Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

(from last week)
Since my initial blog post on Kenmaity Chicken I have conducted addition ethnographic observation of this institution on two separate occasions. First, I ate in at the KMC at Gordons on 5 July in the evening, roughly from 1900-2000. Then today I visited the KMC in town and got more chicken to go.

A large of part of being an anthropologist is learning to see the details of the world in a way that is lost on others. These details typically slide away and beneath us for two reasons: first, because they are so familiar to us and we see them so regularly that we parse them quickly, taking them all in in one big gulp of typification (as we say in the business). In short, we lose the details because they are too easy to see. Second, we lose the details of a world because, when we encounter it, it is strange and new to us, and people who experience new worlds either force them into familiar frameworks of understanding(blotting out the truly novel) or else the novelty is blindingly bright, rendering us unable to appreciate its man subtleties or nuances. For anthropologists — or anyone else who has become thoughtful about what it means to observe — the goal is to strike a balance between being keyed-in enough to understand a situation, but not so keyed-in that the details start slipping away beneath them. In typical ‘culture shock’ fieldwork, anthropologists get to experience both of these extremes, beginning as neophytes and ending, so we like to think, as ‘insiders’.

I always say that human are the most sensitive and complex recording devices on the planet, but also, alas, one of the worst storage devices. We take everything in — smells, sounds, textures. We can listen to the sound of a crowd and then focus on an individual conversation, all without rearranging any microphones or messing about with recording levels. We can feel social dynamics and moods uncapturable on video, even when this takes of smacking ourselves on the head five minutes after the fact and exclaiming “she wanted me to kiss her!” And then we fall asleep, wake up the next morning, and the details is gone, turned into an amalgam of remembrance and impression.

A good example of this are my many errors in describing the KMC shop in town. As Nelson points out, I got the spelling of the name wrong (no surprise to regular readers of the blog): it is in fact Kenmaity (without an ‘e’) as Emmanuel spells it in his blog post. My description of the “the white piece of paper slowly peeling of the wall next to the cash registers which reads ‘a TEAM is MANY hands doing ONE job’ in a vaguely elegant italic font” while right in intent, only vaguely captured what is actually written on the wall (I don’t have the full text yet but hope to get it at the start of my next visit).

Some of my descriptions were more accurate. Consider, for instance, my favorite poster (or perhaps my second favorite given a newly-noticed poster that I will describe below):

One of the the most enigmatic of these posters features the torso of a white toddler (unusual in a country where most people are not white) emerging from the bottom of the frame, a beatific smile on his face — of longing? fulfillment? — wearing a pair of overalls over a collared shirt. His hands are lifted straight up, straining towards a Delicious Chicken Burger which is as large as he is. What makes this particularly unusual is the fact that these images are superimposed over the background of a beach, complete with saves and a seagull flying away. However, the beach scene is upside down — as if the Delicious Chicken Burger has been dropped out of a plane and the baby shortly afterwards, they are both about to be land in the water, and someone has hung the picture upside down.

Here is a picture (from the Gordon’s branch, but the same poster):

The baby is in a t-shirt, without a collar. I didn’t mention the KMC logo in the upper left hand corner of the poster (perhaps I didn’t think it important to mention). And now, as I revisit the scene, I increasingly think (but cannot prove) that the child is pursuing a fishburger rather than a chicken burger. Or so it seems to me now.

Here is another photo, which I described as an “image of a young girl with tremendously round eyes who looks as if she is in a trance state or startled by a loud noise, who sits with her hands down on a table on which lies a bucket (to scale, this time) of fried chicken.”

The big thing that I missed here is that she is holding her hands to her head, rather than down on the ‘desk’. Also, on second thought I would describe the look on her face is ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘over-awed’ by the chicken beneath her. You might also describe it as a look of fixation or longing for the chicken. Also, the airbrushed white lines which are meant to represent the alluring warm scent of the fried chicken are worthy of mention, methinks.

Here is a third picture, of “ a round-faced child… about to bite into an enormous drumstick which is immediately adjacent to some copy describing the benefits of feeding young children fried chicken”

Here my description is accurate, but only because it is so brief. The chinglish text is truly amazing but I didn’t write it down. Also, on reflection, I believe this child is being fed chicken by another, unidentified person.

And finally, here is the money shot:

Having visited the KMC at Gordons (and waited a long time for my chicken) I’ve had a chance to see another KMC, and I think this has given me a chance to see the one in town with new eyes, giving me things to look for. This last time, for instance, I missed a poster which I saw at the Gordons shop. This one, which I think is now my favorite, pictures four white people seated close together around a table, smiling and looking down at a hamburger so enormous that that only its bun, about four feet across, is visible in the frame.

In many ways this discussion of KMC is not a very good representation of ethnographic fieldwork. All of my writings about KMC are based on memory, since I did not take any notes in the restaurants. Also, while anthropologists often write about places where interactions happens, this description focuses on objects and totally excludes people, which are what I actually study. I’ve done this mostly because I don’t want to blog descriptions of my informants (who are entitled to privacy) or, even worse, my friends here in PNG who are not expecting to be put under the microscope at all.

The difference between an anthropologist and a tourist (and I know that sometimes people have trouble telling the difference) is that tourists seek to be amazed by the unusual while anthropologists train themselves to finding the mundane amazing. While it is true that the posters at KMC are titillatingly weird to Americans, I think they help exemplify the way in which anthropologists learn to see things in new ways, and how this vision requires its own sort of discipline — one which cultivates curiosity, rigor, and a belief that the world will never stop being surprising.