Fieldwork anecdote #1
Shakey iPhone footage of intertidal life
After so much time in labs and classrooms over recent weeks, I decided this morning to make images of seaweed where it’s found more frequently (at least, if you’re not a seaweed scientist, seaweed farmer or a social anthropologist following one or the other around) - on the sand and rocks of Wee Ganavan, a small beach a quarter of an hour walk from my front door, where I often go swimming (yes, critics, going to the beach is fieldwork - if you design your projects properly). The intertidal zone at low tide is a complex ecological balance of crackly brown wracks, slimy green algae, razor-sharp barnacles, yellow and black sea snails, ruby-red sea anemones that reach out their tentacles to make alien first contact with your fingers, tiny hunting sticklebacks, the scattered remains of crabs eaten by gulls (I can’t eat crab without getting it everywhere either), and many other species unrecognised, unnoticed or that choose to remain hidden.
This is quite different to the seaweed ‘nursery’, where I made my first series of images for the Seaweed Saves the World project. There, in a sterile environment, everything is tightly controlled: the temperature must be kept at a steady 10C or lower; the light a dim red; macro-algal cultures are separated in flasks and trays by species, sex and provenance. All of this work is done by human scientists to slow down the seaweed’s reproductive cycle and make it cultivable for academic knowledge and financial capital - the nursery sits between the institution’s ‘academic’ and ‘enterprise’ arms. In a sense, the seaweed is being dislocated from the passing seasons on the beach just outside the nursery window and tricked into believing that it is in a different time and place, so that scientists and business people can get what they want from it, when they want it.
Despite the controls and all of this human attention to the seaweeds’ wellbeing, things do occasionally ‘go wrong’ - algal cultures are bleached by too much light, have their nutrients stolen by other forms of microscopic life that have hitchhiked into the lab unnoticed, become reproductive too early, and generally become unhealthy for reasons as yet unknown. Seaweed cultivation is a relatively new field in Scotland and everyone involved, from scientist to seaweed farmer to investor, is learning as they go.
Nice view, impractical camera, sore knee
On the beach, I’m learning as I go too: I quickly realise the challenge of photographing the two main species that are being cultivated at the lab and on the farm - saccharina latissima (‘sugar kelp’) and alaria esculenta (‘dabberlocks’ - I use the scientific names for these first as that’s what my interlocutors do, and I doubt you know what dabberlocks is either). I’d hoped to find some poking out of the water at low tide or cast on the beach. Unlike ‘wracks’, which spend a significant amount of time out of water in the intertidal zone, ‘kelps’ prefer to remain submerged in the subtidal. I stick to photographing the wracks - bladder wrack, serrated wrack, channel wrack and egg wrack - and the species that live on and among them. After all, these seaweeds form the basis of my film developer (something I will write more about in due course), so they’re certainly worthy of my ethnographic attention. This proves challenging enough - I’m more used to leaping about the rocks empty handed and barely clothed, rather than in overalls, clutching a tripod and laden down with film holders. My boots slip and in the process of saving my cameras, I smash my knee. Anthropological fieldwork is a sensory, embodied experience but not all of these experiences are pleasant or desirable.
As I pack up, an elderly gentleman makes his way across the beach to ask what I was up to. “I said to my daughter he must be taking pictures of his feet”, he jokes. I explain that it was part of my PhD research into the seaweed industry, and that I’m hoping for some images that I could contrast with those I had taken in the nursery. I encounter the cognitive dissonance that usually accompanies my announcement that I am simultaneously a social scientist and an artist, and that I use cameras as a research tool: “so how does taking pictures help you?” This is a question I always find difficult to answer (so perhaps that cognitive dissonance is in me, too), and stutter something about focused attention, looking at things in different ways, noticing things I wouldn’t otherwise, striking up conversations and so on. I’m not sure I entirely convinced him about my methods. It turns out that he used to be a geographer and had worked with a lot of social anthropologists but never heard of a visual anthropologist before (we’re rarely spotted in the wild). He parted by wishing me luck and telling me about the famous Far Side cartoon of natives rushing to hide their television sets and VCRs as two anthropologists arrive in a boat. I suggested that things had changed a little in anthropology since then - although looking at it again after returning home I’m pleased to see that the leading anthropologist has both notebook and camera. They’re getting out of a boat too. Perhaps I am a real anthropologist after all!
True-to-life image of the locals reacting to the author’s arrival in Oban
Before I finish, I should note that I am painting an unrealistic picture by dividing the sterile, simplified labs from the messy, complex world outside of their doors so completely. At some point, fertile seaweed collected ‘in the wild’ is brought across the threshold into the lab, and later some cultures are returned to the sea for ‘deployment’ on the farm, before coming back to the lab again as fully grown ‘plants’ following harvest (seaweeds are not plants, except when they are - I’ll write more about this some time, probably). All of this requires a lot of labour. These are the times when scientists go out to sea, science comes down to earth and the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and ‘practical’ expertise become as fuzzy as tidelines (more about this too, I’m sure).
