Re:How can we engage these issues of center/margin, home/field, and informant/interviewer in a meaningful way?

Last winter I had the wonderful opportunity to go to st. Johns Island in the Caribbean. I was taking the natural history of the north woods class during this time, and decided to spend much of my vacation doing a natural history journal entry on the plants and animals I observed. This experience was wonderful, being a new climate, seeing new plants, etc., but the most interesting part of it was the new perception I gained when I came back to Vermont. The trees in the Caribbean seem to have exaggerated many morphological and physiological adaptations that are found here, and seeing this opened my thought process up to make more in depth observations and analyses of the trees of the north woods. The distance I gained by leaving Vermont, and then coming back armed with information from another environment, was invaluable to research process

Distance is an important factor in any research, be it humanistic or scientific - if indeed there is any distinction between these two disciplines. Separating ones environment from the environment of what is being researched contributes to objectivity; a un familiar place holds more interest and complexity than a familiar one. However, if we apply this view not just to the tangible environment that is being researched (i.e informant, setting, geography, etc) but also to the intangible ideology that comprise a researchers framework(values, biases, expectations), the question of distance becomes more intriguing. While it is possible to affect an intellectual distance from our research without ever leaving the physical environment that we a researching, this act still ignores the inherent bias that we bring to out project. I am brought back to the ideas we discussed in our essays, that the researchers own bias can be a tool in the process. If shorten the distance between ourselves and out subject(s) to make them more familiar, we can imbue these seemly mundane things with the same fascinating complexities that we perceive when thrust into a new environment. Homework therefore becomes preferable to fieldwork, we can learn more by reconstructing the places we know than by deconstructing the places we don’t.