Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

So I just interviewed three people in a row about food insecurity (See transcripts 2, 3, 4, to be posted at a later date).  One man, his girlfriend (debatable?), and her dad.  I'm not sure if the girlfriend was a girlfriend, since he called her his girlfriend but she called him her roommate in the the interviews.   Here were stories about kidney failures, medical problems generally, and being so bored that you spend your efforts on thinking of ways to kill time in your life.  And yet, in comparisons to other interviewers, I was not emotionally moved by these stories.  Sometimes that makes me feel soulless, not because I think anything is wrong with me, but because I feel like others must think there is something wrong with me for being such a dispassionate person.  Maybe it's because in some ways I don't relate at all, even though in some ways I do understand. For example, I understood the boredom of the participant who would rather pay for cable and...

After doing this first interview (see transcript 1), I felt like she was very self-conscious during the interview, like she was worried about she was being perceived, and like she wanted to say the "right" things. For me, this came up particularly in areas like when I asked her what sort of foods she liked to eat, and she had what I felt was a "typical female response" of "salads,...no sweets". I say "typical" not because that's what most females like the most, but because I feel like in Western culture that's what women who are concerned about their diet and weight want to be seen as eating; at one point this participant said she didn't want to "get fat".  Usually people on food stamps and worried about hunger are more concerned about getting "enough" to eat rather than worrying about getting too much to eat. She also expressed how she didn't want to eat Ramen noodles, and I definitely got the impression she...

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America LR: I want to start with “What does hunger mean to you? What does it mean to be hungry?” MA: well, hunger for me is like when you don’t have any food, your stomach growling and its hurting because you don’t have anything to eat LR: Definitely. So would you say hunger is something people have pretty much daily, like in between meals you get hungry, or is there a difference between hungry and starving? MA: yes there is. LR: okay and how would you describe that difference? MA: well hunger I said was in between meals, you know, I guess what…what I was saying was starving, you know? But um, yeah, um starving is when you don’t have any food or you don’t know when your next meal is gonna come or whatever… LR: okay, um, what has been your experience with getting food? Like, is that a pretty normal thing to have in your house or is it kinda a day-to-day sorta? MA: um, I go shopping about once a week and um I get food sta...

Rachel is the mother of Laura, who Soumitro had interviewed a few days earlier. Laura told Rachel about the project, and she had also taken several recruitment fliers to pass out to people she knew would benefit from taking part in the project. Though I did not realize it at the time, this simple (f)act – what us researchers call “snowball sampling” – was one example of the larger importance of communication in struggles with hunger. Speaking of the local food pantries, churches, and other organizations she has to rely on for food, Rachel said, “But I recommend a person— I always tell people you want something to eat you could go here and they’ll help you, they’ll help you... especially with peoples that got kids. Yeah, they’ll help you.” Throughout our conversation, Rachel continually placed the conditions of others before her own concerns about herself. When she moved to Lafayette in 2009 after being homeless in Chicago for several years, she did not want to impose herself on...

1.) What are the various facets of resistance that are discussed in this week’s readings? How do the insights from these readings help us to approach and understand the contours of mobilization and resistance? 2.) Kahn critiques many past attempts to research peasant ideologies and resistance as being detached from the immediacy of the localized contexts being studied: “the longer-term evaluation of the academic texts tends to have very little to do with peasants or, perhaps more accurately, the participants in the concrete struggles in which peasants are involved” (71). In what ways does the culture-centered approach address this issue? Is the abstraction or generalization required by theorization inherently distancing?

<> To make the savings just add up to enough so that they could meet the expenses of the summer months when Subeer did not have his assistantship meant that Ratna would work as much as she physically could. <> Waking up early in the morning, she would catch the 6:45 a.m. bus on St. George to get to the house of the Tarafdar's on the other side of town. From the bus stop, a fifteen minutes walk would take her to the home of the Tarafdar's exactly by 7:50 so that she just had enough time to get in so that Mrs. Ruma Tarafdar could hand over her three month old son, Shubhro, and explain all the tasks of the day to Ratna before heading out of the door. She would watch Shubhro, feed him, play with him, read stories to him until Mr. Tarafdar came home at 3:45 p.m. for her to then rush out to catch the 4:00 p.m. bus to the house of Mr. Srinivas. <> It would not be until 6 p.m. that she would reach the Srinivas home to watch Ankit, their four year old son...

Thanks to my friend Bud Goodall for the inspiration to take a narrative turn, although I am rough on the edges and a novice with this... Ratna came to the US in August 2010, newly married, with her dreams tucked lovingly in the corner of her Sari and with her hopes to make a life in the US with her husband, Subeer, a high flying PR executive in a large multinational in New York City. <> The first three months in New York were like a dream sequence of one of those Bollywood movies, amidst high rises, surrounded by people all around, and immersed in the glitz and lights of the city. For her, this was a new lease of life, a new opening to make a home in a completely different country with her husband. She used to spend each day taking the subway to a new part of the city, a map in hand. The newness of her discoveries made up for the feelings of missing home in the late afternoons. Her heart filled with hopes and her spirits filled with courage, Ratna immersed herself in putt...

Let me just begin by bluntly sharing my response: Yes, I think so. Soumitro's blog postings about hunger in Tippecanoe county, the health emergencies that put people on the streets, and the children who throw their parents onto the streets got me both angry and upset. The stories of Melanie and Fiona left me wondering: What goes so fundamentally wrong in a society that it justifies negligence of parents amidst the individualistic pursuits for self satisfaction and material comfort? What makes a son kick out his mother out of his apartment? Where does the pathology of individualism become so extremely pathological that a child stops feeling for his mother as she runs out of a place to stay, sleeps in homeless shelters, and goes to soup kitchens and food pantries to meet her need for food? The roots of this pathology are perhaps in the narcisstic individualism of American society that elevates the self above all else, and celebrates this form of narcissi...

It was difficult to interview Fiona – my last interviewee of the day – because her personality was so bang opposite of Melanie, who I interviewed right before her. For one, she spoke thrice faster than Melanie and kept narrating her story in an intricate web of verbal chaos – sans chronology, sans context. Over and over again, I had to steer her back to the issue of food insecurity – because although I know everything else feeds into it, there were a lot of other intricate personal details which she presented to me that I knew had no link whatsoever to her present situation. But she talked and talked and talked – akin to someone who speaks to herself – her face furrowed with many misfortunes that life had dumped on her. She had a prolapsed uterus AND a prolapsed bladder that caused urine retention. So she went every week to a local hospital so they could put a catheter in her. Her son-in-law had thrown her out and her sons won’t keep her so she divided her time between two local ...

For me, the toughest part of interviewing someone who is homeless or hungry is when they start to cry while telling me about their misery. Because at that moment, seeing what life can do to you, I see in them a reflection of myself. And I shudder to think: This could be me. Once upon a time, people like Melanie – educated, sophisticated and well-paid – had everything they wanted. But then everything changed. So when Melanie – a White, middle-class woman in her mid-50s, dressed impeccably in a chiffon top and dainty costume jewelry – broke down saying she went hungry almost every single day because she felt humiliated going to a food pantry for help, I could understand where her self-esteem was hurting. Years ago, Melanie was a nurse with a degree from Purdue and life was good till an autoimmune disease forced her to give up working. What followed was a web of misfortunes – divorce, her son running into trouble with the law again and again, a second marriage and subsequent death of ...