An Assignment for class...

This was the first assignment for my field seminar course, to type up one of our journal entries.

Please feel free to read it. Sorry for references you might not get to Tunisian cinema...

I didn’t set my alarm last night because I wanted to take advantage of the holiday and grab a little extra sleep when I had the chance. I woke up to music, birds, dogs barking, roosters, and the sound of my neighbor washing his car; much of this has become standard fare for a weekend morning in La Marsa. The music was something new though and when I hurried to unlatch the window and shutters, I was greeted by a burst of fresh air and sunlight. It was already getting hot outside. I instinctively grabbed for my audio recorder that I keep on my nightstand right next to the window, turned it on, and placed it carefully on the windowsill. I wanted to capture the soundscape all around me; the pre-recorded Tunisian music blasting from someone’s house up the street near the park, my neighbor washing his car, the blackbirds singing to each other and to the morning in the trees next to our car port and the kids at the end of the street that play soccer in the road between the pot holes that fill with fresh murky water and trash by every evening. I wanted to “take it all in.” Outside, my nephew, Skander, and two other neighbor’s kids who are half French, one quarter Italian, and one quarter Tunisian scuttled around in circles on their bikes with training wheels squealing as they plowed straight through the potholes, racing each other. I stood there soaking up the sun for ten minutes or so, staring at the women in the park hanging their laundry up to dry amongst the trash, chickens, and sheep and my neighbor washing his red car, while lost in my own thoughts.

It took me those ten minutes, and my other neighbor coming out of her house to check on the newborn puppies sheltered under an overhang in the front corner of her house for me to realize what I was doing. I could have waved to her and greeter her successfully, I could have, but I didn’t. All of a sudden I shut one of the shudders and reached to turn off my recorder. I peeked through the chinks of the shudders to try to establish whether or not I have been discovered. All of a sudden I was overcome by a sense of guilt, self-consciousness, completely ashamed of my fascination in the everyday goings on in other people’s lives. I had caught myself in the act of peeking, peeping; I was the voyeur. I was just standing there capturing images, if even in my head, (note the violence inherent to all verbs associated with photography) and documenting the every sound of the morning with my tiny machine. Was it mine for the taking in the first place? I those few moments I questioned my role here, my “right” to be here in a Tunisian’s home, and on a greater scale, the place of anthropology and the ethnographer. The example of this morning might seem extreme, people watching is a popular hobby of mine back home in the states, but somehow being here I don’t feel justified in the same way. Oh course, students who study anthropology are curious people, they are immensely interested in the complexity of the ways people live and think, but does this give them the right be voyeurs? The lines between “participation” and “disturbance,” “observation” and “voyeurism” are elusive and, for me, pose a question not only of “scientific method,” but also of my own sense of morality and ethics.

This morning’s experience reminded me also of my experiences recently on public bus 52 that I take every morning from La Marsa to the SIT office in Sidi Bou Said. Over the past week or so I have started wearing my sunglasses more regularly to the bus stop and all the while on the bus. Yes, the weather is getting warmed and the sun is brighter, but the main reason I’ve started wearing them is that men seem to have a harder time following my eyes and subsequently (I think, at least) notice and hassle me less. The sunglasses not only help to manage looks from others, but, admittedly, allow me to watch other people without necessarily their knowing. With the mediation of my sunglasses I feel safer observing differences between how men and women of different ages behave in the small space of the bus, I look over the shoulders of students punching numbers into the calculators on their cell phones and studying for math exams. I know that the lenses I am wearing are multi-purpose for me, but I wear them all the same. I let myself be a voyeur because, I think, at this point at least, I am still too shy to be a true “participant observer.” Also, I have found that though participatory experiences are almost always rewarding experiences, observation from a distanced seems always to be a devilishly tempting, safe, guarded possibility. This, I believe is the draw to the voyeur.

I can’t help but think also of Halfouine, Summer in La Goulette, and some of the issues raised by the discussion we had just yesterday with Fareed, the screenwriter and director of the two films. Themes of voyeurism, concealment, and revelation run through both films where peeping toms more than once catch glimpses of nude female bodies, an image concealed to the extreme in much of Islamic thought and practice. Fareed explained that he sees this voyeurism as analogous to the role of the filmmaker and the artist, to steal glimpses into the lives of others (even if they are created by the writer) to develop the narrative and endow the characters with a sort of truth or honesty. He stressed also the importance of avoiding self-censorship and that the artist should stay honest to his characters and to his audience; he or she should write from life, not simply quote from previous films. It seems hard to find a way for both to exist, honesty and voyeurism as one implies openness and the other, secrecy. Where do the anthropologist and ethnographer work her way into this equation, and how does she relate to Fareed’s image of the artist? Where is the poet? Like me and me peers, anthropologists have one foot in and one foot out so to speak, they occupy a space between voyeur and local. In getting accustomed to living with our families and finding ways to move in the spaces we negotiate every day (public buses, trains, the street and side walk, and even our “own” bedrooms that are by no means private by American standards) we are constantly recreating our relation to Tunisia as tourists, anthropologists, voyeurs, locals, peeping toms and family.