From my field notes

The following is an excerpt from my field notes. Aside from my machete, an inquisitive attitude and a consistent habit of taking notes are my best friends. Because what follows comes from my research notes, I use codes instead of the names of my informants, in order to preserve anonymity. The excerpt from my notes is the italized portion. This is followed by a theoretical discussion I put together for a paper for this year's meetings of the American Anthropological Association. If you are just interested in the anectodal portion, then stop reading when the italicized portion ends. For those of you that still ask yourselves, "what the hell is anthropology?", or are interested in my take on the productive/consumptive landscape here in Monteverde, then I encourage you to read on, to catch one glimpse of an anthropological analysis.

The notes take off after I visited an organization of small agricultural producers in search of beans to plant. They had none.

Enjoy (I hope).



Friday 19
Given this turn of events, I purchased two bags of black beans ‘Don Pedrito” in the pulperia in San Luis (alto) (800 colones for 900 grams, 1800grams total). Fortunately DJL was pleased with the quality of the beans, commenting numerous times on how good they were. We walked down the slope of his plot, crossing into CS’s. Just like in the previous years, CS let DJL use some of his plot to plant beans. On our way to the section where DJL had begun planting, he pointed out a section where he lost all the bean plants from last year. “The water melted them”. We walked around 100 meters more, entering another section of CS’s plot. “Look at all the land he has to plant beans (tapar frijol), and he does nothing. That man isn’t worth a damn.” We finally arrived at this slope, in which approximately 1000 square meters were cleared. All that remained were dry grass, vines, brush and small trees on the ground. “Damn, you did this all by yourself?” I asked him. He laughed, telling me that people get scared with the amount of work he does. While I wasn’t scared, I was certainly very impressed.


Since we were planting a different kind of bean (he had previously planted caramel and pink colored beans) he made me plant stakes right at the edge of the brush that would soon be felled. The stakes, he told me, would mark were the differences in beans began. From this, we began making “lanes”. Carving our way through the brush (tacotal), we worked parallel to each other, at around 2 meters distance. Our lanes were eventually connected, producing a loop. The length of the lanes was approximately 50 meters. The lanes completed, DJL walked first next to the stakes I had planted, throwing handfuls of beans into the brush. He then did the same process, as he walked through the lanes. He instructed me to begin chopping down the brush in between the stakes and the first lane. “Make sure you cut it all down to the grown. It has to be nice and low.”

The biggest obstacles we encountered were a thin, rubbery tree called “varilla negra” (black rod). With my garabato (a hooked stick, used to grab tree branches, vines, grass while one swings the machete) in my left hand, I would bend the branches as far down as I could, repeatedly striking them with the machete at the base. Some would give faster than others. I began noticing differences in the feel of strikes, although I was not able (and still am not completely sure) how to articulate it, or to even embody the successful motion all the time. All I knew was that some of my strikes felt better, cut better, and hurt my hands less. What I do know is that the “good” strikes stemmed from a combination of grounding my center, by being conscious about the role my feet play in the swing, and really rotating from the hip. Furthermore, there is also a psychological/cognitive dimension that enters in the picture. At first, my temptation was to simply swing the machete—at whatever was in front of me. Faced with a small forest to clear, I don’t think this reaction was unreasonable. But in being so general and vague in relation to my target, my concentration and my mechanics became general and vague. It was directed effort, but of a rather sloppy kind. I began examining DJLs swings and realized that there was a very focused intent behind his every movement. By this I do not mean to suggest that I had no intention in my motion. It was clear that we had a tall task ahead: cut down a lot of brush, small trees and vines. But to use an apt metaphor, I could not see the trees for the forest, and therefore, my focus and technique suffered. Slowly I began being deliberate in each motion. I would guide my attention first with the garabato, placing it on the object I was about to strike. Once secured on my target, I very consciously brought up my strength from my feet, through my abs, out through my hips and down my arm, culminating in a bit of a swinging motion of the wrist.

Feeling inquisitive, I asked DJL if he thought of something while he was swinging. “Why?” he replied, not lifting his gaze from the tree he was working on. “Well, I don’t know. I’m just curious to know if you think of something while you use the machete”.

“Why?”

“Well since I am learning how to do all these kinds of things, I have to focus my mind on the machete. So I want to know if you have to do the same.”

“Well listen viejo, I’ve been doing this for so long. Well let me tell you that I wasn’t big at all and I was already “tapando” beans. I’ve done this all my life, so this is all natural to me.”
“So do you think of something while you do this?”

“All I am thinking of is to ask God to let these beans grow. I think that if God wills then we will have some nice beans in January. It’s all up to God. Do you think about this?”

“Yeah, I guess” I lied. But then I thought that the thought was nice, and that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to think. But it just wasn’t me. “But I also have to think on how to swing.”

We kept on going, until we had cleared everything up until the first lane. As usual, when DJL got hungry he asked me for the time, volunteering that it might be eleven. Indeed, it was 10 to 11, so upon relaying this to him, he suggested we have our lunch.

“We’ve done some work today” he said. “It’s not anyone that can do this kind of work. People sometimes tell me ‘how horrible this work is’. So I turn to them and say ‘cochinos’! (dirty, lazy). I love to plant everything. I love to watch the land be nice and kept and watch the things grow. The people that say that this is horrible are ‘maricones’ (wusses, weak, wimps, homosexuals). They aren’t worth a damn”, he told me quite emphatically.

“But do people here respect the kind of work you do?” I inquired.

“Well let me tell you that people here are amazed that this old man works like this, but they just want their beans without working for them. They have to buy there beans. Cochinos! I like to plant to watch things grow and so my wife isn’t cheap when she cooks. I want her to use as much vegetables as she wants, so we can all eat. I want her to use a lot of beans. It makes me happy.”

“So have you ever lacked beans or food?” I asked.

“No, no no my friend. I have never had to buy any beans.”

“And the people here, do they lack beans sometimes?” I continued.

“Yeah, they have to buy them! Cochinos! They don’t have beans! They have to buy beans! And with all this land here. MNL says he wanted to put some cattle here [on the land we were clearing for beans]. But then he has to buy beans. Lazy!”

We continued clearing the land up to the next lane. I continued to struggle with maintaining focus and directedness of effort. The blood blister on my right hand that was bright purple had been replaced by dirt and a bit of loose skin. The main source of pain was my hands, my fingers. At times the sweatiness of my palms really made gripping the machete properly a difficult task. DJL had brought two files this time, so I had one at my disposal, which made the chopping experience easier. “You have to have the machete sharp, sharp” he stressed. “If not you hurt your hand.”
More swinging.

“Do you enjoy this DJL?” I asked.
“I love this my friend. This is what I love to do.”
“Well, what do you like about it?”
“Well, to put it this way, I like to watch the brush fall down.” At this point he turned back to look at the progress we had made. “Look at that ‘corte’ (cut, referring to the portion of land we had done, and what remained to be worked on). That’s a nice ‘corte’!”

Several hours went buy and we finally finished clearing all the way up to the second lane. We had cleared around 500 squared meters. On our walk back to his shed, he asked me if I could come back the next day to finish the “corte”. He also asked me to get more of the same beans. We agreed on the time and I was on my way. I stopped by the pulperia, taking my time to look around this time. There were about 5 shelves full of packaged and processed foods. Chips, cookies, canned vegetables, beans in bags, eggs in carton and covered in plastic. In one corner there were three crates with some produce: plantains, potatoes, some citrus and pineapples. As I brought my beans to the counter I asked MGT if the produce was local.

“No, a guy brings them from I don’t know where.” Behind her, a young boy around 5 years of age ate chips out of a bag while he sat 2 feet from a television, watching cartoons. I expected the pineapple to be imported, but the rest! I thought about DJL’s contempt for people that buy their beans and it made me a bit mad too. It wasn’t so much that people buy beans that angered me, but rather the fact that they were beans brought in from somewhere else. Packaged, with labels. I remembered do~na DRA who a month ago had mentioned that she no longer sold her eggs to the little store by her house because people refused to buy eggs that weren’t packaged and sealed.

I paid MGT, thanked her and left.

Back at the Institute I encountered a group of women leaving a workshop on effective communication strategies. Their children were running around, playing. I asked them how the workshop went. “Good”, replied a woman. “I guess we are not supposed to be angry when we reprimand our children. It makes sense, I guess. But it’s so hard sometimes! I mean, look at him [her son]. He runs around, talks in class, pulls the girls pigtails. He loves causing trouble!”

“I know, I was like that” I offered. “But I mean, weren’t you like that as a child too?” I asked.

“No, you see, we were raised on a farm, so we always had something to do. We had to go get the goats in the morning, milk them, feed the chickens, the pigs, carry water, wash clothes, make food, help dad with his planting. At night, you were tired and you slept.”

“It was real nice”, chimed in another woman. “We don’t have that anymore.”

“More and more I wish my son could be raised like that, on a farm”, offered the first woman.

“Do you still have a farm?”, I asked.
“No, father sold that a while ago. We don’t have land anymore.”


I take the preceding scenario to be indicative of various common unfolding processes in the Monteverde Zone. While a small description of a day’s ethnographic fieldwork, this vignette highlights a series of contradictions that permeate life in the area. Given that our concern is with understanding the causes and consequences of food insecurity, the focus here is on the contradictions related to this process. Without being too reductive or deterministic, I see the primary cause of food insecurity in this area as stemming from a consumerist, market-based set of ideologies and practices, that inform peoples’ lives, shaping their actions in ways that reproduces a capitalist life style. Now, having advanced this thesis, various clarifications are necessary. First, as a theoretical and empirical matter, I do not want to suggest an idealist explanation for a material and ideological phenomenon. The consumerist ideologies and practices under discussion should be understood as being the product of a material reality—a particular mode of production, which itself should be seen as the confluence historical processes (material, ideological, always intertwined). Thus, as land use patterns and economic strategies change, and as new markets (in the economic and Bourdieuian sense of the term) open up, a prevailing and privileged way of imagining and undertaking productive and consumerist practices has indeed marginalized other ways of conceptualizing and undertaking food-related practices.
The other clarification I wish to make revolves around the argument being made in relation to the concept of food insecurity. As it is currently understood, this concept entails emic conceptualizations of socially acceptable foods and of socially acceptable ways of acquiring food. Thus, the assertion that the main cause of food insecurity in the area is ideological (as a product of consumerism) might sound as redundant, descriptive and obvious. But, once again, the argument being made is that it is a particular set of historically grounded ideologies and practices that are the main—proximal—causes of food insecurity. The distinction between proximal and distal causes in this regard is useful, in that it prevents the conflation of processes that unfold at very different spatio-temporal scales. In relying on a Bourdieuian framework to explain various unfolding at the micro-sociological level (people interacting, carrying out their daily lives) I want to stress that these processes are of a different order than the distal, political-economic processes that have provided the foundation on which these micro-practices unfold. Thus, the present discussion entails an analysis that incorporates processes of different ontological scope. It is, in essence an analysis of a complex system.
Theoretical clarifications aside, the ethnographic scenario above is informative in various regards. First, concerning the fact that food insecurity must be understood from the perspective of the population under study, the vignette highlights the heterogeneity surrounding issues of socially acceptable channels for the acquisition of food. That is, evinced in the case study is the simple fact that people have differing, contested ways of ascribing prestige to food processes. On the one hand, DJL embodies an older, increasingly forgotten pride surrounding producing food for one\s family. Quality for him is intrinsically linked to the act of production. He can be seen as the prototypical case of a worker who is not alienated in the Marxian sense. Notions of masculinity, responsibility, strength and sacrifice surround and give meaning to the act of swinging machete. Piousness is also relied upon with the affirmation that all the work is meaningless unless God wants to see it through. For DJL, purchasing beans is an unacceptable way to acquire this product. And thus, from his standpoint, people that do so could be considered as being food insecure.
Similarly, the vignette betrays competing sentiments. The fact that there is an alternative and dominating way of ascribing meaning to food practices is evinced primarily from DJL’s antagonistic reading of the ways in which many members of his community reproduce their livelihoods. Similarly, the way the pulperia operates reveals an underlying political-economic structure, guided and reinforced by a capitalist-centered logic. It is the changing set of ideas and practices that have resulted in a situation in which it “makes sense” to have a store that stocks products that have to be trucked in. The fact that beans and eggs must be properly packaged, so that they look like the ones carried by big supermarkets the world over, in order to get people to buy them betrays that a new arena—a new market—has risen, and people now use a different set of currency to convey status within this microcosm of a broader system.
Food insecurity looms large in the area, but fewer and fewer people produce food. Food prices have risen on a global and national scale, but more and more people prefer to purchase food through intermediaries. These contradictions of the current system in Monteverde point to a worsening of the situation. That is, the ways in which ideologies and practices intersect with a deeper economic foundation results in fertile ground for food insecurity.