As a curious young undergraduate in the early 2000s, I chose to study cultural anthropology because it seemed like the field that left no one out. It invited you in by connecting you with your diverse human kin. And it revealed those increasingly globalizing interconnections that bound you relationally with others, for better and for worse.
Although I saw anthropology as inclusive, I soon learned not everyone did. Anthropology has a troubled legacy. Mid-nineteenth-century armchair anthropologists explained (away) Indigenous cultures without ever having left home; early twentieth-century European imperial powers relied on anthropological research to placate people they colonized; and twenty-first-century academic anthropology still relies heavily on European philosophy to make sense of other people’s stories, rather than the other way around.
That’s not the anthropology I do. I choose the anthropology where listening leads research; where learning is often undoing; where people see each other’s differences and connect through what they share; where everyone is part of the story, however messy and painful it gets—Christian fundamentalists and evolutionary biologists; conservatives and liberals; climate disruptors and protectors; the colonized, the colonizer, the decolonizing, the none of the above.
Despite my attraction for a field that, as I saw it, sought openness to everyone’s views, I struggled with it at times. The theorizing felt too European, the research modes extractive (even with the best of intentions), the data dry. Moreover, living decades of a life of the brain in constant academic writing and wordplay seemed to turn against my body. I became ill: light sensitive, chemical sensitive, migraines, mental confusion, visual stress. By 45 I had two cataracts and two retinal detachments. I could no longer use traditional computer screens. I had reached an impasse.
What saved me most was the elements of earth. When artificial lights felt blinding and painful, the sunlight soothed. When manufactured smells accosted my senses, the scent of forests or a flower or oil distilled from melaleuca leaves (tea tree) opened them up again. When my visual system couldn’t make sense of complex constructed patterns like cobblestones, a chain-link fence, plaid, or even white stripes on dark pavement, staring at forest leaves settled and stabilized me. Above all else, the ocean: whenever the modernized, digitized, mechanized landscape sent my body into a cellular mode of threat, ocean water offered refuge.
During the hardest period, I continued to work in academic terrain. I took those jobs I thought I could still do: independent research in Cambridge; fieldwork at an austere Zen temple and farm in Japan; a grant writing job in Honolulu (where I had gone to grad school and where I could work from home, use e-ink screens, and calibrate the natural lighting of a room to find those narrowest of conditions that allowed for a few hours of screen time); a teaching job in Kapolei, West Oʻahu, where as much as possible I took students on field trips to Native Hawaiian NGO’s to learn on and from the land.
Ultimately, by what felt like a kind of grace, I was invited to contribute to a research project on how people cultivate joy in times of crisis, with opportunities for fieldwork among the natural elements and environments of earth I and so many others—I had come to learn—found rejuvenating. In the project I learn how people between Japan and Hawaiʻi turn to land, as well as to each other, to heal: Buddhist inspired natural farming projects in Japan; coastal stewardship in Okinawa; Indigenous practices of land restoration in Hawaiʻi; and cross-cultural partnerships between Japan-Okinawa-Hawaiʻi in which people find that sharing different ways of connecting to the elements of earth restores communities to wholeness.
I cannot say I have chosen my field sites. But neither would I dare to say they chose me. Rather, born in Midwest America, I have had the privilege of living the most meaningful twenty years of my life across Japan and Hawaiʻi. I study these sites because they have gifted me so much of what I am still learning about how communities can heal. In this regard, I am seeking ways to gift back through ethnography—to render research itself as a form of healing, as my colleagues in Hawaiʻi describe.
However messy, complicated, and contested the relationship between my own cultural legacies and those I study, I am undeniably a part of them. As my collaborators in Japan and Hawaiʻi have taught me, but seldom explicitly, this also means I am indebted to my host communities and the environments in which they are placed. Giri in Japanese, or kuleana in Hawaiian (languages I study, think, and learn through), these words point both to one’s opportunities and obligations to place and people.
In this invocation to research, I offer my story above of relating better and worse with the elements of earth as a way to ask permission of my community members to share their own stories of people healing in relation with land. Seeking reciprocity, I offer my time, labor, and best intentions to ensure those stories are told well. Most of all, I ask for help and guidance to share those stories on their terms, in ways that serve their communities, and as resources for mutual healing, reconciliation, and joy.
Me ke aloha and kansha.