Doing ethnographic research is a subject of interest for anthropologists. Many anthropologists initiate their fieldwork by mostly relying on their vision. Therefore, the discourses relating to methodology that many anthropologists debate and discuss can be attributed to gathering and processing data by using sight. However, not all anthropologists can rely on vision to access and process data into information and knowledge. I am an example of such an anthropologist as I am blind. As a blind anthropologist, I have to rely on my other senses, mostly hearing and listening. I gather data and information by auditory means to make sense of people and my environment. When I was initiating my fieldwork, being labelled as a blind man and the way my blindness is perceived by the community under study, of which I am also a member, affected the way I carried out my fieldwork. Therefore, my methodology was unique compared to anthropologists who could observe their participants visually.
My blindness, in conjunction with my academic background, created a perceived otherness between myself and my community. Therefore, I had to present my otherness as positive and as an opportunity to learn from one another. One form this took was through people's curiosity in me being a blind person who is relatively independent and who is doing a research higher degree at the University of Melbourne. People's fascination with my blindness also helped me gain access to participants and spaces which I may not have been able to access otherwise. This was mainly due to a number of people's desire to help me as part of the community's perceived collective responsibility and religious obligation to look after me. In this article, I will be discussing how people's intimacy and desire to help me enabled me to construct inter-subjectivity with my informants. Some unique forms of this inter-subjectivity are eavesdropping, understanding people's emotions through the tone of their voices, understanding the ‘acoustemology’ of spaces, people feeling anonymous around me as I cannot scrutinise their body language nor make eye contact with them, and people perceiving me as innocent and harmless, which leads to the belief that I cannot cause people physical or mystical harm. It is obvious that my blindness, and the way my blindness is perceived by my community, has affected the way I initiated and conducted my ethnographic research.
I am a blind anthropologist. I was born with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and, therefore, I am legally blind. I can see less than ten degrees and I have not experienced any change in my eyesight throughout my life. To provide the reader with a sense of what this entails, I would describe my vision as consisting of no more than a small window in what feels like the top right-hand corner of my head which is filled with colours and moving shadows. I have no meaningful or useable vision of the world outside my body. For a social researcher, this obviously has its drawbacks. The first of these stems, ironically, from the fact that I was not born totally blind. If I had been, I would have qualified for training in braille. Without braille, writing, note-taking and reading—all of which must be assisted by text-to-sound translation programmes and a lot of memory work—are quite a struggle. And, obviously my condition places limits on my fieldwork practices. However, since my blindness is both stable and familiar to me, I did not experience any unanticipated challenges, as did Ed Eames (1994: 30), who gradually lost his eyesight while carrying out his research. Instead, my blindness enabled me to accomplish my fieldwork in a unique way in comparison to other anthropologists.
This thesis involved semi-structured interviews and participant observation, involving gossip, attendance at secular and religious events, and eavesdropping. I say more about this in a moment, especially by way of placating any misplaced suspicions of ethical malpractice. My methodology was unique in that it relied completely on listening to people and the sounds of their environment. I constructed an inter-subjectivity with my informants using methods that are uncommon in anthropological research. This has made my disability more apparent to me, which correlates with Karen Mogendorff's (2007: 270–271) suggestion that researchers with disabilities may require unique research methodologies. In a similar manner to Louise Duval (1994: 3), the reality of being disabled, or of being labelled a disabled person, was intertwined with how I carried out my fieldwork. Despite being a member of the community, my vision impairment and my academic background created a perceived ‘otherness’ between myself and my informants. It was necessary for me to present my ‘otherness’ as positive and to promote it as an opportunity to learn (Steiner 1994: 10). I experience this otherness through people's fascination with my blindness and their related attempts to help me. Strangers are often quite intimate and trusting of me. When I enter certain places or join particular groups, I am always singled out. People tend to stand immediately and offer their own seats or guide me to an unoccupied one. They often touch me without asking. In offering a drink, for instance, people frequently place it on the table before me and guide my hand towards it. I also experience this otherness through the fact that many people I do not know in my area know about me. When they approach me, they talk to me with familiarity, but I do not recognise their voices. I have used these unique forms of inter-subjectivity to create intimate relationships with people in the collection of my fieldwork data.
As compensation for my blindness, I have exceptional hearing. I can hear things other people have trouble discerning. Sometimes, I am able to understand what others are whispering at a distance. I am also highly attuned to the tones of people's voices and to the ambience of the places I am in. Since early childhood, I have learned about human society mostly by listening and eavesdropping. When I was young, while people thought I was playing with my toys or indulging in childhood activities, I was listening to the conversations of adults, even when they whispered to each other at a distance.
Before school, I spent countless hours at my Mum's side in all manner of local places, such as the Islamic hairdressers. In order to kill the boredom, what could one do but listen to the women in attendance and develop an acute interest in the matters of their everyday lives that they shared with one another? However, and to respectfully allow them to maintain a sense of this being their space, and one that should not be disturbed by the presence of an interloper, I developed a quiet and seemingly non-listening disposition of a blind boy immersed in his own peculiarly inward and imaginative non-seeing world. These practices and performances developed through time. In school, I eavesdropped on the conversations of teachers while they gossiped about their colleagues and students. In short, eavesdropping is an inevitable habitus for me. Listening to other people's conversations and gaining access, usually not intentionally, to information that people often do not want me to know has become a way of life for me. My blindness renders it simply unavoidable. Of course, what has in effect been a lifetime's embodied disposition and strategy for getting by in life with blindness runs the risk of being unethical practice in the context of research. All research data collected in this thesis have been subjected to a rigorous process of obtaining informed consent. In particular, data collected and stored (entirely in my memory) through my blind person's habituated practice of eavesdropping has been subjected to the same process. Where I have sought to use these data, I have, after the fact, approached the people concerned and asked for their consent. In the rare cases when it was not given, the data were not used. In the even rarer cases when not only did they not want me to use overheard information but they were also concerned that I had overheard it in the first place, I reassured them that I would not share it with anyone. This is easy for me, and people in my community tend to know it. A lifetime of unavoidable eavesdropping has produced in turn a watertight capacity for keeping confidences.
I make sense of the world by listening to the sounds of the spaces I move through and the tones of people's voices. Active social listening develops a deep awareness of the presence and significance of sound. The nature and volume of the habitus, including the lived experiences of those within it, can be fathomed through sound. I agree that the ‘concept of habitus must include a history of listening’ (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 462). Ethnography includes what people hear every day, which Steve Feld and Donald Brenneis call ‘acoustemology’ (2004: 462). I was able to grasp the emotions of my informants and the social structure of their habitus through deep listening. I visited some sites regularly to familiarise myself with their acoustemology, allowing me to grasp the behavioural patterns of the people in these places. However, sometimes when there is too much background noise, I am unable to concentrate on other people's conversations. A related issue is that I am not always certain who is around me and who can listen in on my own conversations.
When I meet people, I am obviously unaware of how they look or how they express themselves through body language. In particular, I am unable to make eye contact with people. The significance of eye-contact has been expressed by Georg Simmel:
By the glance which reveals the other, one discloses himself. By the same act in which the observer seeks to know the observed, he surrenders himself to be understood by the observer. The eye cannot take unless at the same time it gives. The eye of a person discloses his own soul when he seeks to uncover that of another. What occurs in this direct mutual glance represents the most perfect reciprocity in the entire field of human relationships. (1921: 358)
Amica Lykiardopoulos also states that ‘people believe the eyes or glance of a person can tell a lot about her or him, hence the saying that the eyes are “the window/mirror of the soul”’ (1981: 223). Simmel argues further that ‘[t]he union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances’ (1921: 358). When I encounter people, they may feel that they remain hidden from me or not completely recognised, given the lack of eye-contact and associated moment of reciprocal recognition, as mentioned by Simmel. This may make them feel safe from scrutiny and penetration, as it can often feel invasive, imposing or intense, like a penetration into their inner world.
Simmel also theorises about the importance of the face in communications between people, suggesting it is:
The symbol of all that which the individual has brought with him as the pre-condition of his life. In the face is deposited what has been precipitated from past experience as the substratum of his life, which has become crystallized into the permanent features of his face. (1921: 359)
As I cannot see people's faces, they may feel less exposed or more anonymous when they speak to me. They may feel momentarily free from their past lives or from revealing their identities. Moreover, because they are able to observe my face, while I am not able to reciprocate, this may give them a sense of power over me. An acquaintance from the community, whose daughter is also blind, said that talking to a blind person is like communicating with someone on the internet in that people will sometimes share secrets and intimate information with strangers they believe they are never going to meet.
I have been told that many people feel freed from the social categories that others impose on them because I cannot judge their appearance. When people normally speak to one another, they also scrutinise each other's faces and body language in an attempt to confirm the authenticity of what is being said. I cannot do this. So, perhaps, people feel free from judgement when they are around me, less self-conscious and more comfortable. Lykiardopoulos contends that self-consciousness
may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. Thus, it quite often happens that people feel their greatest risk is to be the object of another person's awareness. (1981: 223)
When people communicate with me, they are less likely to feel self-conscious and to experience this sense of danger. The extreme case is demonstrated in Frankenstein (Shelley 1969 [1818]: 132–135) when the creature approaches the blind man, De Lacey, knowing he will not be judged as a monster on the basis of his physical features. De Lacey is the only person to treat the creature with kindness and compassion because he can only respond to its voice or to what it chooses to communicate to him in the process of seeking his friendship. Body language is often unconscious and can reveal things people do not want to divulge, so some people probably feel more in control of what and how they communicate when they speak to me. For these reasons, I believe that people are more intimate with me than they usually are with strangers or casual acquaintances. The ease with which people became comfortable with me enabled the collection of a lot of the best data for this thesis. Much of this information would have been more difficult to collect for an anthropologist who is not blind.
I recognise people by their voices. In a sense, their voices are like faces to me. Simmel's understanding of the face is invalid in my case. Instead, I rely on the tones in people's voices and how they speak in order to judge and interpret character, which many people fail to realise. If someone has a soothing voice appropriate for a bed time story, for example, I might think they have the attributes of a grandfather or grandmother. I am also very good at comprehending people's accents and moods by the subtle differences in the way they speak. I can tell if someone is happy, angry or apprehensive and, sometimes, I believe, I can tell if someone is lying. When someone lies, their voice tends to become less stable, they are apt to speak as if to a child and in a manner meant to convince you of something they think you might question. As I cannot read people's faces, however, I sometimes have to ask others to verify what they were trying to communicate. This is not always a limitation; it can make explicit what others might have kept implicit and it sometimes allows me to understand how the speaker is perceived by others. I can also read someone's mood by how regularly and how deeply they breathe, and how this changes in regards to the conversation. When people are angry, for example, they often breathe sharply out of their nose. Most people do not notice these behaviours because they focus on the visual appearance of their interlocutors. Detecting these details is a unique skill I have because I compensate for my blindness through acute hearing.
Simmel also theorises about the blind in relation to social theory, explaining the supposed calmness and peacefulness of a blind person:
The sociological attitude of the blind is entirely different from that of the deaf-mute. For the blind, the other person is actually present only in the alternating periods of his utterance. The expression of the anxiety and unrest, the traces of all past events, exposed to view in the faces of men, escape the blind, and that may be the reason for the peaceful and calm disposition, and the unconcern toward their surroundings, which is so often observed in the blind. (1921: 360)
Here, I believe Simmel has an idealised view of the blind. He does not realise that blind people can fathom people's moods, their stress and anxiety, by listening to their voice tones and other sounds. Further, Simmel's proposition that blind people escape the chaos of the urban world is an exaggeration. We experience this chaos through the acoustemology of spaces. The sound pollution of the city—from cars, trams, bells, alarms and people talking loudly—does affect us. We have acute hearing and are more sensitive to the chaos of sound. On the other hand, I agree with Simmel to some degree. Often, I cannot detect stress and anxiety around me. If I am a happy or peaceful person because of my blindness, it could be because I have no concern for other people's judgement of my appearance and facial responses. Indeed, people tell me I am a happy person and I am always open to conversation. Once, Bilal, the brother of the fish and chip store owner, said to me that I was at peace with myself, suggesting this is why people are attracted to me. I am also not easily offended. People can make fun of my blindness and I am happy to laugh along with them. So, in general, people feel easy around me and this has been crucial to my fieldwork because it enables the kind of intimacy necessary for data collection.
Simmel argues that the modern world is similar to the experience of a deaf-mute, suggesting:
The greater perplexity which characterizes the person who only sees, as contrasted with the one who only hears, brings us to the problems of the emotions of modern life: the lack of orientation in the collective life, the sense of utter lonesomeness, and the feeling that the individual is surrounded on all sides by closed doors. (1921: 361)
On the other hand, the ‘sociological attitude of the blind’, as Simmel puts it, is more communitarian and like that of a villager. As a blind person, I do not experience the alienation and confusion of constantly seeing strangers. I mostly interact with those I know or those whose voices are familiar to me. My experience of the world relates to the sociology of the diaspora community in Broadmeadows where most people know each other, and this familiarity is the ideal that the community seeks to uphold in order to preserve Turkishness. I have a special insight into this community, both because I reside within it as a Turkish-Australian and because my world is like a village.
On a couple of occasions, people have told me that I am lucky to be blind as it enables me not to see the filth of the world. Blindness is associated with purity and innocence. People assume I am uncontaminated by the ugliness of the world because I cannot see it. It is also true that I cannot be tempted by the vision of beautiful objects or people. This adds to the idea that I am purer or more innocent than others. It makes people feel more comfortable around me as I do not envy their possessions.
Belief in ‘the evil eye’ (nazar) is a tradition among the Turks. The evil eye is the experience of someone being jealous of you, envying you or feeling ill-will towards you. This experience is either felt through being watched or looked-at, or is like the experience of being watched or looked-at (Johnson 1925: 259). It is thought that the energy released by this ‘looking’ creates misfortune, such as illnesses, disabilities, destruction of property and even death (Boratov 1997: 103). The ‘evil eye’, stemming from envy and causing misfortune, is an ancient belief common to many cultures (Lykiardopoulos 1981; Schoeck 1955). In the Turkish community, when people know others envy them, or when they experience misfortune, they often say ‘bende göz var’ (‘there is an eye on me’) or ‘bende kem göz var’ (‘there is an evil eye on me’). The evil eye is usually an unconscious or unintentional negativity. Sometimes, ‘the evil eye’ is given by praising someone's health, beauty, possessions or suc- cess (Johnson 1925). In the Turkish community, when you praise someone or something, you are expected to also say ‘Maşallah’ (‘what Allah wanted has happened’) to neutralise your own unconscious evil eye and declare that you are not envious. Turks often place a small blue stone, called the nazar boncuğu (the evil eye bead), throughout Turkish homes, in people's cars and particularly over newborn babies to ward off the evil eye. The importance of the evil eye in Turkish culture shows the significance of eyesight for the way people relate to each other. All forms of material desire, including sexual desire, are related to vision. In fact, in Turkish culture, greed is referred to as aç gözlü (hungry eye), meaning that, through vision, people begin to desire what they do not need or what does not belong to them. As a blind person, people trust me more because they perceive me as someone who is not greedy or envious and, therefore, unable to create the negative, mystical energy of the evil eye.
I am also perceived as non-threatening and unable to harm people because I cannot attack what I cannot see or identify. Moreover, I am perceived as vulnerable, at greater risk of being attacked by others, due to my blindness. As a blind person in a diaspora community, I believe people feel especially responsible for me as this magnifies people's sense of communitarianism. Most feel responsible for helping others in the community and, as I have specific needs, there is a collective sense of responsibility for me. Some also desire to serve me because they believe it will earn them sevap (credit) for the afterlife so they can go to heaven. On two occasions, this was explicitly communicated to me. Once when our neighbour Rɪfat offered me a lift, he said to me ‘I have seen you, and I said to myself, “I should commit a sevap”’. On another occasion, a man who often gives me lifts said to me ‘your sevap is always written to me’. In the religion of Islam, it is believed that people who are born with disabilities are being tested by Allah, who is also testing how helpful and understanding the people are around them. Blindness is particularly pitied by Turks because the ability to see is often viewed as a blessing. For example, the utterance ‘iki gözum’ (‘my two eyes’) is used as an endearment when referring to someone. Wishing blindness on someone is considered a severe curse. People's pity towards me, and their sense of responsibility, often enabled my fieldwork. When people offered to give me lifts, guide me through difficult areas or give me free food and drinks, it allowed me to have intimate conversations with them and form new connections.
I am well known in the community. When I am walking around, people I have never met before will approach me and say things like ‘I see you walking in my area’ or ‘when I am driving, I see you going to the station’. Yet, I do not recognise their voices. I am an object of curiosity because I carry a cane and I am the only blind person who is relatively independent in the community. This curiosity encourages people to approach me to chat. I am also aware that I have earned people's respect in going to the University of Melbourne and achieving a research higher degree as a blind man, despite coming from a lower socio-economic suburb where the majority do not attend university. Some people believe I am a good example to the community, and this has meant people are enthusiastic to speak to and form relationships with me.
Being a blind anthropologist on its own does not affect the initiation or the process of ethnographic research. The way my blindness was perceived by my community also had a significant impact on the way I carried out my fieldwork. As I was unable to use visual means to access and process data and information, I was able to pick up on unique cultural elements of the community under study, which an anthropologist who is using vision might have missed or have taken for granted. This is especially relevant to the unique forms of inter-subjectivity that I constructed with my informants throughout the research process. Due to my blindness, I have an acute sense of hearing and, since my childhood, I have made sense of people and places by listening closely to the sounds of my surroundings. One particular way that I do this is by eavesdropping. Another way that I used my hearing during my fieldwork is to familiarise myself with the ‘acoustemology’ of the spaces that I have researched. To do this, I regularly visited these spaces to familiarise myself with their ‘acoustemology’.
I do not need to see or scrutinise people's faces or body language to comprehend their emotions and moods. Instead, I listen to their voice tones. This allows me to judge people's emotional state despite not being able to scrutinise their body language or their facial expressions. Indeed, my inability to scrutinise how people physically and visually express their emotions, such as through body language and facial expressions, actually meant my informants were more intimate towards me, as they felt more comfortable and in control of how much information they revealed to me. This gave my informants a sense of power and security. Closely related to this is the perception that I cannot physically and mystically cause harm, as I cannot attack what I cannot see or identify. Further, as I cannot envy or be jealous of beautiful creatures and objects, members of the community believe I cannot bring the evil eye on them. This is due to the belief that desires result from sight and as I do not have sight I am perceived as harmless and innocent.
As a blind member of the community who is relatively independent and who was in the process of obtaining a higher research degree from the University of Melbourne, I was a curiosity to many members of the community. Further, some of these community members believed that I was a good example for other young people in the community to aspire to be like. I have drawn on these perceptions and curiosities to form intimate relationships with my informants. People were also intimate with me because they felt a collective responsibility to help me as a fellow member of the community, in the process embodying several community values including communitarianism and associated religious tenets of Islam. Through helping me, some people believed that they would earn credit for the afterlife, as in Islam it is believed that people who have disabilities and those around them are tested by Allah. According to these beliefs, those who help and take care of people who have a disability will be rewarded in the afterlife. As I used different research methods and constructed unique inter-subjectivities, my methodology makes a novel contribution to the literature and debates to do with anthropological methodology.
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