Poll: How long have you been living there?

Hi dmscvan,

Well that's a pretty good question. But I'm on my fifth year so I'm confused : am I 3-5 or 5-10 ?
By the way, your fieldwork sounds like you doing a great job as an anthropologist. Congrats ! I've been doing a similar stuff down in the mekong delta. Careful about the malaria !!!

Tôm Càng

This poll is a very good idea dmscvan!

Don't worry I'll arrange the poll options

I've been 2 years in the UK ... then almost one year in Spain ... and I am now back in France, looking for a job that would send me to the other side of the planet! (I voted 1-2 years)

Oops! Another mistake. Sorry, I guess I wasn't careful enough when I posted this. I guess if you've been there five years you could vote for whichever category you feel like you fit into better.

Thanks for the nice comments about my fieldwork, Tôm. Unfortunately, I've already had a couple nice bouts of malaria. Oh well.

I looked at your blog a bit - but I have to admit, my French is not great, so I couldn't understand much. Actually, I've been surprised how many of the posts in French on this site that I have been able to understand. Maybe it'll help me!

I read somewhere that almost 100% of anthropologists working on SEA contracted malaria... I'm no exception. Vietnam is ok as long as you stay on coastlands and cities (side effect of pollution I was told). And now we have to worry about chicken flu too.

Yep, excuse my French I'd like to do it in english but, as years goes by, my english and my vietnamese are sometimes mixing together so I don't feel confortable with english anymore.

Being a wannabe anthropologist myself I'm always impressed by people who do their fieldwork in difficult places. My advisor used to say to me that fieldwork is the ultimate experience, a kind of rite of passage : some failed and some enjoyed it. You can talk until you've done it. Yours reminds me of Malinowski's !

Personnaly, I'm more at ease with theory than fieldwork. Maybe it has something to do with research conditions, it took me almost a year to obtain the authorizations and I had to change my first thesis subject... Anyway, presently I'm trying to organize my data into something that look like a decent database. Gosh, I hate this part...

Actually, I'm doing linguistics - not anthropology. I'm writing a grammar of an undescribed language. But my experience in the field has made me wish I knew a bit more about anthropology. What field of anthropology do you do?

I've always been more interested in theory than fieldwork before - I switched to fieldwork for my  PhD because I thought it would give me a better grounding in the actual data that people use for theoretical work. And it has - I'm certainly not regretting it!

I sympathize with the data organization. For my MA, I had to do an incredible amount of that - not in a database, just a lot of calculations, etc. It's a real pain!

When I arrived some time ago, I was supposed to do my PhD on fishermen viillages in the Central Region...
Now I'm working on shrimp farmers in the Mekong Delta : social change and how it affects the community, networks of technical knowledge and so on. I'm more used to the qualitative but now I have to do some quantitative stuff too... I'm in-between sociology and anthropology really. I have also interest in theories like the Actor-Network Theory and such.
Aquaculture is a big thing here and it has impacts on environment too. Since the tsunami also, stakeholders tend to pay more attention to mangrove areas where shrimp are raised...

Even if anthropology's not your major, you should have a fairly good empirical approach by now. Are you doing participating observation too ? You speak the language ? You have key informants ? You're doing fieldwork for an extended amount of time ? Well, there you are, welcome to the club... Anthropologists are coming from all kind of backgrounds nowadays.

1 Year 4 Months for me.

Currently in India at the moment though, but back in Japan in a week or so. Thank goodness!!!

It will be 7 years on the 1th of July 2006.

Four years and 9 months in France... That's the longest straight stay in a foreign country (I only did 6 years straight in Angola too, so... )

We're going into our third month here in Buenos Aires (and now we're expecting an addition to the family as well :-)). We plan to be here for some time. I want a trilingal child...English, French and Spanish

Old thread, but interesting so I gave it a bump.
Any of the old posters still where they were?

Good idea fred.  For us now starting our 9th year here and no plans to change the situation.

Bob K

I've now been in Indonesia, with the exception of a short visa run to KL, since 2007.
Indonesia has its problems, show me a country that doesn't, but there is far more positive than negative here, so I have zero intention of leaving unless something drastic happens.
The political system is still in flux because of a rather silly man and there are a bunch of extremists around (police shot one yesterday), but things are generally pretty good.
Indonesia has great potential and I'd rather like to play at least a small role in its development.

around 3,5 years in china and now im back home

36 years, and counting! We came for three years, after staying about that long in two other "offshore" tax-havens. But this island in the Caribbean was such a great place to bring up our little boy, we stayed. It's getting a bit expensive to live here these days (even without Income Tax!), so we may have to move on soon. We have our eyes on a couple of places in Central America.