Waiting for Something to Happen: Encountering Gendered Temporality in Anthropological Fieldwork

What does it mean to encounter time, in its temporal stretches, ethnographically? How do social scientists, particularly anthropologists, engage with the relational fluidity of, specifically, ‘waiting time’, and how can that engagement be translated into ethnographic appositeness? To be sure, anthropological inquiry cannot be understood apart from the halting passage of time, for fieldwork is premised on a personal exchange of communicative time. For Anand Pandian (2012), encountering this “anthropology of time” (548) requires an acknowledgment of how such encounters “unfold in a time whose vicissitudes become our own” (ibid, 549); in doing so, the generative qualities of time are illuminated. Extending that insight, in this paper I explore how attending to the temporal reality of fieldwork, here manifested in the experience of ‘waiting’, can open new possibilities for ‘doing’ anthropology in gendered organizational spaces. To do so, I use several related ethnographic encounters to situate an inquiry into the place of waiting in fieldwork, one that brings into focus the pervasive nature of waiting in the field and the ways in which such intervals of ‘time between’ at one quietly impugn and inspirit the relationship between ‘researcher’ and ‘interlocutor’.

My doctoral dissertation is based upon sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with three non-governmental women’s organizations in Amman, Jordan. Such spaces arguably facilitate the involvement of upper-middle class female members in state politics; my work remains concerned with those socio-political themes. In spending countless hours with women in their organizational offices, however, I became curious about how the registers of time, particularly waiting, were regularly mediated. Within the social sciences, time is often treated as an analytic through which to understand the workings of social domination (Auyero 2011), a site of contention separate from the day-to-day rhythms of research. Yet shared senses of time are inextricable from the moments which constitute the preferred focus of social scientific analysis. In response, I question the implications of waiting upon how women – both investigator and informant –navigate the process of relationship formation. Specifically, I reflect upon how fieldwork sensitive to moments of waiting can demonstrate the complex contours of gendered ethnographic engagements within non-governmental women’s organizations. How is waiting, as a particular experience of time, intertwined within the conventional encounters of fieldwork? What effects does it have upon the arrangement of ethnographic relationships and, ultimately, upon the form of ethnographic reports? In taking seriously abeyance – that is, waiting – within research, then, I explore how a consideration of everyday banality can serve to broaden the scope of gendered anthropological inquiry.

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In her 1962 novel, ṭīūr ’īlūl (roughly translated: Birds of September), Emily Nasrallah writes of the women who, abandoned in the throes of the conflicts which characterized most of the Middle East in the mid-twentieth century, became “‘the ones who wait’” (Cooke 1996, 144) – observers, rather than participants, in the drama occurring throughout the region. According to Nasrallah, the wait – like a “magic thread [...] over distant horizons” (as cited in ibid) – became the norm for those women, engendering an alertness of the simultaneous possibility and emptiness of such anticipation. In other words, they were entangled in ‘the wait’, conscious of the presupposed future and yet unable to do anything but indolently await its futurity. The conceptualization of the women’s waiting for something to happen functions similarly in much contemporary Arabic literature. Yet that understanding is not restricted to narrative devices; over the course of my fieldwork, it was importantly reflected back to me both in how my female informants spoke of their own professional engagements with non-governmental women’s organizations and my own experiences with(in) these associations. Thus, waiting, ingrained within the reality of ‘the field’, became impossible to ignore.

Returning briefly to Birds of September, I was first introduced to the story one winter afternoon in 2019, while sitting next to Samar al-Faizan[1] in the third-floor offices occupied by al-tajam’a al-ijtimā‘ī lil-mar’a fī al-urdun (directly translated: ‘Social Assembly for Women in Jordan’, hereby referred to as ‘the assembly’), the non-governmental women’s organization where she worked as a project coordinator. I first met Samar, a modest and soft-spoken woman in her late thirties, due to a ‘cold email’ that I sent to the assembly in the fall of 2018, near the start of my principal fieldwork. Though our first interaction, and many that followed, were rather informal, Samar was, from the moment we met, supportive of my involvement with the assembly, initially allowing me to visit the organization’s main office and eventually allowing me to ‘volunteer’ part-time at an affiliated community center under her supervision. Thus, Samar quickly became one of my primary research informants, inviting me to various events and meetings, contextualizing and translating conversations, and sharing her experiences and opinions without hesitation. Though I never recorded a formal interview with her, our informal conversations informed my fieldwork both explicitly and implicitly. It was during one such exchange, sitting around a small electric sakhān (roughly translated: ‘heater’), that Samar openly spoke of waiting through an enigmatic reference to Nasrallah’s novel.

Fieldnote, 21 February 2019, organizational office, Amman, Jordan: Breaking the silence that had enveloped the assembly’s office since my arrival, Samar says, “Today, with the cold outside and nothing to do inside, I feel as though I am going crazy, really. All of this sitting, sometimes I feel like al-tīūr, like the birds, who are just stuck waiting.” [...] Back in my apartment, I find the story that Samar alluded to in describing ‘the wait’; I am struck by how, for the young girls in the novel, waiting is a passive condition from which one is always hoping to escape.

Though this was not the first instance in which I had been pushed to think of waiting myself – certainly, significant time in the field had already been consumed by precisely that (non)activity – Samar’s unprompted interjection marked the first time that I heard any of my research participants outwardly acknowledge their own experience of what I have come to think of as ‘organizational waiting’. For Samar, waiting seemed to constitute a sense of malaise from which release implied activity; within the context of her work, that meant implementing any number of thematic workshops which were regularly planned but never implemented, languishing as a result of insufficient funding. As a discipline, anthropology often centers action, epitomized in ‘events’; yet the more that I reflect upon this initial conversation, and my fieldwork more generally, the possibilities of thinking of ‘the wait’ as similarly textured are increasingly intriguing. Since that first conversation with Samar, we regularly returned to the dynamics of waiting; as such, I became progressively attuned to how the assorted components of waiting, as an embodied and shared experience, impacted my research. These preliminary thoughts became further crystalized following another, comparatively direct and nuanced, conversation with Samar.

Fieldnote, 7 September 2019, affiliated community center, Amman, Jordan: Sitting with Samar in the community center affiliated with the assembly, located in a busy working-class neighborhood in the eastern area of the city, we are discussing recent operational and structural changes in response to ongoing financial concerns. We have been separately working for several hours when Samar speaks for the first time. “This waiting, it is inescapable,” she tells me. “The only thing to do is sit and wait around, and nothing ever happens. There is such a feeling of insecurity, ya‘nī (colloquial phrase, roughly translated: ‘you know’), that is uncontrollable, every day. [...] But, why do you come here, just to sit? What are you waiting for?” We talk a bit about my research, and, after informing her that, apart from general focus on the engagements of non-governmental women’s organizations, I am interested in her work and the fate of the assembly, she iterates support for my continued presence. Samar then goes on to insist that the one thing I should write about is the present-day sense of organizational ambiguity made apparent by our shared waiting. The experience of waiting, unsure of her future with the assembly, she explains, creates an identifiable pressure, one that is made comparatively bearable by articulating and sharing in ‘the wait’. “The lethargy, you feel it too,” she says. She then concludes our conversation with a succinct statement – “To be honest, I am still not sure why you would want to sit here, when there is nothing happening, but it is nice, in some ways, to have someone to sit with in this center” – before returning to her work.

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Returning home from ‘the field’, the reality of the time that I had spent just waiting while away became acute and, exigently, required a retranslation and transposition within this different environment. The effect(s) of waiting time in anthropological fieldwork should cause researchers to question the implicit privileging of ‘action’ which underlies such research. To be sure, this was made implicitly clear to me during the many interactions that I shared with Samar while sitting together in the offices of al-tajam’a. Yet the analytic possibilities of waiting – that is, what one might do with these moments – remained obscured until quite recently.

Fieldnote, 21 January 2020, university campus, Chicago, Illinois: Meeting with a dissertation committee member, I attempt to distil the past thirteen into a digestible summary for the purpose of this brief check-in. We have been chatting generally when she asks me about how it feels to be back in the city having now ‘finished’ my primary fieldwork. I mumble something about the difficulty of making sense of my experiences since putting a ‘critical distance’ between myself and my interlocutors in the field, before admitting that, despite some precursory thoughts, I have been struggling with how to best interpret and locate the many instances of waiting time in the context of my preliminary analyses. The impression of unmooring that has dominated since preparing for my departure from Amman has been, at times, overwhelming; it has been compounded by a persistent apprehension that the time spent waiting was nothing but wasted time, and a resultant ambiguity of commencing my dissertation writing. She pauses, looking out of her office window at the street below, before she replies: “This is such an interesting question, because all of the time [that we spend] sitting around during fieldwork, feeling as though we should, instead, be doing something, often gets written out of our ethnographic writing. But it is generative, to think about their role in relationship formation.” She goes on, conceiving intersecting lines of signification which help to engender a renewed desire to revisit the waiting that pervades my fieldnotes, something to which I have, until now, merely given cursory thought. From this office, her keen assurances transform my aspirant doubt. “You cannot escape waiting,” she tells me. “The event only assumes significance when placed in conversation with so-called non-events. And while you cannot compel their implication, they are worth attention.”

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In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly attempted to theorize waiting in order to understand how the passage of time – particularly in its manifold manipulations – might foster informal friendships despite, or, perhaps, because of, shared frustrations. The resultant analytic framework is consequently significant, for it helps to trouble the disciplinary focus upon ‘events’ to understand how fieldwork can alter the machinations of time. What is gained if the act of waiting itself is considered not as an interminable interlude ‘between’ momentous episodes but as a phenomenon unto itself, one that is worthy of study? Over the past several months, and especially since that recent meeting, I have again returned to the moments shared with Samar, and others, to rethink what they might suggest about the function of waiting in anthropological fieldwork. In progressively working to apprehend meaning from my own experiences, I have consequently come to appreciate this endeavor as one variably shared by many anthropologists. As such, I suggest a need to engage in ethnographic analyses that not only center phenomenal events but also contemplate routine episodes – in essence, to realize the generative implications of acknowledging waiting as a practical circumstance in the field, an experiential reality that we would do well to consider seriously.

When I encountered instances of apparent inaction, I did not share my trepidation with my advisors at home, concerned that those moments reflected a deeper stagnation in my research. If nothing was happening, what of the larger project in which I was profoundly invested? If waiting should be accepted as legitimate, one returned to the fore of analysis, however, perhaps it is possible to propagate greater academic support networks; by treating waiting time as productive, it is conceivable that this reclamation can offer reassurance, a movement which might reasonably start by allowing for the acknowledgement of ‘time between’ in conversations with departmental colleagues. As it was, it was not until after speaking with one of the individuals supervising my dissertation about the ability to envisage waiting as relevant that I began to fully see those moments as such myself. The acceptance of waiting in the daily practices undertaken in the field, through admission in conversations both amid and after fieldwork, have the potential to strengthen our prospective reporting of ethnographic relationships between researchers and interlocutors. In turn, in presenting these related encounters, I argue for a provisionally candid approach to supervisory conversations regarding fieldwork, in order to initiate a collective disciplinary recognition of waiting with informants in the field as an, albeit challenging, essentiality that must be taken into account.

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On the one hand, waiting time prompted continuous confrontations of my abstruse designation as a ‘volunteer’ and place as a ‘researcher’ within the contextual bounds of the assembly. On the other hand, or, simultaneously, from such temporary apprehensions emerged a deeper sense of affability in my relationship with Samar. That is, in yielding to the potentially displacing nature of waiting, it was possible to resolve ethnographic skepticism and reinforce sociality; waiting provided a temporal region in which to question my continued company while building connections grounded in mutual experiences of and with time. How can ‘time between’ be critically incorporated with anthropological analysis? Acknowledging the effects of waiting upon relationships in the field does not attenuate the relevance of Samar’s questioning of my presence, nor invalidate the ambient necessity for reflexive examinations of power in anthropological research, particularly with(in) gendered field sites. By thinking through the effects of waiting time, however, the execution of fieldwork can more thoughtfully account for the delicate, variable constitution of anthropology. My conversations with Samar illustrated the importance of responding to the relational rupture and repair produced by waiting, as well as of allowing for these instances to permeate subsequent considerations of my time in ‘the field’. Though this short piece serves as part of a much larger effort to reenergize the call to account for waiting, it is hoped that by here attending to the experience of waiting, other researchers, either those just beginning their work or those already finished, might similarly embrace the potentiality of ‘waiting time’ to alter and deepen the endeavor of ethnographic fieldwork over time.

References

Auyero, Javier. 2011. “Patients of the State: An Ethnographic Account of Poor People’s Waiting.” Latin American Research Review 46 (1): 5-29.

Cooke, Miriam. 1996. War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Pandian, Anand. 2012. “The Time of Anthropology: Notes from a Field of Contemporary Experience.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (4): 547-571.

Notes

[1] To protect the identities of my interlocutors, the names of all individuals and places have been replaced with pseudonyms.