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Browsing Tags culture

When Worlds Collide

June 19, 2013 · by Julie

Well, um, this is a little awkward…and yet I’m not at all surprised, given the fuzzy boundaries between my personal and professional lives. You were all bound to make your way here at some point.

So, uh, well, hi AnthroDesigners! Welcome to the party! I’m sorry that I didn’t invite you sooner, but since this started as a travel blog I really didn’t think you’d be interested. Glad to see you here though! Meet my travel readers. Travel readers, meet the AnthroDesigners. Now that I think about it, I actually think you’ll have a lot in common. After all, we’re all interested in culture, people, artifacts, food – the stuff that makes up the beauty and diversity of this world. It’s what we live for, travelers and AnthroDesigners alike.

IMG_1185.JPGCome on in! You can set the wine down over there, and feel free to open whatever you like. Help yourself to a post or two. You’ll find the archives down the sidebar and to the right. I apologize, but I have to run. I’m finally working on a fantastic project again – the kind that makes me remember why I became an ethnographer – but I have ten days of full day immersion fieldwork and the deliverables are due immediately upon leaving the field, on exactly the tenth day. But hey, pulling off the impossible and making our clients look good is what we do, right? So I’m off to finish rocking it! I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Enjoy, make yourself at home, and thanks for joining us!

Pink Elephants and Dead Horses

October 9, 2012 · by Julie

IMG_0734

I’m boarding a plane to Bhutan and reposting a timeless favorite – to shoot (photos) or not to shoot…that is the eternal question.

There’s no denying that visual images are powerful tools for a design ethnographer to have at her disposal. Seeing the childlike joy on a grown man’s face as he opens a box containing his new toy, hearing fear in the quivering voice of a woman who just received a diagnosis of a chronic illness, watching an artist focus on each brushstroke – these moments bring our clients on the journey with us. They see what we saw, feel the emotions that we felt, hear what we heard. It’s easy to be drawn into the world of the visual, and over the course of my career I’ve had to become somewhat of a videographer and a photographer as well as an ethnographer. I’ve learned to shoot and edit and create a story that remains true to the voices of the people who allowed me to share their world for a few hours, a day, or a week.

But there’s a flip side to the camera. Clients and ethnographers alike can fall into the trap of conflating experience with the representation of that experience. The camera can create an emotional connection, but it is also selective. It’s a particular gaze, one that is narrow, limited, and defining. We can get caught up in capturing the perfect shot and find ourselves thinking far too early about how we’re going to convey the experience rather than simply…experiencing.

Ultimately, the ethnographer is still the research instrument. Technology has advanced and perhaps the thought of writing field notes “old school” makes us smile a little, shake our heads, and wonder how we ever got through those years. But the truth is that we would all benefit from putting the camera down once in a while. I recently had a project in which a highly unusual number of participants declined to be videotaped or photographed. Although that was important data in itself, it also opened up a new world to me – or more accurately, it reminded me of the world from which I had come.  After years of relying on visual documentation as a way of both capturing “what really happened” and sharing that experience with others, the intellectual knowledge that the camera only captures the data I choose became embodied reality again. I remembered that all representations of “reality” are partial.

The camera’s gaze is my gaze, yes, but the viewfinder is a narrow perspective indeed.

Putting down the camera opened up my field of vision. I suddenly saw those details that I realized I’d started to miss. There was no awkward fumbling, getting that great action shot, or making sure the camera wasn’t moving during a really good quote. The fieldwork felt more natural. I realized I was feeling their emotions in a way that had started to fade over time. I had been feeling in inverse proportion to the increased resolution of my HD cameras. Now, I could just BE with the participant and experience their day with them, and in the end my analysis didn’t miss the big picture in favor of the perfect shot. I’ve missed that.

Near the end of the project, a friend – who will be traveling to Tanzania with me soon – expressed his concern about getting stuck behind the camera. This was my response:

Photos are great to trigger memories, but the memories are what will last. The vibe, smells, feelings, emotions from seeing the world – and NOT through a camera lens. That’s what you’ll treasure.

My most powerful memories are moments that are NOT captured on film – rounding a corner in the Andes in the pouring rain after hiking for four days and seeing two dogs look up at me with blood all over their faces. It took me a second to register that they were eating a dead horse that slid off the trail just a few hours earlier. The exhaustion and hypothermia and raw emotion of that scene could NEVER be caught on film, and stopping to pull my camera out of my backpack would have ruined the sheer primal power of that moment. I just froze – and rather than run, the dogs returned to their meal. I watched in horror for a few seconds, then put one foot in front of the other, continuing my journey up the mountain.

Watching a pregnant elephant that we saw one day in Hwange, Zimbabwe return the next day to introduce her brand new pink baby to the herd for the first time was awe inspiring. The photos I took don’t begin to do the scene justice – the baby doesn’t even look pink. But the memory hasn’t faded. To see the pink elephant you had to be there, fully in the moment, paying attention. By the time I got the settings on my camera adjusted properly the baby was gone, surrounded by the herd shielding her to protect her from our curious stares. Those stuck behind their lenses missed the pink elephant completely.

Tthe 16 ft crocodile in Guatemala that was sunning itself as we paddled by two feet away, the feel of class V rapids tumbling over you when you’re sucked into a hole and can’t breathe, the random reggae band that was playing at a roadside guesthouse in Zimbabwe in the middle of nowhere, or just the absolute peace of cracking open a Bollinger’s on an African sundowner as a herd of cape buffalo rumble past you.

Just be sure you put the camera down and EXPERIENCE it all. I’ve found it helpful to leave the camera in the tent or room for a game drive or outing or two. It’s a totally different experience without it, and extremely valuable. It will also help you take better shots. You’ll become more selective and purposeful and you’ll really see the scene in context before you hit that button. I have zero technical skill, but the camera becomes an extension of my gaze – not a replacement for it – and that makes all the difference.

 Remember, the camera is just one of many possible tools to tell a story. But the storyteller is always YOU.

Day 46 – Save Tibet!

June 18, 2012 · by Julie

June 18, 2012
Monday

First of all, you’re missing a whole bunch of days here – what’s going on?? It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve had to choose between actually doing stuff and writing about it for the last two weeks, so I decided to do. Don’t worry, I plan to catch up and fill in the gaps. Some really, really important stuff has happened – so here’s the “trailer” version. The asthma my doctor was pretty sure I didn’t really have? Now we’re pretty sure I have it after all. This has made training…interesting. New Barney purple hiking boots? Awesome. And I bought a boob wallet. Tibet? China closed the border and terrible human rights violations are happening there. This makes my travel planning seem so terribly petty in the grand scheme of world events. It’s a reminder of how very lucky I am to have the life that I do, and of how humbling travel can be.

Now, moving forward…

The Culture and Some Gear

On my way back to the hotel from lunch today, I did some shopping along the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. I stopped in at the GoLite store and looked at a backpack that was on sale, but nothing really struck me as worthy of going home with me today. In fact, I’m doing quite well in the gear department and there’s not much left that I truly need. This is the point where I have to start being careful not to buy too much, knowing that once I start packing and weighing my bags I’ll end up leaving half of it behind anyway.

I passed a store called Potala Imports, and the rack of skirts out front caught my eye. An ankle length skirt! Now that’s something that I still need. I have several long skirts at home from my travels in Guatemala, but most of them are only calf length. Even though that’s probably fine – especially since I’ll likely be wearing long underwear beneath it – I think I’ll still be more comfortable going into monasteries and other sacred sites with my ankles fully covered. This type of cultural sensitivity can be tough for us Western women, but I find that erring on the conservative side is preferable to offending anyone in any way. It’s inevitable that when entering a culture with norms that are very different from your own, you will probably offend someone somewhere along the way. Still, it’s best to at least avoid the land mines that you’re warned about in advance, especially when it’s not that hard to do. Now, eating with only my right hand? That one could be a challenge. So I’m at least going to make sure my ankles stay covered.

I walk into the shop and I am mesmerized. I love little shops like this – full of incense, brightly colored fabrics, and tiny statues of Buddha and Ganesh. A mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism fills the air, and the palm reader in the back only adds to the eclectic mix. I marvel at how Eastern spirituality has become such a commodity here in the United States. Sacred beliefs become just more knick-knacks to sell on a tourist-filled street. I marvel at myself for buying into it all too. But I keep shopping.

I find a couple of skirts to try on, but most of them are made in the United States and they are very expensive. I find that odd, given the name of the shop. Imports? From Illinois? I know that if I wait until I get to Kathmandu, I’ll be able to buy a skirt for a fraction of the price and maybe, if I’m lucky and careful, I can find one made locally. Still, I find myself trying them on. One is too stiff and the fabric is a bit scratchy. I like the way it looks, but I remind myself that comfort will be key out there. Nobody will really care how it looks, but I will be wearing the same skirt for five weeks and I will certainly care how it feels. The second one is perfect. I love it. It’s soft, comfy, and will easily fit over a couple of layers if need be. It’s also a bit lighter, and I’ve learned that matters, a lot. It’s made in India and is “ethically produced,” whatever that means. It is also $60. I feel like a touristy fool, but I decide to fork over the cash.

On the way out, I pick up a small Ganesh pendant. Ganesh is the remover of obstacles, and I can certainly use all the help I can get. I look for the perfect tiny Buddha or Ganesh statue to carry with me on my travels, but the offerings here are all too a little too big and too heavy. “Light” is a recurring theme in my travel world. I stick with the pendant and the skirt.

As I wander back to the hotel, I pass another shop on the route that I take to my field site, Tibet Gallery. It’s always closed when I pass, both early in the morning and again late at night when my day is finally done. Today, it’s mid-day and it is open. I wonder if they have tiny Buddhas, so I go in.

This decision changes my whole day.

At first, it looks like just another knick-knack shop catering to people like me who like to spend money on incense and items that make us feel more spiritual while we go about our daily lives selling out to The Man. I could not have been more wrong.

Yes, I found my tiny statues. But I found much more. I overhear the owner, Tenzin Passang, talking with another customer about the Tibetan community. When it’s my turn at the counter, I mention that I’ve been planning a trip to Tibet, but that due to China closing the border it’s probably not going to happen. I ask him if he has family there. He does. For the next 15 minutes, I learn about the people who have chosen to self-immolate in protest. For the first time, I hear their names, ages, and about their families. I learn that they choose self-immolation in order to avoid harming anyone else and that they pray for all sentient beings, as the freedom of Tibet is tied to the freedom of all. This is not just a spiritual belief, it is concrete and real – we talk about how the economy of China impacts the rest of the world, including us, here in the United States. He reminds me that buying products made in China supports the human rights violations of the Chinese elite, as they are not using the profits to uplift their own people but to oppress them.

I remember the movie Mardi Gras: Made in China. I’ve seen it many times, and I used it as a teaching tool in my Social Problems class. Every time I see those girls toiling away in dangerous conditions for the sole purpose of making plastic beads that American women flash body parts to get, I swear off buying Chinese goods. But it strikes me that it’s so easy to forget the message when I’m stressed out, hurrying through a store, trying to find a new microwave or set of coffee mugs or a pair of socks. Today, I’ll think of the people of Tibet and I’ll remember to look for items made in democratic countries with a better human rights record than China. But will I remember to do that tomorrow? I like to think that I will. I will try.

Other customers are in the shop, so I arrange to meet Tenzin another time for more conversation over tea. I am looking forward to hearing more about the beauty of the people and culture of Tibet, and about how we can help. This visit made my day, and I return to the hotel grounded and grateful and more awake and aware than I was when I left.

Namaste.

Day 13 – Khumbu Yak

May 18, 2012 · by Julie

May 17, 2012
Thursday

The Training

Rest day! I did walk between my field sites again today though, so that was good.

The Gear

Okay, time to decide what to do about all that GoLite stuff from yesterday. The Universe answered this one for me, as it started pouring down rain just as I started to head back to my field site from lunch. After kicking myself for not throwing my new Typhoon rain jacket in my bag just in case, I realized that not only was I lacking a rain jacket, but I didn’t even have an umbrella. I saw a cool little travel umbrella at the GoLite store yesterday…good excuse!

I still didn’t have a lot of time, so I wisely decided to limit myself to the umbrella and a couple of running shirts. There were some great hiking pants, but my body shape keeps changing as I go through this process. I haven’t lost any weight or even inches, but clothes are fitting differently, so I’m going to wait until closer to the trek to buy anything new for the bottom half. The top pretty much stays the same no matter what, so I’m safe there.

While I was in the store checking it all out, I also met a really cool guy who is a photographer for an outdoor magazine. We started talking about hiking at altitude, and about the frustrations of finding the right camera backpack. He gave me some tips on his home-crafted system, and I felt a lot better knowing that even the true professionals have the same camera issues that I do on the trail. It’s not just me – the perfect bag simply does not exist.

I left the store with the umbrella, two running/hiking shirts, a travel dress, and a pretty blue fleece hoodie that caught my eye for a pittance. Can’t wait to test it all out!

The Culture

In between all of this work and shopping and writing and meeting cute boys and such, I also managed to arrange an interview with a person that Everest enthusiasts will find quite interesting! That’s all I’m going to say for now, but keep an eye out next month for some Nepali culture and Everest stories. As a hint, Khumbu Yak told me that my hard work will pay off later, but laziness pays off now. So true! He’s quite the fortune-teller, isn’t he?

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