Llamas+to+Helmreich

Yesterday I got to spend some quality time with a couple of inquisitive llamas. I was interviewing one of my "informants" (a term I hate as it always conjures images of the FBI), who happens to run a small llama farm and we were talking (I'm not keen on the word "interviewing" either—as far as I'm concerned, I'm just chatting with someone who's doing something I think is interesting) and hanging out with the llamas. Most of them ignored us, but a few came to get their necks scratched by John which mean that they also noticed me and were clearly undecided as to what to think of me. They reminded me a little bit of people who catch sight of some interesting animal who isn't paying much attention and slowly creep towards it to get a better look. I would turn my head in the course of our (human) conversation and two inches from my nose would be a llama nose, one that had definitely been several feet away only a few minutes before. I never did hear their approach.

The llamas had absolutely nothing to do with my research, which is some kind of ethnography about a community group who is opposing a quarry expansion (backed, unusually enough, by the town government). Why do I mention the llamas? Partly because I am completely enamored of them and just want to say so. And partly because Helmreich's articles have mostly made me think about the ways in which ethnographic/ qualitative data can be presented and that, in fact, the llamas don't have to be left out of whatever it is that I ultimately produce from this. I like Helmreich's writing style, in part because he weaves the narrative of his ethnographic research, both process and product, into the structure of his actual argument. Those narratives aren't the focus of the article—the larger intellectual/abstract/theoretical argument is, but the mini-narratives each text a distinctive flavor. It comes alive, if you will. They are small details that give context to the words of his informants. For example, much of his information appears to come through casual encounters with the scientists—"during a coffee break," "I ran into W. Ford Doolittle, and we had a conversation," which in turn suggests Helmreich's immersion into the world of the people he is studying without his having to delineate, lab-report fashion, the precise length of time for his fieldwork, the number of interviews. Such small details also function just as they do in any good work of fiction—they open up the setting to the imagination, providing enough information to begin a sketch, but leaving the reader to fill in the details. These narrative flourishes also open up places for the author to appear as author, researcher, and human all at once. And so we hear of the Artificial Life scientists joking with Helmreich about studying them as a "tribe", a quick note that lets us see researcher and subjects interacting as just people. Followed immediately by an analysis of what that joking indicates—re-enter Author, full force. Helmreich's various roles are perhaps better integrated in "Trees and Seas" where he uses first-person narratives of both actions ("I walked up a flight of stairs;" "I contacted Doolittle by email") and his thought processes ("As I listened.., I recalled;" "I wondered") to connect the pieces of his more formally, 3rd-person presentations of his analyses and argument.