Why I Moved to Switzerland to Study an African City
I recently moved from the U.S. to Switzerland to study life in an African city as a PhD candidate at the University of Basel, which didn’t make the most geographic sense to friends and family when I first announced my plans. However, the University’s long-standing history of research on African cities, as well as a new research project on social spaces in cities around the globe, helped me to justify my trans-Atlantic relocation. While I will call Basel “home” for the next three years, that title will also have to be shared with Goma, a city in the Eastern Congo.
I am part of the project at the University of Basel called “Making the City: Agency, Urbanity, and Urbanization in Ordinary Cities.” This interdisciplinary project is spearheaded by the Institute of Social Anthropology and the Urban Studies program. Our project team is comprised of two Professors, two Postdocs working in the cities of Cartagena (Colombia) and Biel (Switzerland), and two PhD students, working in Johannesburg (South Africa) and Goma (DRC).
Doing fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
This month, I will head to Goma for the remainder of 2017 to better understand life in this rapidly growing Congolese city through the project’s most fundamental component — fieldwork.
Goma entered the international communities’ consciousness during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 when refugees fled to Goma and other parts of the DRC. You may have also seen Goma’s cityscape in shots from the Netflix documentary Virunga, featuring the national park just 20km north of the city.
By my own assessment, discourses of violent conflict, population displacement, catastrophe, and humanitarian aid have long overshadowed an understanding of Goma’s urban character.
To understand where the city itself fits into these existing narratives, and particularly its role in generating new ones, I need to move to Goma and experience the city.
The science of taking people seriously
Several disciplines and research questions require fieldwork as a method to better understand their subject of study — from biologists collecting data on plants to linguists spending time with native speakers of a dying language. Both biology and linguistics use fieldwork to travel to sites that increase the researchers’ proximity to their object of study.
If we consider that anthropology is the science of “taking people seriously,”[1] it becomes apparent that an anthropologist has to do fieldwork to get closer to the people she is studying. Urban anthropology expands the object of study to the very site or environment in which the people we study live.
Fieldwork is therefore critical, and the qualitative data collected from close observation and participation in social activities in the city enriches analytical, written accounts, often known as urban ethnographies.
Why social scientists love The Wire
If you’ve ever seen an episode of The Wire, you’ve been exposed to what could be described as an urban ethnography. The TV show presents a striking depiction, description and analysis of various social groups and cultures in the U.S. city of Baltimore.
While not an academic text, few scholars would deny that writer David Simon’s experience as a journalist points to his use of ethnographic methods to present Baltimore’s drug culture in a thought-provoking way. The anthropological principles evident in Simon’s work are one of the many reasons social scientists, including myself, tend to be somewhat obsessed with the show.[2]
My favorite TV show, along with past international experiences have helped me to understand the task at hand to complete my thesis. While anthropology and ethnography were not a particular focus in my undergraduate work, the nine months I spent in Senegal could be considered as a fieldwork experience of sorts. This work contributed to my understanding of Senegalese society, culture, history, and, as the picture below indicates, celebrations.
Getting ready to go
So when anthropologists aren’t participating and observing in the field, what are we doing? For my colleague Lotte and I, our first six months have been filled with diverse experiences. Besides taking up new Basel-based pastimes like walks by the Rhine, trips to museums, and deciding whether or not we like Rösti, we’ve been laying the theoretical and logistical groundwork for our trips to our respective cities.
We’ve been reading the work of classic social and urban theorists to understand how to write into existing narratives, while also dealing with regulatory considerations for our trip — making arrangements for visas, flights, houses and even potential internships. In the breaks between generating literature reviews, maps, and atlases [3], we’ve been busy trying to connect with local citizens and other expats online.
As one of our supervisors pointed out, the process of navigating how to get into the field already offers us some foundational information about where we are going. In many ways, the fieldwork has already begun.
[1] My favorite way to understand anthropology comes from Jeremy MacClancy. 2002. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines.
[2] See Critical Inquiry 38:1 (Autumn 2011) for various perspectives on The Wire’s academic resonance with social scientists.
[3] We’re drawing a lot of inspiration from the Atlases, such as The Atlas of Nairobi produced by ETH Studio Basel to present basic information about our sites in their national and continental context through maps, images, and diagrams.
