Last (Field)notes

This may be the last I write for some time, since I left Ukraine yesterday and hope to achieve some distance between the last frenzied months of fieldwork and the process of digesting and writing up all the data that will begin next semester back in New York, back at Columbia (and because our 2009 summer Debutante Tour commences tomorrow in the UK!). I’m typing these thoughts as the sun sets behind Wawel Castle in rainy Krakow, in the comfort of my distant cousin’s comfortable 5th floor flat. When I finally crossed the EU border yesterday, I will admit I experienced a rush of relief, and not only because the roads were suddenly free of the potholes that have nearly ruined the shocks on my weathered car. But it was a bittersweet crossing - I left fully aware that my life is moving forward and now away from the dear friends and adopted family that filled up my life over the last eighteen months.

In the last few days, both Ostap and Oksana, two of my closest friends and informants, independent of one another, confronted me about my role as an observer, just an observer. Just an ethnographer. Someone who stays for a while, ingratiates herself in communities of people, then leaves, writes a book in a faraway country in a foreign language to further her career. To what end? they both asked. Their words stung a little, and hit an old but still raw nerve for me, the place where my struggles about how to be a person of action, creating change, making things happen, should intersect with the academic work I do, which often feels too far away from everyday life, too serious or analytical to have an impact on the way the world works.

But I’m grateful that these two managed to strike that nerve again in my last days, because it reminded me of the responsibility that I have to the people whose courage, creativity, and perseverance inspired me over the course of my 18 months of fieldwork, people whose opportunities have been thwarted by the outrageously corrupt system that they live in, yet people who still manage to introduce beauty and art and justice into the world. And their confrontations reminded me of my belief in the power of stories, in the powerful act of creating an archive, a repertoire, a book. Personal, powerful stories can topple history and shape the future. Now it's my job to make them heard.