Exhausted ethnography

How does one return to normal, after having lived a different normal? Norms and standards of living. The norms are always changing. But launching from Bolivia and heading back to Oxford, Mississippi? A ver, what a difference. My heart is stuck in the transfer tube, half in this Bolivian reality, being pulled to the next. I’m going to miss good bread, though I’ll be happy to have vegetables again. I’m going to miss the ease with which they share affections and show feelings. Or maybe that’s the other way around. Whatever. Point is we’re transplanting from one social norm to another, and it gives me questions. The importance of home, for instance. To have a community. What do those things mean? What makes somewhere home? Is it all about comfort? Having passed multiple, every-day-life weeks in multiple countries now casts Mississippi in a new light. To really have appreciated its wonders and woes, I needed the separation.

So how do ethnographers do it? Cultural anthropologists that have two homes? A fieldwork and a house? A family and a family studied? There’s so much reflexivity in it, so many ways to become invested. Going local. We’re all human in this; we can all relate. We are all light, just cast through a prism. I’m green, studying orange, but we’re the same. I guess that’s why all of this is so interesting and hella hard at the same time.

I guess I’m reflecting. I’m entering my final week in Bolivia, and I’m entering it fresh from a course in social science that has left me molten at core. I have thesis work to do. I have all these questions. What about comfort? What about home? What about norms? What we “get used to” can be extreme depending on the lens. Guns in the USA, none here. Living at home until 28 here, leaving at 18 in there. Is there a better way to live buried in any of this?