Beyond Marble Blocks and Masterpieces in Research and Writing

As a historical anthropologist of early twentieth-century Ecuador, I often recall a passage I came across while researching my first book about the social and cultural history of Ecuador’s national railroad. In 1889, Colonel Wiliam Shunk, a consultant on the railway construction project, explained to Ecuadorian President Eloy Alfaro  that “there are as many possible [railway] routes in a region as there are statues in a block of marble. But a master artist is needed, who will dedicate his time to find the Venus de Milo in that block.” Like railway routes and marble statues, I felt there were many arguments that could be made and books that could be written from the rich, uncatalogued documentary sources I reviewed in archives in the Ecuadorian Andes. But was there only one masterpiece?

Rather than focusing on the master artist and singular Venus de Milo, I have increasingly been reflecting on how we come to write the narratives that we do, from the many potential threads of argument we might elevate and weave together from the research materials we explore. What idiosyncrasies shape our interests and our attention and how does this produce distinctive analyses?

In that early research project, as I sought evidence of local impacts of railway construction, I came across references to outbreaks of bubonic plague in the Andean town where I was reviewing documents. I hadn’t even heard of the third pandemic of plague in the early twentieth-century, much less knew that it had reached Ecuador. I wrote about it briefly in my first book (since infected rats arrived in town on railway wagons), but I kept puzzling over some of plague’s features and effects on Ecuador as I pursued subsequent research projects. Working in an academic department where colleagues combined social and biological analyses deepened my sense of what might be interesting. Because I was doing research in Ecuadorian archives that were largely catalogued only by year – which meant I needed to skim documents on many different topics as I searched for those relevant to my research, rather than being able to identify and access only those on specific topics – my interest in plague led my eye to public health documents as I flipped through large bound volumes of correspondence coming into and being sent out by government agencies. I learned that the arrival of plague in 1908 was the immediate catalyst for the founding of the public health service and I learned about the slow work of building up that service.

At the same time, back on campus my academic career was evolving in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated. As a political anthropologist with an interest in governance, I was drawn into discussions, committees, and roles that gave me insight into how institutions function and what kinds of social and political processes underlie how things get done. I learned that what was distilled in a policy was the outcome of many interventions and negotiations that were smoothed over and suppressed in the subsequent written record. I learned that often a document is a fragment of an argument designed to connect with larger issues, not just a neutral fact.  As I tried to digest an increasingly unmanageable collection of archival materials about plague and the everyday practices of the public health service, my insights from administrative work began to also shape how I interpreted archival materials. As I explored how the Ecuadorian public health service was built up over decades through a slow process of expanding and coordinating the activities of state agents in different locations and through their everyday encounters with a range of social groups, I was fascinated by the mundane practices through which things got done. While I was unsure whether others might be as riveted as I was by those matters, my doubts were quieted by how important those issues became during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, I decided, the issue of how things get done (or as I sometimes thought in exasperation, how anything ever gets done!) is a crucial question. Armed with this reassuring thought, I persisted through two rounds of peer review to complete a book published a full three decades after my first archival encounter with plague, which situates public health campaigns in a broad set of processes through which the state came to be conjured as real and functional in the everyday lives of Ecuadorians in diverse corners of the national territory.

The connection between my own idiosyncratic perspective and the analyses I produce had been even clearer in another project I completed between research on the railway and on public health. As I explored archival materials connected with gender and social policy – where I saw women as both the objects/targets and subjects/agents of social policy – my eye was caught over and over again by women whose lives were touched by illegitimacy, whether their own or that of their offspring. The stories I had heard of my Ecuadorian father-in-law’s early years as the illegitimate son of a wealthy and prominent father, and the effects of his birth on his mother, were ever-present in my mind as I pursued those threads. I could glimpse in the archives how these difficult experiences positioned the women I came across as the most likely to take risks – having the least to lose – in pushing the limits of social norms by taking up new forms of study and work in some social policy areas, where their own backgrounds often shaped how they approached their duties and their clients. Would I have noticed those documents and dynamics without a sensibility shaped by family connections? I could hardly do other than to dedicate that book to my father-in-law.

Institutional ethnographer Dorothy Smith writes of a “text-reader conversation,” where the meaning of a text like a novel is not contained in the object itself but emerges from the encounter between the narrative and its readers and depends on the experiences that shape how the latter approach and interpret the former. Even the documents we notice in the archives – where many choices must be made – is a product of the particular interests, experiences and sensibilities of researchers, just as the analysis they develop is shaped by these factors.

If we accept that the analysis is not just there in the data – waiting to be discovered by the master sculptor like that one potential Venus de Milo hidden in a block of marble – but that it is shaped in unique ways by the researcher at every stage of the process, then we can also appreciate how a more diverse group of researchers will bring forward fresh and innovative insights that might otherwise have been lost to audiences.