Somehow I do more reading and finding of secondary sources at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) campus outside of Nairobi than anywhere else in the world (Yale included), and conversely it seems like this reading takes more of my time here than any other activity. I have mixed feelings about this; do I really need to be in Kenya in order to be downloading and reading papers? If I’m doing all of this reading and finding all of these things that I’ve never seen or considered, am I really ready to be in the field, or should I just still be in New Haven doing background reading? An advisor once told a friend that “Data analysis in the capital city doesn’t count as fieldwork”- if that’s the case, then I’m doubly damned, since I ain’t analyzing SHIT in any kind of systematic way.

Maybe this is self-justification/rationalization, but I really do think that it is precisely being here in Kenya, even before heading up to my field site, that is pushing me to discover these sources and lines of research that I otherwise wouldn’t discover working on my own at school. Somehow, when I am in New Haven, it is easy to patch over complexities and make generalizations and believe that everything is working as I assume it is, but as soon as I get here, I start noticing TONS of findings by other researchers that really challenge what I was thinking about on some fundamental levels.

What I’ve been engaged in over the last few days (and what I think is driving this burst of discovery of sources and new arguments) is a process of talking about my project a lot (and preparing to talk about it) with various researchers and colleagues here at ILRI. Talking to people who know the details of the context intimately has forced me to be try to be more specific about what I want to study, why I want to study it, and what I think is going on; when I lack the precise knowledge to do that, I’m pushed to do some searches on Google scholar until I find some pieces that clarify what I was struggling to articulate. I suppose I would have some of this pressure if I had an Africanist to talk to on a regular basis (which I should now that we’ve made a few key Junior faculty hires), but I still don’t think that is any substitute for engaging with researchers who are Kenyans or who have been working in Kenya for over a decade.

Certainly this method of learning from the field is far less glamorous than running around in villages, but so far its been of equal (but distinct) value for me, and I think it is an often overlooked benefit of doing field research.