Interview with Dr. Charles Stafford, author of "What will Happen Next?
Envisioning a Personal Future in China" by Lauren Cross

Glimpse Journal: When you do fieldwork, how are you able to familiarize yourself with a culture to make a connection?

Charles Stafford: It’s a complex process, but then again nothing especially mysterious.  Anybody living in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people, will go through the same thing.  You learn the rules of another way of life – sometimes because people explain them to you, but sometimes because you develop, on your own, an understanding of how things work and how things fit together.  Much of this implicit understanding happens through observation rather than conversation. 

GJ: One thing that strikes me about your work is how humanly engaged and empathetic you seem to Mr. Zhang’s story and experience.

CS: I’d like to say that anthropologists have exceptional gifts of empathy, but I doubt that it’s true.  Still, most anthropologists read a lot of ethnography, and to some extent this helps them learn what to look for and where to look.  My own fieldwork method is generally non-assertive. I sit back and try to listen sympathetically, or to watch things carefully.  I don’t ask too many questions.  But over time I’ve learned that being assertive can be a good thing too, it really depends on what you’re trying to study.

GJ: As an anthropologist, do you try to “get inside” the culture you are studying?  Does anthropology require standing apart? Blending in?

CS: I’ve never thought that I could “be Chinese” just by showing up and living in a Chinese village for a year or so.  And one of the surprising things about anthropology is the extent to which a study of relatively obvious things (e.g. the well-known fact that Chinese daughters have traditionally left behind their natal families at marriage), based on relatively short-term fieldwork, can be incredibly productive.  You don’t have to “blend in” to do a good study of that kind of thing.

GJ: Do you think there are intricacies and blindspots to Anthropology’s way of “seeing others” that are different from those experienced in casual interaction?

CS: Yes and no. As I’ve said, what anthropologists do is not unlike what most people do when they experience another way of living. In the modern world, this is a very common thing, of course.  I think the blindspots are products both of the particularities of given ethnographers (who might, for example, be tone deaf when it comes to the cultural emphases of their informants) and of the history of anthropology. There are some things we’ve tended to ignore as a discipline. Smell, for example.

GJ:  Why have you decided to highlight Mr. Zhang’s story versus those of the other people that you’ve observed during your research?

CS: Partly because I liked him very much and wanted to think about his story in a more systematic way. But then my view is that basically everybody’s story is fascinating, if seen in the correct light. 

About Charles Stafford