Ethnographic study - part III

Relationships

I have to offer my sincere apologies for the delay in updating you all with my research findings. This community has begun to suck me in like no other; even compared to the Mandingos of southwest Guinea during my 2003 study and the tobacco farmers of Andhra Pradesh in 1998 for my dissertation. Time here astoundingly seems to simultaneously both fly and creep by. There’s just so much (or so little, depending on your vocabulary!) to do in this community. My days have been filled to the brim with sleeping, lying in bed awake, staring at my computer, and drinking in the afternoon, making it difficult to focus enough to even write up my findings. Don’t worry though, I will not compromise my research objectives!

After initially peeling back layers of linguistic understanding, I more recently delved into the relationships between Unemployeds and others in their lives. This subject matter has also been fascinating, in particular how it illuminates which relationships break through the existing divisions in society and which ones reinforce them.

Friendships

I have found that friendships run very closely along traditional in-group/out-group divisions. Employeds tend to predominantly be friends with other Employeds, and Unemployeds are largely friends with other Unemployeds.

Despite this correlation, it has been extremely difficult to determine causality in this trend. Are Employeds predominantly friends with other Employeds because they have similar habits of showering, eating, and being productive members of society? Similarly, Unemployeds are never out and about during the morning hours, which means that they are highly unlikely to even cross paths with Employeds, for example during a morning commute to work or buying a cup of coffee before 9am. As you can see, it would be quite understandable for these social groupings to develop as a result of differing schedules and activities. However, it is also possible that the reason they have these behaviors is precisely because they are friends.

Or still possible is that these differences result because of other isolating factors that I have yet to discover. Whatever the reason, these de facto separations do end up perpetuating and reinforcing stereotypes!

More research is imperative in order to address the root causes of these stark divides.

Romantic Relationships

The divisions in romantic relationships tend to be even more drastic than those within platonic friendships. Nearly across the board, Employeds date other Employeds, and Unemployeds date other Unemployeds. Because of the previously mentioned differences in scheduling and behaviors between the two groups, it is not surprising that these would be magnified in romantic relationships and even more challenging to bridge. Or again, the causality could be reversed.

What I have noticed is that some inter-cultural relationships do exist, but they are often short-lived. Employeds tend to refer to the exhaustion caused by their Unemployed significant other’s relentless complaining, crying, and unwillingness to get out of bed (with the simultaneous yet counter-intuitive disinterest in sexual activity). Even the greatest initial attraction between two people is often insufficient to withstand the divergence in day-to-day needs: cultural engagement, stimulating conversation, discussion of intra-office politics, and the purchasing of goods that cannot be obtained through the barter system on the part of the Employed; An ever-patient listener, many bottles of whiskey, and occasional sunlight, on the part of the Unemployed. Furthermore, while not having a common language is not impossible to surmount in a relationship, it is no doubt another major challenge to an Unemployed-Employed couple. As a result, we are seeing very few Unemployed-Employed relationships these days.

Families

Families are particularly fascinating because unlike most other relationships, these are more often than not, highly inter-cultural. In many families with which I interact, parents and siblings of Unemployeds will be Employeds. This makes for wide divergences of world views, despite the familial closeness and experiential commonalities.

Relationships among family members seem to suffer the most from the linguistic differences I mention earlier in my report. Employed parents and siblings often do not understand their Unemployed family member. This misunderstanding results in feelings of being lied to, betrayed, and let down by their incompetent, lazy, unmotivated Unemployed child or sibling. Employed family members may experience disappointment, frustration, and embarrassment about their blood relative who they may see as a complete waste of space, an insult to the 27 years of rearing, and a disgrace to the family name. Naturally, this can lead to a dangerous cycle where unfounded stressors can multiply and intensify already negative feelings!

Additionally, Unemployeds are usually responsible for most if not all negative aspects of the family’s experience; although again, we are not sure if their Unemployed affiliation is a causal or correlating factor. However, it is nearly universally true that everything is their fault.

As we continue to learn more about these complex inter-cultural relationships, it is important to be mindful of what we can do to affect the present. It is critical for Employed family members to try to prevent the negativity of their Unemployed family members from rubbing off on them.

While I would never encourage further discrimination, it has become clear to me that if we are to heal society of these negative relationships, everyone must look out for his or her own emotional health.