What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty? Studying up as well as down would lead us to ask many common sense questions in reverse. Instead of asking why some people are poor,we would ask why other people are so affluent ... How has it come to be, we might ask, that anthropologists are more interested in why peasants don’t change than why the auto industry doesn’t innovate, or why the pentagon or universities cannot be more organizationally creative? The conservatism of such major institutions and bureaucratic organizations probably has wider implications for the species and for theories of change than does the conservatism of peasantry.6
Anthropology’s imperialism was explicated in more detail in Talal Asad’s 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Studying up proposed a solution to many students’ doubts and showed how traditional academic fields could expand and intersect with others; an anthropology that stayed at home shared interests with urban, community, family and organisational studies. Studying up continued to rely on detailed observation of human beings, but now western metro-poles could be field sites and the people observed could be educated, privileged, powerful or simply those living everyday lives in the first world. Many such studies have now been carried out about scientists, businesspeople, religious figures, doctors, police, lawmakers, educators and, I expect, most possible categories.
In my field work, I studied culturally middle-class people participating in social projects with the disadvantaged. I use the term social agents to mean individuals who work in the social sector, which takes in research (including academic research), theorising, lobbying, policy making and direct services. Social agents work for government or private bodies; they include agency directors and highly placed political appointees, outreach volunteers, bureaucrats, doctors and religious figures. All receive salaries and/or funding. I will refer to organisations, mostly, but sometimes describe the practices of individuals on behalf of organisations.
In mainstream discourses, these people are positioned as normal, their behaviour is usually unquestioned and their voices are much heard in the media, government and NGO events and policy documents. But I wanted to study more than what these figures say they are doing, flat statements like ‘We treat sick people,’ ‘We provide information on services.’ My goal was to look at their everyday practices, believing with Foucault that ‘People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does’.7 Helping projects say their aim is migrants’ welfare but often seem unaware that they are not succeeding, and, if they are aware, they tend to externalise the problem and blame others. One of my earliest publications was entitled ‘They Speak, But Who Listens?’, reflecting my concern that bringing out marginalised voices is not enough if those who need to hear them are not listening.8
Standpoints
The issue of which direction research takes – down, up, sideways – belongs to a wider debate in the social sciences around the idea that a detached observer can do objective research. Feminists dispute this idea, proposing instead the need to ‘situate knowledge’,9 understanding the importance of every researcher’s standpoint, or personal location. In her critique of objectivity, Sandra Harding argues that everyone has a stake in their own research results, white men as well as blacks, women and any other interest group.10 Other theorists suggest that women have knowledge that is unavailable to men, notably about ordinary social relations. Earlier ideas focused on women;11 later ones include many oppressed groups and issues of power and class; black feminists argue that white women cannot perceive issues of heterosexism, racism and class exclusion.12
The last twist on standpoint relevant to my research relates to the researcher’s status as ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ in the group studied, the assumption being that groups are cohesive enough for the researcher’s status to be of crucial importance. Thus, if the researcher is an insider, she is presumed to understand the group’s social relationships and subtleties in their concerns. But the idea of a dichotomy between inside and outside has been thoroughly questioned,13 since one’s status as insider to a group such as ‘black women’ could be compromised by one’s other status as an academic, if the group being investigated were not composed of academics. Or one might be a member of an ecology movement in which whites predominate but be non-white. The issue of how any given researcher manages to be accepted by a group must depend in the last analysis on ineffable questions of sympathy, which sometimes occur between people who apparently have little in common. I also discovered that being an insider on sexual questions caused some academics to sneer at or ridicule my ideas.14
My Own (Shifting) Position in the Field
I used the traditional anthropological methodology known as participant observation. Although some use this term loosely, the traditional anthropological method implies long-time living in a place among people, in order to gain familiarity with their daily life and develop personal relationships over time in the subjects’ own context. Participant observers engage in situations that they do not define, delimit or control. What they learn is different from the information provided in response to direct interview questions. Impressions are recorded as field notes, often after the experience itself is over, in a process known as interpretation.
I have done formal field work in Spain several times since 1997, lived in one city for five years and visited individuals and projects in many places. I had no special access at the beginning of my research. I approached people explaining my background and interest in the workings of projects with migrants who sell sex. Since evaluation of social projects, particularly in health, is conventional in Spain, I was accepted, and having learned the pitfalls of being identified with a particular ideology, I avoided defining my position. But early on in the field work, I was asked by the editor of a local migration journal to write an article on migrants working in the sex industry, specifying that she wanted something without the usual moralising. I complied, and was later told that the article broke the ice among people afraid to reveal their opinions publicly.15 The word gradually got around, then, which may have affected how some people reacted to me in the field.
For a year and a half, I met everyone I could find working with people selling sex in Madrid. Most sent me their writings, invited me to visit them and gave me other names. Others I was able to introduce to each other as, despite having similar interests, they tended to work in an isolated way. I read what was published, attended seminars and conferences, accompanied outreach educators and was contracted to work with a Madrid team, Colectivo Ioé, in their government-funded research on migrant women’s work, for which I researched both social agents and women in the sex industry, including field work in Pamplona. I sought out and collected large amounts of materials published by the social sector: research reports, outreach leaflets, educational booklets, conference programmes, position papers, mani-festos: anything made available to someone interested in people who sell sex, migration, ‘trafficking’.16 I kept abreast of what people were talking about, not in the media but in their everyday jobs. Inevitably, I became aware of the relationships, alliances and disharmonies among organisations, and although I did not consciously research their internal workings (such as funding or management issues), I came to know quite a bit about them.
My position in the field was a mix of insider, outsider, stakeholder, political actor and researcher-with-a-self-interest, and shifted according to the conditions of the moment. At times I identified wholly with clients of health projects grateful for free services and annoyed at prying questions, while at other times I identified with researchers working hard to get decent information from unhelpful informants. My shifting position helped me understand everyone a bit better.
I had been an insider in the Latin American NGO world working with migrants, refugees a
nd sex workers, doing education-cum-organising with women who sold sex, writing proposals for European funding and carrying out field research with families receiving money from migrants overseas. I was familiar with both health projects and those focusing on rights; I was present at the first convention of Dominican sex workers in 1995, when an international organisation sent someone to tell them they were exploited victims. I had worked with nuns offering shelter to asylum-seekers on the Texas border and carried out a life-histories project to record and publish their stories. Later, when I was investigating the possibility of doing an advanced degree, I unwittingly introduced myself to people who informed me that they were on ‘the other side’ of these issues from me.17 A sex workers’ rights activist introduced me to an influential group of militants and experts on legal and epidemiological issues, a relationship that has gone on for ten years. Migrancy has been my own lifelong mode, and when I lived in Spain, I was also a foreigner, but this in itself is complicated, as there are many aspects of Spanish cultures which I feel comfortable with and part of, yet others that bring up feelings of alienation and ‘otherness’ in me (which is true for Spaniards towards me, as well). My experience in addressing migration issues was accepted and respected by some and doubted by others.
Clifford Geertz says that ethical ambiguity between anthropologists and their informants lies at the heart of successful anthropological research.18 There are other power issues involved when doing ethnography where one lives among people who may see one’s research published, be in a position to support or veto future proposals, grant or withdraw invitations and generally be people one can expect to run into later in life.19 Since I went on living in Spain, these apply to me, though this particular research – on social agents themselves – may not be translated and published there. On the other hand, some of the international activists and academics characterised in the research will probably see my work. I entered into the social sector’s life but do not claim to have more than a partial vision of their culture;my specific goal is to reveal practices usually ignored. I have done my best to portray people and events as I saw and felt them, not only in the formal field work but in my longer study.
This can be called multi-sited ethnography, which examines the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in time and space.20 Helen Callaway studied European women in colonial Nigeria during the period 1900–60 who lived in different parts of the country and did not constitute a face-to-face group:
Given such diversity of activities and experience, how can these European women in colonial Nigeria be designated as a social group? They shared the signifying system of their home culture and social class – its language, values, symbolic structures, sacred and secular rituals, hidden meanings, reference points. And in Nigeria they learned the new social prescriptions that upheld the power relations of this specific imperial culture. Although they were separated from each other in both time and space, and present a polyphony of voices, they all took part in a continuing moral pageant with its implicit ordering of the social world.21
Contemporary people working in social programming on commercial sex and migration in Spain also share a language, values and reference points (‘AIDS prevention’,‘access to social services’,‘health promotion’, ‘human rights’), the need for outside financing, the belief that their work is a duty of civilised societies, as well as a worthy occupation.
A Delicate Silence
In 1998, in a Madrid document centre specialising in migrations, I found a glaring silence where the sex industry should be. While serious research on migrant women had been going on for years, I could find no mention of the sex job market;22 the impression given was that most migrant women were domestic servants. One academic known for work on a migrant nationality renowned for selling sex seemed to ignore one of her own findings: in a survey of previous jobs, two of her interviewees volunteered that they had been ‘prostitutes’, yet the author made no reference to this finding in her detailed examination of survey responses.23 The silence was so deafening that I approached a member of the documentation centre.‘Even your own research dodges the issue,’ I complained,‘How can this be?’ He replied,‘No one wants to hear about it. We get paid to do research on subjects they want to hear about.’
Spanish writing traditionally focused on providing a definitive feminist analysis of ‘prostitution’, without doing research with actual people and without having any concrete knowledge of the sex industry.24 Most sociological studies were carried out within a framework of deviant behaviour; a well-known example analysed life histories of fewer than twenty women working in an old and poor red-light district of Barcelona, beginning from the premise that ‘prostitution’ is a perversion, illness or weakness of character.25 Only one empirical research study of any note had been carried out in Spain;26 other research had involved either very small samples27 or questionable methodology.28 There were celebratory29 and critical30 studies about the past.
The silence in scholarly venues contrasted with a constant hubbub in the media, where news was published daily on police actions with criminals said to be ‘trafficking prostitutes’. References to ‘sexual slavery’ and ‘mafias’ (gangs) were made indiscriminately, victims were characterised by nationality, and ethnic stereotyping was rampant. While the names of Spanish suspects were not published, those of foreigners were, and if the suspects were Colombian, for example, stories about other violent crimes appeared close by, apparently linking them.31 The media focused on people selling sex outdoors in parks, parking lots, empty lots and streets.
So what I call a silence was really a kind of delicacy or discretion on the part of social figures, while the media produced scandalised brouhaha. By the late 1990s, projects to help migrants were beginning to make their presence felt.
Projects to Help People Who Sell Sex
By 2000 it was no longer possible to analyse this area of social programming in purely national terms. First, the migration phenomenon had increased such that projects to deal with it were sprouting constantly. Second, the European Commission’s Daphne Programme was gaining a reputation for funding projects on migration and sex, and several other EC-funded programmes were accepting proposals; by 2000, proposals for Daphne funding had to incorporate multiple European partners. Third, a significant battle was fought between June 1998 and October 2000 in Vienna, at meetings of the UN Commission for the Prevention of Crime and Penal Justice on ‘trafficking’ and ‘smuggling’ of human beings. The Vienna meetings became the focus for lobbying efforts over both abolitionism and sex workers’ rights, at stake the language of protocols to be appended to a new convention on international crime. Fourth, the use of e-mail was increasingly common. Last, transnational networks of NGOs were seeking partners.32 So the Spanish field was expanding to include transnational experiences and influences. Within Spain, I was present at the founding of a national network of projects working in the field (health, religious, rescue, migrant aid, and research) in 2001.
My work centred on Madrid, though the same panorama of services is found everywhere: epidemiology and health promotion (the majority), assistance in leaving or rescue from sex work (difficult but often mentioned), and support for workers’ (embattled) rights. Epidemiological projects receive serious funding and are integrated into mainstream social programming; rescue projects have the longest ‘charity’ tradition; rights projects are newest, least funded and most closely allied to movements to protect migrants’ rights in general. In Madrid itself, various projects belong to each tradition. In addition to offering direct services, they also produce reports, publications and conferences.
Health projects
The main Madrid project was Médicos del Mundo-Madrid, part of an international organisation whose magazine depicts doctors helping villagers, slum dwellers and war refugees around the world. In Spain, Médicos have a harm reduction programme aimed at the ‘fourth world’, a concept that frames Spanish marginalised groups with migrants and that targe
ts women who sell sex in the street, taking gynaecological services and information to them in outreach vehicles. Médicos did not give out materials but offered direct counselling to migrants who approached the vehicle. A large organisation funded by both government and private sources, Médicos has sizeable and well-equipped mobile units, though these are largely staffed by volunteers. The principle of outreach to people who sell sex was expounded some time ago in Madrid:
… foreigners in illegal situations … collectives marginalised in these ways from general social life are usually marginalised as well from public social and health services, which they hardly use – when they exist – and if they do use them, it is without expressing openly their personal circumstances, which means that the attention [they receive] is necessarily deficient …The social and health services must themselves approach these collectives, eliminating as much as possible the barriers that exist, in order to be used: in prostitution ghettos … they must be located in the same neighbourhood; the services they offer shouldn’t be destined exclusively to women … administrative requirements must be flexible, since in many cases documents are missing or clients wish to maintain clandestinity … emergency visits seem to be more effective than requiring appointments at specific times; the techniques used must be adapted to the cultural characteristics of the population, more conducive to intensive therapeutic relationships than to regular, long-term therapeutic work … In place of placidly waiting for demand to be produced according to the manner convenient to the service’s requirements … in this case the technicians try to facilitate the capture of people at risk.33
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 17
