddenly isn’t enough to hold you up?  Who are you then?  What do you have left? 

So I was in a funk for a while.  And not the groovy Isley Brothers kind.

But then there was one night where I gathered enough energy to not stay curled up in bed on the phone with mom, telling her I want to go home.  I give credit to my friend Rayce, who told me to “get the ball rolling” instead of just feeling sorry for myself, and my fellow cohort members who reminded me in a Zoom call that it’s okay to change directions, and more importantly, it’s okay to let yourself have fun.  I found myself ravenously brainstorming all the ways I could make this better for myself and filled up three pages of my notebook, most of which turned out to be illegible.  I had to accept that things weren’t working with my current topic, a hard pill to swallow when 20% of my data collection period has already gone by—but when I took a step back and reevaluated what I’ve been seeing here every day, the answer was clear.

I realized the only thing I wanted to do was to study people and their food.  That’s what I had wanted from the start, but I let the idea go thinking it would be hard to gather interactional data on it.  But after spending some time here, it turned out to be the only kind of data that I’ve been able to write about.  

That’s right.  I couldn’t seem to find any data that fit my focus—but it was actually the focus that didn’t fit the data all along.  Sometimes the one who’s meant for you is the one who’s been standing right in front of you this whole time.  I just had to open myself up to it and give it the chance it deserved.  I’m keeping my original project, exploring themes like modernity and tradition, urban and rural, girlhood and womanhood—but with food as my lens to look into these aspects of everyday life.  I’ve been testing it out for a few days now and I’m the happiest I’ve been this whole trip.  Being busy with work is a great distraction from loneliness, and now that I finally feel like I know what I’m doing, I’m excited about being here again.

Plus, I’ve got a little side project going: asago yachay hulspa parlashun Kichwa (Learning to speak Kichwa little by little).  75% of what my host dad says to me is in Kichwa now because he’s quite confident that if I hear him speaking it enough I’ll eventually be able to understand him completely.  So far I can ask to buy seven eggs (kanchis lulun) or compliment someone’s cooking (kamba yanushka mishki mishki) or let people know that it’s raining outside (tamyahun) and honestly, I think that pretty much covers all I would ever need to function in this society.  (The spelling is probably way off, sorry about that.)

But check this out.  There’s this little discovery I made that got me super excited, and maybe it’ll excite you too, if you’re one fellow Linguistics nerd out there lurking about:

When José was teaching me the aforementioned phrase, I was able to figure out what he was trying to say before he translated it into Spanish.  Did I just instantly develop fluency in Kichwa?  No, but I recognized that the Kichwa verb “parlashun” sounds an awful lot like the French verb “parler,” meaning “to speak.”  You guessed it, they’re false cognates—similar in sound and meaning, even though the two languages belong to different etymological families.  I can tell you’re begging to know, how could this happen?  It stumped me as well.  Could it just be mere coincidence?  Perhaps.  But I did some excavating (See that? Little Archaeology humor there, not that I’m an Archaeologist, no no) and it’s possible that the French word got brought into Ecuador during the French Geodesic Mission of the 18th century, when French and Spanish scientists passed through this particular region to figure out the shape of the earth.  And think about it—for a word as ubiquitous as “speak,” for a bunch of white dudes trying to communicate with indigenous people in a foreign land, it’s very likely that the word was passed around and eventually adopted by the people here, right?  But if anyone has any other theories on this, let’s discuss! I’m desperate for human interaction, remember!!!?