Glesne, Corrine

Published in N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.) 2007. Ethical Futures in Qualitative

Research :Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge (169-178). Walnut Creek, CA: Left
Coast Press.

Research as Solidarity

“Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the
other. I have a lot to learn from other people.” (Galeano, 1999)

Oaxaca, Mexico, 2006. I was told to hold the candle with both hands at eye level. Nine
more candles flickered on the altar. The curandera, the healer, was behind me, an
unembodied voice that said, “The flames are moving, the soul is here. Whom have you
called?”
“My brother,” I answered.
“He is here. What do you want to tell him?” she continued.
“Tell him that…”
She interrupted, “You tell him. I am leaving the room so you can talk.”
Tears streamed down my face as I held a conversation of sorts with my brother
who had died over 20 years ago. At the point I felt peace, the curandera returned and
filled my hands with smoke from incense of copal and motioned for me to wash it over
my head, neck, and shoulders, pushing what remained toward my feet.
“This life,” she said, “is but a dream. When we grow up, we know this. We
know we dream the dream.”

Question: How do we know what we know?

“How” seems to affect “what” we know, what we think we know, what we dream
to know. Let’s begin with considering how we’ve gone about knowing. Less than fifteen
years ago, qualitative research was seen as the “alternative paradigm” (Guba, 1990).
Historically rooted in anthropology, qualitative inquiry became more widespread through
the context of civil rights and feminist movements. While many of us were embracing
this alternative paradigm that sought to reveal the range of experiences rather than a
norm, technology and capital were working to homogenize the world in the image of the
West.1 Increasingly, however, Western ideologies are met with resistance as other
cultures seek to maintain or regenerate their own perspectives of the “good life” (Esteva
and Prakash, 1998). Western science is questioned as well, including the qualitative
paradigm (Smith, 1999, Vidich & Lyman, 2000).
Here, I touch upon four ways qualitative inquiry is resisted and suggest some
alternative ethics to guide us in our research. My perspective has been shaped by
interactions with Gustavo Esteva and people of southern Mexico, in particular, and also
with indigenous groups in India and New Zealand, as well as by various scholarly works
(i.e., Escobar, 1997; Esteva, 1987; Esteva and Prakash,1998; Harding,1998; Sachs,1992;
Smith, 1999). The generic “we” throughout the paper refers primarily to Western social
scientists, generally white, whose perspectives have dominated research acts.
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First Resistance: Research Purpose. We tend to believe that a purpose of qualitative

inquiry is to help us understand a social phenomenon. The more I experience, the more I
wonder if I can ever fully understand anything. Presumption and arrogance often
accompany our claims to understanding, which are partial at best (Lincoln & Denzin,
2000; Richardson, 2000). Perhaps we and those we research with would be better served
if a purpose were one of “solidarity.”
Esteva (personal communication) paraphrases Zapatista Subcomadante Marcos2
and tells international volunteers, “If you have come to help us, you can go home. If you
have come to accompany us, please come. We can talk.” Many of us are dismayed by
economic or political or gendered or racial inequities we perceive in different parts of the
world and we want to do something. A primary motivator seems to be the need to make
a difference and a belief that we can help. This belief tends to be grounded erroneously,
however, on an assumption that others want to be and should be just like us, to live as we
live in the United States (Illich, 1968). The desire to help co-occurs with the privilege of
having the means and time to become involved in lives half way around the world. And,
it feeds on the addicting sensations of novelty and learning that, for many, are part of
interacting in different cultures. Cross-cultural research involves similar motivations and
sensations. I think we can rephrase the advice of Esteva and the Zapatistas and caution,
“If you want to research us, you can go home. If you have come to accompany us, if you
think our struggle is also your struggle, we have plenty of things to talk.” As researchers,
we need to examine the sense of entitlement that often comes along with us into spaces
not our own. A research purpose of “solidarity,” helps make us do so. Solidarity implies
working with others in a research endeavor determined by others’ needs and perceptions
in conjunction with our own.

Second Resistance: Data Collection through Participant Observation. To those who

are observed, the process of an outsider noting actions and words is objectifying and
often offensive. A group of young people with whom I was working in Mexico found
troubling the actions of a young woman who came to “research” them. They granted
permission, thinking she was coming to learn from them, but were upset when she mostly
wanted to sit in their compound and note what she heard and saw. The way in which the
woman set herself apart is not the only way to be a participant observer, but her actions
demonstrated how alienating it is to be the recipient of another’s gaze. The term
“participant observation” is, itself, sometimes resisted because it suggests the “fly on the
wall” approach. Tedlock (2000, 465) notes that the term is, afterall, an oxymoron that
urges engagement and distance, involvement and detachment. The decision to
accompany, rather than to be a participant observer, works better in the solidarity model.
Fieldnotes are kept, generally written at the end of the day, but these notes become group
documents, subject to discussion and mutual comment and learning.

Third Resistance: Data Collection through Individual Pre-Structured Interviews. In

Becoming Qualitative Researchers (Glesne, 2006), I tell the story of staying in an
indigenous village in India with a group of students with whom I was traveling as part of
a year-long program in five different countries. Our first evening there, villagers met
with our group: women with the women and men with the men. As usual, we—the
outsiders--began the interaction with a series of questions. One student was doing a
 3

comparative research project focused on reproductive health and asked, “What kinds of
problems do women have during childbearing?” Our interpreter suggested that instead,
she ask each woman there to state how many children she had born and, of those, how
many were living. One by one, the women answered, “I have born seven children, three
are living.” Five, two are alive.” “Nine, four are still with me.” Suddenly, the students
had many more questions—why had their children died? What happens when a child
dies? Finally, a student asked the women if they had any questions of us.
The villagers turned our question around and asked us, at least twenty women of
childbearing age, how many children we had had and how many had died. None of us
had children. They wanted to know how many of us were married since we were all
beyond the age at which they marry. None of us were married. They asked questions we
hadn’t considered asking of them—what songs we sang in the evenings, what dances we
danced together. The only dance we could come up with that we all knew was the hokey-
pokey.
Their questions of us helped us learn as much about the women and their lives as
their answers to our questions. We also saw our own lives differently. The one-on-one
interview used in many qualitative inquiries is a fairly recent construction that generally
depends upon the individualization of the self, rather than a “collective” self. We need to
consider this when doing cross-cultural work and also ask how we can co-construct
interviews and, in the process, co-construct knowledge.

Fourth Resistance: Data Interpretation through Preset Lenses. We may learn the
language, hang out a year, talk with many people, and expand our horizons of knowing.
Yet, it is difficult to break out of our Western categories of interpretation. For example, a
focus of my work in Oaxaca became that of young peoples’ interactions with the
environment. At some point, after many discussions with different groups of youth, I’m
told, “We don’t really talk about the environment but about “harmony.” Previously, I
had read about the importance of harmony in Oaxaca (Cohen, 1999; Nader, 1990). I had
heard people talk about it just as I had also heard about susto or fright and its effects on
health, about the nagual or animal allies, and about nature spirits of many kinds.
Nonetheless, unconsciously, I kept assigning what I was reading and hearing and
experiencing to my Western categories of people, animals, environment, religion or
spirituality, etc. Hearing that phrase, “We don’t really talk about the environment, but
about harmony,” I could suddenly see my categories and how, in Oaxaca, something else
was going on, something quite different, something that did not segregate humans,
nature, and spirits the way I was doing.
Our framework for understanding the world, our categories for segmenting the
world, are culturally-determined mythologies (Panikkar, 1979) and difficult to see. In a
solidarity research model, we would work to listen to and respect many different
perspectives for understanding the world. This involves more than member-checking or
requesting the input of a confidant.

Question: What ethics practiced in non-western cultures could guide us to undertake our
inquiries differently?3
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An Ethic of Community. A group of students and I were in Teotitlan de Valle in the

central valley of Oaxaca. We spent a day with a group of women who card, spin, and dye
wool that they weave into rugs, the mainstay of the village’s economy. When it was
lunch time, the women led us into an adobe room in which tables had been set. At one
end was an altar where the Virgin del Guadalupe joined photos of ancestors. As we were
served beans and hand-made tortillas, one of the students asked about the room. “It was
built before the Spanish came,” a woman answered. “Our family has always lived here.”
We, the wanderers, see lots of places with old histories. What we cannot
completely fathom, however, is how being a part of those long histories would make us
value things differently. I don’t have a sense of allegiance to a place as Teotitlan
villagers have, as many indigenous people throughout the world have. I don’t have an
allegiance to a community other than a widespread one of friends and family connected
by the filaments of modern communication and travel. I don’t have a vast extended
family around me from which both rights and obligations flow. People in many parts of
the world say that we from the United States are the homeless ones, those in need of pity.
Research as solidarity implies communal decision-making rather than negotiating
individual to individual. It implies being willing to take the time required for consensus
if consensus is a practice there. It implies a willingness to become as much a part of a
community as possible, with all the obligations and time that entails. And it implies that
as researchers, we consider our academic communities and how our connections,
constraints, and obligations there have implications for the people with whom we work.

An Ethic of Hospitality.4 In New Zealand, each Maori community we visited hosted us

on their marae or communal land and meeting house. Once welcomed officially through
a call and response ceremony, we were fed amazing amounts of food and treated to songs
and dances and stories of the marae, its history and current struggles—often involving
access to land and rivers or combating effects of dams and other products of so-called
“development.” They taught us how to harvest flax and weave simple baskets. They fed
us more, sang to us more, and told us more stories long into the night. People gave freely
of themselves and what they had.
This was a pattern that we became accustomed to in our travels. I try to find
equivalents in the United States in which a community bestows such hospitality to invited
strangers. Many U.S. communities, however, are large and un-connected. Often, we
don’t know who lives next door. It is more likely to be an organization such as a church
or school that would host a group. These organizations arrange for food (often catered)
and set up tours of local sites, but do members spend un-organized time with the visiting
group as well, sharing of themselves and what they possess? Some do, I’m sure, but in
general, our society is more grounded in economic exchange than in hospitality.
What would an ethic of hospitality look like in our research acts? We are often
met with hospitality, and we need to ask how we are hospitable in return. If our research
is “in solidarity” with others, then we can give freely of ourselves in the research process.
We can share what it is that we can do, not as an imposition, but as service determined in
conjunction with others. We also have an obligation to be hospitable in our home
communities, in our scientific disciplines, to many different voices and ways of coming
to know.
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First Concluding Question: What are the homographic equivalents to research?

A “homograph” is a word that is spelled the same way as one or more other words
but is different in meaning, origin, and sometimes pronunciation as in “bow,” to bend,
and “bow,” a decorative knot. I’m wondering what concepts get translated as “research”
or are seen as synonyms for research, but are not procedural equivalents.
All communities learn and integrate new technologies. Sandra Harding (1998)
discusses how “sciences (plural) and their cultures co-evolve” (p. 3). She states, “The
distinctive ways that cultures gain knowledge contribute to their being the kinds of
cultures they are; and the distinctiveness of cultures contributes to the distinctively
“local” patterns of their systematic knowledge and systematic ignorance” (Harding, 1998,
p. 3). I want to know about these different patterns of systematic knowledge practiced in
countries throughout the world and think about how they might inform us as qualitative
researchers.

Second Concluding Question: What happened in that hour and a half with the
curandera in Oaxaca?
I went for a limpia, a cleansing. I did not know she would call in spirits. She had
not done so with a friend who had gone to her and it had never happened before in other
cleansings that I have experienced. Was my brother’s spirit there? The whole time I was
talking to him, part of my head was saying, “this is ridiculous, this is a finely-produced
psychological/emotional catharsis.” Yet, simultaneously, I was noticing something else.
When the curandera returned, I said, “I felt my grandmother here too.”
How do we know what we know?

References
Cohen, Jeffrey. (1999). Cooperation and community: Economy and society in Oaxaca.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Escobar, Arturo. (1997). The making and unmaking of the Third World through
development. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.) The post-development reader
(pp. 85-93). New York, NY: Zed Books.
Esteva, Gustavo. (1987). Regenerating people’s space. In S. Mendlovitz & R. Walker
(Eds.) Towards a just world peace (pp. 271-298). London: Butterworths.
Esteva, Gustavo & Madhu Suri Prakash. (1998). Grassroots post-modernism: Remaking
the soil of cultures. New York, NY: Zed Books.
Galeano, Eduardo. 1999. Interview by David Barsamian. The Progressive. Retrieved
from http:www.progressive.org.
Glesne, Corrine. (2006). Becoming qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Boston, MA:
Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
Guba, Egon (Ed.). (1990). The paradigm dialog. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Harding, Sandra. (1998). Is science multi-cultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and
epistemologies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
 6

Illich, Ivan. (1968, April). To hell with good intentions. Address given at the Conference
on InterAmerican Student Projects, Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Lincoln, Yvonna. & Denzin, Norm. (2000). The seventh moment: Out of the past. In N.
Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 1047-
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Martin, Pamela & Glesne, Corrine. (2002). From the global village to the pluriverse?
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(eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923-946). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications.
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Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous
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1
The term “West” is problematic, as also the use of “North.” Probably a better term would be the “One-
third World” (Esteva & Prakash, 1998, 16-17) referring to the economically and politically dominant
groups that make up a minority of the world’s population, no matter the geographical location. I am
choosing to use “West/ Western,” however, because it has come to connote European and European
American dominant thought and practices.
2
Esteva (personal communication) quotes Subcomadante Marcos as saying, “If you have come to help a
group of poor Indians in struggles against a bad government, thanks, but no thanks. If you think that our
struggle is also your struggle, please come. We have plenty of things to talk.”
3
For further discussion on this topic, see Martin and Glesne, 2002.
4
See Esteva & Prakash, 1998, for their discussion of hospitality and its role in the dynamics of radical
pluralism.